Today is September 4 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “Do you think about yesterday so much that it gets in the way of your tomorrow?”
People who navigate the chaos seldom let their yesterday get in the way of their tomorrow.
Learning lessons from the past is reasonable.
Reminiscing also can be healthy.
But focusing on the past at the expense of the future is no way to grow personally or professionally.
Charles F. Kettering was a prominent inventor and the head of research at General Motors for more than twenty-five years.
In 1961 a collection of speeches by Kettering was published under the title “Prophet of Progress.”
He spoke at a luncheon in his honor on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his development of the electric self-starter for automobiles and noted “I have said I was pretty sure that man came from the crab family because we back into everything. We don’t go straight forward at all. I think it is time we turned around and faced the future with our backs to history. You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time. If you want to back into history far enough to get some bearings, that is perfectly all right.”
Do you think about yesterday so much that it gets in the way of your tomorrow?