We all have dreams, ideas, impressions about ourselves, or solutions to other people’s problems. There are 100 things we want to accomplish while starting three others.
What I have found to be the most effective feedback tool in life is contact. Where all of your internalized thinking begins to be transformed into action, choices, or implementation. There is a messiness to life where things don’t go quite as we planned or how we thought.
This is where our mind is graded by everything around us. Acting on something is much more valuable than thinking about something because we quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s strange, but the more we are in a set routine, the less opportunities we have to learn. We become insulated from learning because we only do what we have found to work.
Discussing an issue or problem with a colleague provides the contact we need to see if our ideas make sense. Choosing a certain path to accomplish something will give us an opportunity to see if what we thought was true. Most times, some of what we thought will work and other parts of our thinking won’t.
What happens when there is no contact between our thoughts and the world is that idealism, unrealistic expectations, and possibly extremism festers and grows within ourselves like a weed in the grass. Sometimes, even with contact, our ego blinds us to the feedback that the world around us gives us when we fail.
The lesson to be learned is that when we have a dream, an idea, a possible solution to a problem we must seek out contact to quickly get feedback to sharpen and adjust our thinking, choices and actions to get to the outcome we are looking for.
Nothing other than contact with the outside world will help us find traction in our lives. This is where we need the courage to try to find the outside world to gain any brutally honest feedback on what we believe and are thinking. Being ready to adjust, change or move on depending on what we see from our contact with the outside world.
And don’t be the one who never seems to have the time, patience, or stamina to test their thinking through action with the outside world. For you will find little help from others once they come to understand that you are “all talk and no action”.