Today’s topic is headwinds and tailwinds.
I don’t mean, of course, real wind. I mean metaphorically. Imagine you are walking and feel a headwind. You lean into it and you correctly understand that all your effort is extra hard and difficult because the wind is at your face. Now, what happens when we have a tailwind? When we walk the same route on the same terrain, but the wind comes from behind us? Now the wind is helping us. Do we recognize its help in the same way?
The argument is that when it comes to real life, we don’t. (I think also when it comes to wind.) If we think about the metaphor, the idea is that when we have forces that fight against us, we notice them to a minute degree. We understand every nuance about them and the small ways in which they make our lives more difficult. In my case, bureaucracy is one of them.
But when things are helping us, we don’t notice them in the same way. Think about your current situation. Think about how you got to where you are. Probably the obstacles are quite salient and clear. What about the forces that helped you? I can tell you, for example, that I have a lot of trust in people. When somebody wants to meet me, I usually say yes, and meet them. Sometimes these meetings don’t work out well, and the times when it didn’t work out well are very, very clear and sometimes painful. The times when it worked out for me are not as salient. Because I met somebody who introduced me to something and something happened and so on and so on. By the way, when it comes to thinking about our success in life, we often attribute our success to ourselves and our failures to forces against us. Why is this? Because the forces against us are very clear. But the forces that help us, the tailwind, we don’t recognize to the same degree.
I would like to propose that we have lots of headwinds and we have lots of tailwinds. In my own life, I think I had much more tailwind than headwind. But the obstacles, the headwinds, are much more noticeable, clearer, and painful. The tailwinds are not as countable. Because of that we attribute too much to ourselves, too much of our success to ourselves, rather than to all kinds of help that we got. But we also don’t recognize how helpful the world is.
So, when you look at the world and ask yourself if there are more headwinds than tailwinds, realize that you’re probably very biased and probably overemphasizing the headwinds but underemphasizing the tailwinds. If you can—and I try to do this, though not always successfully—try to observe and focus on the tailwinds. Try to understand all the forces that helped get you where you are.
Here’s to recognizing the tailwinds and to trying to do things that increase them for ourselves and for others.
