Non Linear

Notes

Many things in life, including life itself, are not linear. Linear means that things, events, time follows a known and simple patterns that we can predict in advance. We would have loved life to be so, because we are sense seeking creatures. We hate Uncertainty and wish that life would be a stable trend going upwards. However, it rarely has a logic behind it, nor a clear linear path. In contrast, non-linearity means that the line might go up or down, curve in a weird way, or even split into multiple lines. Instead of one clear path, we get a tangled spaghetti bowl.

The only certainly is that life is change - nothing remains constant, so we can't expect life to progress in a straight line. We will fail, we will change our mind, unexpected things will happen, so we can never know our path in advance prediction, only at hindsight at best.

There are however some non linear things that still follow a relatively expected pattern. For example compounding has a non linear pattern. Things that happen beneath the surface and then suddenly bursts out with great presence. At first progress is low or even flat, but with time it increases exponentially.

Similarly, some things follow a seasonal pattern. For instance vacations are not equally divided throughout the year, rather it is centered around holidays and seasons so we can reasonably expect when they will occur.

Non linearity forces us to be flexible, patient, and optimists. Since we can't know in advance how things will turn out, we need to constantly adjust our behavior and our Expectations so that we won't give up before our efforts pay off, while also aligning ourselves with the natural pace of reality.

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Overview

🔼Topic:: Change (MOC) ↩️Origin:: 🔗Link::