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SpiritStriver90 t1_jcrnfd2 wrote

Reply to comment by TheBertinator3000 in [Image] Don't we all like to fix things? by dreamingonastar1

Sure, but how do you avoid making dangerous mistakes or errors and how do you avoid wasting too much valuable time? Or are those concerns themselves part of the problem and blitheness might actually be better?

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TheBertinator3000 t1_jcrq0xs wrote

Define dangerous.

Define wasting valuable time. Define too much.

Answers to these questions are situation specific, unfortunately, not generalized.

As to your last question, it unfortunately also depends on the situation, and got much you're over thinking it.

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SpiritStriver90 t1_jcrri9f wrote

"Dangerous mistake" in this context would be something that, say, harms another in a real way, or that puts you at a risk of serious (possibly physical) harm, and that you could have avoided with more careful, informed, and rational thought.

"Wasting valuable time" / "too much time": yeah, that's much more grey, but basically you only have so much time in a lifetime so if you spend the whole thing until you're dead and failed that's the extreme, but even before that we have the inevitabilities of things like aging, changes to the world, and so forth that may cause the goal's achievability to recede from you or become less relevant if you dally too long in getting there.

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TheBertinator3000 t1_jcrsskv wrote

Unfortunately, even in your "dangerous mistake" question, you're still asking for too general an answer. I haven't currently found any, that I think would work as a general rule of thumb. The closest might be to remember that how you think you're impacting other people, and how you're actually impacting them, are not always the same thing.

>but basically you only have so much time in a lifetime so if you spend the whole thing until you're dead and failed that's the extreme

Who cares what you did, at that point? You won't even be around to define success and failure, anymore. So defining success and failure, at that point, doesn't really seem to be a meaningful thing to do, if that makes any sense. I'd maybe set my goals more short/intermediate term.

What is success? What is failure? What is wasting time?

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