0 Uncertainty

_27.6.2021_ People do not like uncertainty. They prefer suffering to uncertainty. This is why poor people stay being poor rather than trying new business or move to new location. They make assumption that what is familiar is safer and more comfortable, even if it's poverty. They avoid uncertainty and risk. This behavior is self-defeating behavior that prevent them from their flourishing. I can refer this to myself very clearly. I'm afraid of people's opinions. I'm afraid of failure and rejection, therefore I never really asked someone to have a date or apply to new job. When I study a new language, I play safe to avoid mistakes and ridicule of others. When I read, I choose easier books. Normally I do not challenge myself and I do not take risks. In short, I'm a coward. I'm about to change. I try to take risks and do what is difficult for me. I try to present myself as "horrible" so people can despise me as they like and I can practice to face rejection and negative opinion from others. Failure is the way to success. To fail every day and get better is the fastest way to get to the destination. A basketball player fail thousands times a day throwing a ball to the ring. Most people aim low and therefore it's easier for them to be successful. Playing stupid game winning stupid prize. People spending their time doing unimportant things, and they don't risk anything. They do not have big picture and big effort. If the aim is to run 1km a day, the mental effort will be different from 10km a day. Just to think about running 10km a day is tiresome. Most people avoid thinking about it and therefore fail to do it at all. At the start, aiming low and small is the best start. Until one create the solid habit, he must not aim high. After the solid habit is established, he can increase the distance and difficulty. That's the key, never aim big until you build the solid habit. I learned this from atomic habit and it sounds so logical. The purpose is to build the habit first. Build the system. After that move slowly to the next target. If now I target ten pages every day I probably will kill the habit that I just started. It needs time to establish a new habit. After I can write one page every day for several months, I can start to double the page. By that time writing one page will be very easy and I need new challenge. Now I'm learning Mandarin but I don't really study every day. I do not memorize new vocabularies outside of what my students are learning. This is how people fail at their attempt to build a skill. They do not really improve every day. To improve is to learn what they do not know yet. It means to fail and feel uncomfortable every day, to face uncertainty. After a while, uncertainty becomes certain, then one should go to the next uncertainty. This whole process is necessary for improvement. Imagine if one reads a book and doesn't want to go to the next page, just read one page over and over again because it's familiar and comfortable. He will never be able to finish the book. Lately I took a risk, I asked someone to marry me after just the first meeting, and she said yes. I didn't know what terrified me long ago to do the same. I waited for 37 years to be able to do so. I was so afraid of rejection and made no attempt to anything that had the potential to fail me. I thought it would break me into pieces. I was afraid and shy, no one should know that I was rejected. Now I think it's ridiculous. Now if I apply for a job I would apply the high salary job that I even believe they will reject my application. Out of many rejections, there will be one or two that will accept me. Say it's my luck or whatever, I do not really care. I'm practicing to be antifragile. I am learning to fail and to love uncertainty, volatility, randomness, problems, difficulties and such things. Now I start reading difficult books that I avoided in the past. Derrida said, "Go there you cannot go; to the impossible, it's indeed the only way of going and coming." I challenge myself to do it. Now I choose to challenge myself every day. This way life is more colorful and fun. It's more like a game than boring obligation. It's good to fail, just try to fail better the next time. If you take the challenge every day, one day you will find the black swan. It's a rare event when you find your luck or success. Like digging a tunnel every day until one day you find the treasure. That's how success works. Working hard every single day and seems failure every single day until you suddenly make it. To climb a mountain is the same process, just walking and walking until one moment you see the top and get there. Digging a well is the same process, you just dig and dig until later you reach the water fountain underground. That's when the black swan appear. That moment is the success moment. Everyone will make it eventually if they do the effort every single day, losing and failing little every single day and win big at the end. What most people do is the opposite, winning little every day and lose big at the end. For example smoking, it's a small pleasure every day until one day, the smoker is diagnosed with lung cancer. Eating junk foods, it's small gain every day and big loss at the end. Working in a company can also become small gain every day, get salary every month, until one day one is fired or the company is bankrupt. If the end is big loss, it's fragile. It's better to live poor and uncertainty every day but after ten years black swan will appear and become rich than to live good every day and become poor at the end after ten or twenty years. People are afraid of uncertainty and they hate it. They do not know whether they will find black swan or not. They would rather take the road of everyone else. To live normal live every day, to work for others and get monthly salary. They will never become rich and that's better than living in uncertainty and risking their only life to look for black swan. People tend to plan vegetables that they can see the result after a month than planting trees that they can only see the result in 15 years. To wait for 15 years to be rich and successful is too much for them. They won't even try to do it. It's out of question. They way to success is full of risk, uncertainties and failures, only those who crazy enough to take it will get there.