A former boss often used the phrase 'horses for courses.' The idea is that not everyone will find that a particular environment or a particular situation suits them. If you find yourself in such a negative or slow paced world, perhaps what is wrong is that you are misplaced in some way.
Moving to another place or situation may improve your ability to perform. Hoever, an alternative to that may be that you need to change your environment in some way so that you perform better, or you are happier. Such a change is 'courses for horses.' You are building a course on which you will have greater chance of winning.
Knowing which type of course, you will find better suited to your skills is often an enormous task. It is increasingly difficult for people to see into the future with confidence that they are following a long term strategy that will lead to success. As the world matures, it is becoming a maze of opportunities and potential dead ends.
One thing is certain and that is the need for balance in one's goals. It is increasingly difficult to pick the horse and the course for that horse. This is because our world increasing requires specificity in processes and goals.
Specificity
In the past, nations and people made mistakes that now seem weird. For example, Germany, Russia, Great Britain, France, and Italy fought the first world war. We look back on this history and find it puzzling.
Why would rational nations do such stupid things?
Why would so-called intelligent human beings go to war and destroy so many lives and so many things that they had worked so hard to achieve?
Was the world so bad that war was necessary?
When we examine the past, it seems that peoples and nations stumbled into destruction. We can't say that wars were productive, we can only say that they happened and that because of them much that was good was destroyed for ever.
We can see that wars and fighting are a consequence of historical events, but we cannot clearly see the processes that led up to the events that produced the wars. We live with the consequences of war and destruction, but we are not free from them.
We may agree that war is bad, that it should not be a solution, but we are very poor at working out a strategy that will avoid war. If ever the mathematical butterfly effect has potency, it seems to be evident in process of moving towards the imbalance that teeters the world into war on a regular basis.
What can we Learn from Our Unnecessary Wars
The first thing that seems to emerge from the experience of war is that it does not lead to a better world relative to what would have been possible without war. War is like the slide. War pushes the world down and makes the climb up more difficult. Although war may change the lists of people active in the world and may change leadership of events, it does not mean that the world overall has improved over what could have been. War leads to a disconnect from the past as if the past did not have a contribution to make.
The alternative to war is housekeeping or reorganizing. In fact, the alternative to war is what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. It is a realization that humans are creative entities and that they can produce very rapid change for the betterment of all mankind, and they can do it very quickly. What they do not need to produce change and improvement is a destructive war.
Creative destruction is a peaceful process of reorganizing. It produces the change that wars are faught over, but it produces the cahnge more effectively and with less total stress in the world environment. Underlying creative destruction is the notion that all change is a result of disequilibriums in the world arising from its nature. The nature of the world is non-linear and potentially destructive. In order to achieve creative destruction and at the same time positive change, the world needs to understand the role of work and the fuller dynamics of investment.
All people that are born into the world can have a role to play in building 'courses' in which they as 'horses' can run. The thing to realize is that there is enough space and places for everyone should we as a world decide that maintaining our world in balance is our overriding goal. We can all share and live in a greater world, but we need to participate and have an effective role. Where the leaders fail us now, is in not telling all of us that we are important and giving us 'all' the hope that we all need to be significant.
The world needs to have goal setters that will create the dynamics of investment into areas that we think are impossible. We know intiutively that all things are possible, but we need to have investment of time and energy into processes and ways to make all things possible. First of all, we need to raise everyone's level of living, not just the levels of people who are lucky enough to be born into specific communities.
