Vacuously True

This post is for YOU! Ok, maybe not, but read it anyway! It seems to me that there are many people who lose perspective. They either get so wrapped up in the details, that they do not have a clear direction, or, they get so wrapped up about the destination, they do not do the things they need to do now. This post is going to mostly be about the latter.

I love analogies. I don't separate knowledge well, and thus concepts bleed over from one to another. Imagine you are making a trip. You are driving from Colorado to California. If, while you are driving, you simply focus on the destination, you will end up crashing your car. You need to be making local decisions---when to brake, when to turn, etc. You cannot simply be focused on your goal.

Something I often hear goes something like: "If I had X, then I would do Y!"--"If I was rich, I would buy a car." These people tend to make up all sorts of scenarios that currently depend on conditions that do not hold. They do this to the detriment of the decisions they actually have. Instead of focusing their effort on guiding themselves to their goal using the steering wheel of their car, they instead tell me how, if they had a teleporter, they would simply teleport there. You can see this with all the 'get rich quick' schemes that many people get involved with.

Coming up with these vacuously true statements lends toward a feeling of helplessness. "I cannot control my destiny, because all my conditionals are false." Instead of spending effort on these, one should focus on the things they do have control over, the decisions that they must make, and every time they make one, ensure that it is moving them on the way toward their goal.