A dear friend of mine, made a comment the other day about an article I wrote earlier: Controlling Your Environment.
It made me think, about the foundation for my reasoning: complicated systems and complex systems.
A stage environment is a complicated system. But with enough training (and the help of other specialists) you’ll be able to master this complicated system. Thanks to your mastery, the “complicated system” will produce predictable results.
Complex systems, on the other hand, are unpredictable. Check out Vince Ebert’s Tedx Talk about two-body and three-body problems and why success is not predictable.
Your life and your professional goals are part of a complex system. You cannot predict what is going to happen.
So instead of wasting your resources on how to control your environment, I invite you to direct your attention to the opportunities that surround you. Mix that with your values and a sense of purpose you will be able to set pretty clear goals for yourself.
… and the beauty of it all is that those goals will be both meaningful to you and valuable to others.
PS: Be mindful that your opinion about how much control you have over your life, is influenced by cultural norms – but I’ll keep that for another post.
What do you say? How does that resonate with your experience?
Image by Dan-Cristian Pădureț
