TMI

Gun’s Quote-of-the-Week:

“S**t or get off the pot!”

-American Proverb

I have come to observe two major things over the course of the summer. First, that there is a plethora of information that is out there, all formed from the collective research and discovery of billions of humans all over the world who are channeling that information in to one, singular repository; the internet. The second is that we, as individuals, have no idea how to handle that much information.

This has led me to discover a third; we are more indecisive than ever.

Take Syria, for example. We think they used chemical weapons. Other nations haven’t come to the same conclusion based upon their observations. Some nations think their use is justified. Others don’t. Some say that thousands of Civilians died. Others think the targets were justified. Everybody thinks everybody else’s perspective is lunacy.

Nothing has changed the fact that there is a terrible war going on in the Middle East and that people are dying, starving and being displaced. Nobody is doing anything about that, because everybody wants to get their facts straight and, of course, make their friends agree with them first. Nobody can make a decision until everybody else agrees with them. God forbid going at it alone, even if the one person alone is the one who’s right.

I get a trade journal once a month. I have all my notes and textbooks from college. I work with building engineers and maintenance personnel, owners, architects and bean-counters who all have varying interests in a construction project… and that’s just one job. At any time, I have 4-6 on my desk. If I can’t make a decision about them quickly, and on a certain schedule, I make people mad, bump schedules, miss deadlines or simply look dumb. All of this ultimately results in losing money.

…and that’s just the office.

At some point in time, we have to acknowledge that no matter what we will never have all the answers. You will never know everything that there is to know about what school to send your kid to. You will never know everything there is to know about what car you should buy. The same could be said for your house, your church, hell, even the person you are going to marry. (Oh wait… first you should decide who to date…)

One of our biggest problems right now is that we know we have all of this information in front of us, yet knowing this, we actually second-guess our lives and the decisions we make inside of them because the facts we used to make our choices in the first place now change daily. In a way, it was easier to live and make choices before computers, cell phones, the internet or even easily-accessible libraries and universities. When you only have one or two sources of information, it takes very little to reach a conclusion.

This isn’t saying that you should look before you leap, fly by the seat of your pants or otherwise refuse to plan. (Unless you are that kind of a person in which case this Gun’s Quote is meaningless to you anyway) What it does say is that you still have to choose even when you know full and well that you will not know everything there is to know behind that decision. That requires faith. Faith that the time you spent and the efforts that you make are enough to make a decision with enough confidence to know at the time it was made the best decision was chosen.

Finally, if there is any one thing I have learned this summer, it is that you will always be wrong. Even if you did bury yourself in research, fact-finding and perhaps even meditation, you still will not acquire enough information to fool-proof yourself. You make errors. You make bad choices. Sometimes your discretion is a little off. That’s because you are a human and imperfect. Stop trying to be perfect. It doesn’t work and it will make you miserable.

Take your dump and leave. The world doesn’t revolve around you, which means it won’t wait on your choices, either. Do your due-diligence, evaluate, pick and do it.

…and that’s why it’s a Gun’s Quote!