Imagination is a form of understanding that isn’t constrained by reality. In that sense, children typically have the strongest ability to understand (even if they’re unskilled at it) and we typically lose that ability as we gain experience.
Imagination is unfettered by nothing and nobody but our mental limits, but the practical effects of science and culture can impede our attempts to build whatever we imagine. If we become too conceited, we lose the ability to conform our thoughts to reality, which makes our imagination and feelings about them effectively useless.
The things you dwell on in your mind define what you produce and how effectively. While you don’t directly create reality with your thoughts, your focus on something will increase and decrease the likelihood of events happening that ripple out from that imagined circumstance.
Our minds have a tendency to drift. You don’t remember anything as well as you think you do, so nobody and nothing can quite measure to how you’ve reframed it in your mind. This becomes a major problem if you’re grieving a loved one’s death.
Blame is a waste of effort. Outside the need for forgiving or power games, we don’t need to know what caused an issue, but instead what to do about it now to create desirable results in the future.
We imagine we understand the world around us, but most of our beliefs are simply prejudices we’ve acquired through experience, without much consideration for the idiosyncrasies of reality. Abstractions are valuable as theoretical concepts, but theories always take more work to become reality (when they do work).
We obsess about odd, unlikely circumstances. This gets us into trouble because we assume that the unlikely things are likely, which can make us superstitious or anxious, depending on how we imagine its results.
Statistics and statisticians feel more accurate because they’re a group instead of an individual, but look very closely at how they receive and manipulate their data, and don’t trust their predictions if it doesn’t match your instincts. They might be trying to distort the truth, especially when they have something to gain or have competitors.
Statistical analysis is useful for finding correlations, not causation, so it’s reliable to see whether your expectations have become reality. If you must decide instead of tracking results, ask for advice from industry veterans instead.
We can’t predict the future, so we must stay open-minded for all imagined circumstances to be logically possible, then stop thinking about it. Unless we’re having fun with it or minimizing presently fixable risks, dwelling on the future serves little benefit to our souls.
Staying unaware of the consequences of decisions that may have a terrible consequence can often expose us to tremendous advantages we otherwise wouldn’t have had. If we can humanly survive the likely risks, it’s always worth taking an unsafe decision for the advantages from the change.
When something happens, it typically means one thing: it happened. If it was unlikely, it’s just as unlikely to happen again. Sometimes people get lucky, but it’s better to trust an unlikely thing happening from an unnoticed place than where everyone is currently looking.
Often, the most “likely” trends are the ones that were fringe ideas:
- Investing in airplanes in 1900 was a crackpot idea for only crazy people.
- Cars were once a “dying trend” before they applied assembly line technology to it.
- Before the microchip, the “personal computer” was also a dying trend.
- Economists once predicted that New York City wouldn’t be sustainable because it’d be covered in pony poop.
- Too many others to count!