Driven By Fear
My latest personal observation is that a lot of people and – importantly - myself included are driven by fear.
It’s not like the fear you would cry out loud, it’s more the softer type, influenced from the personal experience we’ve all made. It seems to me that a lot of decisions we make are not about progress, but trying to succeed without making mistakes. And there I see a fundamental problem:
Is it wise to avoid mistakes in the first place, even if a potential failure can be fixed at a later time? Aren’t we often tricked into a kind of “attribution error” regarding the future?
Can past experience really be applied to new projects?
There are two related quotes I like to mention:
Failure is an option, fear is not. - James Cameron
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. – Donald Knuth
and furthermore there is the DRY principle: Don’t repeat yourself.
So when every new project is different and every next requirement can be unforeseen, how is it then possible to see ahead based on our past experience?
I suspect that this fear is the “fear of the future” the outcome, the surprises, the unforeseen. Shouldn’t it be different?
I fear ! that a lot of our decisions we make are progress-blockers. When driven by experience, they often fall into the “premature optimization” category, and often – fatally – we may fear the result, the progress and the change that is coming.
Eventually, a large part of our “experience” is just blocking progress and manifests in fear.
So does that mean that “growing older” also is a curse in regard to “experience”?
Experience should be manifested in tools, not in humans. Software requires steady refactoring, minds are wetware:
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. – Gloria Steinem
May be it is time to reflect and categorize every decision with the ultimate goal to eliminate the ones based on fear.