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.