Choose Your Fate

“Okay. Put it in your pocket. It’s yours. With the rest of those wallets and the register that makes this a pretty successful little score.” – Pulp Fiction

If Snow White gets tired of feeling Sleepy in the bath tub, is it okay if she feels Happy?

I think a lot about what could be versus what is. Probably too much, sometimes.

What sort of examples? Well, a piece of walnut could be turned into fine furniture that might be used for hundreds of years. Or it could be burned in a fireplace and turned into ash.

That’s what I’m talking about. Yes, both of the results are useful, but one has enduring value while the other is ephemeral. Yeah, if it’s the single piece of firewood that keeps you alive for a night, well, that’s a goal, but in all the years I spent cutting firewood, not a single stick ever lived up to that level of valor. In fact, some sticks are downright bad, when a doctor presses my tongue down with a stick, I feel depressed.

There are other things, though, since I’m done talking about my wood. There is the split between having a high IQ and the performance that comes from that. Yes, generally higher IQ is correlated strongly with having a higher wealth and income, but I’ve seen geniuses who wasted it all. Athletic ability is in there, too. How many potentially great athletes disappeared because they had the work ethic of lightning: they followed the path of least resistance?

In France, is marijuana called oui’d?

I could go on and on with examples of this, but I’m thinking that these are enough. And, generally, it’s not firewood that I’m concerned with as much as human potential. A wasted stick of mahogany is one thing, but a wasted Isaac Newton is a tragedy. Man, after a few pints, Isaac really was a mess: Leibniz really pissed him off somehow.

The biggest part, I think, of turning human potential into achievement is something very simple: language. In one sense, I think we speak the world we live in and ourselves into existence. When I say, “I’m going to write a post today” that changes my future. There have been several times I’ve promised something like, “And I’ll have a great post on Monday” and I was very pleased with the result of what I created each time I said that.

You have to know your limits.

We take, I think, potential and will it into use. There is no time, ever, that I achieved something great and that it was something that accidentally happened. Dead Roman philosopher Seneca said that luck is when preparation meets opportunity, but the preparation took place in order to prepare for the opportunity. Thomas Jefferson didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to write the Declaration of Independence. Nope. Jefferson wanted to write it. Plus, they knew if Franklin wrote it that it would have been filled with jokes that everyone would have missed until after the FedEx® horse and buggy dropped it off to the king.

I’ve noticed that when I say that I’m going to do something, that’s 90% of the way to success in whatever I had planned. Today, for instance, I wanted to write a post that didn’t focus on politics or the cares of the day (that will come on Monday with the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report) since I felt I wanted a brief change before jumping back into the fray. So, with that declaration, I looked at some notes I had scribbled down, and saw that there were three that were related.

And I started writing.

Words, then, crystallized my vague intent into something specific.

The policeman was arresting me for counterfeiting, but I gave him 50 crisp $17 dollar bills and he let me go.

This brings me to the final point: the difference between potential and achievement is words, but with intent. Nothing (generally) happens in my life without intent. Sure, there are accidents. Sure, there are the things that other people do that change my plans, but more often than not, the only real barrier to any achievement that is physically possible is me failing to put my goal into words and intent.

I think that intention is important. Without intention, all I see are obstacles. If my goal becomes to achieve, however, I start to try to focus in my mind ways to achieve my goal by going around, through, or even using those obstacles to my advantage.

The final point is:

What is it you are here to do?

Why are you here?

If you’re unhappy, why aren’t you changing your circumstances? Until we draw our final breath, we have choices. Sure, I don’t have the same wide array of choices in this world that I did when I was 18, but there is still a lot of runway left for me to say those words that lock in the intent.

Did Noah keep the bees in the Ark-hive?

I’m here tonight writing because I want to be. I’m going to get up tomorrow morning because I want to. And I know I haven’t written the best essay I’m going to write, because I know that’s in front of me, not behind me. And I know that the grandest revelation isn’t behind me, it’s in my future.

So, almost everyone reading this today has the option to make the work that they do with the rest of their life a pile of ashes, or a piece of furniture worth being handed down.

Maybe I’ll make a recliner. That way my grandkids could say, “Me and this chair go way back.”

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

21 thoughts on “Choose Your Fate”

    1. How about a great column exploring the difference between the words “new” and “knew”, as in “knew if Franklin…”?

  2. Hard work, intelligence, and preparation will get you half way up the ladder of success, but the upper rungs are mostly off limits unless you are a sociopath with the right personal connections. This is particularly true if you are a technical person.

    1. Yup. Connections are key to getting to the top, but the middle and upper middle are available just with talent and drive.

  3. Dang it, John, your get-off-your-behind-and-do-something columns always make me feel uncomfortable and inadequate.

    Thank you for that!

  4. So often we hear it said that a particular individual died tragically young (Henry Gray, James Dean, JFK, etc.) with conjecture on what he might have accomplished, otherwise. Yes, that is a great thought experiment. But if you are twisted, like me, you consider the possibility that the person died at precisely the right moment, to prevent unforeseen disaster.

    What if Mozart hadn’t drunk himself into a pauper’s grave and instead turned to a more lucrative career path ghostwriting pop songs for 18th century Austria’s Taylor Swift? What if Tycho Brahe had not “died of politeness”, too embarrassed to use the loo at the royal banquet (or was poisoned by a jealous and catty Johannes Kepler, take your pick) and went on to discover that Pluto is not only NOT a planet, but a large ball of Camembert, instead?

    Imagine the horror if Hitchhiker author Douglas Adams had lived long enough to fall prey to the sickness of uber-leftism and felt compelled to refashion Zaphod Beeblebrox into a pansexual, New Age Influencer with not one but TWO man-buns, mincing about the universe on a quantum-drive moped?

    Be careful what you wish for. Maybe things really do work out for the best.

    1. A friend recently asked a similar question in terms of what Einstein might have accomplished had he access to modern day computers? My flippant answer was “nothing” as he’d just spend most of his days having to manage email and dealing with TPS reports.

      But on a more serious note, I think computers would have actually prevented him from making some of his biggest discoveries. He conceptualized those ideas by thinking about the problem for long periods of time and visualizing how things like waves and particles might interact. It’s through those visualizations that he figured out the math for some of his theories. If he had lived in modern times, I don’t think he would have had enough free time to perform that level of technical daydreaming so those concepts might never have come to fruition.

      1. Sometimes I wonder what I, myself, might contribute to the store of world knowledge, were I not regularly distracted by the comical doings of AOC, the crumbling Biden empire, and the Kardashians. World peace, cold fusion, and cancer cures must wait, it seems, for there are far more immediate concerns to occupy my time and talents.

        1. We all should be asking ourselves that same question. Before the internet, I was constantly doing things and building things but now I mostly just sit on the recliner and skim youtube videos. I hate that I have allowed myself to get so lazy in this regard so am in the process of limiting how much time I’m online.

          I had to do this previously after the 2020 election steal because I would get so angry that it was affecting my health. But now, it sounds weird, but I feel like Trump has sort of got things going in the right direction so maybe I can put the computer down and enjoy the outside world again.

  5. Yes…”A man has to know his limitations”. -Lt. Harry Callahan, in “Magnum Force”

    But, if you don’t push at your limitations, you never get from A to B, so to speak. I remember being in Driver’s Ed back in the late 1960s sitting at a driving simulator, learning how to shift a manual transmission. Finally got it down pat.

    Then had to drive a real manual transmission car. Failed miserably. But finally mastered it. Wanted to buy a Tacoma with a manual tra**y several months ago, but Sweetie’s knees ain’t what they once were, so automatic it was.

      1. “**”. Didn’t know if WordPress allows that word, BTW, Nancy’s my CongressCritter. We watched that clip two days ago. Hilarious.

        Hated to see they showed our district as “Charleston & Hilton Hell Island”. Should be Charleston & Beaufort, as we’re the county seat.

    2. I am so advanced now, when I leave A, I go well past B. I go from A to only as far as L. Because I know my LIMITATIONS.

    3. Even getting a manual is difficult today. I bought an older truck so my boys would have to learn it to drive. Success!

  6. Snow White was the first woman to break the glass ceiling.
    By staying home, cooking and cleaning, and marrying the first prince to come along.

    It took modern womenidiots to dump that guy, saying “I can do better”.
    Then dying old, alone, and with a surplus of cats and empty wine boxes wondering in stunned misery why no more princes want to come along.

    It would be comedic if it weren’t such a tragedy.

    1. It is tragic – man is meant for women, and vice versa. Divorces should be hard to get, and there should be no fun and prizes after getting one.

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