I wonder how many opportunities we lose by throwing away ideas or deeds that we consider unpromising. Sometimes these considerations are based on our complexes, sometimes on our experience, and I cannot say which reason is worse. In any case, while complexes are something that is a bit out of control of an average man, experience is more or less a cognitive substance. A man with huge experience is somewhat similar to an expert system; they maintain a knowledgebase of various statements along with a set of possible ways of their resolution. As a matter of fact, that feature of experience makes life simpler, as it allows to automate many aspects of life; instead of thinking over yet another use case, a man "contacts" his experience database and gets the known pattern for that use case.

What is bad, is that these specifics of our mind prevent us from doing irrational things. It is hard to run something unusual and exotic, as our experience raises both its hands up and shouts "No, buddy, this activity never used to be successful in the past, so what the hell are you expecting from it now? Stop and do something well-tried". As a trivial example, we will never go shopping on Sunday, as our experience tells us that the stores are all closed (and may miss some attractive Sunday offer). This doesn't look reasonable to me.

Our world does not encourage rational way of living; luck and randomness have a great effect on our life. People living in a rational way are doomed to flow together with the common stream, as the factor of randomness is rarely present in a rational life (of course, there are exceptions). As minds of different people are more or less similar to each other (of course, there are exceptions), one will not be able to outrun the crowd acting in the same way as the crowd. By acting irrationally, one brings some randomness and luck into his life (by exploiting the chances that are ignored by the others, rationally-acting people), increasing the probability of catching the faster train.

Black Cat

Several days ago I was walking down the street. One middle-aged lady carrying two heavy bags in her hands appeared far ahead. We were walking towards each other, getting closer and closer, when suddenly a black cat appeared in the middle of the distance between us and began to cross the street.

I really love cats, you know, I like to talk to them, that's why I smiled when I saw her and accelerated a bit to take a closer look (she was a beautiful shiny one). Suddenly the lady raced on, panting and shaking her enormous bags as if they were two fan blades. I was a bit confused at first, but in a moment I got the idea. Some people in our country consider black cat as a sign of bad luck. If one crosses your way, something bad and terrible will reach you sooner or later. That's why they try to omit such situations wherever possible. The lady happened to succeed in her undertaking, and the frightened cat failed to reach the opposite side of the street and jumped out to the bush. Having the victory in her hands, the lady put her bags on the ground and stopped, continuing to pant. Obviously, she has just rescued herself from a mortal danger.

I was thinking about different sides of this situation on my further way home. First, it appears that we have more signs of bad luck than signs of good luck. Moreover, bad luck signs are much more ordinary, easy-to-come-across ones. Bad luck is guaranteed by broken mirrors, ladders, empty buckets, Friday 13s, scattered salt, ravens, owls, left feet and that poor black cat. Good luck by four-leaf clover (anybody seen that?), horseshoes, coins found on street, rainbows, ladybugs... is that all?

Second, there is no problem in trapping into something bad. Lack of attention, misunderstanding, memory failures, wrong estimations and simply a bad mood often lead to unpleasant consequences that can be treated as caused by bad luck. Life ain't easy, and in many situations we get not what we expect to. It is natural for a man to be mistaken, but those mistakes are often considered as a crook in the lot.

So what we have? We have a huge number of bad luck signs and are open to various bad things due to the nature of our world. There is a high probability that another fault comes soon after a sign of bad luck... confirming the latter. Good luck signs are just too rare to affect something. A good environment to build a loser from everyone.

Thence, accepting bad luck signs is a wrong strategy. Instead, it is reasonable to invent various good luck signs and let them make you think positively. The bad things are going to occur independently of whether there were bad luck signs or there weren't; and the good luck signs bring you in good mood, making you feel confident and easy. Luck is something that can be built, and we should care about building it in the right way.

No wrong no right,
I'm gonna tell you there's no black and no white.
Queen, "One Vision"

A small addition to the previous post.

Dividing people (and other things) into black and white on the basis of some particular feature of them is one of the biggest mistakes one can make. Unfortunately, our mind is lazy. It is much easier for us to sort a hundred elements out into two (three, four, ten) groups by some common criteria and operate with those N groups, than to put each one to a separate personal group and deal with 100 groups instead. Sometimes this is called abstracting. Naturally, abstracting is good when used in maths or biology, but it distorts our vision when applied to real-world or social stuff.

Sometimes this feature of our mind is exploited by unfair people. The teams of candidates of presidential/governmental races often try to blacken the opposite candidate by showing them as adulterer, a person of doubtful character and so on. Well, it is difficult for me to understand the relation between PM's sexual temperament and their economical and manager's skills (needed for the state to prosper).

I try to classify the things as vectors of different essential properties. For instance, a typical vector of a person is (name, sex, age, sense of humour (1-10), kindness (1-10), intellectual level (-1-10), positiveness (1-10), honesty, appearance, physical skills, risk-ability, ..., smoking (yes/no), ...). This relates to all people, not only to friends (politics have some of the properties grayed, e.g. honesty ;)). The properties are mostly orthogonal, and thus such classification helps not to sort people into black and white, stupid and clever, or honest and dishonest. Really, there are quite a few properties to consider, and the presence of negative ones does not mean the absence of positive ones.

Opportunities

It is hard to imagine how many opportunities we miss in our lives just because of our passiveness. Some of those opportunities could have made our lives more interesting, sensible and happy, helping us to reach higher peaks. What is clear for me is that the life flow is not a well-defined thing; conversely, it is quite unstable and highly detail-dependent. Though the socium stimulates an iterative and more or less steady way of life (school, high school, university, then building a career brick-by-brick...), this one is obviously not the best one. Yes, it is really not that bad, as it provides some stability and makes you confident in your future... a future of a yet another average man or woman.

The thing that comes to my mind is that the iterative way is ideal for passive persons. It just lets you drift with the flow, with minimal movements required from your side (as a side effect, this system does not accept active persons, having various insulting words such as upstarts and careerists to refer to them; Russians even have a proverb stating that “the initiative leads to punishment”).

At the same time, every day gives us a number of opportunities -- big or small, residing near or far, promising or with almost no evident output. In many cases those opportunities are hard to observe, but even being discovered, they require us to leave our cozy shell and do something unusual to catch them. Strikingly, but most of the people tend to stay in their shells even if they do see those opportunities. In some cases there is no reason to blame them, as catching opportunities may result in loss of stability of their current lifeflows (which is the core of life model propagated by the socium). However, the other opportunities are ignored for totally different reasons... For our scares, first of all. We refuse to suggest our revolutionary ideas to the director because we are afraid of his skepticism; we have to lock our manuscripts in the drawer because we do not consider them to worth a penny; we miss a chance to dance with a girl at a prom because we are afraid of being kicked off... Yes, it is completely possible that the director will tear your ideas down, the editor will send your stories back, and that blue-eyed girl will just laugh at you... But at least you will be confident that you did everything you could. Yes, the romance failed. But was it possible at all if you just have preferred to have another beer?

Being active and catching positive opportunities is vital for putting yourself above the average line.

Do you care about your autumn?

Youth is a good time to think about your gray hairs times. It is important to understand that even though you probably are an advanced one and earn quite good today, inevitable is the moment when you will be unable to do it anymore. The older you become, the less energy you have; besides, it is usually a problem to find a good job for older people because employers prefer to hire young and active ones instead. Having prepared to those times beforehand, you will protect yourself from a potential stress in future and will be able to adapt to your new way of life without too much difficulties.

Such pension-aimed strategy might consist of the following basic elements:

1) Maintain a kind of own “pension fund” by putting aside a certain fraction of your monthly income and investing the accumulated money into various assets. There is a huge number of investment instruments available, from public pension funds and bank deposits (for conservative people), to metals, shares and stocks (for geeks).

2) Prepare yourself for earning money in old ages. It is very likely that you would be unable to succeed on some full-time position (even if you get it). As for me, it is a good idea to concentrate on some self-employment activity such as flowers growing, wood decorating, painting, ship modeling, cage mastering etc. Having started with it now, you will acquire good skills for the moment when you really need it. As a reasonable option, one might wish to have a look at several activities involving different senses (it would be pity to end up with excellent piano tuning skills being totally deaf).

3) Take care about your health. The healthier you are, the less money you will spend to maintain your life, the more time and energy you will have to do what you really love.

And I am pretty sure that an old you will send many thanks to a young you :).