Increa Technology |Engineer |Aviator |Educator

Are you taking tax deductions on your home office? Do you know how the tax rules when you leave that house? Are you getting married? Talk to someone about the death of their spouse, or someone who’s been through a divorce. Buying a new hybrid car? Do you know what to do with hundreds of pounds of hazardous waste batteries? Are you born? Best think of what’s going on in eternity after you die. Buying that great investment is a decision. The decision to sell will be more meaningful to your overall gain.

What’s the theme? Simple: we’re often awestruck by getting into that cool new thing we desire. Plan for how the situation is going to end. It will set the path between here and there. You’ll know where you’re going. It cuts down on pain. It minimized wasted heart beats.

Done habitually, a steady but not excessive look forward will reap efficiency and excess capacity today. Maybe it’s more money because you’re out of debt. Maybe it’s more time with your wife or kids. Maybe it’s doing that thing together with a friend because you know the time you’ll live in the same city is finite.

Thinking a little bit about tomorrow will make today better. That’s just my opinion.

There are two separate ways of looking at processes to a Chemist – Kinetic and Equilibrium. Equilibrium arguments predict where a process is going and what the end state will be. Kinetic arguments predict how fast it’s going to happen.

Using either alone may not be sufficient to characterize life. For example, glass remains a liquid. Equilibrium arguments, applied to all the windows of your house, predict they will slowly sag into pools of silicon. In fact, on older houses, you can start to see the ripples developing in the window panes. But functionally, kinetic arguments identify that it’s going to happen so slow that probably your great grand-daughter will be content looking out the same window with nary a thought about liquid windows.

I think most people know where they want to go in life. Or, where they should go in life. They know the equilibrium end state they want to reach. But almost always, the kinetics of the process are unsatisfying. Looking back over each 5 year interval, what I want to have happened just hasn’t happened fast enough.

Maybe a truly good thing happens when external circumstances force me to change faster than I’m comfortable with, but toward the equilibrium goal I know is right.