This video from Tim Minchins speach at UWA just about sums up where I currently stand in life – so thank you Tim for sharing!
If you have an opinion – question it.
If you have one dream – don’t make it a tunnel, there is only one light at the end of the tunnel, but lots of lights on the sides
It is ok to live in micro dreams – just follow them and see where you end up
It’s all luck – however you ended up where you are, it’s all luck or not, but if you are in a good place, be humble about it.
Ok, I am going to stay with this idea today, because it is one that I try to base my life on, and one that I have seen in different contexts the last couple of years. In Re-evaluation Counseling (Omvärderande parsamtal in Swedish) one of the basic assumptions is that in any give situation we make the best choice we can, given the resources we have at that time. Kay Pollack, NLP and Richard Brodie (in Getting Past OK) all talk about the same concept.
This concept might impose on your idea of ”free will” and it might threaten your idea that you are where you are because of hard work, doing the right thing, or that you are simply better than others. As I see it though, life is a timeline that starts when you are born (or maybe conceived) and ends up in the choices you make right now. And it has been that way all through your life (and everybody elses).
When we make a bad decision it’s because that our previous experiences from life didn’t give us the possibility to handle the situation in a better way, we just didn’t have a good enough toolbox. If you make a good decision it’s because you had the right tool, and that was given to you prior to the point were you could make the choice. Think of a time when you made a bad decision, and think about what other choices you could have made. Then ask yourself why you didn’t make another one. Your answer might be: ”I did not know of the other choices” or ”I did not have time to think about other choices”.
Now extend this idea to all the choices you make yourself and all the choices that others make. In my case it makes me 1) want to extend the toolbox I have to be able to make better choices all the time, choices that make me come closer to my long and short term goals, 2) don’t put myself or others down for making bad choices, we all tried our best.
Now how is this idea compatible with the idea of 100% responsibility for you r own actions? Time to go running!
