The wisdom of crowds

Not for the first time, I've been inspired by a Scott Adams blog.  This one was about the importance of strategic thinking.  I do recommend it: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/125175145561/thinking-strategically

It's not a hard-sell for Scott, this notion.  I hold with strategic thinking generally, and indeed I am a very able conciliare to family and friends, even if I say so myself.  I'm pretty good at seeing the bigger picture and navigating the path of least resistance through it.  I've always had this ability, and as with most things I do well, I thought everyone else was similarly equipped.  Not so it seems.  My work colleagues down the years have consistently commented on my clear-thinking.

However, there is a frailty in my superpower.  I cannot direct the analysis inwards.  I find it extremely difficult to apply the same good sense and detached logic to my own situation.  I lose my objectivity.  This is a result I think of my natural pessimism.  Scott Adams maintains that a pessimist cannot transform him or herself into an optimist.  Pessimists can though learn to think strategically, he holds.  And there's precedence for this view.  There are for example plenty of naturally disorganised individuals who by dint of rigorous training in the military become excellent logisticians.  It shouldn't be beyond a pessimist to train himself to think in different way then.

This is what I shall endeavour to do.  As it happens, I saw a example of this at the weekend.  I got chatting to a friend I hadn't seen for several years.  We're fairly casual acquaintances, so I've not kept up to speed with what he's been doing with himself.  Last time I heard, he was doing social work.  I expected some variation on this when I asked him what he'd been up to.  It turns out he's been running his own business for the last three years.  He makes memorial wooden plaques.

One of his relatives died a few years ago, and wished to have her ashes buried in an urn at a memorial garden somewhere picturesque.  This was done.  When the family asked the firm organising the whole thing if they might commission a small wooden plaque with her name, dates and a choice quote to mark the spot, they said "yes"...for three-hundred pounds.  My friend's father was far from gruntled by this, and asked his son to knock something up.  He did.  But not only that, he saw a massive gap in the market and moved to fill it.  He now does this for a living.

I was filled with admiration for the way he assessed the situation and used the opportunity to change his life for the better into the bargain.  I need to think more like this.