“One of my friends — a noted West Coast philosopher — maintains that a majority of life’s errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do.” — Warren Buffett, 1965 BPL Partnership Letter
The most important benefit from having a lot of free time is that it lets you think about what your ultimate goals are and whether what you are currently doing actually accomplishes these. Failing to reflect upon this leads to some of the most tragic outcomes in both fiction and reality. In the Star Wars prequels, Anakin turns to the dark side in an attempt to protect Padme but this just drives her away, resulting in her death. At Gettysburg, Lee was so desperate to end the bloodshed of the Civil War that he made unforced errors which not only caused the destruction of large parts of his army but led to the war continuing for almost two more years. These are just examples that come to mind based on my recent writing; you can probably think of your own as well. The worst part is that these tragedies could have been avoided if the people causing them realized that they were bringing about the very outcome they feared.
Many people’s lives, including yours and mine, might be vastly improved if we stopped and really thought about this. I’m not sure about what your goals are, what they should be, or how best to get there. I’m not even sure what mine are, but the main goal of my writing is to help both of us by figuring that out. It may be hard or even impossible to articulate such seemingly nebulous and ever-changing things as human desires or motivations. But as a wise individual once said, “Do or do not. There is no try.”
You may have noticed that none of the posts prior to today’s have an importance ranking higher than a 6/10. I want to write about important topics, but it turns out that these are the hardest to write about (at least for me, but probably for many of you as well). For this month, I am simply trying to get words down every day to improve my writing skills. Surprisingly, I have been able to make it halfway through the month without missing a day so far, so I will try and see it through. However, due to a combination of procrastination and lack of free time, I usually don’t have it in me to do the proper deep dive warranted by the more important topics. Therefore, it is much easier to write about my thoughts on pixel art, poetry, dating apps, or other relatively-less-important-to-me1 subjects since I don’t feel bad about not putting in the same degree of effort.
Having said this, I plan to focus on more important topics in my writing over the second half of this month. The initial goal was just to be able to improve my ability to communicate my thoughts. Now that I have established a routine (to continue my tradition of gym metaphors), it is time to increase the weight. These won’t be very polished or well-researched, but I can always go back and update them once I reach the endpoint of my self-imposed writing challenge. The goal is just to go from nothing to something before eventually making it good. I hope these words inspire you (and my future self) to consider how well you are truly aligning your actions to your goals, then update the former accordingly.
Footnotes
-
at least according to my tastes. ↩