The world outside my doorstep is a really complex net of chaos and I am effectively blind to most of its existence.
Say I’m looking for a job. And I know what job I want to do. I can search for it on a job listing site, but there will still be many such jobs that won’t be cataloged on the site and that I’ll hence be missing. How can I find the rest? What are some alternative approaches?
Also there are two ways you can end up with a job: either you find it (going on a job search), or it finds you (headhunters etc.). Obviously the latter possibility is much better as it’s less tiring and it means you end up with an over-abundance of opportunities (if people message you every week). What are some rules of thumb for life to make it so that the opportunities come to you? (and not only for jobs)
Often I don’t even know what opportunities are on offer out in that misty unknown (and my ADHD brain finds it straining to research them (searching 1 job site feels almost futile because you don’t know how many of the actual opportunities you aren’t seeing)), so the strategy I resort to is imagining what I concievably expect to be out there and then trying to find it. This has several weaknesses: firstly I could be imagining something that doesn’t actually exist and waste hours beating myself up because I can’t find it. Or, almost even worse, my limited imagination might be limiting what sorts of opportunities I look for which means I miss out of the truly crazy things out there.
Here’s an example of an alternative approach that worked for me once:
Last month I wanted to visit a university in another city for a few days to see if I liked it, and I needed a place to stay. I first tried the obvious approach of searching AirBnB for rents I could afford, but none came up. Hence I had to search through the unmapped. What ended up working was: I messaged the students union -> they added me to their whatsapp group -> sb from my country replied to my post on there adding me to a different WA group for students from my country -> sb in that WA group then DM’d saying I could crash on their couch.
I would have never thought of trying an approach like this when I set out, and yet I must have done something right because it worked. What? The idea to message the students union and join whatsapp groups took quite a lot of straining the creative part of my brain, so I’m wondering whether the approach I took here can somehow be generalized so that I can use it in the future.
TL;DR: Search engines don’t map the world comprehensively. You might not even be searching for the right thing. What are some other good ways to search among the unstructured unknown that is out there?
You are right. Another word to describe it: it is lacking structures. That’s where man comes into the picture: You. You can create structure.
Having that wonderful and powerful ADHD brain too, I found that I need to find and create structures within myself first. Then I can go on and give structures to the world outside.
One important step is to describe structures in explicit words. Often write them down or draw them on real paper, in order not to forget on the next day, or after an eventful weekend (for me it’s always the weekend - Monday morning I am so empty and I need to start with reading all that I have done at the end of last week).
Another good approach is to describe and define goals and strategies. A goal is where I want to get. A strategy is the order of steps needed to get to the goal.
Somebody explained it to me like climbing the mountains. You can’t just wander around there and hope to find a way sooner or later because you would get lost inevitably, and your force is limited and your day runs out etc. So you have to look at a specific point and say “There it is where I want to go!”. Then you look and think and decide and say “This is the way, and these are the steps to get there!”. And you cannot start before you know the way. But when you know it, you can go and start your climbing.
You are right that being delibarate about picking a strategy and constantly returning to it so it structures your ADHD brain is a very helpful approach. What I’m looking to hear about is people’s alternatives to the strategy of googling when the goal is finding real-world opportunities like jobs or housing. Ie. other methods for traversing that net of chaos.