EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG

Lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe there’s something more useful than the art of learning. It’s the art of unlearning.

Our paradigms are shaped by a hodgepodge of things: the experiences of our past, all the junk we’ve fed our brains, our perspective of the future. All these things guide how we think, what we say, how we act.

Going through the daily grind called life, at some point we begin to settle into auto-pilot mode. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. What has worked before, will work again. What we’ve learned can be consistently applied - time and time again - and you will get more or less the same result.

Pretty much until these past few weeks, I thought I had it all figured out.

But life has its way of smacking your head with a brick, if only to knock some sense into your head and hammer you into shape. You can scenario-plan every possible occurrence, but there will always be things that will sneak up under your radar. Sometimes, there are things that you actually saw coming – giving leeway for mental preparation --- but the reality of it finally happening will jolt you nonetheless.

At the end of the day, there are no magic formulas, sure-win strategies, no secret sauce, that will guarantee success time and time again. Because reality and context will change from situation to situation. Life is rooted in time, and time is rooted in fluidity. As such, everything you do must be constantly anchor itself in the reality of the present. It needs an objective assessment of “what the hell is goin’ on?”.

So what to do when the proverbial shit hits the fan?

One of my favorite thoughts ever goes like this: “The event is not important. But the response to the event is everything.” Let me repeat that for emphasis --- “The event is not important, but the response to the event is everything.”

Greater than the ability to plan is the ability to adapt; and to adapt quickly to the present moment. Now, I’m not saying we should stop planning - people close to me know how fervently I plan my life. But plans are useless if we’re bogged down by our paradigms and mindsets and comfort zones that might no longer work.

Plans are the lighthouse, the general direction and aspiration. In times of crisis, more than ever we need to stay firmly rooted and stay the course. But we have to accept that conditions will change and we might need to zigzag a bit – at times, take a few steps back even – just to end up to where we want to go. Reality’s harsh, but embracing the setbacks that come your way is literally the only option you’ve got.

But then again, the eternal optimist in me believes that setbacks are like slingshots. They create tension, pull you back, stretch you to your limit, only to finally release you on a higher, greater trajectory. They can actually push you farther and faster to where you want to go.

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All these thoughts are brewing in my head because what I’m sharing is what I’m going through right now, a period of transition. I’m breaking away from my past – literally on different levels, both in the corporate life and more personal matters.

The past few days, I’ve returned everything I used to have in my corporate life. I’ve said goodbye to my cubicle, the high-plan XDA, the laptop, the car, the parking slot. It kinda hit my gut a bit, the fact that I’ve now got no job title, no stability; it’s almost as if a part of my identity died.

But this is exactly part of the process of unlearning. Of letting go. Of shedding one’s skin. Of emptying to ready oneself for renewal. Of recharting trajectories, of going for your own personal lighthouse.

Now, I’ve got seven years of corporate programming I need to put at the backseat for awhile in order to start anew. Because it’s a whole new ballgame, with all new rules. And it means i have to be ready to relearn everything, if needed, all over again. Because it could very well be that everything I know is wrong.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then the flow and motion of life and all the baggage it entails is the root of personal reinvention.

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“Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations : no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this “friction”: the difference between our plans and what actually happens.”
Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War