How do you know if you are having a glorious adventure or a kamikaze mission?

You skip to the last chapter

The ending gives it away, of course, but what about in the beginning of the journey? What if you are in the middle? How do you know along the way whether you are a hero or a stooge? It isn’t easy.

It is hard to know.

Did Bill Gates know when he started Microsoft that he would control the universe? Did Steve Jobs see the iPod and iPad from his garage? What did they see and when did they see it? Inquiring minds want to know. How did they decide to persevere and triumph? How many potential Bill Gates and Steve Jobs stopped and quit on their dreams after helpful critics told them they were crazy? On the other hand, how many driven individuals continued to tilt after windmills, wasting their time and talent on hopeless tasks. What makes the difference? Is it just luck or can people know that their time and commitment will produce fruit or empty branches?

Dogs and invisible rabbits

There is a story about a dog and a rabbit that I hear from time to time. Rabbits are quick and agile and when trying to escape from a dog they move fast and change course constantly. Any dog trying to catch a rabbit will scramble and flail trying to keep up. It can be amusing to watch the dog but imagine what you would think about the dog if you could not see the rabbit. The dog would seem insane. Nothing it did would make any sense. It’s every action would seem meaningless. There would be no purpose to any of them as the dog stumbled and dashed around falling all over himself. That is how visionaries appear to normal people who cant see what drives the them. The visionary sees a destination invisible to others and his actions defy explanation to ‘realists’.

How do you help the dog?

How would you advise a dog chasing an invisible rabbit? You can’t but of course you don’t know that. You want to help and so you make up an hypothesis to explain the dog’s actions and you give advice to help the dog be normal. It would be good advice if the rabbit did not exist and it is bad advice if it does. You would tell the dog to play with the other dogs; fetch a ball, bark at the neighbors. In short you would tell the dog to do what the other dogs are doing that don’t see the rabbit. Who is right? Who knows if the rabbit is real? Well the problem is that there is no way to know until the rabbit is caught.

Is there a lesson here?

So back to the journey. How can you know whether you are tilting at windmills or breaking new ground? How can you know when to stop mission impossible and select another destination? Sometimes you can plow ahead and the sun will rise over a glorious new day. Other times you get mired in quicksand making no progress as you struggle to move on.

Do you have an answer?

While you are on the journey, there is no way to know how it will all end. Is your rabbit imaginary or real. Should you stop, lick your wounds and prepare for another hunt or do you need to suck it up and push on? If you were expecting answers from me, you won’t get them. I am clueless to identify which rabbits are real and which are imaginary, especially mine. Maybe Bill Gates and Steve Jobs don’t have that problem. Maybe they are just lucky. I am throwing the question to you. What do you think about glorious adventures and kamikaze runs? Maybe you avoid both just to be safe. Just do what everybody else does and everything is simple and boring.