Although this should be no surprise to me at all, I am periodically reminded that there are always others that have already thought of something that I come up with.
Over the Labor Day weekend, I finished a new science fiction, Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card. This is a part of the popular Ender’s Game series by the same author (if you haven’t read Ender’s Game, you really should). It’s not exactly a sequel because the events from the same period is told from a different character’s perspective. They called it “a parallel novel.”
Anyway, in this novel, Card describes the same principle what I’ve come to realize the only “right” way to achieve anything. My version of it goes something like this: Learn as much as you can about the situation, evaluation options, make a best decision on your own, and never look back. In the book, Card was describing how Bean worked and it goes something like this: learn, choose, and act (I think I am missing something, but I can’t seem to go back and find it again).
The reason I came to that conclusion was that I can’t know everything before I make a decision most of the time. So, if I’ve done my research, evaluated every options, weighed every options, made what I would think would be the best course of action with the given information, that decision can never be “wrong.” And I wanted to also stress that the execution to carry out that decision is also very important. Also, I thought that the final decision being one’s own was crucial because you really can’t defer the responsibilities to others when it comes to your own life.
Anyway, I haven’t seen a serious flaw in this principle yet. I just thought that it was interesting to see someone else (a writer whose work I enjoyed a lot) thinking the same.
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