{ Monday, February 19, 2007 }
If you look back on the experience of freedom in your life, chances are that it wasn't when you were measuring the options against one another, or making sure you weren't getting stuck with a decision. It was when you were fully expressed, playing full out. It was when you chose fully and completely, when you knew you were in the place you were meant to be in.
Recently gave this quote to a friend who was having trouble making a decision -- for months, even years and it was causing her considerable misery. I think this inability to commit to something -- people, a career -- is a particularly modern malaise, since there are now so many possibilities open to us. It used to be you were a peasant, your parents and their parents and their parents were peasants back 10 generations, and you were always going to be a peasant, so why worry about anything except whether there would be sunshine and rain? Infinite choice is its own kind of misery, just as having no choice at all.
In a book I read a few years back (Economics Explained
In some ways too this is relevant to entrepreneurs. I was talking to a VC the other day, who said that most of the entrepreneurs that they see are in their early 20s. They don't have other commitments, such as relationships and families to keep them from working around the clock. And at brunch, when discussing a single woman we wanted to set up, a friend at Google said, "Hey, I know 11,000 single guys!" On the other hand, last weekend I met a half a dozen people who started companies right after their babies were born -- you wouldn't think that'd be a god time -- and we started Flickr 2 days after we got married. It's *never* a good time to start a company. :-)
LINK | 8:05 PM | TB
You might be interested in this book:
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
by Barry Schwartz
"...a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us."
I went through a phase of screenwriting and took several classes, including Robert McKee's Story (recommended as performance art if you are not interested in screenwriting). The common thread: in structure there is freedom.
David | February 20, 2007 9:10 AMEZ -- of course it was intentional. But you'll notice that the reasons given in the first post were external; this post is about individual commitment.
David -- Yes! As with formal poetry. And I'd add contstraint equals freedom.
Caterina | February 20, 2007 9:28 AMThank you so much for flickr. I LOVE IT!!! By the way check your bio-link, i saw it was broken. Many greets from Germany.
Reinhold
Wentsch | February 20, 2007 10:56 AMI say it's the ability to choose one's constraints that make for freedom--to go from many choices, to pursing the consequences of those choices, and then back to many choices. Suppose Shakespeare had to write Hamlet in limericks?
Randolph Fritz | February 20, 2007 10:57 AMThe somewhat controversial yet always rather interesting Chogyam Trungpa wrote about this idea to some extent in _The Myth of Freedom_. There's a sense of freedom as in "having a lot of choices" but there's also freedom from the constraints of habitual or dogmatic responses to your situation --- this latter freedom is often made more easy to connect with when one imposes on oneself arbitrary constraint. Richard Meier and his all white architecture, or Zen monks in their monasteries.
Mitsu | February 20, 2007 11:42 PMI agree that too many options (or inability to commit) can be constraining and stifling. This is exactly what I am going through right now (personally and professionally). There are so many ideas running through my head that I don't know where to begin. It's very interesting to read these comments because it describes my situation to a tee!
Cesar | February 27, 2007 9:07 AM{ Post a comment }
Whether it was intentional or not, this post makes for good (if ironic) counterpoint to your 2006-03-21 post ("It's a bad time to start a company"), which I revisit now and again whenever I need some "resistance" to work against.
Indeed, it's never a good time to start a company, but isn't that why we do?
EZ | February 20, 2007 1:21 AM