Ever have that experience of sitting in front of your screen, watching the cursor blink, knowing that you have all sorts of ideas but you're thoroughly stuck because "where should I BEGIN?"
I suppose the wise Talking Heads who purport to be sufficiently expert at motivation that they can sell $500 seminars on the topic would come up with some boilerplate truism like "Start from where you are," or Start at the beginning."
It's not really helping me, right now.
The invariable issue I have been battling since age 14 — that was 50 years ago, folks! — is that of drawing inspiration from too many sources.
Having been raised in a hypercritical environment, I learned at an early age that it was never enough to merely take an idea and run with it... I needed to come up with an entirely new perspective, in order to be given the time of the day by my extended family.
If you leaned too much on the mundane, the invariable feedback would be "Fine... AND?"
Whether learned or natural I excelled at pattern recognition, perhaps because it served the purpose of simple survival to be able to draw together bits of disparate and random information to create new perspectives about something, because there was a high likelihood that nobody had previously considered the consequences of bacon, smelly socks, civil engineering and microchips as somehow related.
No, that's not a real thing. Just testing to see if anyone is reading!
But, circling around to "getting burned," I often find myself reflecting on what — retrospectively — might be considered as poor choices, because they were invariably informed by the esoteric and unlikely, as opposed to the obvious and relatable.
There's a good reason why most sane people steer clear of things that have never been tried before... namely that there may be a really good reason why they shouldn't ever be tried.
Not ALWAYS, of course...
So you're really excited about something you decide to get involved in, and it fails. So you try something else, and it fails. And then something else, and it fails. And so on, and so forth... and you gradually reach this point of feeling like it's almost a given that you're going to get burned.
In a sense, it was why I almost didn't decide to join up with Hive (well, "Hive 1.0"), somewhat over nine years ago.
I looked at it, thought to myself "Now HERE's something interesting and unique that looks really promising..." and that was almost immediately followed by the thought "This is doomed to almost certain failure!"
I spent a great many years in some version of "self inquiry," trying not only to understand myself, but trying to heal the unfortunate side-effects of growing up in a perfectonistic environment of "high level thinkers."
All these years later, one of my primary observations is that the world we live in has simply changed, and the rate of change keeps accelerating. And I am perhaps a little too anchored in an obsolete paradigm that if something is good/worthwhile it is going to last.
Permanence and longevity (of ANY-thing) has become more and more of an illusion. Things around us — from trends to technology — change so fast and so often that we have to accept that they aren't meant to persevere for more than a short while.
"Winning" means that something was hugely successful for two years, not for twenty. If something has done well for a couple of years, get ready to bail and look for something else... before it wilts away and takes you with it!
I look at our kids, and their work. Even if they might be "doing well," they are often moving on to the next thing after a year or two; new company, "lateral-upwards" move. The whole notion of you get in, get really good at something and build a life there... seems obsolete AND like an invitation to getting burned as a result of not keeping up.
Perhaps this is the new normal, but I find myself struggling to stay optimistic about life and the general direction of the world.
Maybe you're just TOO OLD for this!
Considered tangibly, maybe I am. I am of an age where retirement should be looming large in my mind, but I live in a reality where I can't afford to retire; not now, likely not ever.
Perhaps, to a great extent, as a result of making choices that led to getting burned... and ending up with a big bag of... absolutely nothing.
But, I'm still going to try to stay optimistic for the future!
Not writing this as some kind of wah-wah pity party, but instead as an observation (or two!) about the way the choices we make invariably have consequences, even if you never really thought of it that way when you made those choices.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!
Comments, feedback and other engagement is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!
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Created at 2026.03.05 22:42 PST
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