I'm going through a Korean lesson with a string of 4-character Chinese idioms, and so many are applicable to my life! MJ and I hang out every day so we share all our joys and sorrows together (동고동락), and part of those sorrows are that MJ has to wake up at 5:30AM every day that she has preceptorship (similar to an internship working with a nurse at a hospital) and go through an entire 13-hour shift while half asleep and half awake. (비몽사몽) I can only imagine what it will be like when she has to do a night shift.
The power of foresight is really important, much more than analyzing the past.....it's often what my goal is when analyzing the past, to learn and use it for the future.....but alas often times I end up dwelling on the past. I often look back at what life was like ten years ago and try to project what the next 10 years will be like for me....let's see, in 2011 I was coming out of law school and worried about employment, the economy was just beginning to recover and I was single and on my own in the big city of Los Angeles... but it often becomes a fool's errand because there's nothing to suggest the years of 2011- 2021 will look anything like 2021-2031. When I was living in my 20's, I just brushed away thoughts of what I'd be doing in my thirties; 2020 seemed like an abstract concept, like going to Mars or getting old. I've seen people on the Internet hoping for another "Roaring Twenties" like the 1920's after recovering from the World War and a raging pandemic (similar to our most recent pandemic), which seems optimistic, but pessimistically it could be what Andrew Yang was prognistcating in the 2020 Presidential campaign, the possibility of robots replacing humans' jobs like trucking, retail jobs in what amounts to a Fourth Industrial Revolution, but this one might not be one where the human labor market might recover from. Nothing in my life is astronomically different than my life in 2011: we're still driving cars on grounded roads (not in the sky), we still use the Internet, albeit at higher speeds and unlimited Wifi and smarter smartphones, and social relationships are still intact although more divisive politically than ever before. I wonder if something comes along that revolutionizes the way we live by 2031.
Often times 선견지명 is used to describe a successful person who seems to always be one step ahead of everyone else; in many ways MJ becoming a nurse can prove to be great foresight when we look back it in 10 years, as there are more and more adults getting older who need medical care, MJ is learning a great deal about what happens at hospitals, what kind of diseases are out there, and what to watch out for. Just like in investing, it's often going into an uncertain area or taking a risky step that yields the greatest return; going with the same thing that's been working and staying the course can be a safe and winning strategy, but it usually doesn't reap the maxium rewards; often it's buying up the stocks, businesses, or investments that don't look too good right now and no one's interested in that become the wise investments that make people look like they have great foresight. I'm also wary of "false lessons," or lessons from the past that don't translate to the future, where I think I learned something but apply that lesson erroneously for the future action, or the future has changed so much that it doesn't apply anymore.
Whatever the secret to the power of foresight is, I do know there's an aspect of luck to it as well, and anyone who says they "knew all along" is just benefiting from hindsight and/or got lucky that the version of the future they predicted actually came true. We can still change the future! It isn't set in stone yet.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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