1.
They say you can bite your finger off as easily as biting a carrot. I never believed them. It didn’t seem possible. But, also, I’ve never tried. I wondered: what else in life might be like this?
2.
In the tech/business world, there’s this idea of a “cashflow business.” This mainly refers to a business which makes profit, but it has other connotations: being more relaxed, having lower ambitions, and not raising a bunch of venture capital, among others.
I have on a few occasions talked with flailing startup founders who have told me that their next move is to run a “cashflow business.” Because they want something “easier” and “more chill.” Sometimes they make it sound a little like they are Nikola Jokic going to play basketball at the YMCA.
But how many of them have tried it? And succeeded? Part of me wonders whether a “cashflow business” is really as easy as they say. It’s probably harder to hire ambitious people. It might be harder to motivate yourself. And, of course, to run a cashflow business in the long-term you generally need to be good at creating consistent value for your customers; this is a tricky skill which many of the people who say a cashflow business is “easy” may not be overly familiar with.
3.
When you are in your 20s (as both of us who write this blog are) you will frequently talk to out-of-shape friends who tell you they just need to “lock in” and “get ripped.”
I can sense another carrot-ism here, because often these friends will accompany their motivation with a line like: “It isn’t even that hard. I literally just need to go to the gym.”
Getting into shape is so easy. But, well… I never see you in the gym.
4.
Now it is time for a personal confession: I have often told myself I could ‘easily’ become great at writing short fiction. (There is even some on this blog: here and here and here). I listened to the writing podcasts and read the advice and told myself a very carrot-adjacent story:
If I just wrote one short story a day for, like, a year I would become really good.
So becoming great, or at least very good, at writing short stories would be as simple as dedicating 30 minutes a day to the craft. How hard could it be? It’s just like biting a carrot.
5.
I will stop with the carrot examples here because you can think of hundreds.
6.
You should now know that I omitted an important piece of information at the start of this essay: the whole thing about the carrot is bullshit. It is way harder (not just psychologically, but physically) to bite your finger off than it is to bite a carrot. I mean, come on now: what would life be like if your finger bones were as weak as a carrot? I probably would’ve lost an index or a pinky in the writing of this essay.
You can bite your finger off, if you really want to. It’s just hard. And the reason people say it’s easy is that there are no consequences to saying it’s easy; you can simply not try it, and keep saying it’s easy.
It’s rather fitting that they chose a carrot for this old myth. Because, you know, there is that other phrase they have about the vegetable: dangling a carrot. And when people say carrot-isms to me, be it biting off their finger or running a cashflow business or getting into shape, I sort of picture them as Bugs Bunny chasing around a carrot on a stick. Except the carrot is in reach, and they are scared of grabbing it.
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