Always Outside Looking In

"There's always a third way, and it's not a combination of the other two ways."
- David Carradine

So I feel that there's a totally inappropriate joke in that quote somewhere, considering what happened to Carradine. I'm not going to elaborate though, for fear of being ghost-crane kicked.

Anyway, there are times in life when we seemingly only have crappy choices left. We've been trained by society to settle for compromises from day one. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, but sometimes relying on this approach to solving problems could be mentally unhealthy.

In a lot of cases, we are seemingly rushed into making decisions without being allowed to think things through. Unfortunately, "practicality" trumps common sense these days. Some people actually make it part of their strategy to get decisions out of others as fast as possible, even when the best course of action is to ask for time to contemplate on them.

I've always appreciated offbeat solutions. I've always been in the belief that one can learn a lot about a people by how they approach and solve problems that come to them. Sometimes their answers do not really make sense at the first glance, or even during execution, but it's surprising how elegantly they solve problems sometimes.

Hence, there's a lot one can learn by taking mental notes on how others work. Sometimes hints to self improvement could be found by observing how others work their way out of a problem.

After all, not everyone had the same teachers and obviously not everyone had the same things thrown at them throughout the course of their lives.