Accepting invitations you normally refuse
Researching many possibilities
All of us get invitations or offers that we decide we don’t have time for, aren’t interested in, or that might break up our nice little routine. This week, say yes to something that you would not normally say yes to. Go out on a limb. Remember, this is research. Just see if you end up enjoying any activities that you don’t normally include in your routine.
- Regena Thomashauer (a.k.a Mama Gena)
No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.
- Stephen Hawking
I recently finished James Clear’s Atomic Habits, a book that I resisted for quite some time but in the end, I found hugely interesting and even transformative. One thing that stayed with me right away was the idea that we embody our identity through our habits. Ultimately, Clear says, “The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.”
There’s a lot to love here: the idea of becoming (hey there, Michelle Obama), the focus on building of habits rather than the idea of adopting habits, and the focus on becoming yourself. I love all of that.
Building habits as a path to becoming yourself stayed with me for many miles (I listened to the book on Audible during my walks). I kept coming back to something I read years ago: the call to accept invitations you normally refuse.
When we stop to think about it, invitations are with us all the time: we’re invited to coffee or drinks, to a meeting, to a party, to meet someone, to read something, to eat something, to go somewhere, to walk a different route. Some of those seem insignificant while others might seem more weighty.
Here’s the thing: big or small, important or benign….it doesn’t matter. Accepting an invitation you normally refuse is more than the accepting or the invitation.
Much more.
When you accept an invitation you normally refuse, you are:
Noticing your norm. You are seeing your comfort zone, your routine, your usual way.
Making a choice. You are saying yes to something else for a time. For an experience. For learning.
Opening. You are opening up to a broader spectrum of seeing, experiencing, learning, and growing. You are changing the channel from what you know and what you do to what you might learn or what might happen.
Those three acts (noticing, choosing, and opening) are all essential elements to discernment. By accepting those invitations, you are really taking a step towards becoming yourself because you are aware of your actions, your routines, your habits. You are evaluating if those are really yours or ones that are just what you have been conditioned or comfortable doing. You are exploring alternatives and asking yourself if those alternatives have value for you. For you.
Along with the challenge, I loved the focus on using this as a way to research. After all, the first 15 years of my career was in research and academic libraries! During that time, I taught students how to research. Research is not about learning to use a database. Those are tools. Research is about exploring a topic by asking questions. And using those questions to ask more questions.
When we look at accepting invitations we normally refuse as research, we bring to it some curiosity. With our pencils ready and our notebooks ready - yes I am visualizing the researcher metaphor here - we start to ask different questions. For example:
What might it look like for me to do something other than what I normally do?
What does it feel like?
What results did I get from doing something I normally don’t?
What surprises me?
What new perspective did I gain?
Did I have fun? When? In what way?
What would happen if I did something else I normally don’t do?
What would happen if I did this again but changed an element of it?
I could keep going.
With this research lens on, we are exploring a line of thought to see where it takes us. And you know what we learned? There are many possibilities.
If you didn’t like your experience? If it wasn’t fun? Or interesting? Or productive?
As a librarian, if we had a “failed search” we’d still use it: what keywords did we identify, what change in terms can we apply. With the “failure”, came clarification.
The same is true here: by accepting invitations you normally refuse, you are opening up to something other than what you know.
Will it work? Who knows.
Will you learn something from it? No question about it.
Will you know more than you did if you hadn’t accepted it? Yes.
Will it prove useful? If you learned something, absolutely.
As Stephen Hawking points out, it is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.