A huge chunk of my thought process behind even the smallest of decisions centers around the idea of “future-proof” — the goal to make any plan hatched today even better by ensuring it will still be a valid plan in the future.
This can be an awesome quality. My boss loves me. My customers love me. Anyone who has ever had to coolaborate with me is full of nothing but compliments. My financial planner and I are on board. Any establishment I’ve bought anything from ever thinks I’m one of their best customers. Like I said, it’s an awesome quality.
But, it can also be terrible. In an extreme, imagine the following car buying scenario. I’m 18. I’m buying my first car. I don’t have a lot of money. A used Honda Civic seems to be a good choice. It’s small, great on gas, and dependable. But then I get to thinking, some day I’ll have a family and I might need to move something heavy on a moments notice. Maybe a brand new 9-seater SUV with a towing package would be a better choice? Of course, at 18, I couldn’t even afford the gas for the SUV, let alone the vehicle itself. I would be so stuck in the decision making state that the end result would be buying nothing at all.
Thankfully, I’m not that bad. My first car was a 1980s model Volkswagen Fox named Roxanne. But the point is, I could easily get that bad. And I am that bad when it comes to other decisions, relationships, vacation planning, and the like.
As you can see, this can be both a virtue and a fault. As a virtue, it comes naturally. I have to work at keeping it from being a fault.
It remains a goal of mine to be more impulsive and to seek the company of those who encourage it. I also constantly remind myself that the best choice for right now may not always be the best choice for tomorrow. I regularly have to convince myself that sometimes it’s okay to destroy your work from the past to build something better for now and that planning to destroy what’s been built at some point in the future is an okay thing to do.