Predicting the future

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How much reliance can we place on regression to the mean in judging what the future will bring? What are we to make of a concept that has great power under some conditions but leads to disaster under others? Keynes admitted that “as living and moving beings, we are forced to act … (even when) our existing knowledge does not provide a sufficient basis for a calculated mathematical expectation.”

With rules of thumb, experience, instinct and conventions – in other words, gut - we manage to stumble from the present into the future … The trick is to be flexible enough to recognize that regression to the mean is only a tool; it is not a religion with immutable dogma and ceremonies. Used to make mechanical extrapolations of the past … regression to the mean is little more than mumbo-jumbo. Never depend upon it to come into play without constantly questioning the relevance of the assumptions that support the procedure. Francis Galton spoke wisely when he urged us to “revel in more comprehensive views” that the average.

Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods

The duty of encouragement 

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One of the highest of duties is the duty of encouragement ... It is easy to laugh at men's ideas; it is easy to pour cold water on their enthusiasm; it is easy to discourage others. The world is full of discouragers. We have a Christian duty to encourage one another. Many a time a word of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer has kept a man on his feet. Blessed is the man who speaks such a word.

William Barclay

Letting Go

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We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one—not just outwardly, but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are. There we are, living in a new town, but our heads are full of all the old trivia: where the Chinese restaurant was (and when it opened in the evening), what Bob’s phone number was, what shoe store stocked the children’s sizes.. 

We usually fail to discover our need for an ending until we have made the most of our necessary external changes. There we are, in the new house or the new job or involved in a new relationship, waking up to find that we have not yet let go of our old ties. Or worse yet, not waking up to that fact, even though we are still moving to the inner rhythm of life back in the old situation. We’re like shell fish that continue to open and close their shells on the tide schedule of their home waters after they have been transplanted to a laboratory tank or at the restaurant kitchen.  

William Bridges, Transitions

Choosing Your Way

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We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Victor Frankl

The Beginner's Mind

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A child does not know what is not possible and so was open to exploration, discovery, and experimentation. If you approach create tasks with the beginner's mind, you can see things more clearly as they are, unburden by your fixed views, habits, or what conventional wisdom says it is (or should be). 

One who possesses a beginner's mind is not burdened by old habits or obsessed about "the way things are done around here" or with the way things could have or should have been done. 

If you approach a task with a beginner's mind, you’re not afraid of being wrong. The fear of making a mistake, of risking an error, or of being told you’re wrong is constantly with us. And that’s a shame. Making mistakes is not the same thing as being creative, but if you’re not willing to make mistakes then it is impossible to be truly creative.  

Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen

The Way of Transition

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Life fishtails its way across an undulating landscape. If you want to live, you need to give yourself over to the way of transition—to let go when life presents you with a time of ending, to abandon yourself to the neutral zone when that is where you find yourself, to seize the opportunity to make a new beginning when that moment presents itself.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition