In all my years of school I never studied. Chapters from the textbook were assigned regularly, but I didn’t feel like I could read them. I didn’t know how to stay interested enough to absorb any knowledge from them.

Studying, for me, amounted to looking up bolded words in the glossary and trying to remember what the teacher had been talking about when she said, “This will be on the test.”

I was well aware that studying is a normal thing people do, an obvious and straightforward solution to school’s challenges, just as washing the dishes in soapy water is an obvious solution to having an unsightly pile of dishes in the sink. Whenever I sought instruction on how to study, however, it was assumed that one could simply read a textbook when necessary, and I could not explain why I couldn’t do that.

Somehow I got by, although my no-studying method was definitely inferior to the usual “some studying” method. My marks were good through primary school, “satisfactory” in high school, and probationary in college. I did graduate, but I was anxious and afraid all the time, and lived my life avoiding any endeavors involving the reading of dense material, whether at school, work, or play.

The Long Way Around

I suspect my studying problem is one form of a common scenario: there’s a normal and straightforward way to do a thing, yet you’ve come to do it in some eccentric roundabout way that doesn’t work so well, just because you can’t get on board with the usual way for some reason.

Maybe you get too nervous trying to parallel park on the street, despite ample spots, so you always pay for an underground lot and have to walk a half-mile each way. Or you don’t go to the cinema anymore solely because you’re embarrassed to shuffle past people mid-movie go to the bathroom, and you may have to do that. Or you always must maintain a large supply of change because you don’t know how those MetroPass things work, eight years after they introduced them.

I’m sure all of us make private compromises around certain specific corners of life, tasks that others seem to navigate as a matter of course by doing the simple and obvious thing. Just quit avoiding it and learn to park. Just get up and go to the bathroom. Just crack the books and study.

We may have our reasons, at least at first: acute anxiety around certain situations, a genuine inability to understand a common concept or perform a common action, or just a sense that you’re not ready to tackle this particular question mark quite yet. Whatever it is, you balk and go around where others just go ahead.

Maybe you can relate to the above examples, or something like them. Or perhaps you know someone who does a certain thing in a seemingly self-defeating and inefficient way:

• A man insists he cannot cook and cannot learn to cook. “I burn everything,” he says. Privately, he has always found it stressful to try follow a recipe, mostly because he turns on the burner before he even starts prepping the ingredients. So he lives on takeout, to the detriment of his health and finances.
• Another man has worn a simple buzzcut his entire adult life because he has never known how to do his hair in a way he likes. He’d love to have something more interesting, but the possibility of making it look good feels beyond him.
• A woman doesn’t invest her savings because money stuff has always felt too complicated, so she keeps it all in a low-interest savings account. She rarely thinks about investing now. Her unusual retirement strategy has already cost her tens of thousands of dollars.
• A man can never remember what the washing symbols on clothing tags mean, so he washes everything together on the default setting, every time. His clothes get clean enough, although he has to replace them often, and he doesn’t wear white garments anymore because they just won’t stay white.
• A woman has a little garden, where she only grows chives and thyme, because she thinks they’re the only plants she can keep alive. She’d love to grow some big colorful flowers but it feels like it would be tricky — annuals, perennials, climate zones, and all that.
• An office worker doesn’t go out with her colleagues because she’s afraid people will make fun of her for not drinking alcohol. Instead of going anyway and ordering whatever she wants, she simply declines every invitation. She likes these people, and is respected in the office, but she always feels like an outsider because everybody else knows each other.

A casual observer in all of these cases would be scratching their head. Why don’t you just read Investing for Dummies? Why not take half an hour and learn the laundry symbols? Why not just go out with the coworkers and see what it’s like?

What has happened with each of these people is that they’ve abandoned the usual, most straightforward way at some point — which is virtually everyone’s Plan A — because it seemed unworkable or painful when they tried it, or thought about trying it. To get by, they’ve settled on an idiosyncratic Plan B, which “works” but is more costly, less rewarding, and makes the person feel left out of something others seem to do freely.

Over time, Plan B methods get so familiar that they become part of your identity. You become blind to the possibility that the thing can be a lot simpler. Plan A is how things work for others, and Plan B is simply how your life must be.

In fact, Plan Bs become so ingrained that you might not even realize you’re making a fairly drastic compromise. The only clue might be that everybody else does a certain thing in a common, conventional way, with little visible trouble, and you do that thing some other way, and it remains troublesome to you.

For example, I always shy away from swimming-related activities because in my mind it seems like such a hassle — finding a place to change, putting my wallet and phone somewhere safe, doing something with my sopping trunks afterward — even though I like swimming itself, and those reservations are all small, easily solved problems that everyone else just deals with.

Stepping off the long detour

Being stuck in a Plan B can feel like a personal curse, but really, it’s just a method. Cooking and growing flowers works under the same laws for everyone. If the fish gets to the right temperature for the right amount of time, it cooks nicely. If the flower gets the light and nutrients it needs, it grows. There is no person for whom those conditions have some other result, but there are people who have stopped trying to create those conditions and are doing something else.

And they probably stopped with Plan A after only a few early failures. It doesn’t take many painful or frustrating experiences before you’re looking elsewhere for a way past. And you’ll always find some way, some Plan B. But the problem with Plan A might have been a small or contingent thing that’s no trouble anymore, or at least isn’t the brick wall it once seemed to be. Maybe you just didn’t have someone to ask for help, or there was no internet back then, or you were just younger and less wise.

It occurred to me recently — after trying to explain to someone why I can’t simply study the topics I want to be well-studied in — just how many Plan A’s I’ve abandoned in my life, and how many might work fine now. Undiagnosed ADHD has instilled a lot of Plan B compromises in me, so many that I began to assume that no Plan A approach is going work for me, even before I’ve tried it.

Anyway, I’m now going back to Plan A approaches I’d long abandoned — and they work! Ten or twenty years later, I find I have sufficient patience to sort out the details of most normal, straightforward methods without getting frustrated. Lo and behold, I can understand and use financial instruments. I can make pastry. I can study.

You’re probably not as hard a case as I am though. Whatever your challenge is, perhaps it’s finally time for Plan A.

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In other news, something cool is happening: my friend Robert Wringham is resurrecting his small-print magazine New Escapologist, about escaping the worker-consumer treadmill into a life of creativity. I’m writing a regular column. Get a copy via their Kickstarter campaign, which is happening now.

Photos by Priscilla Du Preez, Tom Harpel, Vidar Nordli-Mathisen, Elkagye, Shane, and Josh Appel