Filosophy

Personal filisophy

Having a personal filosophy helps add an overall framework or direction to life. It need not necessarily push you to do things you are not already prepared to do, but I find that having a defined filosophical view greatly aids me in making decisions as I go through life. For me filosophy acts as a lubricant, smoothing things out and making life flow better. Here are some basic points of my personal filosophy.

Goals

If you have clear and attainable goals, you are much more likely to meet with success than if you simply stumble through life. One needn’t aspire to become the president, but you’ll achieve a lot more if you have a plan. Without goals you may simply be responding to environmental stimuli like a ball in a pinball machine bouncing off the bumpers. You become a tool of those who do have a plan.

Motivate

Having a plan is not enough. If you ask a large number of people if they would like to be wealthy, for example, most of them will probably answer yes. Take a step back and see how many of them are actually taking steps to achieve that end. Obviously having a goal is nothing if you do not act on it. Many people maintain that it is important to have a dream, some grand aspiration in their life. Dreams are too idle for me. I’d rather have a road map, a procedure, a plan of how to get to my eventual goal. Then I have to start working. No one else is going to make it happen for you. You have to count on your self. Getting going and following up can be difficult, but it is necessary if you’re going to achieve your goals.

“The measure of a man is not what he starts, but how he finishes.”

No excuses

Your failure or success, for the most part, lies completely in your own hands. There are only two reasons for not accomplishing something. Either it was (1) fysically impossible, or (2) you didn’t want it bad enough. As soon as you start pointing the finger at someone else and saying “I can’t because…” you have given up. When a student says they didn’t get their homework finished because “I was too busy doing XYZ.” I instantly know that they didn’t value the homework as much as they valued “XYZ”. If the homework was more important, then it would have been completed. They didn’t want it bad enough.

Luck

Luck is a byproduct of preparation. Good preparation yields good luck. Just look at the initial expeditions to the South Pole. Scott and the British team were woefully unprepared, and daily cursed their bad luck. Amundsen, the Norwegian came ready for the task, and gave many thanks for his good luck.

Beliefs

Your neighbors probably care more about what you do than what you believe. If you want to know someone, don’t listen to what they say they believe, watch what they do.

Learn

It is never a bad idea to learn something new. Ignorance is never the solution to a problem.

Focus

Some things, like anything that happened in the past, are beyond your control. Rather than wasting your time fretting over things in the past or things you can not affect, focus your efforts on those things you can change.

Efficiency

If you have the choice between doing something either wastefully or efficiently, it makes good sense to do it efficiently. Nothing good comes from wasting resources. Likewise there is a huge potential in “tuning” things to run well. A poorly tuned car, for example, may be getting 25 miles to the gallon of gasoline. You could spend $15,000 on a car that gets 30 mpg, or you could tune the old one up for $50, properly inflate the tires and remove the extra weight of the “junk in the trunk” for free, and get 30 mpg. Each additional mpg will cost $3000 in the case of the new car [ $15,000 / (30-25) ], or about $10 [ $50 / (30-25) ] in the case of the tune up.

The English language is overdue for a tune up. I’d like to start by replacing the initial “ph” in words with “f”, as in fone. True, is it a small step, but at least I’m making progress!