Monday 23 April 2012

Worthless Aspirational Quotes: Aiming for the Moon to get to the top of the Tree

"If you aim for the moon you may get to the top of the trees," a witless motivational speaker may tell you, "but if you aim for the top of the trees, you may never get off the ground!"  Don't, in otherwords, choose realistic or sensible goals, and that way your life will work out exactly as you wish!



No. If you are aiming for the moon, and you're serious about it, you'll spend the rest of your life, frustrated and alone, in your basement. Best case scenario, you'll go and work for NASA, and even then, most likely you won't make it - not even NASA has been in 40 years. Okay, Richard Branson might be a better bet. Whatever, it won't help you get to the top of a tree.

If you want to get to the top of a tree, climb it, my son, and stop listening to motivational speakers.

You will achieve almost nothing in your life consequent on an outrageous, long-odds punt. Even those few freak Outliers that seem to have (Elvis, Bill Gates and so on) most likely weren't dreaming anything of the sort when they started out.

Instead, meander through the evolutionary design space of your life like the rest of us do, as pygmies in a field of high grass, purblindly stumbling hither and thither, attracted intuitively to what you like and repelled by what you don't. Continually set sensible, achievable goals, achieve them, and after a while you might think it isn't such a miserable existence on mother earth after all.