Online and in media, people often ask:
- What’s the one thing you would do differently if you could go back in time to the beginning of your career (or marriage, journey, financial situation, family planning etc.)?
- If you could give one piece of advice to someone starting out, what would you tell them?
- What are your top 3 recommendations for xyz?
These make for compelling (I guess) sound bites, interview closing lines and Twitter posts. However, beyond providing distractive entertainment and content filler, they don’t help anyone.
For life’s biggest problems, there aren’t no easy answers and no shortcuts.
You don’t need someone to provide easy answers. If these choices existed, you would have already made them.
Also, solving hard problems is never about doing the one thing. Real change requires a series of actions repeated for a long time. There is no magic bullet.
Doing something sporadically never works.
My own experiences regarding work, diet, exercise, finances, relationships, health, society, love or anything else all require effort, persistence and consistency.
I wish this wasn’t the case. I want to believe I could be rescued like a character in a fairy tale or the person who wins the Powerball Jackpot.
I won’t. Nor will you.
