I was speaking with a client last week about pricing his home. He asked me what price I thought it would sell for. I told him that if I could answer that question, I would be the only Realtor in the country who could. Later, he said he thought that buying the home was the right thing to do at the time. Of course he did. Nobody in his right mind would buy a home thinking it was the wrong thing to do at the time.The truism is that hindsight is 20-20. But look at the way our culture represents life's journey. We march along the path of our lives "looking forward" to the future. We're admonished not to "look back" at our mistakes--or our triumphs, for that matter. But the problem with this image is that it doesn't recognize that we can't see "down the road" of the future, and we can't "look back" on our pasts unless we stop and turn around.
The native American culture uses a different metaphor. It represents life's journey by having us walk backwards. We can't see what's coming and we focus on where we've been.
I don't know which image accurate, whether we're talking about career choices, choices in our relationships, or choices in real estate. But I do know that because we can't see the future, we can't make choices with certainty.
Should We stop trying to predict our own future? Or should we listen to more experienced travelers, to those who have gone before and learned before us?
Let me know what you think.
2 comments:
Why the false dichotomy? Study our past, and use this to make educated guesses about our future. Sure, you'll be wrong sometimes, but you'll be right a lot more than you'll be wrong.
If you can't afford to be wrong, then the only solution is to do nothing at all.
Perhaps Winston Churchill said it best: "The father backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see." TLMB
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