No. For two reasons:
- It pulls your focus away from the present.
- It’s usually wrong.
Let’s talk about both.
Thinking about how life would be different based on a single inflection point pulls you out of the present into a place in which you’ll never live: the past.
We rarely ever use this mechanism in a positive way.
- “If only I’d started blogging in high school.”
- “If only I’d never gotten into that relationship.”
- “If only I’d have made it into that college.”
All thoughts that have crossed my mind before. As an optimist, these usually turn into:
- “At least I started in 2014.”
- “It taught me who I don’t want to be.”
- “Then I wouldn’t be at the better college I’m at now.”
But what if you’re not an optimist? What if you’re a dweller?
Instead of treating these events as springboard into something better, you’ll spend most of your day lamenting the lady who cut in line, the client that canceled or your last D in high school.
Whether you end up wallowing or walking down memory lane for the right reasons, neither will get you to focus on what’s right in front of you.
On top of that, you can’t untangle life. There is no one thing that changed everything. It’s just a frantic thing of the human mind to want to make conclusions. There’s even a name for it.
In his book, Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains something called hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along-effect.
It’s the human tendency to judge events as more likely than they were in hindsight, by making up cause-and-effect relationships where there are none. In fact, if you analyze any situation long enough, inevitably, a pattern will emerge.
Think of a superstitious stock market analyst, who finishes with a plus three days in a row when he’s wearing sunglasses, but takes a loss on the fourth day, when he isn’t. He might then decide to wear sunglasses each day, which is, of course, nonsense.
In the same way, you can’t point at a single event from your past and say: that was the move that made me do X, and that’s what got me to Y. Because Y might not have been a logical consequence of X, but just one you decided to take in that moment.
Instead of the failed college application in Mannheim, maybe it was the two years of freelancing that made me go to TU Munich. Maybe it was the internship I did here before.
Who knows? Not me.
Whatever you’ve done in the past has gotten you here. Right to this point, reading this answer. That includes every blink of your eyes, every slight whizz of your fingers and every one of your choices.
Don’t rob that miracle of its magic by chopping it into pieces. It’s all part of it. You are ONE human being with ONE life. And that’s a wonderful thing.
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.” — Albert Einstein
