An ally called Objective Reality

There are four thousand young people who move into the city of Los Angeles on a daily basis, following their dream of becoming successful actors in the cinema industry. Many of them have intense belief - an emotional component that is equally noteworthy amongst youngsters moving to cities like Mumbai and Chennai, following the same dream.

A week away from being slapped in the face by the outcome of the US presidential election, John McCain believes he will win and go on to become the next president. There is a theoretical chance of course, but it is akin to needing 36 runs in the last over of a cricket match - possible, but highly improbable. That's why it has never been achieved. That is objective reality. All knowledge begs us to respect this objective reality, while this pesky thing called "belief" can often step in to reinforce the impossible chance!

Faith and belief are inherently risky things to give any sort of importance to, unless all objective reality and the acknowledgment of such has already been comprehensively thrown out! Belief is that elusive something you will hear from people who succeeded against impossible odds. The truth is, belief played no part, but statistics did. The odds were not beaten, merely reinforced. Those who succeed in these circumstances do so because there already exists a small window of opportunity and they are willing to hang in there hoping to be lucky. It has nothing to do with belief when the chance of being hit by lightning is actually bigger than the chance of winning the biggest lotteries.

The reality is, even the ones who didn't hang around long enough to tell us their stories, those who failed and had to give up, also had belief! Even if they had hung around longer, they would have failed, just because the statistics are stacked against them. Why then, do we promote this nonsense called belief, faith, and so on? Quite simply it is because of our inability to tell someone to base their efforts on mere statistical chance! Faith and belief can give us something to hold on to, however illusionary that may be - to stay positive and run hard while not really acknowledging that sometimes, effort can only go that far, and beyond that, we are as much creatures of chance as we are anything else we might imagine.

In taking stock of an individual's chances of becoming rich, for instance, neither effort nor faith, neither objectivism nor prayer can actually guarantee a favourable result. But those who did take their opportunities and based their judgement on a fundamentally sound direction definitely came out on top. People in the community of successful businesses will put less on faith and more on running hard when they know it is time to accelerate their efforts. This is based on acknowledging the objective realities before them. But asking Tiger Woods to be a standout example of "high performance" that we can all emulate is a bit too much. For a genius breakout success like Tiger Woods to take place, a lot of elements have to naturally find their places together. Vijay Singh probably puts in more effort than Woods, but hasn't seen the same kind of success.

What works in the favour of enterprising people engaged in business ventures is that the onus comes onto them, and on certain market factors which they can still work to their advantage, giving importance to understanding and processing information. There are usually many ways to succeed, unlike actors, for instance, whose success depends on someone else's perceptions at a particular time and a potentially life altering decision that might simply "work out". So, what advice can we sincerely give someone who wants to pursue a chance of being successful in a highly unpredictable line of endeavour? The truthful advice would indeed be "Do your best to prepare for an opportunity that might never come!"

The power of prayer is the one unknown that is yet to be acknowledged as a balance tilter. Coming from someone as competitive and celebrated as Billie Jean King, who said she would have achieved a lot more had she realized the power of prayer earlier on, there has to be some truth to it. There are some parts of this realm outside the purview of knowledge that can be applied to every individual. Hence, it is a challenge to ask people to pray and be serious about it!

The truth is, there is an objective reality that stares down upon us all the time. Some of us acknowledge it and use it to our advantage. Most will perish under its intense glare by ignoring it - it is just too cold to handle for most of us. All suffering is because of a refusal to acknowledge the presence of an objective reality. Knowledge can free us, even while being painful. Faith can destroy us, even while being positive. Stupidity, on the other hand, can be the sweetest, shortest ride to doom. It takes stupidity to use faith instead of knowledge.

In choosing our friends and relationships, it doesn't take much for us to decide what influence is good for us and what can be potentially destructive. And yet, all over human society, we can see some of us stuck in relationships that are purely corrosive, erosive of all good energy, and heading towards, at best, a prolonged state of agony. Yet, we will continue to hear from people their summary dismissal of all objective reality, giving themselves excuses and reasons to maintain status quo just for the comfort of the familiar.

There is no guarantee that we live longer by using the seat belt. But it definitely improves our chance of survival in a collision. It is by observing more and more of reality that we have longer life spans today than we did during the stone age. Humans have not progressed by faith and belief. Every step we have taken forward, we have taken because of someone's worship of knowledge and an embrace of curiosity.

And yet, we pray, consult psychics, perform rituals, give our Gods special places in our inconsistent, inconsequential lives, and put unnecessary pressure on them to perform where we might fail! We wear lucky stones, lucky colours, look for auspicious times to do things and basically do everything in our power to ignore objective reality that tells us simply what we need to do better or more than others to get ahead. Now, the number one cause for us to do this has to be laziness. How convenient if we can blame luck instead of lack of effort or understanding! The second more important cause for us to choose this line of reasoning is fear - fear that we might fail despite our best efforts. Fear and ignorance! The two biggest, least mysterious causes for all human problems. May we live to fight them! And may we celebrate reality for the best friend it is!