Have Opinions

You should definitely have your own opinions. Don’t go to the internet to discover what you should think. It’s alright to discover new tools (or toys) to use in your everyday life, or to learn more about those tools (or toys), but why would you pass over something that could be very useful to you for a specific, niche purpose just because it doesn’t have the general appeal that everybody’s starving for nowadays? Figure that out for yourself. Make mistakes. The world of software is incredibly maleable and constantly changing. If you organize your day properly, you can change a significant portion of your world every week, so why wouldn’t you take a chance on something that makes sense to you?

Human beings are constantly learning, and we don’t necessarily learn best by reading about phenomena around the world. We have to experience things for ourselves. We have to touch them, manipulate them, study them. And just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s unable to be understood. Chaos simply means that your model of the world (or this specific subsection of it) is inadequate. We aren’t governed by chaos. We’re governed by natural principles that color our interactions. We just don’t know all of them well enough yet.

When you throw a ball up in the air, you expect it to come back down. Depending on the angle, you could either be trying to make a wide arc or strike a batter out in a game of baseball. Balls generally follow rules of physics that we currently understand: gravity, air resistence, etc. The funny thing is, people don’t need to have taken a physics course to understand this. We know that a baseball, when thrown at a 45 degree angle, doesn’t make a perfect arc. The tail end of the trajectory is much shorter than the head end. This is because we throw and catch baseballs. We know where to stand and where to position our mitt to catch the thrown ball.

In the game of baseball, accuracy is important. In the game of life, accuracy is even more important. If you don’t know any better, you may fall into a “pop culture trap” of sorts where your predictions for the future are purely based on the media that you consume and only partially, or minimally, based on your own experiences. When things don’t go as you expect, you don’t blame your presuppositions (and seek to modify them). You blame others for acting inappropriately (or are convinced to blame others). You can’t live your life as a ping-pong ball being batted around by opposing forces. Imagine the whiplash!

How do you take control of your life and become responsible for how it pans out? Have opinions. Have tons and tons of opinions. Figure them out. Change them. Propagate them among people who are amenable to new ideas - who take them, incorporate them into their own ideas, and produce new, beautiful ideas of their own that you can feed back into your life. If we build a world of opinionated individuals, we build a world that can adapt to anything.