Thank you for reading my blog.
It is very important to take action and to get started, but I am going to share with you in this issue that there is something more important than that.
The content of this issue is based on the book “The Art of Thinking Clearly” by Rolf Dobelli.
So let’s get started and see what is more important than taking action.
What is more important than taking action and getting started?
First consider the following questions
What percentage of the total flight time do you think airplanes fly their scheduled routes?
Most of you probably think that 80-90% of the time the plane is on schedule, since it is on autopilot and so on.
I am one of them.
Except for takeoffs and landings, I thought that the plane was proceeding only on the scheduled route.
But to my surprise, the actual answer is 0%.
The airplane has “auxiliary wings” attached to the edge of its wings, and they are constantly moving during the flight.
These “auxiliary wings” are responsible for constantly correcting the flight path, and they correct the deviation between the current position and the planned position, which is sensed many times per second.
It is exactly the same as in driving a car, where the trajectory is corrected by constantly operating the bundle.
The same applies to our lives.
Things rarely work out the way they are supposed to.
Life is really an airplane fighting turbulence.
So it is very important to change course.
You can’t fly in clear skies all the time.
It is important to steer your life like a pilot who can keep the wheel in bad weather and get back on the right track.
I hope that people will value the idea of starting anyway and then making corrections afterward, rather than only being diligent in setting initial conditions when starting things.
The term “as planned” is nothing but an illusion
As mentioned above, it is important to revise, but why do we avoid revising and reviewing?
It is because any small correction is an admission that the plan you made was wrong.
The plan is a failure, and we feel incompetent for having made it.
But you don’t have to feel incompetent.
Things rarely, if ever, go according to plan.
It is only by chance that things go according to plan. It is more incompetent to think that you are competent because things went according to plan by accident.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, former president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, said the following
Planning itself has no value. It is what keeps you planning that counts.
The important thing is not to make a perfect plan, but to make changes to the plan as often as circumstances require.
The sooner you get your life back on track, the better.
Think about the great people you know and the people around you whom you admire and respect, and how they got that way.
Is it because they were born into a first-class rich family and graduated from a first-class university?
Or is it the result of overcoming your shortcomings or continuing to make up for what you lack, with or without those conditions?
We must stop seeing fixing things as a bad thing.
It takes a long time to perfect all the conditions for success, and it is better to keep correcting the plan and ourselves than to just wait for the plan to work out.
There is no “ideal”.
The right way to go about life is to start everything under certain conditions, good or bad, and then make continuous adjustments as it progresses.
–Postscript–
In this article, I have explained that the important thing in life is to change the course of your life.
The starting point is no longer so important.
Instead, it is more important to keep making corrections, and to pursue the “better” in your life.
Instead of thinking that you should have studied harder and graduated from a better university, you should just start out as you are now, make corrections, and grow.
Thank you again for reading this article.
See you in my next post!
▪️Reference
Rolf Dobelli, “The Art of Thinking Clearly”
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