When Things Don't Go Our Way

 When Things Don't Go Our Way

📌We always know that only two things may happen in life.  Either it goes MY WAY or the OTHER WAY, which means, it doesn't go your way.  And that's fine.  We'll be fine.  The issue is that with our human nature, once we set our expectations and then we fall flat, it smacks right into our face, we're bruised, at worst defaced.  And when we fall flat, that necessity to eke out from that pit becomes a must-do.  And that necessity should drive us to be creative, inventive and innovative.  And could drive you to be creative, inventive and innovative ?  This is when the importance of what you learn [by failing] becomes proportionate to just how wretched it is to learn it, in the first place.  Conversely, if what you're doing is working, you get what you want but there's no learning opportunity for you in that.

When I came back to my native country more than ten years back, my favorite gadget was my own blackberry.  And when I received my business phone, it was another blackberry model.  Two years down the road, BlackBerry as a business was literally obliterated from the landscape.  Kodak was another business giant who monopolized the global market for the longest time and no amount of competition could cause a dent from its tight grip of the market until it lost sight of its innovation drive. Palm Inc was another giant who monopolized the PDA market until it went south, following the same tragic path of BlackBerry and Kodak.

And this leads us back to that pit hole where we fell.  And the ground rule tells us that if you're not getting anywhere, you're not doing the right things.  Instead, you tend to keep on doing the same thing over and over again even if you are not even able to extricate yourself out from that pit.  The thing is, when thing are not going your way, be focused on finding that light.  With no vision, you will drift away.  It all boils down as to how you conceive the limits of your being.  And it's only you yourself who would put up that ceiling, that limit that constrains you to go beyond.

Whether we swing from us individuals to business entities to governments, unless and until innovation is at the centerpiece of one's masterplan, nothing will progress, nil, zilch.  Twenty years ago, that Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] was already in full swing in Jakarta.  Twenty years after, the brightest minds of another Southeast Asian country have been grandstanding about their plans to implement their local version of Jakarta's Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] and government hearings to approve a gargantuan infrastructure budget whose number kept moving upward north till this Covid pandemic hit us all and voila, that local government shifted their focus for other multi-billion projects.

Bottomline is if things are not working out within the box, 'THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX'.  Don't just work but work hard.  Work hard with tenacity.  You gotta change your life.  Look back months back or a few years back.  How many times you were swearing to QUIT smoking, STOP drinking, ABANDON gambling and all those vices.  For the more mundane things, how many times you went on that weighing scale.  And before you know it, you are so equipped with excuses left and right as you keep looking for your way out.  Problem is, if you don't push yourself in a position to change, you would know well that you are capable to do it but you just wanna do it.  And to console yourself, you keep telling yourself you'll do it the next time.

To navigate in life, asked yourself these two basic questions:  WHERE ARE YOU and WHERE ARE YOU GOING.  By your own reckoning, you need to take stock of things, figure out what needs some work, what needs some fixing.  Once you get it, what's your 'damn plan' ?  And can you convince yourself that is not a plan of a 'babbling fool' because if you didn't figure that out, likely it is.  And you end up living that out, that wretched plan.

Ludwin von Mises, the noted Austrian economist and sociologist capped it all: 'INNOVATION is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public'.  Straight from the press, going through this very recent piece from C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago @ https://jungchicago.org/blog/author/cgjungchicago/ Carl Jung declared that you're always in a story regardless whether you know it or not.  The catch is that if it's someone else's story, you will end up with a 

bit part [and worst, it may not be what you want] whereas if it's a story you don't know, it might be one with a not so good ending.  At the end of the day, it's you who would know what's best for you.  And whatever you figure out, we need to be serious in making things less wretched than what they are and that's when you could pull that off.📌