Sean Eby

The unexpected in life

With so many different philosophical views on how to live life, no one can doubt the spectrum presented with the phrase, "what you do now affects what you do later" against "what you do now is changeable and/or reversible later."

It's true that many decisions made now can be changed later but often recognizing which decisions are changeable later are sometimes more ambiguous than you would otherwise know. To complicate matters, "what-if" scenarios about choices you didn't make and predicting their outcomes makes it all the more interesting. "What if I hadn't taken that job and took a different one?" "What if I had applied to that other university?" "What if I had pushed harder for that promotion?" "What if I had made that sales call?" "Wouldn't it be more fun to have taken that time off?"

Quite honestly, I believe that woven between the fabric of decisions is a slight element of luck, perhaps even fate (if you believe it). A small pence of luck does indeed have a role in life as in nature. The luck is really masked by the things you don't know that you don't know. This area of knowledge is the truly unexpected; the things we absolutely know nothing about and can't even describe to others that we don't know anything about them. The absolutely undiscovered area of reality; things that, hopefully, scientists are moving towards discovering bit by bit. Of course, the game be as it may is such that the more we know, the more we learn that we don't know. Luck, whether prescribed by some higher spirit or fate or not is the area of the unknown.

Walking into an area unknown (but perhaps opportunistic) is what makes things happen. Life is about bets and making choices that sometimes you don't always have all the facts for up-front. Risk really is the reality, if not the most interesting part of life. Risk is about trying to discern between the choices that affect what happens later and cannot be changed against choices that can be changed. Ideally, all decisions are somehow reversible or fixable later on but the reality is such that they are not.

The funny thing about that is that opportunity is what creates "reversible" decisions. Counter-intuitive, maybe, but opportunity and finding new opportunities is what allows someone to escape (or "fix") a bad decision or situation. In contract terms, it is all about your BATNA (Best alternative to a negotiated agreement) [Thanks Jeff], which basically means your substitutes or alternatives if something were to not work out as you thought. Just as if you were stuck in a house fire, having more doors in the room that hopefully aren't up in flames yet is a set of opportunities that might just save your life.

The lesson (at least for me) is to try and make decisions that create more opportunity. Straight-forward, you say? Not quite. In fact, making choices that create more opportunity often involve the risk factor that I mentioned. What I mean is that sometimes creating more opportunity means closing doors to existing opportunities and, yes you guessed it, making a bet that more opportunities will emerge down the road even if you forgo existing opportunities now. Economists would call that opportunity-cost but in fact, it is part of our everyday life, and should be embraced as first-class tool for doing the best things for ourselves. Think about the new opportunities you can make for yourself, not just the immediate or short-term value, the next time you make any decision.