Brain Food #745
To let perfectly good alternatives go
Thoughts of the day
Our abilities can sometimes set a natural limit to our ambitions. If you do not have the right body for it, you might not become a professional gymnast. If you do not have a good voice, a singing career may not be right for you.
Still, with hard training and hard work, many intangibles can become more possible than we imagined. There are thousands of online courses that can teach us new skills from the comfort of our homes. We are taught that anything is possible if we try hard enough. The existentialist school of thought dictates that we have the freedom to shape our lives -and existence- as we desire.
This can be described not only as the curse of possibility, but also the curse of capability. We are all able to live more than one life because we have the freedom to do so, but also the potential. Still, ultimately, we need to choose. This is what makes the difference between anything and everything, but also, what makes every single life unique.
And maturity, as Ray Dalio wrote in his Principles, is having an awareness of which path may be a better option, and to let perfectly good alternatives go:
“I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.”
— Ray Dalio
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