We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. – T.S. Elliott

When the opportunity arises, my dad is fond of citing one of the plays of Cimrman, a fictional polymath whose disciples lecture about his many accomplishments. At one point, one of the disciples is talking about a failed experiment and, by way of apology, says something like: “But humanity needs someone who ventures into the unknown and comes back and says ‘no, friends, that’s not the way forward’.” It’s meant to be humorous, and it can sound trite, but there can be real value in trying out and confirming these dead ends.

There are few things I find more annoying than having to redo work. There’s something particularly disconcerting about the discovery that a task which I had categorized as done and archived away in my mind is in fact unfinished. A closed loop has been reopened and reset to zero. What I used to dread most at work was sending off a completed assignment and then, several days later, getting it sent back with instructions to do it a different way. Evidently, upon seeing the results, my boss had realized the initial approach didn’t work or was sub-optimal. To me, this used to feel like straightforward redoing. My feelings changed when I came to realize that it wasn’t. The second time around, I wasn’t actually starting from zero, even though, in a sense, the task was as completely unfinished as it had been initially. The first failed attempt generated important knowledge, illuminating how to accomplish the task. It’s possible that I could have stumbled onto the right approach by accident the first time around, but that was unlikely. It wasn’t obviously the right approach, and it would be naive to think that I should or would have made that choice with any reliability. In The Obstacle Is The Way, Ryan Holiday observes that the path forward very often depends upon or runs through the very circumstance that seemingly blocks progress. The first attempt can thus be a necessary passageway to the way forward and achieve progress, albeit in a less visible and indirect way.

Something similar happens when I find myself wondering whether there’s a better alternative to the status quo, especially when the doubt isn’t merely speculative but based on the existence of a known, concrete alternative or option. Evaluating this alternative could be done theoretically. Indeed, in many cases, the objective merits of this alternative as compared to my status quo are known or well-studied. That doesn’t do much to help my subjective predicament though; I still have doubts. Often I’ll try out the alternative and find I don’t like it better. This wasn’t pointless though: the test served to eliminate my doubts and reaffirm the status quo. For example, I’ve been making coffee with a moka pot for years. Given how long I had been using it and the many other coffee brewing methods out there, I wasn’t sure whether it was the ideal method. As a gift, I recently received an AeroPress and tried it out. The coffee was very good, and I’ll continue to experiment with the AeroPress and use it for certain purposes. But I think that, as before, I’ll continue to make my regular morning coffee with my moka pot. Now, however, I feel more confident in that choice. I ended up in a place that was the same, but different.