Doubt

Being hunted on launch sites, earning a Spidey Sense, & doubting Certainty.

Stalked by Doubt

On the launch site, failure stalked us at every turn — vendors that wouldn’t deliver parts on time (or even at all), small electrical connectors that broke as we tried to plug in some final piece of critical instrumentation, and even bigger things like multi-month detailed designs that failed to operate after they’d been deployed on the pad. That’s life on a launch site; a new disaster is always lurking around every corner.

That first year, I constantly thought to myself, “What in the hell do I know about any of this? Nothing!” I could see the same thought written across many of my coworkers’ faces, too. Building a launch site is like hitting a constantly shifting target; one that moves side to side, up and down, in and out of sight. Despite the changes in focus and direction, and the intense Doubt we each experienced individually, we never doubted as a group that we would figure it out.

A belief like that is both powerful and dangerous. Taken to an extreme, it’s the type of hubris we see wreck lives and legacies.¹ But our surety didn’t come from blind faith or drinking of company Kool-Aid. It developed slowly as our team solved problems that had seemed impossible just the day, week, or month before. We saw that each of us possessed a piece of the puzzle and had a part to play. Something beyond my reach was simple for others, and vice versa. Over time, a vague but inexorable sense that the Way would eventually become clear took over. It was our job to discover that invisible Path, channel that Energy, or otherwise summon “It” into existence — whatever “It” might be.

In the years that followed on the landing barges and in building Launch Co., I continued to run into Doubt on a daily basis and kept learning how to work with it. But in the six-plus months of my sabbatical, a different kind of Doubt has started to creep in.

It Ain’t Taught in School

First, I want to acknowledge that dealing with Doubt was not taught in engineering school, and certainly neither purposefully, nor explicitly, at SpaceX or any other aerospace company I worked with. No one went around smiling and blessing us, acknowledging our struggle and making conditions ideal for the infinite path to unfold before us. No, it was pretty much the exact opposite of that. A constant deluge of phone calls, emails, instant messages, and in-person meetings demanding to know just what-the-fuck-we’re-gonna-do-about-this-and-why-isn’t-it-done-yet-and-it-better-work-or-we-have-a-real-fucking-problem-and-one-more-thing-while-I-have-you.

It was sink or swim, and by the way please hold this bag of concrete, I’ll check on you at this afternoon’s tag-up. Learn to live with Doubt or lose your job. Learn to live with Doubt or go live somewhere else, far away from the cool kids building the cool stuff. I don’t think it was healthy, but damn if it wasn’t effective. I didn’t want to miss out. I wanted to belong, I wanted to measure up. Hell, I wanted to kick some ass.²

Working with Doubt

If I couldn’t escape it, then I’d have to work with it. How do to that? Well, I realized early on that I couldn’t stay frozen, hoping enlightenment would find me. I had to get out there and look for answers. I started to cobble lessons together by reviewing old designs across the company server for the existing launch site at the Cape, as well as the integrated test site in Texas. I spent countless hours shadowing technicians around our own developing site, learning how systems further along than mine were put together, how they were tested, and how they performed. Some things went well, some were disasters, most were somewhere in the middle.

Still, I couldn’t shake that hunted feeling. Like a wounded impala that escaped a cheetah, only to have to then evade a pack of lions, and finally a cackle of hyenas, I stumbled from failure to failure, lesson to lesson, and all the while shook the “little t” traumas of each fuckup out of my trembling hands, singing curses like prayers all the while. Through each fuck, shit, dammit uttered to process each run in with hard reality, I began to realize that I was just going to have to get comfortable with not knowing much — and even more comfortable with being willing to make choices with incomplete information.

As I made that peace, quit fighting against Doubt all the time, a funny thing happened: I started to treat Doubt more as a friend. I renamed it my “Spidey Sense” to make it a little more digestible when speaking about it to others, and whenever it spoke up, I paid good attention. I learned, too, that dealing with Doubt rarely brings us closer to Certainty; in fact, done properly, I believe it takes us even further from it.

Avoiding Certainty

Finding it hard to live with Doubt? Well, imagine the nightmare it would be to live with absolute Certainty instead. First, turn yourself off from the neck down. The brain is in charge and everyone else is just along for the ride. Then, pick the moment in your life when you felt safest, happiest, fittest, wealthiest, or whatever else seems cozy and freeze yourself there. For lots of men³, that’s sometime vaguely after high school but before college got too serious. Old enough to drink every night at the bar, young enough not to know any better.

Then adopt one, or some combination of all, of the following: withering cynicism, seething irony, or simmering anger threatening to erupt as rage. Anything new that comes along that doesn’t fit your worldview is dealt with by one or all of these, depending on the scale of the perceived threat. Don’t get the message of a book? It was garbage. Can’t figure out some sticky technical problem? It’s bullshit. Significant other unhappy with you? Well, you’re even more unhappy with her! Something inconvenient conflict with your world view? Distract, ignore, belittle.

This isn’t some made up character, this is largely how I operated from college until I finally couldn’t take it anymore in my late 20’s. Judging only by my experience with it, I can say that this approach to life majorly sucks and is no way to live. It’s a small, confusing, and highly unsatisfying existence completely at odds with the way we’re designed to live.

As I continue down my path, I’ve noticed a funny thing happen: the game has actually become avoiding Certainty.⁴ I don’t trust anything I’m sure about. I’ve just experienced too much of my own flawed thinking; the gaps, the fuzzy areas, the places I’m willing to make jumps without showing my work. It’s funny to say, but the surer I am about something, the more I doubt my own certainty.

Expanding Along the Path Ahead

I am writing about this because, as I mentioned up top, I again feel Doubt creeping in. I learned to deal with it in highly technical situations, like being launch sites or running an aerospace engineering company, but it’s harder to digest when I also don’t have a clear direction at the moment. Put another way, a sabbatical is an amazing place to come face to face with Doubt in all of its forms:

• Doubt that I can write, edit, and publish a book? Yeah, probably a tall order! Better find some help⁵.

• Current newsletter issue doesn’t feel right? Hm, read it again and be willing to kill the darlings that don’t fit.⁶

• Don’t believe that I can expand to other callings, and different work? I couldn’t build launch sites when I started, either. Treat this like the launch site and lean on peers for help.

This last point has been the most powerful realization for me already this year. A sabbatical, especially one where I am trying to recast what I do for my work, and the way that I do it, can feel isolating and lonely. It feels too personal. But it’s crucial to share the vision, the goals, the concerns, the fuzzy areas of weakness with others; especially those that will play a part like family, close friends, and long-time collaborators.

To that end, I have redoubled my efforts to articulate what I think I am doing, before I feel ready, just to see how it lands, all the while being ready to iterate as I learn. Just like back on the launch site a decade ago, the key is not to freeze in place and expect enlightenment to find me.

This practice helps me to remain humble, to slow down, and to stay present with a complex set of work in front of me⁷. Still, I try to treat Doubt as a friend bringing a warning whenever it arises, trusting that it has something important to tell me.⁸

1. This reminds me I need to write about how much I dislike the ill-applied adage “Failure is not an option.” Failure is always an option, and generally the most energetically favorable outcome at that!

2. You’ll be shocked to learn that when I quit, I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue bordering on failure and was so exhausted that I, paradoxically, couldn’t sleep.

3. Purposefully gendered. I can’t speak for others, but I’m willing to risk painting us men with this broad brush.

4. I assume older readers are shaking their heads, laughing at this and saying, “Just wait.”

5. Major shoutout to my editor Bev, as well as my lovely wife Jennie whose brilliance helps shape the project at key points.

6. I have written and deleted close to 3,000 extra words from this post on three different occasions. I had to schedule the post to publish to get this thing out the door! T-minus five min until it goes out by email.

7. Right now, those tasks include some in-depth prototype design work for clients, equity advising for startups, redrafting the latest revision of my book, looking for manufacturing businesses to buy, angel investing, and creating a road map for other deep tech hardware entrepreneurs with lessons learned from my work so far. I’m excited to see which grow, which evolve, and which fall away.

8. The key here is ‘try.’ It’s a practice, and it’s ongoing. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes the Doubt is too loud and I have to step back for a while to plot my next move. C’est la vie.