It is very crucial to be definite. To imagine a future truly worth experiencing and throw your whole self behind it. As I say this, I do not have the full idea or experience of what that is and I am coming at this from a psychological perspective - but really, it is based on Peter Thiel’s Zero To One’s reiteration of the idea. Take for example his ideas on social entrepreneurship. He says:
“Whatever is good enough to receive applause from all audiences can only be conventional, like the general idea of green energy”
“Doing something different is what’s truly good for society—and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market.”
“indefinitely optimistic investors betting on the general idea of green energy funded cleantech companies that lacked specific business plans, the result was a bubble.”
“An entrepreneur can’t benefit from macro-scale insight unless his own plans begin at the micro-scale.”
“no matter how much the world needs energy, only a firm that offers a superior solution for a specific energy problem can make money. No sector will ever be so important that merely participating in it will be enough to build a great company.”
He also reiterates it when he opens the book with a discussion of the future:
“what makes the future distinctive and important isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today”
“Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.”
And later on, he discusses it explicitly:
“If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.”
“An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it.”
“A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it.”
“To a definite optimist, the future will be better than the present if he plans and works to make it better.”
“To an indefinite optimist, the future will be better, but he doesn’t know how exactly, so he won’t make any specific plans. He expects to profit from the future but sees no reason to design it concretely.”
“Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.”
“arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.”
“Definite optimism works when you build the future you envision. Definite pessimism works by building what can be copied without expecting anything new. Indefinite pessimism works because it’s self-fulfilling: if you’re a slacker with low expectations, they’ll probably be met. But indefinite optimism seems inherently unsustainable: how can the future get better if no one plans for it?”
“A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.”
“only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund”
“once you think that you’re playing the lottery, you’ve already psychologically prepared yourself to lose.”
You can only be wrong by being specific, but it’s also the only way to be right.
My experience of this has been that if you do not define a future for yourself, you devolve into an unrecognized persona. Not just a person, you become an actor of things you are not conscious of, an NPC. Your ideas, feelings and time will not be yours. Your days are spent watching yourself live and it is a truly sad experience to feel stuck in that.
I feared that definition of a future would be the definition of potential failure, but a lack of definition meant consistent failure, because all surrounding successes seemed attractive but were clearly not mine. These successes reminded me of my lack of attempts and I felt terrible. Because I did not want to fail at one thing, I was failing at everything.
I have flirted with failure for so long, I seem to have forgotten the beauty of success.
It would have been helpful to define a time, goal or experience in my future that I truly found satisfying to protect me from life’s ups and downs, save me from myself, and give me an inner prospect to hope for.