The Hidden Power of Naivety
It wasn’t so long ago, and a lifetime ago, that I found myself slumped in my small downtown cubicle on a cold February afternoon with a strange feeling in my soul.
The sky was grey and the view was bleak. It was hard to see the surrounding office towers because my window had never been cleaned in the two and a half years I had worked there. Snow streaks, then rain streaks, had been baked on by the summer sun, dusted up by the autumn dryness, and then repeated for who-knows-how-long, resulting in a blurry, blotchy haze.
I had been feeling deeply discouraged for some time. In fact, I felt as if I had hit the rock bottom of such a deep hole that gravity had an extra good pull on me. The journey to the bottom started, I suspected, when I landed a job I thought might be The Job only to be confronted by an existential dread related to the vastness of life. As far as I was concerned, there was no more school on the horizon, no more obstacles, no more challenges, just a lot more of this. The prospect of nearly 40 years spent doing this job or something like it was more than I could bear. I was clearly in the wrong place.
But I had been able to bear it for months. This Atlas-like feeling became familiar to me. It was as though a heaviness had infiltrated my lungs, expanded my ribcage, curled up, and made itself at home. I had carried this feeling into the office at 8am and walked it back home at 4pm for quite some time.
This particular afternoon, though, there was suddenly a new feeling.
This new feeling was not unfamiliar either. I had felt it when I went skydiving a few years before, as I stood on the turbulent wing of a small propeller plane in a daze of fear and exhilaration, taking my last breaths before the plunge.
I had also experienced it years before that as my plane to Edinburgh, Scotland touched the ground, neatly depositing me, Bambi-eyed and 18 years old, in a foreign city, all alone, with no plans beyond two nights in a hostel and a work visa awaiting me somewhere.
And here it was again, this feeling of having no idea what is coming next, but in this instant, choosing optimism.
This choice, I came to understand later, is one of the most powerful ones we can make.
Choosing optimism over despair in a dark place means admitting that:
You want happiness. You want goodness in your life. You want inner peace, or joy, or maybe just more than this. Do not underestimate the power of acknowledging this, because it is big and vulnerable. The light of the happiness you have decided to want tends to expose how different your current reality is to that vision. If you want something with all of yourself, you’ll likely find yourself facing the uncomfortable lack in your present reality.
You don’t really know what happiness of this sort is like, because you’ve never had it before. This is a maiden voyage of sorts, a pipe dream, a foray into a potentially different reality. If you want true love, for instance, and you feel the pain of not having it now, you may also feel the adrenaline and strangeness of setting out to attain something you do not fully understand.
At this point, in order to embrace the happiness you’ve decided you want, you must trust that something (call it the universe, call it God, call it “the way the cookie crumbles”) will take care of you and see you to your destination. If you want it, you must believe it is out there waiting for you and that there are forces outside you that are in fact serving you
Another word for this feeling is hope.
Hope has a bad reputation in our hustling world, because it suggests a lack of action and a dangerous untethering from reality. Don’t hope, do! In my opinion, hope is an action – the act of releasing whatever it is that is keeping you in this place you don’t want to be.
The sunny Kindred on our Archetype Wheel lives right next door to Titan, which inhabits the highest level of control.
This means that while Kindred is still on the “control” side of the spectrum, it has to let something go to embody its true form of happiness. When we are in this space of wanting something very badly and right on the razor edge of almost believing that the best thing could happen, we must relinquish some form of control in order to attain what we really want.
Relinquishing control in the Kindred space means trusting, something that most of us struggle with immensely.
We commonly hear about the bad side of trust… those instances when trusting too much goes terribly wrong. For instance, we can see what goes wrong when we wholeheartedly trust in dubious religions, or self-professed gurus, or troubled belief systems. We see the negative outcomes when we trust in diets and wellness programs, in charismatic politicians, and in loan sharks. We occasionally drink the Kool-Aid and by the time we wake up, we have lost a lot. We call other people who do this “naive”.
But trust also leads to good places, and we forget that. We trust in programs or systems that end up changing our lives – and if we didn’t trust in them, we would still be where we were before. We trust in people who become our greatest allies and friends. We trust in doctors who save us. No matter how independent you are, at some point you realize you are quite small in this vast universe, and in order to fulfil your dreams and hopes for a happier life, you must trust someone, even if they are simply on the journey with you.
In other words, in order to claim the joy, peace, and love that is rightfully yours – and especially when you’re standing in a place of heaviness, lack, failure, and loneliness– you must accept your own naivety. Nothing begins from a place of knowledge. Everything begins from not knowing. And this is not a weakness.
Naivety means believing things are going to be grand when there is little to no evidence to back it up. In order to see the best in your faults, and in order to participate in a world where things are good and work out, you may need to trust in:
God
Yourself
Humanity
The universe
That program
The professionals
A promise of safety
The nature of things
The goodness of humanity
The fact that things usually work out.
As you can see, there is no room for doubt in these pivotal moments between desiring happiness and stepping up to claim it. There is no space for “I can’t do it”, or “what if it goes wrong?” or “maybe I’m better off here.”
If you’re going to jump out of a plane with gusto, the way you want to, you have to trust that you will land safely. If you’re going to move to an unknown place, you must believe that things will work out for you – you must believe that somewhere there is a job waiting, a home waiting, friends waiting. You just haven’t found them yet.
By the way, this experience of naivety and trust is the most entrepreneurial of experiences.
When I was sitting in my little cubicle on that cold February day, that feeling of rare optimism in amongst the grey happened when I allowed myself (at last) to imagine, to fully embody, what it would be like to be sitting with a steaming cup of coffee on my stoop at 2pm, typing away at my leisure, writing something that mattered to me. It felt as if it could be real for the first time. As it turns out, that is exactly how I’m writing this now, under the cool spring sun, full of promise.
That small, hopeful vision was all I needed to leave my job when I had zero idea how to start and run a business. Naivety was the blessed engine that carried me forward once I began. It was the only reason I even tried. And yes, I failed at it sometimes, and I succeeded at it sometimes, and I charged too little, and I did hard things, and I almost missed rent payments, and slowly, with a lot of hard work, I arrived here, to a place, dare I say, of happiness.
During this journey, I’ve locked eyes with so many entrepreneurs in deep agreement: Thank god I didn’t know what I was in for, we whisper to one another reverently. Thank god I didn’t know how hard it would be, because if I had known, I would have doubted my strength. I would have overthought it. I might have forgotten the vision of happiness and gotten lost in beliefs that I was unskilled, unknowing, underprepared, that I didn’t have what I needed to succeed. I might have given up before I started, and I would have never ended up here, having this conversation with you.
In this way, naivety is a precious gift. Your ability to accept it as such, to follow the light of possibility rather than the sober darkness of doubt, is the only thing that will make you take the leap. May we continue to believe in the best outcome and be the kind of people that make others wonder, what do they know that I don’t?
Brittany Veenhuysen is a writer and co-founder of BrandPsyche. With a BA in English and a philosophical lens, she uses strategic storytelling to connect entrepreneurial folk with people they love to serve.