Accept Your Mistakes
~ 2.5 Minute Read.
In my last post I wrote how my idea of determinism influences some of my mentality. I still think it’s a bad word for the concept, as the first associations with determinism seem to be rather negative. Instead, see it as “everything is not completely arbitrary”.
Your actions at present are a sum of the influences of your past. As a consequence you are only able to handle and react to any situation in a determined way. If you make a mistake, you could not have acted differently. If you understand that, all dwelling in “If only I had…” will move to learning from the mistake and not making it again should the situation ever occur again: “Next time I will…”.
This way you influenced your future self and gave yourself the ability to act differently next time. Assume you make the wrong choice and “correct” yourself into the wrong direction and make a different mistake next time. Again, you were not able to make a different choice of how to avoid the error next time, hence, accept that and move on.
Never Fire Anyone
The most ludicrous statement to infer from that mentality. I bring this up not only to avoid this assumption should I get the privilege to have people work for me, but to avoid unconditional retention of people that don’t fit into their jobs.
I see two ways to handle someone’s unmotivation: either invest the time to motivate — e.g. by conveying your own motivation, creating understanding for the mission, finding better suited tasks for that person… — or realizing that doing so is out of question and let go. You cannot motivate a passionate programmer to do a gardener’s job if he doesn’t at least have some affinity for it. 1
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- After a discussion with a friend about this, I do realize that there are jobs for which there is nobody who could be motivated for it. I actually think there is a person for every job, but definitely jobs where this is very rare. Sometime in the future robots will be doing those jobs and more people will instead be able to within their area of passion — hopefully?
Written in 30 minutes, edited in 5 minutes.