Over 31 years ago, the late Steve Jobs, dropped out of college where he found no value in the lessons and where all of his working-class parents' savings were being spent on his college tuition. He had no idea what to do next but he hung around for another 18 months before he really quit Reed College. In those 18 months he attended the classes he chose rather than the ones he was required to. Reed College was known for its calligraphy classes and Steve was unwittingly drawn to the beauty and the creativity of the craft. His actions, though, at that time made no proper sense to himself but seventeen years later when he built his first Macintosh, everything that he had picked up in those 18 months went it what till date makes the Mac a computer for ones with a creative twist.
Sometimes, the choices we make do not have all the logical answers for what we chose but there are unconscious resources that we own and unknowingly employ. The wisdom or the fallacy of these choices can only be measured in hindsight. Or, as Steve Jobs puts it, “you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” The 8th principle of NLP that I want to put across from this perspective is that. “In any situation a person makes the best choices with the resources currently available to him.”
When we do make the choices we make after exhausting ourselves logically, after doing the research, doing the math, doing the permutations and the combinations, we make them based absolutely on the resources we have and own at that time. And, these resources are not just the physical, the financial but also the mental, the emotional and the spiritual. All these put together, to those with a certain sense of alacrity, can be termed as acute foresight. Not many can claim to have this heightened sense of clarity and again this heightened sense of clarity can only be proven right looking backward.
In essence, this principle spurs us on to make the decisions and the choices that we keep placing on the back burner for lack of enough data, evidence or justifications. Make those decisions now and make them with information that is good enough for now! If your gut has been involved and if your choices are ethical and mean no harm to man or nature, chances are they will turn out well.
This also brings me to another point about making choices. They need to be in alignment with what is referred to in NLP, as “Ecology.” The decisions you make not only have to be good for you but also good for the neighbor, the community and nature. If not, someday they will surely backfire on us like the industrial growth and the mindless development that is now backfiring on us now through landslides, meltdowns and tsunamis. The decisions we made decades ago, in spite of the gnawing guilt that we were abusing some elements of the system, is now hitting back at us. Thankfully, our collective conscience has wizened up and we are now taking into consideration not just one bottom-line of economics but also ethics, social emotions and the environment. We have learned that the four bottom line put together create long-term corporate sustenance.
Steve Jobs’ decision to quit was made with two measurable pieces of information: one the financial pressure of his studies was hard on his parents and two that his studies were providing him with no value he could use but somewhere within his internal resources there was conviction and curiosity that told him that success lay elsewhere and when he did make the make the decision it was in harmony with the “ecology.” Even though there was ambiguity about the outcome, it caused no ill-effects on anyone or any system.
Raju Mandhyan
Author, Coach and Trainer
www.mandhyan.com
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