6th June 2022, The Mindful Entrepreneur

📅 Thought for today:

‘Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed.’

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#thoughtfortoday #cause #effect #means #ends #seeds #fruit #Emerson

This is a quote that has had me pondering for a few months.

I must have seen it somewhere and made a note in my “quotes notes” to come back to when the moment is right.

They say that hindsight is 20/20 – that we can see afterwards why things happened the way they did. Personally, I’m not convinced by this – I think we want to, and our biases help us come to a conclusion – whether it is the right one or not is harder to say.

I do think we are more likely to be able to determine the cause when we see the effect.

The other way around however is a different story.

How well can we predict the future and say if we do “this” then “that” will happen?

With simple things which we have experienced before and are predictable – very well!

What sent me off down this thought path was considering the failure of a big start-up in the UK, one that was privately funded and closed down in an orderly fashion.

The owners “blamed” other similar businesses that had floated and then crashed – affecting market sentiment and in particular, investors’ appetite for their own business.

Could they have predicted this? I don’t think so.

Could they have anticipated this? Yes, if they had been diligent in their risk analysis, they could have.

Yet the entrepreneurial way seems to be to plough on regardless, which in itself is a cause leading to an effect.

Keep trying until something sticks.

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