What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

JEFF BEZOS

The ability to forecast the future is sketchy at best. Many of us do our best to predict certain occurrences and leverage that knowledge into some form of game plan, but the reality is that we are continually taken off course by the persistence of variables beyond our control.

The wave of unforeseen circumstances comes at us with substantive outcomes, far beyond most people’s ability to anticipate, calculate and prepare. These come through political, environmental, and social phenomena that are often so intense and far reaching as to set even the largest bodies of humanity into a chaos that perpetuates a continuous need to recalculate and strategize.

Look at the vast ripples of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. It may have been a potential threat that has sat on the sidelines for years in advance of the occurrence. Yet, when it actually happened, the entire world is reeling from the outcome. 

Economists would have predicted the rise in oil costs leading to inflation. The potential famine coming from the inability to deliver the grains in the silos to their respective purchasing countries, but to the majority of individuals who were otherwise living their lives, this wave of instability and financial chaos has delivered ramifications that appear to arise out of nowhere.

Bezos’ point in this aphorism is that complaining solves nothing, and to his credit, it is unquestionably so. We may wince, gripe, moan and wail personally, but in the end, those are solely an expression of personal anguish and grief and do not in and of themselves accomplish anything towards the resolution of the problems that they have posed for any one of us. 

There is only one solution in the face of such chaos, and that is to stare straight in the face of the fear that any one of these issues has posed, and work directly to change those variables, or to change our world around those variables such that we may survive in the course of how they potentially play out on the global stage. Anything less than decisive action in the face of such controversy is merely an expression of the emotional reaction we feel in the face of such conflict, and does absolutely nothing in the course of solving such issues of magnitude. 

Happy Sunday!