I’ve always been an extremely left-brainy guy.

Few things give me as much joy as making sense of the world using language.

Frameworks, models, labels, these kind of things.

But it’s becoming increasingly obvious to me how limiting this approach is.

For example, the elegant frameworks you read about in self-help and business books never work as promised. Never.

But there is no malicious intent. People aren’t intentionally lying. They don’t sit down thinking “let me come up with some nonsense to fool people”.

At the same time, some people very clearly do better in life and I don’t think it’s entirely random or due to some hidden unfair advantages.

Some people do have certain things figured out.

The real problem is when they try to explain it in a left-brainy way.

You could listen to 10-hours of Lionel Messi explaining how to shoot a football and still have zero clue what to do on a football pitch.

You cannot download Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial skills or Stephen King’s writing skills into your brain by reading some book or listening to some lecture.

Tacit knowledge is what left-brainers like to call this.

The root issue is that reality has a surprising amount of detail. All models are wrong. The map is not the territory.

But my left brain likes to hide these facts from me since they diminish its influence and status.

My left brain is the power hungry emissary that likes to overstate its own importance.

It does everything it can to keep me in the belief that I’m just one framework, one mental model away. That I can download real-world skills the same way Neo does in the Matrix movies by reading books, blog posts and tweets, or listening to podcasts.

And just as in Nietzsche’s story, once the emissary actually starts ruling, things quickly start to fall apart.

The emissary’s narrow, analytical view of the world and desire to have everything fully under control, cut it into pieces and arrange it in ways it can fully grasp, is inadequate for dealing with the complexities of reality.

The grand masterplan you come up with is doomed to fail for the same reason as the five-year plans of the Soviet Union.

But that doesn’t mean that the left brain is useless — far from it.

After all, maps and other wrong models are useful. Plans areuseless but planning is everything.

Our left brain allows us to create a conceptual map of the world, substituting words as symbols for real things. This symboli...

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