Taking a dive (hesitation)

Today (at a quiz, at which I was completely useless since it was about stuff that most people know) I was reminded that I'm writing a blog. It has been almost two weeks since the last post, which should be the upper limit for what is called a blog. So here goes one of my newer pieces of understanding (you'd be surprised at how long it took me to figure this one out).

Today is about choices, and I've hunted down some elusive citations (when googling for the first one, I started typing "taking a", and the very helpful suggestion was "taking an arrow to the knee"), together with finding formulations in my favourite online text.

"Sometimes you have to take the leap, and build your wings on the way down."
- Kobi Yamada (My sources are not exactly peer-reviewed scientific journals, so I have no idea if this is the guy, but I do "feel lucky".)

For once, I don't feel like I have to add something (this quote has the unique quality of having actual information in it). But then, let me mention that some personalities may be prone to invest a preposterous amount of time-resources to deliberating achievement strategies, in other words, overthink stuff.

Let us consider another part of the theme (the theme is hesitation by the way). Here I will pass the baton to somebody else:

"Hessitation iss alwayss eassy, rarely usseful.
So the Defense Professor had told him.[...] Did some plans call for waiting? Yes, many plans called for delayed action; but that was not the same as hesitating to choose. Not delaying because you knew the right moment to do what was necessary, but delaying because you couldn't make up your mind - there was no cunning plan which called for that.

Did you sometimes need more information to choose? Yes, but that could also turn into an excuse for delaying; and it would be tempting to delay, when you were faced with a choice between two painful alternatives, and not choosing would avoid the mental pain for a time. So you would pick a piece of information you couldn't easily obtain, and claim that you couldn't possibly decide without it; that would be your excuse. Although if you knew what information you needed, knew when and how you would obtain that information, and knew what you would do depending on each possible observation, then that was less suspicious as an excuse for hesitating."

You know when in movies they find the correct page in the book after 1 or 2 attempts? Even though it's a big book and they're looking for the proverbial needle? Well that just happened when trying to find the above citation. To find the next I was shunted back to reality and had to use a well worded google search...

"But Father had once told her that the trouble with passing up opportunities was that it was habit-forming. If you told yourself you were waiting for a better opportunity next time, why, next time you'd probably tell yourself the same thing. Father had said that most people spent their whole lives waiting for an opportunity that was good enough, and then they died. Father had said that while seizing opportunities would mean that all sorts of things went wrong, it wasn't nearly as bad as being a hopeless lump. Father had said that after she got into the habit of seizing opportunities, then it was time to start being picky about them. "

Something could definately (I have a bad feeling about this word, why can't I find a spell-checker in this program?) be said about creating one's own opportunities, and about the philosophical standpoint where this theme is related to how much free will we have (the amount of free will you have is proportional to how much you exercise it), but I am kinda hungry.

Newborn Wisdom

A friend asked me

"If you could offer a newborn child only one piece of advice, what would it be?"

And I took it quite seriously, and gave it some thought. (We have to follow the sense of the question – even though we cannot communicate with a newborn, we can give him/her a medallion with an inscription and explain it later.)

"Follow your dreams" was the first saying that hit me. But what kind of advice is that? Sometimes you should follow your dreams, and sometimes not. I have several dreams I am glad that I didn't chase. So it doesn't really say anything. Let us try something else,

"Appreciate what you have", "Don't do unto others that which you do not want done unto you" (the golden rule), "Search for your own happiness, not other peoples unhappiness", "The meaning of life is to be happy and useful". All of these are quite common, and you will hear them several times, from all kinds of people (except the last one from Ghandi – somehow people tend to forget it). But if I could offer some advice, and only one thing, I would want it to be something that most people don't know, and that they don't know that they don't know. And it would also need to carry a lot of information, unlike the "follow your dreams"-quote.

"Give yourself and the world room to fail and be mistaken," is what I ended up with. This originally comes from an understanding of what limits the learning and intelligence of my students when they embark on a university education. They often think that the goal is to be right, that those who give correct answers are the smartest people. So they keep their inquiries inside their sphere of knowledge, they don't ask or answer questions where they might seem stupid, they show the world how much they know, not how much they would like to learn. If someone wins an argument by convincing the other party, that person gains some measure of respect, or as I said, he wins. The feeling of changing your viewpoint (after being convinced) is a crappy feeling of loss. But if you look at the outcome of the dialogue, the "loosing" party learned ten times more than those who won. The looser should be proclaimed the winner.

This doesn't apply only when you loose the argument (you should loose with gratitude), but also when you win an argument. People who are correct and convincing often see themselves as all high and mighty, superior to the other party. If you feel this, and let it shine through (for example via body-language) you destroy much of the potential in future dialogues, including your own potential for learning, and, of course, you diminish the current outcome.

So far we have only looked at what I mean by saying "Give yourself and the world room to be mistaken." But what about the part with "failing"? Why is it important to fail, and to give the world an opportunity to disappoint you? If you always succeed at what you do, or have a high rate of success, it is a sign that you are working entirely within the box. If you only ever stretch your comfort zone a tiny bit, adding just a grain of sand, the probability of failure is small. To think outside the box is to allow for failure, to be creative is to allow for poor results.

If you never let the world disappoint you, you ask too little of it. If you don't want to be denied a job, so you don't even apply for it, you fall into this trap. If you never tell the people around you about your dreams because they might laugh at you instead of helping you, you do not give them the opportunity to disappoint you, and neither do you give them the opportunity of helping you succeed.