People like to explain success with a single “most important” trait. Alexandr Wang says the most important trait is a bias for action, Paul Graham says it’s being relentlessly resourceful. The trait that has been ringing true for me lately as a key to success is the willingness to not take things for granted.

i. levels of reality

When I think about what I should or shouldn’t take for granted, I like to break down reality into different layers. There’s physical reality, biological reality, social reality, and emotional reality.

Physical reality is something you are safe to take for granted. The laws of physics don’t change much—they are pretty reliable statements of what is or isn’t allowed by the universe. “Physical reality” includes not just abstract theories about physics but also our embodied intuitions of how the physical world works, e.g. that I can’t walk through a wall, travel backwards in time, or move clouds with my mind. These are assumptions I need not test repeatedly to see whether they’re still true.1

Biology is another level of reality that is mostly safe to take for granted, albeit slightly more malleable than the laws of physics. It’s safe to assume that you are going to age and die and that you need food and water to survive. But the parameters can be tuned quite a bit—some people get by with extreme fasting or very little sleep, and plenty of people think we’ll eventually cure aging, cancer, and other biological problems. In broad strokes though, your biology is mostly fixed: you can’t (as of now) edit your genes, and alterations you make to your biology will generally be slow and costly to maintain, e.g. you can gain muscle mass with substantial exercise and dieting, but without maintenance you’ll revert back to some “baseline” body composition.

Social and emotional reality are the most malleable, and I think these are the areas where people take too many things for granted.

ii. social reality is made up and is changing

Remember that all of our rules, laws, and social conventions are made up. Even the literal concept of a corridor is something that a guy came up with in 1597.

Here’s an example from my own life: in high school I believed it was a fact of social reality that to be a successful person you had to go to an Ivy League school. I came to this conclusion from reading the wikipedia pages of a few notable people and realizing that they all went to Yale or something. As a result of this belief I spent many many months agonizing about how to improve my college applications, wasting a bunch of time doing things I didn’t want to do. I only later learned that this is not true—there are plenty of notable people who did not go to a prestigious school, and there are plenty of people who went to prestigious schools but who are completely unremarkable.

Recently I’ve been making the exact same mistake but in a slightly different way: I’m exploring a potential career in psychotherapy or psychology and a pattern I’ve noticed is that a lot of the notable psychologists of the past (Freud, Jung, Adler, Yalom, Beck, van der Kolk) were psychiatrists, as in they all got medical degrees. Which then made me wonder: do you have to be a physician to be a notable therapist? And of course, the answer is no: there are plenty of people who haven’t done that (Kelly, Rogers, Gendlin). But there’s a more important note here: it’s not just that there are exceptions to the pattern, it’s that the pattern applies to people in the past, and social reality is always changing.

In particular, social reality is changing more quickly than ever because of the internet. Most people still don’t appreciate how much power the internet gives us: for accessing information, for sharing ideas, for connecting with people who share your interests and goals.

Examples of social realities that people take for granted but which are subject to change (and have already changed a lot):

  • I need to go to college in order to have a well-paying career
  • I need to pay for a course in order to learn about X

The broadest form of this is “I need permission from someone with authority in order to do what I want to do”. I guess we can be forgiven for believing this, since this is what elementary school looked like for many of us: you had to get a hall pass in order to leave the classroom to drink water. So of course you’ll believe that “getting permission” is the default mode of navigating the world.

iii. emotional reality

We often take emotional truths for granted too – “I need X to be happy” or “I don’t have what it takes to do Y”.

For much of this piece I’ve been focusing on “conventional” success and it’s important to note that conventional success is neither necessary nor sufficient for happiness (yet another mistaken emotional belief to be wary of). But the nice thing about our psychology is that learning not to take things for granted—especially when it comes to your emotional reality—often leads to both happiness and conventional success, because you learn how to get out of your own way and increase your agency.

iv. how to modulate your assumptions

I don’t have a formula to know when to re-assess one of my assumptions and when to just take it for granted. The main techniques that come to mind are: doing periodic reflections about what I want to do and what is getting in the way of that, as well as learning to have a “flexible” mental orientation with methods like Alexander Technique.

Whenever you feel bad about the fact that you have to do something, it’s worth asking yourself whether you really have to do it, and what level of reality the constraint lies in. You’ll either discover that it’s a real, hard constraint (which I often find makes it much easier to accept and work with) or you’ll find you made it up, at which point you can begin letting go of it.

iv. not taking things for granted is the only way to keep up with a changing world

The future will be in the hands of the people who are willing to build it and willing to adapt to it. There is a sinister element to this, namely the fact that specific groups of people who were lucky and diligent will accumulate outsized power, but there is also an element of this which is perfectly fair: if you choose not to face reality, you can’t really complain when it comes back around and smacks you in the face.

Starting a venture is one fundamental form of not taking things for granted, because you’re literally birthing something into existence that is currently not accomodated by social reality.

Sometimes I feel a little embarassed that I’ve come to this conclusion rather late. But I think it’s something you keep discovering. And it’s actually something you relearn—the capacity to not take reality for granted was something you had as a kid, you only learned to conform and stop questioning as you got older.

What even is success? Success, in this framing, is having made a significant dent to the shape of reality. You can’t make a dent in it if you take its shape for granted.

  1. The exception is if you want to be Einstein and make contributions to theoretical physics, in which case yes, you shouldn’t take physical reality for granted. ↩︎