Imagination is the easy part
Executive Editor Matt Sutherland Interviews Scott Davis, Author of Surf the Seesaw: Unconventional Essays on Balance, Beauty, and Meaning in Life
It’s lonely out there. All those big questions to answer, the search for meaning a daily chore, and just the thought of suffering around the world makes getting out of bed that much harder. What to do?
Scott Davis gets it, and decided to do something about it. His Surf the Seesaw crystalizes the lessons he learned during his extraordinary business life and off-the-grid years on remote islands and intrepid sailboats. Truly, this is a guy who deserves a listen.
Foreword‘s Matt Sutherland recently caught up with Scott to talk about happiness, human superpowers, love’s relationship with perfection, and don’t-try-this-at-home playground tricks.
“90 percent of Americans who have an idea for starting a business never actually start that business. 90 percent of all diets fail. 90 percent of New Year’s resolutions are not followed through to completion. Everyone plans; few execute,” you write. Why do you think there’s such a disconnect between human goal setting and achievement?
Because imagination is the easy part.
I think human imagination is a beautiful but two-sided coin. The Eiffel Tower, the telescope, the airplane—all of these are examples of human beings imagining something that did not exist, then using that imagination as a blueprint for the hard work that conjured those imaginations into reality. Without the imagination there would’ve been no new reality, so in that sense imagination is vitally important to the way that human beings create a better future rather than simply riding the status quo we inherit. But imagination is actually the easy part. The hard part is execution, putting yourself out there in the arena, where everyone can watch. So, we can be tempted to stay in imagination land too long. When we wallow in imagination to avoid stepping into the arena of action, imagination becomes an opiate that prevents us from creating a great new future—prevents our lives from becoming significant. Because imagination alone never created anything.
So on one side of the coin, human imagination is the fantastic source of blueprints for the future, and on the other side of the coin, it can also be a drug of comfortable storytelling that can prevent us from embracing the hard work of forging that future in the actual world.
The fact that humans are inherently different from one another is our greatest superpower, you write—an assertion that might surprise a few corporate leaders, school teachers, and parents. Can you flesh out your thinking on the importance of diversity and individualism, please?
Human beings differ, and the extent of that differentiation is unparalleled within the animal kingdom on Earth. Dolphins, for example, differ from each other, but that differentiation is trivial compared to human differentiation. It is quite remarkable that we are all part of the same species, because no other single species is nearly so heterogeneous as we humans. Physically we differ, mentally we differ, emotionally we differ—and to great degrees. We have innumerable unique imaginations, aspirations, values, fears, skills, preferences, experiences, loves, and hates. This is not, I think, an accident or an irrelevant detail of human evolution.
This differentiation is incredibly important for two reasons. First, because otherwise I would be terribly bored with you. Where did you go on vacation? Me, too. What did you read last week? Me, too. What are you ordering for dinner? Me, too. Boring.
Second, and, of course, this is the serious reason, without differentiation all of our eggs would be in a single basket—which is not a good strategy for surviving the unforeseeable challenges of the future.
One of the main themes of the book is the unavoidable reality of uncertainty, of Big Surprises. Since we cannot know what challenges the future holds in store for us, the smartest strategy is to cultivate the widest possible array of human differentiation today, to maximize the probability that someone will hold the solution we need to thrive in the face of the actual challenge that emerges. It is analogous to a hedging strategy in investing.
When the world is unpredictable, only fools put all their eggs in one basket.
As a precursor to the following question, I’d like readers to know that you believe love is the natural response to how we perceive perfection. In other words, that love is how perfection causes us to feel when we experience it. So, your marriage sounds to be one of extraordinary love and respect—but are you implying that you find your wife, Elise, to be perfect?
It is one of the great wonders of human life, that demonstrably imperfect people can nonetheless give us occasional glimpses of perfection through their words and deeds. I have never known a perfect person, and that includes Elise. But I have known many real human beings, imperfect as the rest, who nonetheless could bring tears to my eyes with their grand and mundane gestures. They crack open the door a little bit on my perception to allow me a glimpse at the perfection of the divine, the standard, the inspiring. They show me—sometimes only for a moment, sometimes for longer—a pattern, a possibility, a hint of my own potential.
So that’s really what I meant in the book when I wrote that some people give us a glimpse of the divine. It is a hint of perfection, not actual perfection. But, when we perceive even a hint of perfection, it attracts our attention and triggers an emotional response. The strongest experiences of that emotion are what I call Love.
Can you talk about the factors that make for a lasting relationship? Is the happenchance luck of meeting the right person a matter of fate? How much work goes into a healthy marriage/relationship?
I have seen marriages that look like a lot of work, and I have seen marriages that just seem to flow. Some couples have the particular cocktail of chemistry that makes the hard-work model last forever. I respect that. But my lived experience is so different from that.
In my experience, it is unnatural to stumble into conflict with someone when you are intently focused on the facets of them that are inspiring, admirable, elevating—when you are seeing glimpses of perfection through them. Those glimmers are rare in life, so that makes people who give you those glimmers a treasure. It’s very difficult to get cranky with your mate about running out of toothpaste when you notice in the morning how they smile with their eyes at you and remind you that someone is genuinely glad to see you wake up next to them. So in my experience, the most important thing is to cultivate a constant sense of wonder at the inspiring traits of your mate, because if you do this, it will be so enjoyable that you’ll want to do it all the time—and you’ll have very little interest in the silly little annoying things.
At the conclusion of each chapter in Surf the Seesaw, you offer two writing prompts: Contemplate, typically, a hypothetical exercise; and Adapt, for readers to ponder ways they might apply the book’s ideas to their own life. How do you hope these prompts will be used by readers? Is this approach tapping the same wellspring as journaling?
I think unprompted journaling is a difficult path to new ideas for most people. It can easily just be a way of recycling and reinforcing the same old ideas that are already rolling around in their heads.
In contrast, having a conversation with someone you trust—but who sees the world from a slightly different perspective—can cause you to think along new paths, use new words, and experiment with new imaginations. So in the Contemplate and Adapt exercises in Surf the Seesaw, I’m trying to offer the reader the experience of a conversation that is perhaps slightly different than the one that’s going on in their head when they’re alone. And hopefully slightly different than the one that they are hearing in whatever echo chambers they’re immersed daily. I hope to nudge them a little bit off-balance to see a familiar topic from a slightly different angle, so that they can begin to experiment with thinking about life and themselves and others in slightly different ways. I have no idea where that will go, and it’s not my job to control or forecast that. My job is to inspire the emergence of something new in my readers’ imaginations.
In your mind’s eye, who do you picture benefitting the most from this book?
I think the two most common traits of the readers that are engaging most energetically with the book are Curiosity and Restlessness. They’re a little bit restless because they realize that they don’t have a reliable model for how life works. Things frequently just don’t quite seem to work out the way that they hope or plan. Which makes them curious, of course, about whether there is more to know about how life works and whether there is perhaps another way to approach it.
So that’s who I see enjoying Surf the Seesaw: a person who is presently slightly restless and greatly curious.
We all want to live a significant life. But, please help us define significance in a way that provides us with an actionable plan?
In the discussions of significance in the book, I’m trying to accomplish two things. First, I’m trying to define significance in a way that is easy for people to picture. Because if we don’t understand what significance is, we absolutely have no hope of living a life of significance. And the second thing that I attempt to get across in the book is that it is possible for anyone to live a life of significance. Significance is not synonymous with Fame. From the chapters on greatness to the chapters on heroes to the chapters on entropy to the chapters on significance itself, I think I’ve made a broad and consistent case that our fellow human beings have walked innumerable, varied pathways to significance. But all of those pathways to significance share one thing in common: a life becomes significant strictly in virtue of the effect it has on other lives.
Here’s how I put it in the book:
“To rise above background noise and achieve significance, your life must inspire, empower, and resonate with our Brothers and Sisters. They are the only way to postpone entropy’s eraser removing all evidence of your existence. If your life becomes significant to others—if they notice what you do, are attracted to it, inspired by it, derive energy from it, and combine their energy and creativity with it, such that the joint result propagates even further—then it is possible that some tiny part of you will be amplified and remixed and repeated across many human relays long after all of your direct works have returned to background noise.”
One of the concepts that often gets confused with Significance is Purpose. To be clear, I do not believe that significance as discussed in Surf the Seesaw has anything at all to do with the concept of purpose as used in many other books. As it is typically used, Purpose is an externally derived notion: something or someone stamps a purpose on me, and my obligation is to live in accordance with that stamp. The rebel in me, the iconoclast, the freedom seeker, bristles at being defined by someone else like that.
So the concept of significance that I use in the book is infinitely malleable and is generated exclusively from within the individual. In short, the idea in the book is that we become significant by being true to ourselves and doing it in a way that is harmonious and inspiring relative to other people. No part of that definition looks to any other person or power for the definition of what we are to do or how we are to do it. It all comes from within you.
As for the question of actionability, I don’t think anything could be more actionable and tractable for every person, than to live consistent with their nature as a social individual: true to themselves and in harmony with others. As for a “plan,” it only has one to-do item: observe which of your passionate actions inspire, elevate, and equip others—then repeat those sorts of actions.
You took a unique approach to meditation, one with very practical, identifiable goals, rather than the more common search for peace of mind or stopping the monkey mind. Can you talk about your practice and how others might benefit from a similar approach?
The first thing that I will say is that any step toward mindfulness is a positive step. So I have nothing but positive feelings towards those who practice and advocate for meditation focused on quieting the mind or clearing the mind. I think there are times when we can all use a reminder to settle our minds.
Settling your mind is like widening your stance and bending your knees before you prepare to jump into action. I suppose you could say that my approach to meditation is about what you do with that balanced stance after you have taken a moment to quiet your mind.
I think what makes people like you respond to Surf the Seesaw‘s framework for meditation differently than perhaps some other meditation frameworks is that the book’s meditation is productive, constructive, active. If we have found ourselves in a place that we do not want to be, then certainly the first step must be to stop walking further in the wrong direction. A pause; settling the mind. But, a second step is also vital: we must certainly begin walking in a different direction. That is to say, actively reshaping our minds. We must pause, but it is not enough simply to pause. We must actively move in a new direction. And I think this is where my approach to meditation is most different: it is primarily about reinforcing patterns of thought that reinforce patterns of action that bring you joy.
And, of course, the other rather unique aspect of the approach is that I do not provide a universal meditation for the reader; rather, I walk them through a process of creating their own individualized meditation. Because powerful meditation must connect with one’s personal lived experiences and the values one has derived through those experiences.
Alright, how about a reading list. A couple books for a high school graduate? A newlywed? A new parent? A bankrupted, end of his/her rope, pessimist?
A couple books for a high school graduate?
A Theory of Justice, by Rawls
The Righteous Mind, by Haidt
The Elegant Universe, by Greene
The common thread through these books is that life is actually far more complex and far more nuanced and far more beautiful than any of the models teenagers have been using to navigate high school. Getting exposed to that beautiful complexity early is important, so that they can begin opening up their minds to richer models of perceiving and of behavior.
A newlywed?
The Book of Questions, by Stock
20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair, by Neruda
The Five Love Languages, by Chapman
The common thread through these books is plugging in to the psyche and emotion of one’s partner, of making a life-long habit of charting the beautiful depths of another soul, or emotional curiosity.
A new parent?
Swiss Family Robinson, by Wyss
Freakonomics, by Levitt
West with the Night, by Markham
The common thread among these books is that children are adults-in-progress, not a categorically different type of being. It’s hard to keep that in mind when everything your eyes tell you is that these little, awkward things are “other.” They are not other; they are simply becoming—at a very rapid pace. These books help us parent like Gretzky played hockey: skating to where the puck WILL be.
A bankrupted, end of his/her rope, pessimist?
The Alchemist, by Coelho
Blue Like Jazz, by Miller
This was a tough question. Because my instinct is that such people need a person, not a book. But, I chose books that are hopeful in a relatively non-saccharin way and that focus our attention beyond the confines of our own heads.
After an intimate discussion of just how breathtakingly unlikely our place in the universe really is, and that everything we know and have won’t last in its present state, you write, “Ours is an astonishingly rare moment, so we should live gratefully, intentionally, and creatively within it.” Please send us off with a final, hopeful message to ponder?
I find it wondrous that a frog came into being in this universe. I find it even more wondrous that dolphins evolved their social playfulness. If the experiment of life on Earth had stopped there, it would still be the most spectacular and unique result in the million trillion trillion cubic miles of our neighborhood of the galaxy. But it didn’t stop there. It continued to our kind. We are all the children of Aristotle and Gutenberg, of Michelangelo and da Vinci, of Homer and Harper Lee, of Turing and Monet, of Napoleon and Gandhi, of Gustaf Eiffel and Julia Child, of Feynman and Curie. Jacinda Ardern is your sister, and Usain Bolt is your cousin, and Pablo Neruda is your uncle, and Oprah is your aunt. We all come from a great family—not perfect but incredibly beautiful and strong, and we should call one another to great acts that honor and further the legacy of our great forebears and fulfill the amazing potential within each of us.
And might you also explain the book’s title?
My kids poke fun at me by calling me the king of nuance. I suppose the nicknames our closest friends give us are probably pretty close to the mark. So one of the central recurring themes in my life, in my conversations, and in my writings is that the magic is in the middle—that there’s energy in the dynamic interplay between two ideas in tension.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do on the playground was to stand on top of the seesaw, placing my feet on opposite sides of the fulcrum and working actively to keep both seats in the air. It was a constant balancing act; there was no equilibrium, no stasis. It was active. It was a dynamo of energy. It was surfing the seesaw.
I did not begin the project with a title in mind; rather, the title emerged from the work, because the concept of active balance showed up in so many of the chapters. “Surf the Seesaw” captured that idea in a way that most people can easily visualize from childhood.
Matt Sutherland
