Confusion is Sending You a Friendly Message

Particularly as a young man, I felt a need to be sure of myself and strident and to walk with conviction.

I see many people in their 20's these days with a similar attitude. I refer to it as 'Young Man's disease" which, of course, is an omage to my own history.

However through the years, some important people have encouraged me to prize clarity over progress and over action. And for me, clarity takes time.

I can't overstate how many decisions I've made in my life where I've substituted desire for clarity or truth for clarity or guilt for clarity. All of those can be incredibly destructive in the wrong situation. And each tends to minimize or eliminate other important points of view.

And there is the danger. When one does not have the necessary professional or personal experience to make certain decisions or deal with challenging circumstances, one tends to substitute the natural confusion that can normally exists with ego, false confidence and defensiveness. And unfortuneately that leads to many minor disasters and some not so minor.

So the math here reads like this:  Move too slow and it may cost you something, move too fast and it could cost you almost everything (paraphrasing Brant Bryan; yeah, I didn't listen to him).  But if you want to know when to move, decide, take action, then you will have to cultivate a discipline which leads you to clarity; and this will take time.