Originally published on Monster Potion, October 2, 2013. Life has changed quite a bit since then; I find it worthwhile to mark where we’ve been.
For more than a year now, the old song Rise by Public Image Limited has been playing through my head with more frequency than necessarily makes sense to me. I wasn’t exactly a big P.I.L. fan growing up so it’s not like The Smiths running through my head.
I could be wrong.
I could be right.
As I’ve gotten older, if not wiser, I’ve been willing to take more and more thoughtful risks in my life, I find it behooves me to ‘trust my gut.’ In fact, the biggest payoffs in my life have, to the external observer, made no sense.
As I wrote earlier this week, sometimes I need to turn my cerebral navigation computer off. Just speaking for myself here.
One such decision that comes to mind is, oh, say, redirecting our entire savings to risk living differently by traveling the world and forging a new, uncharted path for ourselves. Others include speaking my mind at work when I sense wrongdoing, even if those around me do their best to convince me otherwise, reasonable evidence in hand.
As Rich Rosetti, my first boss during my days as a private investigator at Kroll Associates, was fond of telling me: ‘If it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and quacks like a duck…then it’s probably a duck.’ To be honest, I’m not even sure if this anecdote is relevant but it came to mind and so I’m taking this opportunity to pay homage to a man who gambled on a guy straight out of college who, candidly, knew jack ding dong about anything. I also don’t know if the ‘smells like a duck’ was part of that equation but including it allows me to point out that I do not know what a duck smells like.
I digress.
One thing I’ve had to teach myself — or that I’ve had to open up to others teaching me — is that I will not always be right with these decisions. Furthermore, in the short-term, decisions often present themselves as ‘right’ when they may ultimately end up being ‘wrong.’
And vice versa.
It’s difficult to say, especially when the reality is that 100% of the time I’m both right and wrong. No decision is perfect. No decision is without consequences, some seemingly better than others.
They’re just consequences.
I do know that my best choices are when I go with my gut. My instinct. My heart.
I also know that, while I do need to use my brain, leaning on it entirely is a dangerous bit.
So lacking better data, I’ll go ahead and figure that I’m right 50% of the time. Sure, in reality, I feel right far more than 50% of the time — sometimes as much as 99% — and yet I’ve been known to get a bad case of Icarus and can get to thinking I’m truly right even close to 99% of the time.
In the spirit of betting on myself, let’s go with a modest 51% hit rate. Heck, if I were a baseball player, that’d be impressive.
Of course, do these percentages mean anything?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Monster Potion articles originally appeared on monsterpotion.com, now defunct, where we wrote about life in general, including our family's travels around the world in 2012 and 2013. Robyn and I wrote most of it, the kids wrote once or twice, and we went quiet by 2014.
Read more at omnipolar.ai/s/monster-potion