The strongest. The Fastest. The Smartest.
They all fail.
It is not that these traits are failing traits, it is more that they are limited in their usefulness, if they aren't combined with other skills. The skill that has really made us successful and has helped us evolve incredibly quick technologically, is our ability to predict what is coming in the future.
And that is up to our imagination.
imagination
/ɪˌmadʒɪˈneɪʃn/
noun
the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.
Essentially, making shit up. But a lot of people talk about "having imagination" in the creativity sense, where it is about artistic pursuit. However, imagination is probably most value in the daily drudgery of existence, not to escape through daydreaming, but to predict what is the best next course of action.
“Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”
Sartre
But, because we spend a lot of time hung up on the past, a lot of our mental energy is spent in some way obsessing over it. And spending too much time dreaming about the future is going to come with its own costs. However, accepting that the past has happened and taking stock of our current situation and resources, looking into the future predictively means having a chance at seeing how things might go and planning actions to perform to get there, or avoid there as the case may be.
Everything that has brought us to this point today, has been "done" to us in the sense that the majority of it we never even chose. However, if we choose that we have responsibility for our life moving forward, no matter what has happened to us previously, we don't need to find blame, we just have to accept it, and move on.
On to what?
What do you want to move onto?
You are free.
Aren't you?
Well, if your decisions are being made on what has happened in your past, doesn't that mean you are tethered to them? Doesn't that mean you are limited by their anchor? That doesn't sound very free. And yes, we are all limited by who we are and what we have available to us, but it is also good to note that someone else with exactly the same situations and resources, but with different anchors, would go a different way. This means that, we needn't limit our range of choices based on the anchors we are used to. We can anchor to something else instead.
Something that helps us forward, rather than holds us back.
Which goes back to the prediction of the future. But rather just thinking about what might happen in the world, work out where you want to be at some point in the future and then predict what actions you will need to perform to get there. Once you have worked out in detail the timeline and the process forward. Take a good long hard look at it and ask yourself,
"Am I willing?"
If not, accept that you are not and then repeat the process for something that you are willing to work toward. Kill your dreaming, and realise your dreams. At least then it is possible to succeed at a lesser goal knowingly, without chasing a fantasy that you aren't going to actually work toward anyway. Which is probably a big part of the attraction of fantasising.
No risk.
But change, which is the nature of the world, always comes with risks to bear. And if you are willing to predict what the future actions will be to get you to where you want to go, and you are willing to perform those actions, you will also have to accept the risks that come with with both the successes and the failures. Life inevitably changes, but you will be an agent of your own change, rather than a victim of it.
So putting your predictive skills to the test,
What do you see in your future?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Be part of the Hive discussion.
And you may be rewarded.
