nemorathwald | Chaos Theory and The First Habit of Highly Successful People (Reply)

"...he's not smarter than you, Hari. Very few people are ... He just ...He goes for what he wants, y'know? ... He's always shaving the odds, always taking another baby step toward where he wants to go, even when he doesn't know how it'll all pull together in the end ... When you do that long enough, hard enough, things fall into place and ... and you look like a genius, when you never really planned anything..."

- page 335, Heroes Die, by Matthew Woodring Stover

Habit #1: Begin with the end in mind.

The Seven Habits Of Highly Successful People, Stephen Covey

You've heard the adage "a butterfly's wings in the Amazon stir a breeze yada yada yada, there's a hurricane in New York." There's no way to know which precise flutters will lead to a specific storm. What I'm doing about this is to make a mind map of words that keep cropping up again and again in my long-term dreams. As long as I keep fluttering toward these associations, I'll increase my odds of landing somewhere that I want to get to. I don't have to know yet which one of my dreams it will be, or what route would lead straight there from here.

Web administration, Python, and Flash are good examples of words that keep coming up. Given how many of my ideas end when I don't know how to do one or more of those things, it's clear that I'll benefit from improving my skills in these areas. To achieve those subgoals, I need some kind of structured learning, or I'll never actually devote the time.

And what do you know. I just now fluttered across something I had been hoping to create for myself for quite a long time.