Your Journey Should Have Exponentials
Imagine your life one year from now.
You cannot be certain that you’ll have more money than you do now.
Incomes rise and fall, markets change overnight, and you never know what is lurking around the corner. Your job can go, the banking system can collapse, and everything you’ve saved and worked hard for can be wiped away in an instant.
And you may be sufficiently diversified. You may listen to Ray Dalio, you may have a few piles of gold, and your fat-bellied, horn-rimmed glasses-wearing financial advisor might tell you at your appointments that everything is in order. But even then, you are not diversified against the apocalypse.
We cannot be certain you’ll have the people around you.
Your relationship might be going well, and you may have exciting plans for the future. Your family may have a full bill of health, with no qualms or disputes amongst you.
But things can change in an instant, and everyone has a breaking point. All the people who never saw it coming all have one thing in common: They never saw it coming.
My grandfather was fifty-five when he said goodbye to his family for the last time – he boarded a plane for a trip not knowing that he would never return. I guess you don’t know what you don’t know.
So turn to the person beside you and give them a hug – and call your mother, tell her you love her. Because one day you will be dust – and dust finds it hard to say the words “I love you”.
We cannot be certain you’ll have your health
Feeling healthy at the moment? No cough, no headaches, no sore throat? Well consider this, what are the warning symptoms for being crushed by a meteor or hit by a car?
Can you tell me that you are absolutely positive that you will be in good health this time next year? The only thing that is easier to take for granted than good health is oxygen itself – our most precious resource, yet the one we think about the least.
Because like good health, it feels so plentiful, and it seems like it has always been there. But we are not entitled to oxygen, and, we are not entitled to good health.
But we stand every chance of learning more than we have learnt so far.
Assuming you are alive, then no matter what happens in the next twelve months, there are few excuses for not having learnt more than you’ve learnt up until this point. It is certainly hard for you to lose wisdom.
When bad things happen, you just use the Slingshot Mechanism, right? And if you’re going through the Thousand Doors, on a true journey, the return on learning should compound, regardless of failures, disappointments and setbacks.
Because the events we’ve learnt the most from are the most horrific ones – the World Wars and mass genocides, global financial crises and pandemics. So bad events are a good excuse for a lot but never for a lack of learning.
Each year of learning has the years prior to build on – to interact with and cross-reference – and for this reason, your journey should compound just like compound interest. That is, it should improve at an improving rate.
Your Journey Should Have Exponentials.
Because the learning is the journey. The journey is the life. And so, the learning is the life too.
