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.

When opportunities choose us

On August 20, 2008 an MD-82 airplane performing a JK5022 (Madrid-Las Palmas) flight has failed to take off from Madrid-Barajas airport, fell down and exploded. 154 of 172 passengers and crew members were killed. The further investigation has shown that the accident has been caused by a sequence of pilots’ and technicians’ mistakes. The fatal mistake, the one that actually was an immediate reason for the crash, was an attempt to take off with slats and flaps closed.

A very similar case (and happily, not a “very similar accident”) has happened in that very Spain a year before the Barajas crash. On June 5, 2007 an MD-83 airplane performing Lanzarote-Barcelona flight had been a subject for exactly the same bunch of staff mistakes, and also attempted to take off with closed flaps. Fortunately, there was a strong headwind; besides, the aircraft was slightly underloaded. Because of these two factors the machine succeeded in reaching the necessary lift that let it have avoided the JK5022 fate. The crew and the passengers had to experience several seconds of drastic 60 degrees right and left rolls though.


Generally, an aircraft taking off with its flaps closed does not have a chance to climb. That is, the passengers of MD-83 have been sentenced to death when they checked in to the flight in Lanzarote (or when they were booking the tickets, or ... who knows when exactly they’ve been, never mind). But the environment -- someone might wish to call it fortune, destiny, God, weather, closed system, whatever -- just has given them a minute opportunity to survive.

A good case to recall when you will be blaming the piercing wind that has blown your hat away.

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.