The Consequences of "Later"

Have you seen the book "The Power of Now" in the bookstore? I don't own the book, or else I will be taking picture of the book as my cover for this post.

The Consequences of "Later" is something like the opposite idea of "The Power of Now". I only flip a few pages of the book "The Power of Now", it's basically emphasize on the importance of bringing our thoughts and idea into reality as soon as we can before we forgotten about it or we somehow give excuses to delay it and in the end, we procrastinate too much and we are not doing it at all.

Can you recall the last time when people ask you about something and you reply "Later"? How long does it take for you to remember the task or subject requested by other people and finish it up? Small matters that does not take us much time & effort probably not going to take long. But stuff that make you feel clinging to do it would take a long time, and they are either important to you or not important and you don't feel like doing it.

Would you be surprise that the things that we usually would say "Later" are usually something that are important to us? Remember the time when you thought to yourself that you need to clean and tidy up your room but soon, you tell yourself that you do it later but end up dragging it for days or weeks. And during college or university time, you told yourself that you will study after dinner but end up surfing Facebook or doing other stuff, and you told yourself that you will study later after all these relaxing activities but end up it was too late and you need to go to bed, so again you told your that you will study tomorrow.

We can witness and experience unlimited times when we or other people would say "Later" but only choose to remember it when we wanted to. To a certain extent, you can consider that things that we would procrastinate are usually things that we dislike and it's just because we are suppose to do it, one of the serious issues that I notice is the procrastination of people dream and ambitions.

As I'm getting older (not really that old, currently I'm just 26yo), many of my friends are getting into the stage of slowly realizing that they need to get into an advance stage where they need to have dreams, and they need to persuade them and start changing their life for goods. They should not stay at the same stage and most of them feel uncomfortable thinking that their life would be just like that for the rest of their life.

But in order to get out of our current life and start changing, you need practical plan and clear idea of what you want to change and how. You need to find a nice & relaxing place to think and best if you could write down everything in your mind and make sure you truly know what you want instead of thinking about your thoughts over and over again. This is the life changing stage where we call it "Planning". But do you know that most people who seeking for life changes doesn't failed during their life changing process, but failed in this initial stage because they have problem starting it?

In Chinese, there is a saying: "Everything is hard in the beginning". This quote perfectly apply to this situation. Because we do not know how we should start changing, we have no idea what we truly want and we not sure how we should think or do about it, so when comes to starting your plan for it, you frequently or unconsciously tell yourself Later.

If you have experience on the situation above, try to think if you have any dreams or wishes that you thought about them a lot in the past but eventually, you totally forgotten about it and even if you remember it now, it doesn't seems important to you?

Time flies, a lot of things that matter to us in the past no longer seems significant to us, but doesn't mean that those dreams and wishes don't play an important role in our life. Imagine if you have a dreams in the past to became a singer. Now you know that being a singer is tough, but what if you pursuit your dreams during that time and succeeded to be a famous star? If you stubbornly hold on to the passion at that time, you might be, or perhaps I should say you definitely living a total different life right now. But that is only IF you did not tell yourself to do things "Later".

There is no saying of what could come true in the future. Quote from Steve Jobs: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards." Yes, you can't know what's going to happen ahead, but you know things that already happen. If you experience the lost of passion in the past because you frequently push your passion to "Later", you should not let the same thing happen again right now and in the future.

Thinking about 10 years later when you look backwards, what do you wish to see? Do you wish to look backward and blame yourself that you did not chase after your passion again but let them fade? I'm sure you don't want it.

If "The Power of Now" is insufficient to ignite the passion for you to do what you wanted to do now, think about "The Consequences of Later" to remind yourself that you want a meaningful and fulfilling life and not a regretful life of not achieving anything.

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Wisdom Trap: Truth Believer

Knowledge in this world can be divided into three types: Truth, Belief, and Assumptions. To determine if a matter belongs to the specified type of the subject, it’s all depending on how we view the subject.

Truth is an undeniable subject. For instance, sky will be blue in colour during day time if it’s a sunny day is one truth that we cannot deny. If we want to deny, means we want to say that the clear blue sky is actually not blue. Of course, we can further deny it by specifying that the sky seems blue in our eyes but it’s actually not the case when we look at at the point of the universe. But simply put, the sky is indeed blue during day time when we look at it.

Belief is a subject that we want to think it’s true according to our knowledge and willingness. It’s a subject that can be denied for many reasons regardless the willingness of the people. You probably notice, the most related subject would be religion. It’s an issue that people can deny them in many ways regardless of how many believers a religion has. While the believers can provide all the proofs, theories and information to prove that their religion is a truth and it’s not just a matter of belief, the subject can still be denied because there is no absolute truth in the subject.

Assumption will not be covered here although it’s somehow related. It’s basically a subject that is created based on weak reasoning or points that not are not proven to be solid. Thus cannot be relied in most cases.

“Truth Believer” is a type of inaccurate mindset to think that the subject that they believe in is a truth. It’s incorrect to think that a belief would be a truth because these two are different matters. It’s the same concept that you can’t say that an Apple is same as Orange although these two are fruits.

Again, religious person frequently demonstrate such practice when they claim that their god is real although there isn't much solid proofs to support that. No matter how many documents, books, or discoveries existed, all supporting matters are not solid in most cases. And it’s quite common that assumptions and other thoughts that are made up according to the supporting matters would occur.

This topic not only related to religious people, my main focus is actually more on usual society thinking. This phenomenon can occur everywhere as long as we have knowledge and we have idea of what is true and false.

Truth believer is one of the wisdom trap because it’s an occurrence when we have knowledge, and we use that to judge the solidity of certain subjects. A partial problem occur when we put out feeling into it when we want to think that certain subjects must be true or false, regardless of how much we know about it.

One of the related fallacies that produced by Truth Believer mindset is general prejudice. When we walk on the street and we notice a particular person face, we would have a great idea of what type of personality and attitude he/she has based on his/her appearance and behaviour, without having any idea who is him/her, what type of background he/she has, or wanted to know the true personality he/she has. Sometimes we only have a brief and simple thoughts about it and we forget about it, but sometimes we have a strong thoughts that the person must be the type of person we thought he/she is. Probably because a certain behaviour remind you of someone you know, and you immediately relate this stranger to be the same person that you knew.

This is not an issue until we truly develop a type of strong feeling in that person because he/she remind us of someone we knew in the past without us realizing such feeling. For example, he/she talks really loud when using the phone and is really rude. You would thought he/she must be an inconsiderate person and does not has any manner at all. So you would avoid him/her and not letting him/her to get close to you because he/she might crash on you instead of avoiding you as he/she walks.

In this case, you are actually believing that the person is inconsiderate and rude due to his/her behaviour, but your consciousness telling you to avoid that person because your mind telling you that getting near to him/her will definitely be a bad idea. I don’t deny the possibility that things would happen according to what you think because you have a good reason for thinking it that way, but this does not conclude that it definitely going to happen. Not only that this is a matter of possibility, it’s also relate to you believing that your thoughts definitely came true, because you unconsciously thought that what you believe is a truth. When the Truth Believer instincts occur, you develop prejudice to a person or subject, and refuse to find out what is the truth behind your idea or how true is your thoughts.

In a much serious case, when you are being cheated by a certain of person before, you will developed a strong beliefs, in which you thought of it as a truth, that anyone that you met that belong to that type must be a cheater as well.

You probably heard this before: “There is no good guy in this world” or something similar. I heard a lot of it when the lady who said this is really firm with it and there is no space for debates on this subject. While there are possibilities that they were just parroting what other people said, it’s also not surprising that they encounter terrible experience before and thus creating such claims.

While I don’t feel offended of any hard feeling of this subject, but I have to emphasize that this is definitely not a truth because who they met in the past remain in the past, it has nothing to do with any other guy in this world. Just because you have not seen any good guy, you can’t just conclude that there is no good guy anymore. Furthermore, claiming things that way only creating a strong resistance for them to consider things the other way. When a good guy finally appear before them, their Truth Believer instincts would pull them away from the good guy. So it will be really hard to realize things when they are unwilling to think things a little different. On side note, if a girl always surrounded by bad guys, they should really consider if there is any problem with their lifestyle.

This is why, Truth Believer will be an obstacles for us to be willing to understand things better and we are directly influence by our own feeling to improve our thinking and knowledge. We even get to become really unwilling to find out what supposed to be right and wrong. It’s also really common that such mindset not only lasted for a period of time until they willing to reconsider the subject, there are also unlimited cases where people carry the same mindset for the rest of their life. Unwilling to know what supposed to be right and wrong even at the end of their life.

When a person had fallen as Truth Believer in one or more subjects, they would practice in that way in their usual days. They might even teach others about their beliefs but claiming that to be truth to ask people to practice their life according to the way they want.

Remember how frequent and serious our parent is when they taught us not to talk to strangers? I strongly support the fact that we must not simply talk to strangers to avoid the risk of any unwanted thing happen to us. But I also need to urge on the importance of socializing to expand your network and meeting with more people for sharing of knowledge and idea to make your life more meaningful. It may sounds a crash between not talking to strangers and meeting new people to make your life more meaningful, what I’m trying to emphasize is your mindset when meeting with new people, you can have your thoughts to be cautious and beware when certain people would have a bad idea on you, but there are people who are sincere about meeting new friends and they might be capable of changing your life for good. Imagine if you fallen as a Truth Believer in this subject, you probably not going to meet any kind people and you will always be in your comfort zone without anything new and interesting for the rest of your life.

So basically, to avoid falling as Truth Believer, it’s simply a matter of identifying what should be truth and what should be belief. While it sounds simple, it’s actually really difficult as there are infinite amount of people out there who only focus on living as a Truth Believer for the rest of their life. You might want to consider them having weaker wisdom and knowledge, but bear in mind that such situation occurs to all type of people regardless of how great or capable they are, or how great is their education qualitifaction. So failing into such wisdom trap is really easy and it’s not simple to pull yourself out from it. Especially we humans have a strong ties to our own feeling, which often screw things up.

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Wisdom Trap Series

This is one of the major thing that keep me living, the study and analysis on the wisdom trap that exist in all human being.

Wisdom Trap is the process of human mind deceiving their own knowledge by utilizing the inappropriate or incorrect knowledge according to the particular situation, people, or time. To make it more understandable by most people, it means you are not practicing the right thing or using your knowledge properly when you have the right knowledge.

This phenomenon is quite common in this society, and it’s not surprising that this is commonly happening on adult that has higher education level or position. This is especially common for people who expose to lots of experience and variety of knowledge.

There are so much of real life situation that demonstrate this phenomenon. One example is when people giving themselves excuses to do something wrong because others are doing it. Despite knowing others are doing wrong, knowing doing so will make them wrong too, and they might or might not realize there is always a better way, people prefer to follow the wrong path that everyone is practicing instead of being different. Such topic will be covered further later on in another post. Basically this is one of the real life example of Wisdom Trap.

Why Wisdom Trap occur?

Conceptually, human knowledge frequently has loopholes when people practice their thoughts to identify the correct reasoning for all purpose in living. One of the reasons that it happen is the lack of thinking ability to determine the best and absolute thoughts. This is especially obvious when a person is stressed out due to physical, mental, or being forced to pick a decision soon. Or simply, they refuse to use the appropriate method to construct the correct thoughts. This could be due to laziness, lack of initiative to produce the best possible thoughts, or other factors.

Precisely, human brain has their own limit in conceiving knowledge, and current education level in general only teach people about knowledge, but not how to manage and organize so that people know how to think the right thing at the right time, and with the right method. To be able to consider the right thoughts is basically the correct way of thinking, but modern world don’t really seems to be able to practice this method properly. As a result, many situations and people would be considered as “stupid” for certain people because there are always much better ways for things to happen.

Another common scenario that happens everyday without us realizing it is the lack of understanding on certain subject but we thought that we know it all, so we produce our final judgement based on the limited understanding we have. We might or might not think deeper that there might be things that we need to consider further in order to reevaluate the situation, but the moment we voice out our judgement or opinion on the subject, we might cause certain impacts on the situation without realizing the seriousness that we produce. This could occur for infinite amount of times and we might never learn our mistake, because we couldn’t even understand that the impact due to our lack of understanding in this careless mistake. .

One of the common subject that we would face frequently is dealing with other drivers on the road when we drive. When a vehicle make a sudden quick turn to the front of us without signal, we usually thought of them as rude or road bully. When having bad mood, we might judge further that the particular driver is probably a certain race that does not receive good education and he/she has all sort of problems in terms of attitude and personality. This is what I mean by the lack of understanding on a subject and judge according to our limited understanding.

While not all type of wisdom trap lead to anger and frustration, and causes continuous practice of incorrect mindset that judge without understand things better, the major problem in wisdom trap is serving as an obstacle for a person to revise their own thinking and to be willing to seek further knowledge to understand and think if they can practice better ways to think, and finally, to truly understand the impact of producing the wrong thoughts in the long run and avoid that.

Purpose of Wisdom Trap Series

The purpose of topics under wisdom trap is to identify list of mindset that we might easily think wrongly without realizing it, or we realize that but without proper understanding on the impact and consequences, we might think on the wrong way again in the future. On the other words, we want to explore new thoughts in the conventional way of thinking and reconsider things that we could think better and to think in another new angle in order to figure out how to see things in better way.

Improving your thinking ability allow yourself to widen your knowledge as you willing to explore additional idea and knowledge. You would eventually think things differently and even much better in certain subjects when you are able to consider one thing in different angle and produce solution and thoughts, you would be able to avoid as much fallacies as possible.

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