What superpower might you like to acquire? Life Hacks by Charles Assisi

What superpower might you like to acquire? This question is worth thinking about at the beginning of each year. Around this time last year, I wanted to acquire the ability to be comfortable with discomfort.

Work on that started after receiving feedback from those around me, who said I gravitate to people and voices that echo my world views. If I continued to do that, I was told, I stood the risk of living in a filter bubble. And then, when life (as it inevitably does) pushed me outside my comfort zone, my world would crumble. There were practical reasons, then, to seek discomfort out.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that the pursuit of discomfort was both interesting and an eye-opener. All that I once held to be true came under scrutiny.

By way of example, I thought of myself as a liberal voice. Discomfort then meant seeking out those whom I thought of as illiberal. Upon engaging with them, my impression of myself imploded. Because as things turned out, I got into heated arguments with all those who disagreed with me.

It took a long while for the irony to make itself apparent. Liberal thought insists I allow for all streams of thought.

Upon doing that and listening deeply, I realised that much of my impressions of people were based on gut feel and what they looked like, as opposed to how they thought or what they said. I was responding intuitively. Very simply put, I was responding to my biases. I wasn’t thinking slowly, or deliberately.

To think slowly and deliberately is hard. Because much of it must be done alone. That is why, to take forward the work I started last year, this year I want to acquire the superpower of being comfortable with being alone.

I am convinced that this power is worth acquiring because we live in a noisy world that provides us with access to terabytes of data via our smartphones. While the information this data offers can make us appear brilliant, it does not confer wisdom. How does being alone help? The legendary American teacher and author John Gatto, who died in 2018, offered pointers in a talk he delivered on the skills every human ought to possess when they are alone. They were, he said, the ability to…

define problems without a guide

ask questions that challenge common assumptions

work without guidance; work absolutely alone

persuade others that yours is the right course

debate issues and techniques in public

re-organise information into new patterns

discard irrelevant information

think dialectically; think inductively, deductively, and heuristically

Clearly, there is much that can be accomplished when one is comfortable with being alone.

(The writer is co-founder at Founding Fuel & co-author of The Aadhaar Effect)

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