“The ultimate form of preparation is not planning for a specific scenario, but a mindset that can handle uncertainty.” — James Clear
You know why Alice follows the White Rabbit? It’s not because she’s brave. It’s not because she has a plan. It’s because she’s curious: she sees something she doesn’t understand and she can’t help herself. A rabbit with a waistcoat and a pocket watch? That’s odd. I have to know more. And down she goes.
Lewis Carroll never explains why Alice is like this. He doesn’t need to. We all recognise the impulse. Something is weird, or unexpected, or doesn’t make sense, and a part of your brain goes: I need to look at that.
Sometimes I make butter. Actual butter, sometimes with salt, and chives, or garlic, or lemon, or black pepper and anchovies. I pour cream into a mixer, whip it up for a few minutes, then rinse it, knead it, mix it. And out comes real, spreadable, absurdly good butter. The first time I did it, I thought: Well, that was easy enough!
That’s the Alice moment. The rabbit just ran past, and now I’m falling.
Down the rabbit hole
You know this feeling. You’ve had it.
Maybe it was the first time you cooked something complicated without a recipe and it actually tasted good. Or the time you opened up that broken thing (a drawer, a tap, a bike, whatever) and realised the problem was obvious once you looked at it. Or the time you were somewhere foreign and managed to communicate in a language you barely speak, and the other person smiled, and suddenly the whole place felt less alien.
Something happens in your head when you do a thing you didn’t know you could do. A door opens. Not a big dramatic portal, more like the tiny door Alice finds at the bottom of the rabbit hole. You have to get down on your knees to look through it, but on the other side there’s a whole world.
And the thing about Wonderland is: every room has more doors.
You make butter and you think: ok but what about cheese? You fix a tap and you think: how does the water pressure actually work? You learn to sail and you think the weather is important! How do you read the sky?
I’ve been falling down this hole my whole life. As a kid I just couldn’t leave questions alone. How does a radio work? How do planes fly? What happens if I take this remote control apart? (Answer: for some reason you can’t put it back together.)
My dad was the same. He’s a doctor, not a plumber or an electrician, but when something broke in the house he’d look at it, swear at it, and then fix it. My grandmother sewed clothes. My uncle built his own barbecue. Nobody called this “being handy.” It was just normal. The rabbit ran past, and they followed it. Every time.
I can find North without a compass. I can get by in six or seven languages. I can sail a boat, solder electronics, fly an aeroplane, disassemble a gun. I can also tell you how butter is made, or how to perfectly sear steak. None of this was planned. All of it started the same way: a rabbit ran past, and I followed it.
“Curiouser and curiouser”
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: most things are easier than you think.
Not easy. Easier than you think. That’s different. We walk around assuming that the stuff we don’t know how to do is complicated, specialised, requires training or talent or equipment. And some of it is. Brain surgery is hard, don’t do brain surgery.
But cooking? You can learn the basics in a weekend. You can figure out how to change a plug in an hour. You can figure out how to do stuff by looking at experts, sometimes. My dad hires a gardener occasionally. Then, he follows him around. “To steal his craft”, he says.
Alice eats a cake labelled “EAT ME” and she grows. She drinks from a bottle labelled “DRINK ME” and she shrinks. She doesn’t know the rules of Wonderland. She just looks at things, and tries things and finds out. That’s it. That’s the whole method.
Somewhere along the way, though, we got convinced the rabbit hole isn’t for us. That there are People Who Know How To Do Things, and then there’s the rest of us. Bullshit. You can make butter in a jar. You can fix a tap. You can cook a meal from whatever’s in the fridge. You just haven’t followed the rabbit yet.
Wonderland is a family trip
My daughter is nine. She can make a stir fry from scratch.
Not a “kids in the kitchen” stir fry where daddy does the hard bits. A proper one. Chopping, heat control, seasoning, timing. She started because she loves “cooking with dad”. I gave her a proper but slightly smaller knife, and we went from there. Her own rabbit, her own hole. Last week, she made fried chicken.
My son loves maps. We navigate with paper maps on road trips. Proper road atlases that aren’t quite ever precisely up-to-date. He figures it all out. He asks: “can I navigate?”. My wife turns Google Maps off, and off we go. He knows he needs to alert me a couple of kilometres before we need to turn, and that a place has a shape, a direction, a relationship to other places. Not a blue dot on a screen. Sometimes we make mistakes and arrive late. But it’s more fun, and a useful skill.
We fix things when they break. I explain what I’m doing even when the explanation is “honestly, I have no idea, let’s figure it out.” Especially then. Because that’s the real thing that matters. Not any specific skill. The reflex. The hacker reflex, the Alice reflex: see something you don’t understand, and go toward it instead of away from it.
It’s contagious. A kid cooks dinner and nails it, and you can see it — that flash in her face, the pride, the “wait, I can just do this?” moment. A new door opening. Off she goes.
Padronanza
There’s a word in Italian: padronanza. It means mastery, but not the “10,000 hours” kind. It’s closer to ownership. You own the skill. It’s in your hands. Nobody can take it away, or sunset it, or put it behind a paywall.
Alice doesn’t take anything home from Wonderland. No souvenirs, no treasure. But she comes back different. She’s seen what’s behind the small doors, and she knows she can open more.
That’s padronanza. Not the skills themselves. The knowing that you can.
Pick one thing you’ve always assumed you couldn’t do. Fix something. Cook something. Make something. Take something apart. Follow the rabbit. You’ll probably mess it up the first time, Alice certainly did. That’s fine. That’s how Wonderland works.
And maybe start with the butter. Trust me on the butter.