selection

I keep on revisiting the idea that you are not meant to accomplish everything you wanted in life. You aim for the moon. Sometimes you miss and you fall back on Earth. Other times you miss and hit the stars. There are a lot of things I wanted in my life. Some things I have accomplished more than I set out. Other things I have not. Some things in life require selection into exclusive groups or resources or opportunities. You are not always selected, and then you have to work around your initial plan to get to where you want.

For the most part, I’ve been able to accomplish what I wanted if we take a big picture lens. On most majors things I’ve wanted, like getting into Penn or finding a position on the buyside, I have been able to accomplish. Other things I have not been able to accomplish. And, for the most part, I feel like I’ve been able to survive despite not being able to accomplish the things I’ve not been able to accomplish. It’s not been great, especially right now, but I’ll survive, and whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I have become stronger.

I don’t believe that everything was meant to be. I believe that’s just cope. There are things that you want, and not everything you want you are able to achieve. I don’t believe that things we don’t achieve lead us to better paths, just different paths, and we love our fate anyways. But reality is that there are better outcomes for our lives that we didn’t take. These outcomes exist in the ideal, but they are not reality. The world is full of outcomes like this. You can’t index too heavily on them because they are not real. I would rather take unoptimal real outcomes over optimal unreal outcomes any day.