Why the Manual You're Following Might Be the Thing That's Holding You Back (With Apologies to All the Manuals)

Why the Manual You're Following Might Be the Thing That's Holding You Back (With Apologies to All the Manuals)
Photo by Jon Tyson / Unsplash

There was a period in my mid-twenties when I carried a small notebook everywhere, not the Moleskine (Or is it Leuchtturm now?) kind favored by people who want you to know they're writers, but a cheap spiral-bound thing from the drugstore, filled with conversation frameworks. "Active listening" techniques. "Powerful Questions" templates. The FORD method (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams) for small talk.[1] I'd memorized these scripts the way medieval monks memorized scripture, and I deployed them with similar religious fervor at networking events, coffee meetings, awkward silences at parties.

The frameworks worked, technically. People responded positively. I appeared engaged, interested, socially competent, all the markers of someone who'd figured out the mysterious algorithm of human connection. Except I was miserable. Every conversation felt performed, rehearsed, an improv show where I'd forgotten I was supposed to improvate and instead kept checking my internal script. I'd become the conversational equivalent of someone learning to drive by staring at the gear shift, technically executing all the right moves while completely missing the road ahead.

The moment I finally threw the notebook away, literally, into a trash can outside a conference center after yet another interaction where I'd hit all my "rapport-building" checkpoints while feeling absolutely nothing, I had what I can only describe as a minor crisis of competence.[2] Without my frameworks, who was I? What did I actually sound when I wasn't following someone else's template for authenticity?

Turns out, I sounded uncertain. Awkward. Sometimes boring. But also, occasionally, real.

The Paradox of Scaffolding

In 1921, an Austrian philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein, who abandoned several fortunes and career paths in his relentless pursuit of logical precision, finished his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with a section about ladders. Not literal ladders (though Wittgenstein did briefly work as a gardener and probably encountered his share of actual ladders), but metaphorical ones. The entire book, he suggested, was a ladder readers should climb and then discard. His propositions were meant to be recognized as nonsensical once they'd served their purpose, scaffolding you kick away once the building stands.[3]

What Wittgenstein understood (and what terrified and liberated him in roughly equal measure) was this: The very structures helping you ascend will eventually ceiling your height (I think I created a new verb).

Think about it. The five-paragraph essay structure helps students organize thoughts, then becomes a prison preventing actual argumentation. Training wheels give children the confidence to ride, then prevent them from learning balance. Management frameworks provide decision-making clarity, then substitute for judgment. The tools aren't wrong, they're incomplete, temporally bound, designed for a version of you who no longer exists once you've internalized what they taught.[4]

Japanese martial arts have a framework for this progression called Shu-Ha-Ri:[5]

Shu (守): You follow the rules completely. You are a vessel for tradition, executing forms with the kind of rigid precision people mistake for mastery. You need this stage, it builds muscle memory, instills fundamentals, gives you something to push against. But it's not the destination! It's the entry fee.

Ha (破): You begin to break the rules. Not randomly, not rebelliously, but intelligently, you understand the principles deeply enough to know when and why to deviate. You're improvising within the grammar you've internalized. This is where most people who consider themselves "advanced" actually live.[6]

Ri (離): You transcend the rules entirely. You've absorbed and metabolized the fundamentals so completely you're no longer referencing them. You're creating new grammar, operating beyond the frontier of what was previously mapped. This is where mastery actually begins.

Here's the big, fat secret no one tells you: the transition between stages feels irresponsible. Abandoning the frameworks feels reckless, arrogant even. You've just gotten good at following the rules, why would you throw them away? Because staying in Shu when you're ready for Ha is its own kind of intellectual cowardice, a refusal to grow disguised as humility.

The Comfort of Instruction Manuals

We love frameworks because they promise to short-circuit uncertainty. Buy this planner system, follow these seven habits, implement this productivity method, and you'll get the results without the uncomfortable work of figuring out what actually works for you. It's intellectual outsourcing dressed up as self-improvement.[7]

And early on? This works. You need the training wheels. You need someone to tell you the basics because you genuinely don't know them yet. The problem is we become addicted to being told. We collect frameworks the way some people collect books they'll never read, as evidence of our commitment to growth without the risk of actual transformation.[8]

I see this pattern everywhere now:

The entrepreneur who keeps taking courses on "how to start a business" instead of starting the business. The writer workshopping the same chapter for years rather than writing the messy next one. The person reading their fifth book on meditation without sitting still for five minutes.[9] We mistake the accumulation of instructions for progress, the possession of knowledge for understanding.[10]

What would it look knowing the difference? Between genuinely needing guidance and hiding behind it?

Frameworks whisper seductive lies: Follow me and you'll be safe. Follow me and you can't fail. Follow me and you won't have to face the terrifying blankness of your own judgment. But there's no version of mastery, in your career, your relationships, your internal life, accessed by blind obedience to someone else's roadmap.[11]

The Vertigo of Autonomy

When you first abandon the frameworks, you'll feel unmoored. I did. Without my conversation scripts, I stammered. I said awkward things. I asked questions no "active listening" coach would endorse. I existed in conversations as my actual self, which turned out to be far less polished than my performed self.[12]

But here's what happened: people started having real conversations with me. Not the kind where we trade scripted rapport-building questions, the kind where someone actually tells you something they're struggling with because they sense you're present enough to hear it. The kind where you laugh at something genuinely funny rather than something you've been taught signals "good engagement."

This is the uncomfortable middle zone, after you've thrown away the ladder but before you've learned to fly, to stretch Wittgenstein's metaphor past its breaking point. You're standing on top of a structure you no longer trust, with no clear path forward except jumping.[13]

The Japanese call this mu (無), emptiness, the void, the pregnant space between forms. It's where growth actually happens, in the gap between instruction and innovation. But we're not trained to value voids. We're trained to fill them immediately with new frameworks, new systems, new instructions.[14]

What if you stayed in the void a little longer? What if you let yourself be bad at something you used to do well because you're learning to do it differently? What if the discomfort of not-knowing is the signal you're actually growing rather than just rearranging familiar furniture?[15]

Applications for the Terrified[16]

This pattern appears everywhere once you see it:

In creating things: You learn writing by imitating. You absorb structure, voice, technique from those who came before.[17] But at some point, imitation becomes limitation. Your actual voice, strange, particular, imperfect, gets buried under the accumulated weight of how things "should" be done. Innovation doesn't come from better imitation; it comes from the courage to sound yourself.

In professional development: Early career guidance is useful, learn the norms, understand the politics, develop the skills. But excellence emerges from the ways you're weird, not the ways you successfully conform. The people who actually shape their fields are the ones who stopped asking "what do successful people do?" and started asking "what do I uniquely understand?"[18]

In relationships: Dating advice, communication frameworks, love languages, useful training wheels for understanding human connection. But real intimacy requires you to abandon the scripts and risk being seen. The vulnerability you're trying to systemize is precisely what resists systemization.[19]

In the internal work no external framework can touch: You can read every book on mindfulness, follow every guru's morning routine, implement every happiness habit. At some point, you have to do the uncomfortable archaeology of understanding your actual mind, in its specific weirdness, without a guidebook. No one can tell you what your particular path through your particular psyche looks like. The ladder only goes so far.[20]

What are you still following because it genuinely serves you, and what are you following because abandoning it would require admitting you don't know what comes next?

Flying as a Technical Term

The metaphor falls apart here, I promised you'd learn to fly, but that's not quite right.[21] It's more you learn to walk without constantly checking if you're doing it correctly. You internalize the movement until it becomes thoughtless, and in becoming thoughtless it becomes yours.

My conversations now? Sometimes brilliant, often awkward, occasionally boring, but unmistakably mine. I no longer carry frameworks because I've become the framework, messy, inconsistent, but at least authentic. Which turns out to be what people actually respond to, this sense of someone present rather than performed. Though maybe I'm just better at justifying my incompetence these days. Hard to know from inside your own story whether you've transcended or simply stopped trying.

What I do know: there was a moment when I realized the notebook wasn't helping anymore. Not because I'd mastered conversation, I hadn't, but because the notebook had become the thing preventing mastery. It was a buffer between me and the discomfort of genuine human contact. And once I saw that, truly saw it, carrying the notebook became impossible. Not morally wrong or strategically suboptimal, just impossible in the way continuing to use training wheels becomes impossible once you've felt what balance actually feels like.

You probably have your own notebook. Maybe it's literal, some system you've built around productivity or relationships or creative work. Maybe it's conceptual, a set of beliefs about how things should be done, inherited from mentors or books or the accumulated wisdom of people who came before you. Maybe you don't even see it as a notebook. Maybe you see it as simply "the right way to do things."

Watch for the moment when it stops serving you. Not when it becomes inconvenient or challenging (frameworks are supposed to be challenging), but when it becomes the ceiling. When you notice yourself contorting to fit the framework rather than using the framework to clarify your thinking. When you're more concerned with executing the method correctly than achieving the outcome the method was designed to produce. When the rules have become more real than the reality they were meant to describe.[22]

Wittgenstein spent his life building logical systems, then dismantling them, then building new ones. He never found the final system, the ultimate ladder. What he found instead was something stranger: each ladder takes you high enough to see that you need a different ladder. The process doesn't end. You don't arrive at some plateau where the frameworks finally work forever. You arrive at the understanding that the frameworks were never the point.

The point was what you became while climbing them.

Which means right now, wherever you are, whatever ladder you're on, you're exactly where you need to be. Not in some inspirational poster way, but in the simple sense your current frameworks are teaching you something you couldn't learn any other way. They're building capacity you'll need later. They're showing you the edges of what's possible within their logic, which is the only way to see beyond their logic.

But they're not you. They can never be. And the moment you realize you've internalized what they had to teach, the moment you catch yourself performing the rules rather than embodying the principles, the moment the ladder feels more a cage than a tool, something shifts. You won't decide to throw away the ladder. The ladder simply becomes impossible to carry.

What you can't do, what becomes impossible once you've seen it, is pretend the ladder is the destination. You can stay on it, you can climb down, you can build a house on top of it and live there comfortably for decades. But you can't unsee what you saw from up here: there's something beyond the ladder. Your something. Unknowable until you risk knowing it.

The ladder served its purpose. It still is, even now as you realize you'll eventually need to abandon it. Because abandoning it, when the time comes, won't feel like loss. It'll feel like finally setting down weight you didn't realize you were carrying. It'll feel like the most terrifying freedom you've ever experienced.

And then you'll start building new frameworks, because that's what humans do. We're framework-builders, system-makers, pattern-seekers. We climb and climb and periodically throw away ladders and build new ones and climb again. The enlightenment isn't escaping this cycle. The enlightenment is recognizing you're in it, knowing when each ladder has taught you what it can teach, and being willing to stand at the top of something sturdy and tested and trusted and step into the air anyway.

[1] I once asked someone about their dreams at a funeral reception. The FORD method does not account for context.

[2] Minor by objective standards. Felt catastrophic at the time, which is how all genuine growth feels in the moment.

[3] Philosophers are still arguing about whether Wittgenstein meant this literally or was making some deeper point about the limits of language, which is itself a kind of proof of concept for the whole "throwing away the ladder" thing.

[4] This applies to these very words you're reading right now, which should make you suspicious of how seriously to take them.

[5] The irony of using a framework to explain why you need to abandon frameworks is not lost on me. We'll get there.

[6] Including, probably, me. Self-awareness doesn't automatically confer transcendence, which is annoying.

[7] The self-help industry has revenues in the billions. We are paying good money to avoid knowing ourselves.

[8] My bookshelf is an archaeological record of every version of myself I thought I should become.

[9] Guilty on all counts, your honor.

[10] You are, right now, reading instructions about how instructions eventually fail you. The snake is eating its tail.

[11] Though plenty of people build perfectly adequate lives this way. Adequacy is underrated until you realize you're capable of more.

[12] My actual self interrupts people and forgets their names and sometimes just zones out. Charming? No. Honest? Unavoidably.

[13] Or climbing back down and pretending you never saw what you saw from up there. People do this too.

[14] The self-help industrial apparatus depends entirely on this refusal to sit with emptiness, generating an infinite supply of new ladders to replace the old ones.

[15] I have rearranged my furniture 47 times. I have rearranged my life considerably less.

[16] A section promising practical applications in an essay about abandoning frameworks. I contain multitudes, or contradictions, or both.

[17] The writers I imitated are now embedded so deeply in my syntax I can't tell where they end and I begin. This is either transcendence or theft.

[18] I cannot answer this question about myself yet, which tells you something about where I am on the ladder.

[19] Though people keep trying. God bless them. God help them.

[20] Therapy helps. Actual therapy, not the self-help version. Just putting that out there.

[21] What I see from up here: more ladders, extending infinitely upward. It's ladders all the way up.