Overlook | St. Lawrence River, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada | Sep 2008

Social Overlook | Quebec City, Quebec, Canada | Sep 2008

Erica at Travel Blissful on Imaginary Lives:

Most people don’t get their dream job or reach their goals at once. It takes time. And even if we – despite hard work, blood, sweat and tears – don’t end up where we hope, one dream might lead to another that leads you to embark on a new career, move to another city, take up a new hobby, get a new best friend, or learn something significant about yourself. So keep dreaming. And no matter what you choose to do, as long as you are happy with your choice, everything’s fine.

Similar: Marc Andreessen’s two rules about career planning:

1) Do not plan your career.
2) Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities.

Related: Abraham Maslow:

“If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life.”

Sunday’s thoughts…

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If you want to read about great places to travel, check out Travel Blissful for lots of ideas.

Over | Blue Mountain, Adirondacks, New York | Sep 2008

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you wanna do with your life; the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives; some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t. (Baz Luhrmann)

People do not always know what they want. As a company, some of the best things you can do for customers are things they didn’t know they wanted.

Perhaps there is a parallel: some of the most interesting companies out there know what they want to do (what to deliver, and hopefully what problems they solve), but are not sure of what the end result will be (how to make money).

We expect people to know what they want to do before they have done anything. We expect companies to know how to make money before they’ve created a product.

Give people time and the chance to try things out. Give companies time and the opportunity to test their ideas.

Lesson | Golden Gate Recreation Area, San Francisco, CA, USA | Apr 2008

On Unstructured Thoughts: it’s important to experiment and test, just be very cognizant of what you’re testing…

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

I love the idea. Life is an experiment, albeit an experiment where we are the subjects and directly bear the gains and consequences of our tests.

The only problem is the qualifier “too.” There is always a restraint, always a point that is too far, always a bit of timidity that is needed to keep us from going too far. Learning what is too far is the hardest part.

Sometimes you just have to burn your hands a couple times to figure out how hot is too hot.

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Previously in the “Wisdom from the Cookie” series: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5