What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do

Prepare yourself, create options—or just walk.

This is part of a series of tools and techniques that form my operational philosophy. This is not part of my book-length memoir AN ORDINARY DISASTER—but if you dig my writing you should be sure to check that out!

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Just ready enough for a night on the beach at Cape Scott, BC

Sometimes you just don’t know what to do, right?

I’ve been there. Just the other day I had returned from a 48-hour solo backpacking trip, and I didn’t quite know where I was heading next. Down the road, southbound for California, yes—but would I return through Victoria, or perhaps by ferry across to Powell River? I stood there outside a brewpub called Devil’s Bath and, for a minute or so, I didn’t know.

As is often the case when considering something larger that’s still unresolved, some much smaller detail presents itself as important. In this case, I’d borrowed a book from friends in Victoria and would need to return it to them, either by dropping it off in person or by putting it in the mail. I tried thinking about what I wanted to do, but the answer simply wasn’t there yet.

There happened to be a post office right across the street. If I could drop the book off in person, mailing it would be a waste of postage. On the other hand, if I chose to take a ferry to the mainland without mailing it, I’d have to find a post office over there, somewhere in the uncertain future. Might be a pain in the ass. Might forget. Might as well just mail it right then—it would cost me less than ten dollars, and in doing so I’d be creating more options for myself.

After a quick transaction with Canada Post, I was free to drive on down the road and make my decision on the fly, with the book already taken care of. In the end, I did drive straight to Victoria, and so I paid for an option that I didn’t exercise. Sometimes that’s how it goes.

You could also say that $7.25 in postage was the cost of my indecision, or even of my anxiety. Well, that’s true too—and I used to be like that all the time! I was constantly in that anxious state of not knowing, and I was willing to do many things to avoid that anxiety—certainly, many times over, I spent much greater amounts to do so.

My example might seem like overthinking it, but it still holds true that when you don’t know what to do, you can always do something that falls into one of three categories: prepare yourself, create options—or just walk.

“Prepare myself for what?” you might ask. Well, prepare yourself for when you do know what it is that you want to do. Get ready. Do anything that will help you be more ready when it does become clear what it is you want to do in a larger way. Practice a skill, keep yourself healthy and fit, learn something new, talk to a friend, rest up, save some money—any of those things are good examples of how to prepare yourself. Don’t worry about overdoing it. While it is possible to over-prepare, the fact that you don’t yet know what to do is itself a sign that aren’t in any danger of being too ready.

The other thing you can do is to create more options. I love Nassim Taleb how put it, that “if you have optionality, you don't have much need for what is commonly called intelligence.” Options are freedom, and a lack of options can box you in—even right into the ground. Our job in life, much more than to figure out what we should be doing in any particular moment, is to create options for our future self and then to be ready, so that we are free to act when we reach a fork in the road. We don’t just happen upon branches of opportunity—they are the options we create for ourselves. This is how you make yourself lucky.

What can you do to create more options for yourself? You might start by sketching out what your options currently are, in whatever situation it is that you’re considering. Flesh out the picture with an eye to which of them are open-ended enough to lead to even more options.

Trying to decide almost always leads to tunnel vision, and that tight focus often gets in the way of noticing how I’m really feeling—so, zoom out. For me, it’s usually the case that if I step back one or two levels, it becomes clear that it’s not so critical that I make a decision right at the moment, and giving myself some more space reveals—sooner or later—the answer that I’m looking for.

Mail that book—so what? Drive straight south or take the longer route—so what? It turns out that what I was feeling was that I was ready to get back home, and that’s why I took the more direct route, but that feeling didn’t quite become clear until I’d moved on from standing there with two slices of pizza in a to-go box, staring at the post office across the street.

How about another example.

Let’s say that you’re trying to decide which college to go to, but you don’t know what to do. Again, first of all, you can prepare yourself. Research schools, take whatever tests are required, get your applications in, talk to alumni who have been to some of the schools that you are considering—those are all useful and productive things to do.

Then, create some more options for yourself. Are there schools, or types of schools that you haven’t fully considered? Places that you might like to go, but that you’ve written off for one reason or another? Are there more people that you could speak with who’ve been to any of those schools or places, especially in recent years?

Now, zoom out. What about the question of college itself? Have you considered not going to college at all, and going to a non-traditional, trade, or outdoor school, or to university in a foreign country? Have you considered apprenticing? The school of life? Buy a boat and sail around the world? Start a business?

Feel into each potential options, and also about how each of these might result in turn in greater, or fewer options in the future. If you choose to go to an expensive university and incur a substantial debt in the process, you may have more options by way of a (seemingly) prestigious degree, but that might well be outweighed by the fact that you’re saddled with a quarter-million dollar loan that you have to pay back.

If you feel ready enough and you have good options, but you still don’t know what to do, my advice is to decide nothing for a while. It’s OK to not know what to do. Let go of the idea that you need to resolve that right away. In fact, the feeling of trying to decide is almost always a message that means the answer isn’t quite cooked yet. Just follow your daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms, and what’s next will arrive soon enough.

This is the way of the Way—the dao—and it’s “the walking that creates the road.” If you still don’t know what to do and nothing else comes to mind, just walk. The message here is to move your body, to keep things moving, and also just to walk the regular practice of your life. You can never go wrong by taking your animal self out for a walk, but the walking that we need is also often just the steady walk of life.

If you don’t have much of a regular pattern of life to follow in such pregnant times, then your work is back to preparing, by creating more steadiness for yourself. Up until fairly recently, I’d never had any sort of regular rhythm or routine. I loved having the freedom to choose what I was going to do every day, every hour, just about every moment, without a fixed plan. I’d always heard about how discipline can serve creativity, about how having at least a morning routine, in particular, can be helpful, and healthy, and relaxing, and productive—but that hadn’t ever felt like me, until I began to really work in earnest in my memoir book project. At that point, I found that a much more regular routine emerged naturally for me, and that it was hugely supportive to my work. Even if you’re the kind of person who hates routines, I’d suggest that you consider making just one thing in your life a no-brainer—something that doesn’t require a daily decision. It could be what you eat for breakfast, when you exercise, or when you sit down to work. Just one thing.

All of this taken together is actually how decision-making is supposed to work. Prepare the soil, plant some seeds, and then strut your happy ass all down the line, confident that the path will become clear as each moment arrives. Everything else will fall away, or be cut away—which happens to be the root meaning of “decide.”

If you’re ready, and you have some good options, here’s the thing—you can’t really fuck it up.

The last thing that you would want to do, really the thing that is not going to be fun, interesting, or productive, is to think about it.

“Think about it” always seemed useless to me, and even more so now. Whenever I find myself trying to decide, and “think about it,” comes up, I now know that leads to a self-referential tangle, and not to anywhere useful or interesting. I know now that I need to create the fertile ground—and leave the space—for intuition to bubble up.

So—instead of thinking about it, I take that as a signal to stop.

Don’t think about it.

Get ready.

Place some bets.

and then, just move.

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Further Reading

• Antifragile, Nassim Taleb

• Free Will, Sam Harris

• Annie Murphy Paul The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.

• Method Writing, Jack Grapes

Questions for you

1. What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

2. What are some of the ways that you create more options for yourself?

3. Do you have a good story about deciding, not deciding, or the answer arriving later, having been given space to emerge?

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