Completism

Tactics

Have you ever got good at something then lost to a complete novice? Did you lose because you took short cuts hoping for a quick win. Did you go against your normal tried and tested tactics that produce reliable results? You are in effect putting square wheels on your car knowing full well that they are just dreadful compared to round ones. Not using your experiences makes a mockery of learning a skill in the first place. People with stature are reliably boringly good at what they do. Their responses are considered. They act in keeping with their stature. Always. Highly regarded individuals pause before jumping in. Highly regarded individuals stick to solid tactics.

Many things can’t be undone, chances are missed, opportunities lost, and cash misspent. We regret doing, we regret not doing. There will be once in a lifetime opportunities and things we do that are damaging beyond repair. However, some things we need not regret. We look at them as mistakes instead. Change the word regret to mistake and see how you look at the error then. It can turn what you have done into more of a positive. Seeing something as a mistake as something that we can learn from is helpful. When you change a regret into a mistake it can lead to a positive. We can choose to act differently next time. We can also spread the word and help others avoid making the same error. There is a subtle difference between a regret and a mistake. Dwell on the past or gain from mistakes made.

Your car has smoke belching out of it. You want to stop and argue, blame the person who forgot to check the oil. Perhaps one could put aside who is at fault for now, time is pressing. Handle it, deal with it. Look at what you have. What is the solution? How can we move forward? When things are back on the straight and narrow you can then reflect on why things turned ugly.

The best chess players, the best poker players focus their attention on what their opponents are up to. What are they planning. Countering their plans is as important as making plans of your own. We may need to adapt our strategy as the game plays out, changing things to suit our opponents. Each opponent will deploy a different strategy so you can’t always use the same approach every time. Instead, you must adapt and change according to the individual situation. Adaptability is the key to success in many games.

In life, there is always a counter view. Nothing is concrete. There are different sides to every story. Things evolve. Some things are no longer applicable. The points you make today may no longer hold true tomorrow. Things that are important today can end up being less relevant as time goes by. We discover new ways of looking at things, overriding past ideas. They too are superseded. We trash old ideas and replace them with new ones. In later reflection, we see that both old and new ideas have some merit when tailored to suit the situation. We may say, in general, on the whole, as a way of accepting that it is difficult to make a factual statement that takes into account every possible variation.

We can spend days, week, years mulling over what we should do. What is for the best? Our life rumbles on regardless, imperfectly, with compromises. Flexibly. It has to. Life throws up many challenges and conundrums. You can debate for an eternity but when you are hungry you need to eat. Sooner or later, we need to pick an option.