We can't control how things eventually turn out. But why sabotage yourself by intentionally aiming lower? We can certainly control what we put in, and if we put in more, well, we may not get what we want, but we're likely to get something that's pretty good regardless.
It is an optimization problem. It's just not a maximization problem. We try to make the best decisions we can with the information that we have available, and if those turn out not to be the best decisions in the end, well, we now have more information.
But my second point was a general comment about the popularity of the self-help/corporate/utilitarian discourse of "success", "usefulness", "improvement" etc.. You should improve yourself (if that's what you want), but don't become obsessed with improvement. There are other worthwhile and meaningful ways of living - just consider other options.
I'm afraid to sound new-agist ('cause I'm not), but let me suggest that the desire to improve is often the result of an external motivation such as competition. Also, "success", and "improvement" are common words in corporate-speak for two reasons: people who build corporations are often those who are obsessed with success to begin with, and second, people thinking about success and improvement tend to make better employees and better consumers. In general, people overly concerned with success and/or improvement either create authority or serve it well.
So improving yourself is certainly a great goal, but as you do it, make sure that you're improving yourself in order to serve yourself and those you love better - not someone else.
When I look back into the economic opportunities I "fell into" the same principle was at work. I did something, did it for two or three reasons, one fell through, another one became important, and suddenly my direction shifted. The same thing is now happening as well.....
In nature in a healthy ecosystem, no plant fills only a single niche, and no niche is filled by only a single species. I guess it took reading about permaculture to see some of my own patterns in a deeper light.
A cave is mostly only inhabited by fungus. There you go, a niche only inhabited by a single kind of organism, and that's not even difficult to find.
Anyways, basing your behavior on how "things are in nature" is as insane as eating bark because you see a bear do it. It's stupid because analogies do not translate at all between things so distant as human and animal feeding patterns, or - in your case - yellowstone forest and business markets. Unless your CEO is Yogi Bear.
This really resonates well with me. Problem is that realizing what to aim for isn't that easy. A lot of people base this on financial success and the benefit of that is that it is very easy to measure, my problem with it is that financial success is being sought after because of the assumption that money brings happiness.
I admire those that put a lot of effort on problems where success isn't easily measurable. (As always, you need balance)
Going in one direction (also metaphorically) always increases your chance of reaching your goal. John Nash even proved that keeping the same strategy all along will stochastically result in greater success, and he received the Nobel prize for exactly that.
People shouldn't just sit there hoping for their luck to change (although if they do, they might still have an interesting life, even if not quite "successful"). But they shouldn't obsess about goals, self-improvement and control, either, and should learn to accept life's many surprises. Or, they can choose not to accept them and to obsess about control - hey, that's cool too. After all our existence is absurd. Life's absurd.
I didn't even imply that effort directed in the opposite way breeds failure. There are no doubt (rare) examples of people with a strong self-sacrificing mindset becoming successful despite those - just no one I know or have observed personally... Most lottery winners presumably fall into this category.
Chance can work both ways, but if you rely only on chance, the chance itself says you probably won't "succeed" for any given definition of success. Success is rare. Even if you fight tooth and nail you may not succeed, but you can perhaps change a 0.001% probability into a 10% probability, or a 0.01% probability into a 90% probability. That's worth fighting for.
Simple counter-example of your "chance rules all" idea: if your goal is to become a famous writer, there's nothing you can do to make success certain - but if you never write anything, you can guarantee failure.
I know you were using that as a counter-example but this immediately came to mind (from a successful writer)
> It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism. Wasn’t that the point of the creation – to communicate something to the world? So PUT IT OUT THERE. Send your work off to editors and agents as much as possible, show it to your neighbors, plaster it on the walls of the bus stops – just don’t sit on your work and suffocate it. At least try. And when the powers-that-be send you back your manuscript (and they will), take a deep breath and try again. I often hear people say, “I’m not good enough yet to be published.” That’s quite possible. Probable, even. All I’m saying is: Let someone else decide that. Magazines, editors, agents – they all employ young people making $22,000 a year whose job it is to read through piles of manuscripts and send you back letters telling you that you aren’t good enough yet: LET THEM DO IT. Don’t pre-reject yourself. That’s their job, not yours. Your job is only to write your heart out, and let destiny take care of the rest.
All the wind really does is provide power, it's up to you to decide how you want to use that power.
If people just sit there, like you said, they are not optimizing for success at all. They are just doing nothing, missing chances, waiting for something to fall into their lap. That can work, but probability of success is lower.
Life is what you make it - your opinion and view of the world definitely falls into the category "can change".
There's a fine line between saying that you can make a difference in what happens to you, and saying that everything happens to you because of you. The latter is blatantly false, and leads to some perverted philosophies...
Anyway, that's just my guess as to why you're being downvoted...
That.
Of course one should try and reverse his situation to where he wants to go.
With that as a given, seeing your situation as your sole personal responsibility is a blindfold, that makes people not understanding how their society works and blaming themselves for irrational things. It also hinders progress, because it doesn't let you see and address systemic failures outside of yourself.
A black man that wanted to succeed in the '40s shouldn't just "improve himself" and "work on it", etc, he should also work with others to bring down segregation and racism. All else would be futile.
> "If somebody swears at you in traffic, you decide if you just shrug on it ("He's had a bad day") or freak out, swear back, and think about it for the rest of the day."
and
> "I am convinced that what most people call luck or bad luck is partly due to their own decisions (previous or current)."
These two statements have no relation to each other.
The first one is obviously true. The second one is much more ambiguous - and comes with a lot of baggage. The same stance has been used to blame the victim throughout history, and continues today. For example, we continue to blame the poor for their own poverty, despite putting up barriers at every turn for them. It's a despicable stance that is entirely devoid of compassion or perspective, and does no good except to inflame the ego of the accuser.
You can't reason from my first argument to the second, that's correct. But it's hard to deny that we are responsible for our reactions, as illustrated by the traffic example. If life rains down on you as a startup founder (no real progress or no funding for a year), you can react by giving it all up, or just continue for some more months. The latter will increase your chances of success, naturally - it's a simple statistics game of throwing the dice more often. That's why I'm convinced that everybody forges a PART of her own destiny - it's my opinion, no fact ;)
Or people blame the blacks for being poor and "underachieving", not understanding that they started off in the US as slaves (much worse than anyone starting off as a poor migrant), and were still under segregation rules and heavy racism until at least the 60's.
Slave parents aren't exactly a guarantee of success. Sharecroppers parent's (the next generation) aren't either. Then, if you play your cards correctly, you end up with country and urban dirt poor parents, and maybe a small percentage of them can get to middle class --while still seen under suspicion by the wealthier and more white middle and upper class.
That a few people can overcome those things and be, say, even the first black President, doesn't mean that statistically everybody can --you don't judge a population by the outliers. The truth is, if they can get to college or get rich, for example, it's a far greatest achievement than the children of a 3rd generation immigrant achieving the same thing.
That's what I took from this, anyway. I definitely am a self-sacrifice sort, so it's a relief to think that maybe I can try to gain small "boring" successes, enjoy my life along the way, and it'll help me on my way to more interesting stuff.
After that comes a life that ends up being pretty darn normal, interrupted by the occasional realization that if it all ended right now that would be just fine.
New York Times link included below less for its mediocre writing than because it actually links to PDFs of several of these studies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to...
First, much in our lives is governed by pure chance. I can't quantify exactly how much, but it's a lot. It's true that here in the West, we've managed to eliminate many forms of sudden destruction that were quite common in pre-modern life (and are quite common today in less developed countries), and when disaster strikes we have mechanisms for mitigating its effects like insurance and medicine. All this has led the Western man to believe that if he picks his priorities just so and organizes his life just right, he has a good chance of achieving any goal he sets out to achieve. This is, well, to put it simply - not true. Not only is this not true, but believing it is dangerous for two reasons: The first is that if in spite of everything you do not "succeed" you may come to believe this is the result of some personal failing; this may be, but it certainly not necessarily so. The other is that when others do not attain success you may come to believe that this is the result of some personal failing on their part - like laziness, and, again, this ain't necessarily so. Especially in America, where social mobility is so rare compared to other modern countries (though it's better than in underdeveloped nations), many failings are simply due to the environment a child was born into. But even if you're born to the right parents, disaster, and fortune will strike you at random.
My problem with the second premise, that we should even aspire to optimize our lives, is more one of a personal preference. One of my favorite books is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground". The book's protagonist has this to say:
"Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything."
"For man's everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe."
He rebels against intentionality. He balks at modern attempts to optimize life. He insists on his right to do things out of sheer spite. He want do do things that go against any common or uncommon sense. He sometimes wants to inflict pain upon himself, to wallow in the ensuing misery, and enjoy it. And though he is far from a man anyone would want to end-up like, he is a free spirit who chooses to be a slave only to his own neuroticism rather than to anyone else's utilitarian logic.