An Austrian writer, Robert Musil, wrote a two-volume novel about industrial-society life (and lifelessness) called "The Man Without Qualities." The novel contains what's become my favorite fallback phrase:
"Man weiss nicht was er will und will nicht was er weiss."
Or, we don't know what we want and we don't want what we know we should/could be doing.
That's the human condition parallax: we're always going to create or perceive a gap between desire and reality.
Taoists go into denial. That's one way of eliminating the human condition parallax. Unless you desire to desire nothing and can't do it.
I bring this up because I recently spoke to a freshman class at UC Berkeley entitled Entrepreneurship 101. They all asked me questions in an attempt to figure out why some of my high-tech clients were successful, as if there were a magic formula they could follow. I told them basically what Musil told all of us: check out what you really want to do and what you're good at. That's all you need to know, and the rest will follow.
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