At every stage of my life, I've looked back at who I was five years ago and shaken my head at how immature and short-sighted I was. When I was 12, I cringed at the thought of 7-year-old Joe. When I was 17, I cringed at the thought of 12-year-old Joe. And so on.
But now that time has given me adequate distance and I'm able to view all these iterations on an even playing field, I've realized something interesting.
I was right more often at the age of 10 than I was at the age of 17.
10-year-old Joe made decisions purely on gut feeling. He couldn't really articulate any sort of values or decision making process or anything relating to a "why" he did something because he was, well, 10. But he normally had a good sense of what the right thing to do or the right answer to a problem was, and rather than overthinking it, he just sort of did that. It was perhaps an overly naive way to live, but you could probably say that about me at any age, so I won't hold it against him.
17-year-old Joe was way too overconfident. He thought he had a really strong sense of the world when really he just had a really strong sense of what he personally saw of it. He assumed everyone always understood he meant well and that gave him immunity whenever he screwed up. And he just didn't question himself enough. He was developing values to help inform his decisions, but those values were often flawed or misguided, so his decisions were too.
And now I feel like I'm in a place where I've corrected a lot of those issues and am prouder of who I am, but it's funny that most of the decisions I make today are probably closer to the ones I would have made at age 10 when I was just winging it than the ones I would have made at age 17 when I thought I had myself figured out. Instinct is the ultimate form of sophistication, I guess. Thinking you know everything has much greater room for error than being young enough where that thought never even crosses your mind.
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