On Small Changes And The Predictability Of The Future

“A single drop of a pebble in a pond creates ripples of waves.”  This phrase is often quoted to empower people to make small changes in their daily lives to achieve bigger goals they set for themselves.  After contemplating and assessing the recent decisions and plans I’ve made about my future,  it occurred to me that 80% of the time, none of my original plans turned out the way as I hoped they would. (Is the Pareto Principle at work here? More on this topic in another entry).

They say goals are dreams with deadlines, but what if you didn’t achieve your goals the first time you attempted? What happens then? How does one decide to keep chasing a dream that failed at the first try? When people say, don’t give up on your dreams, you have a voice in your head that says, “Yeah, you say don’t give up, but it’s easier said than done.”  Reality hits you in the face and life happens in between, external forces of nature that could either help you speed up your journey or slow you down towards your intended path. There are so many variables and unknowns along the way.

Motivational speakers will tell you that anything is possible if you set your mind into it and make the necessary marginal improvements to reach your goals. Just watch the inspiring TED Talk by Stephen Duneier below. He went from an average C Student in school who couldn’t even concentrate in class to someone who had continuously broken world records and achieved new goals for himself defying all the limitations we think we have with age.

 

And what about the predictability of the future? What if while we’re exerting all our efforts, nothing seems to come our way? How do we know that what we invest now will reap bigger rewards eventually? How does one keep going without any assurance of some level of success?

The thing is we don’t know, and we know that this is how it is with anything in life.

The meteorologist Edward Lorenz once coined the term “the butterfly effect.” According to several scholarly articles online, in Chaos Theory, this is the sensitive dependence on primary conditions in which a marginal change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system could result in bigger variations at a later state.

A simpler interpretation of this theory in plain English can be explained by a metaphorical example by Lorenz which was started with a question:

“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”  

While in popular culture this had been often used to make poetic references about how small things can have big impact, the original theory’s intention was to actually demonstrate the complexity of systems (most of the things that happen on earth everyday–the weather, hurricanes, etc.) and the unpredictable nature of these systems–that a small change may have a massive impact or nothing at all.

So, where am I going about with this theory? This isn’t a motivational piece of knowledge at all.

It attempts to prove however that with the same nature of unpredictability is the existence of a possibility. We can do small things and it may still lead to something big, even if it’s a 0.000001% chance or that it takes us much longer.