The Art of Living a Nonlinear Life
I want to talk about the surprising effects of living a nonlinear life, of doing nonlinear things, or at least about what happened to me, and what I like to think of as the art of a nonlinear life.
Most of us are put onto a very linear path early on.
We go to school.
We play sports.
We eat at the same time.
We get a full-time job.
And all of a sudden, our days become structured in a very linear way.
We’re required to put in the same hours. We’re required to meet at the same time. We’re required to do this, and this, and this, every single day.
And we get tired of having to follow this pattern.
What’s interesting is that even the people who design these systems themselves don’t actually like living in them.
The structure collapsed at scale.
I also don’t believe the answer is to make life completely non-linear, where you do one thing today, something totally different tomorrow, and never have any structure.
That kind of chaos isn’t sustainable either.
What we should do, is to sprinkle non-linear activities into our day.
These are the things we’re curious about. The things we’re okay letting loose on top of our linear responsibilities.
You still show up. You still do the work. But alongside that, you allow space for exploration, without demanding immediate results.
Over time, something interesting happens: the results of those nonlinear activities begin to reveal themselves. That’s when you start to see what Charlie Munger called the lollapalooza effect - multiple nonlinear efforts compounding together to produce outsized results through the combination of many small, curious, and seemingly unrelated pursuits.
Another way to think about non-linearity is through self-designed living:
Force yourself to design your own life if you haven’t yet.
As long as it isn’t self-destructive, do activities you’re curious about and stay with them long enough for them to become part of your life. It can be something simple, like reading, which doesn’t sound exciting at all! It just needs to work well enough to give you space to think, explore, and build things that are different from others.
Even within the things you do, there are non-linear paths to explore.
You don’t have to do exactly the way they’ve always been done. There’s always room to explore a different angle, a new approach, when you give yourself permission to look for it.
To me, that’s the only way to get non-linear results: take non-linear actions and explore paths most people don’t take.
Paths only you would.