Secondhand Wisdom

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how even the soundest, most well intentioned advice can be misinterpreted.

I remember one of my earliest personality shaping contemplations of self analysis was in middle primary school when I decided with absolute clarity that if I wanted to succeed in life in any area, all I had to do was to learn from those before me. Everyone knows the saying: "learn from your mistakes", but my brain being as sharp (but slightly tangled) as it is, thought it could improve on this logic, and decided an even better way to do things was to learn from other peoples mistakes, therefore eliminating the need to commit any error previously enacted by another person, ever. It seemed genius.

As years went on I continued to absorb other tidbits of our grandparents wisdom from sayings like: "work to live, don't live to work...", "look before you leap...", "every cloud has a silver lining...", "two's company, but three's a crowd...", and (here's the kicker).... "good things come to those who wait".

The thing is... they don't. Many of these sayings are idealistic and not actually that accurate, a few are just really dated, and some are, in reality, a huge pile of steaming turd burger. I'm sure environmentalists would now argue the political correctness of the old adage "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush". Likewise, good things do not come to those who wait - they come to those who go and get them.

So in taking one, seemingly invaluable piece of secondhand wisdom ("learn from your mistakes") which to me read: "learn from other people's mistakes" and installing it in to my conscience, I unwittingly opened the door for all these other less accurate tidbits to take up residence in my brain without really being challenged or questioned - until fairly recently. Now I recognise that I've waited the better part of my life for something good to "come" to me. Years spent forever exercising forethought, without ever progressing to the "taking action". You could just label it procrastination, or worse yet, label me lazy; but I've realised now that it's more than that - it's a couple of pieces of ill informed mental programming on behalf of my 10 year old self that now have to go.

Unfortunately it's not that simple to give such long standing beliefs the boot, but I'm rapidly working on replacing them with a different dictum from the past which will hopefully serve me better - "He who hesitates is lost".