“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.“
Henry David Thoreau
Embracing the unexpected is one of the most difficult things for me to do. I am an analytical thinker, gathering data on everything from my studies in economics, to my instagram posts, to my heart rate fluctuations throughout workouts, which earned me the nickname, “Big-Analytics Guy.” I enjoy choosing a goal and working to understand everything that I need to do to achieve it. After calculating each and every move, I love to battle to complete every step to achieve it.
Entering an unsure part of life, it is incredibly hard for me to step back and put the analytics aside. I can apply these skills into everything in my life other than making decisions from my heart. It is hard to put numbers to the path that you plan to take in life. Even in choosing a college, I used a spreadsheet to add a numeric value to each attribute the schools I was choosing between had. I weighted these based on their level of importance to me and I chose the school that had the highest aggregate score. But ultimately, how can I choose what to do with my life from a spreadsheet?
I find it extremely hard to reflect in my current environment. I think that is why I find posting this is so helpful. It is not that I do not want to tell the people around me, but rather that I don’t want to influence their lives from my opinions. If people see this, I hope my words help them find clarity in their own lives, allows them to reflect on their own values, or gives them a feeling of not being alone. Life is brutal sometimes, but we don’t have to know everything. We might not be comfortable with the unexpected, but the unexpected is coming, so we must embrace it and run with it.