Hacking Life
The term hacker has a sordid history. The term canonically is used to refer to a coder who through an act of subterfuge illegally taps into a computer architecture and appropriates data. The negative connotation has since softened a bit, denoting a coder who through ingenuity and quick work is able to concoct something useful. Silicon Valley has hosted its share of hackathons, events where small groups of agile entrepreneurs develop app-based startups overnight. Then the term became generalized to represent anybody who developed a sly method to efficiently achieve a certain outcome, albeit by cutting some corners. This connotation still has the faint whiff of impropriety, while staying on the right side of the line.
As the term evolved, a proliferation of “life hacks” began to bombard the internet. These are marginally clever little tricks you could use to make your life slightly better. Things like using empty toilet paper cores to store loose charger chords; removing a strawberry stem using a straw; or employing the cleanest and most delicious way to consume a cupcake. I’m all for pursuing efficiencies in life and learning ways to do things a little bit better. I like to tinker, create, and invent, and it’s fun to see how people come up with creative solutions to life’s minor challenges.
Yet when hacker culture finds its way deeper into the center of our most critical pursuits, one needs to pause and make sure these shortcuts aren’t really short shrifts. Sometimes you have to go all in and pay full price in order to achieve the type of results that allow you to excel in life. You wouldn’t want your surgeon using hacks to slide through residency, or your investment professional employing clever shortcuts while developing your financial plan, or a parent relying on hacks to ease the challenge of child-rearing.
In my youth, the hack equivalent was Cliff Notes, those bright yellow, heavily abridged versions of classic texts that tried to eliminate the need for a student to read, understand, and analyze the actual book. The idea was that if you could fool your teacher into thinking you read the text and got the gist of it, then you saved yourself the hassle of reading Wuthering Heights, or Ulysses, or Anna Karenina. But in this case, the injustice was actually directed at the perpetrator, not the educator. The student who tries to game the novel is intellectually poorer for the experience. Similarly, students who merely memorize the formulas for math or physics, rather than trying to understand and derive them, are depriving themselves of the deep beauty of nature and science.
The reward of school, and life, isn’t getting the grade. It’s achieving mastery. Mastery enables us to achieve greater levels of gratification and impact than any hack-induced accolade. It’s through mastery that we can make a disproportionate impact.
Masters tend to do the opposite of hacks. They invest huge amounts of time to make small improvements for the things that matter the most to them. The effort and the enhanced production are worth it for them. A quarterback will put that much more extra time into his throwing technique because good enough isn’t good enough. A physicist will pour hours into a single problem to make sure that she truly grasps the concept before going on to the next one. An author will fret over a single word, hoping to perfectly capture the atmosphere of an event and, ultimately, enchant the reader.
Hacking your way to the answer may get you an A, but it won’t get you much else. As Walker Percy wrote in Second Coming, “You can get all As and still flunk life.”
What about hacks for our relationships? Sending a quick text message, Snap, or DM to sustain a meaningful friendship won’t lead to a deep and lasting connection. You have to show up. In person. Often. And when needed. The people in your life who truly matter to you deserve more than an occasional “Sup” or “LOL.”
It’s hard and taxing at times, but the best things in life can’t be realized through a hack, shortcut, smartcut, or whatever term you want to use for a clever workaround. Perhaps the single best life hack is in knowing when a novel trick won’t cut it.
I try to be cognizant of not coming across as too old school as I mature in life. But I have to admit, I am a fan of reading physical books from cover to cover; of writing down thoughts using pen and paper; of picking up the phone rather than tapping an abbreviation-laden text; of having meetings in person, and looking folks in the eye, rather than squinting to see them on Zoom; and of cooking dinner fresh on the grill, rather than one-clicking on DoorDash. It’s not an anathema to order in, or video conference, or text your friends—these are all conveniences that we should avail ourselves from time to time. Yet if we lose the art of putting in the labor of love to create something of greater meaning, we deprive ourselves of one of life’s greatest treasures.