John’s Law Number 2
September 22nd, 2004 @ 10:11 pm | Filed under What Was I On?
This is the second in a series of articles to let you see my thought process. For what that’s worth!
Get A Bit Of Perspective
If I have a decision to make that isn’t a yes / no one (which would have been sorted out by John’s Law Number 1), I have a strategy that helps me make an informed choice.
I picture myself lying in a bed. I’m staring at the ceiling but I’m not really looking at it. I can hear people around me but I’m not really listening to them. I don’t feel any pain, in fact I’d don’t really feel much of anything. It’s probably the drugs. You see it’s decades from now and I’m lying on my death-bed. I know I’m on my way out and I’m running through my life in my head seeing what I made of it all.
I then find myself at the exact point of making the decision I’m about to make. Back to the present. I play out each possible decision in my head and see what the death-bed version of myself would make of each choice. The one that makes my grey, withered old self smile is the one I’ll do.
The way I see it, nothing much we do really changes anything in the grand scheme of things. We’re pretty small, living on a pretty small planet circling an insignificant star in a rather unspectacular part of an average galaxy in a near infinite cosmos filled with a near infinite number of galaxies. Once I have that perspective in mind I’m free to make an informed choice without being influenced unduly. It works for me.
6 Comments on “John’s Law Number 2”
September 23rd, 2004 at 13:15
Sort of like extrapolating the relationship between all matter with say, a piece of fairy cake ….
September 23rd, 2004 at 15:06
That’s an interesting thought…
September 23rd, 2004 at 18:46
Spookily, I was already a follower of this law because whatever you do, you die anyway. How depressing!
September 28th, 2004 at 07:21
John, do you ever actually make any decisions? Do you agonise over them for hours and days and weeks and years until the opportune moment for action has passed, making your decision a default ‘do nothing’?
What about a more intuitive approach to problem solving?
To put it another way, if it’s something you’d actually remember on your death bed, then it’s probably important enough to warrant a bit of cogitation, otherwise, take a best guess and replan on the fly if you happened to be wrong.
Bah! What do I know?
October 5th, 2004 at 15:57
OK, while i’m impressed at the depth of your perspective rule, i’m totally amazed with your ability to break these rules down. it must be an engineering/computer geek thing that makes them think in such detail and process!
April 9th, 2005 at 17:37
Very interesting…and not stupid! Remembering Rowen and Martin laugh in, or are you too young and me too old?