Advice is great, and it’s sometimes the best dose that you need to break through and move forward. However, one should treat advice with care, for it might be true in one context and not in yours.
Look at the similarities, but also the differences, including that you are different, and this is a different time.
Only you can add what’s unique, and through acting on your wisdom, course-correct as you go.
So I am advised.
There’s a lot to learn from the past. It helps us to understand the present and also prepare for the future.
The future, however, must be invented. And one cannot simply extrapolate for the future.
“To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means to preserve peace” said George Washington. While I do not know much about warfare, I interpret this to mean that getting the foundations right allows you the freedom to operate on a higher level.
If you master the basics about your craft, it becomes automatic, and you have thus won that battle. You are then free to be creative with your craft, to create something more.
The greatest coaches in sport focus on the fundamentals, and that is for a reason. Practice, practice, practice.
In electrical engineering, there is this concept of noise, which is any unwanted signal that interferes with the message. The goal is to make your signal so strong that the noise is cancelled out. It is the basis of communication networks.
It turns out that noise, and the need to reduce it is true in many human activities. Managing the signal to noise ratio well allows us to focus on the right information to make good decisions. Although it is tough at times to distinguish between the signal and the noise, it pays off to invest in noise cancellation.
By focusing on the important few, and ignoring the noisy bunch, we can make the investment of our precious time pay off well.
Planning, they say, is invaluable, but plans are useless. The value therefore lies in the exercise of looking at the trends, analysing them, and coming up with a story of how the future might unfold.
Of course, because we cannot know for certain, it makes sense to ask “What if?” This can help us to come up with multiple scenarios, i.e., a range of possibilities. While it is important to realise that there is a strong likelihood that none of the future scenarios we developed will play out, the mere act of thinking and analysing the scenarios places us in a better position to understand the changes, and adapt to them to improve our chances of success.
Random Walks 