thinking – Wild Rain

The here and now

I had a conversation recently with someone that knew they did not have long left. They had already beat the odds and now, in their early 90s, they were saying that any day that you get to wake up is a good day.

We were discussing a book author whose work we both enjoyed. Their next book won’t be out until next year and the chances of my conversation partner being around to read it were slim. What was interesting was his attitude. It didn’t bother him. He went on to explain that he had made peace with the end being near long ago and it was very liberating. “I’m not worried about being able to finish a book, a movie, TV series, whatever. I just enjoy it for what it is as long as it lasts now. If I never get to find out what happens in the end then that’s ok. That’s life. We never find out what happens in the end so just enjoy the present”.

It was a very sobering point. Putting life’s FOMO in its place. You are only missing out if you are not enjoying the here and now.

Prove it with a negative

There are various testing techniques used by the Quality Assurance and Penetration Testing professions known as blind testing. Essentially it is where you can’t see something to prove it exists, so you test it by feel, or by testing for an absence of something. For example there are database injection attacks that utilise time. You ask questions you know to be true, followed by ones that you know to be false. With each you measure the time taken for the question to be answered. If there is a measurable difference between the right and wrong ones then you can blind test something based on the time taken to answer your questions even if the response is a return of the prompt with no answer.

How often have you been asked to prove that something is not true? Someone states their argument as if it is gospel, providing no evidence whatsoever to back it up, and then demands that you prove them wrong. You have to do all the work (assuming that you disagree and wish to prove them wrong). In some cases it is impossible to prove, such as the statement that there is some higher being. How do you prove/disprove it?

There is also the practice of proving something with a negative. If all alternative options cannot be true then the assumption is that you have proven that the statement or thing being tested is true.

Can you be really good at more than one thing?

I’ve been told that if you split your time between more than one thing you’ll only ever be average at any one of them. Whether sports, career, or whatever it is you are focusing the majority of your time on, if you spread your time and effort you will never be really good at any one thing.

Really?

I disagree. We can all be good at more than one thing, and the art of mastery has been disproven. Instead, I would propose that you will get good at whatever you spend the most time on. If you procrastinate, watch too much TV, laze about, then that is how you have chosen to spend your time and you will get good at doing that. Alternatively, if you spend your time learning something and practicing it, then over time you will get better and better at it. It’s common sense: whatever you feed will grow.

That doesn’t mean that you can only focus on one thing. There’s nothing stopping us from focusing on more than one thing, at different times. It may take longer but we can still become really good at more than one thing. It all comes down to time management and where you apply your focus.

Never enough

There’s a type of annoyance that I refer to as the never enough annoyance.

You are out and about running errands in your car and your water bottle runs out and you are very thirsty. Or you are out on a long walk or jog. There’s just never enough.

You are painting a room and the paint tin runs empty with just a bit of wall left to paint. Frustrating. There should of been more than enough, but there wasn’t, there’s never enough.

There’s a job that you have almost completed but you need to be somewhere else soon. There’s never enough time!

You have a day off work and you plan to use it to finish important jobs that you’ve been putting off for far too long. The day is almost over and you feel like you’ve hardly made a dent. Where did the time go?

There’s never enough.

The you on the outside

The you on the outside is not the same as the you on the inside.

Look in the mirror. You don’t look the same. That’s not how you think or dream that you look. You look older, more stressed, more grey.

Record your voice and play it back. Is that really you? It’s what others hear. It’s not what you sound like in your head. An accent? What accent.

What others see and hear is not the real you. It’s camouflage. It’s the outer shell, the skin, the layer that protects the real you. The one that only you can see. What everyone else sees is just what’s painted on the outer wall.

There’s you on the outside, and then there’s the real you on the inside.