When They Can’t See the Whole Picture

In their sugar, caffeine, or alcohol induced high, your friends may come to you and say:

You should do X, then Y, and then Z!

At one point, you may have expressed your enthusiasm for X.

In the meantime, your plan may have changed from X to A, but there’s no way your friends could know all the minute details that got you to A. So, they still assume X is your plan when you’ve already moved onto A.

Or, because of the urgency of the situation, you’ve dedicated most of your energy to A, and X has been put on the backburner, becoming a mere figment of your thinking from two or three months ago.

There could also be B, C, and D considerations that need to be addressed before you can safely and confidently move forward with X.

All your friends are seeing is the destination, not the journey to getting there. They aren’t seeing the people, circumstances, and events that can act as constraints, real or imagined.

You don’t want to dedicate all your time and energy to “worst case” thinking, but it has its place. If you’re going to dedicate time to “best case” thinking, then it needs to be balanced out with “worst case” thinking too.

Your friends can’t see the whole picture. It’s not worth fighting over, and it may not even be worth your time to explain how you got to A, or to comb through considerations B, C, and D with them either. It may come across as little more than an excuse. X has become so obvious to them now; they can’t see any other way for you!

If you want to move the conversation forward, say “I would love to speculate on how we can make X possible. It’s been on the backburner because of A.”

Or, say “X was the best I could see at the time. But now I’m exploring D, which encompasses everything I talked about with X and more!”