Feasibility

[billroper]

My brother-in-law, jeff_duntemann posted here on why he believes idealism is a bad thing. I don't know if I exactly agree or disagree. I think that some idealism is a good thing and -- like most things! -- an excess of idealism is what's going to get you in trouble.

Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good." Well, yeah. If you spend all of your time searching for the perfect solution to a problem, you'll discard a lot of perfectly good, but perfectly imperfect solutions. As a result, you may never get anywhere. (I'm anticipating a problem of this sort at work shortly. We'll see how that develops -- or doesn't, as the case may be.)

The trick, in my opinion, is that you need to select your choices from the feasible set. Now, the feasible set isn't a fixed entity. It may get larger or smaller, sometimes due to luck, sometimes due to the choices that we make ourselves. Jeff mentions his college friend who wasn't interested in any woman who didn't look like a Playboy centerfold. That's not a choice that I'd make, nor does it appear to have been in his feasible set. But maybe it could have been, if he'd done the right things and made the right choices and had the right set of luck. We might assume that he'd improve his chances if he improved his own appearance, or perhaps if he made a lot of money, or even went into politics, just to pick some possible examples. Any of those things is a lot of work.

If you don't do the work, you don't improve the choices that are in your feasible set. You can even watch them get more constrained by the choices that you've already made.

Being lucky doesn't hurt. I'm 26 years now at a job that I got by being in the right place at the right time. And that job's resulted in a lot of things landing in my feasible set of choices.

Like my two pretty little daughters. :)

daisy_knotwise and I might have said, "It looks like no kids." Ideally, we would have been able to have children without going through all the hoops that we went through. But ideal wasn't what we got.

We got feasible. And feasible has turned out to be pretty darned good.

Look at your feasible set. And make your choices.

Comments

[grey-lady.livejournal.com]

Well said - thank you.

[sibylle]

A good reminder. Thank you for posting it!

[madfilkentist]

There are different senses of the word "idealism." Its bad reputation comes mostly from the sense in which the ideal becomes an end in itself that takes precedence over reality. In philosophy, "idealism" refers to the notion that ideas are the ultimate reality; living by this generally screws up one's aims in (actual) reality badly.

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

This is precisely what I mean by "idealism," and what I was getting at in the entry Bill references. In my experience, idealists are almost invariably Platonists, and can't seem to think effectively except in terms of abstractions, without the annoying fuzziness and complications of reality. This is different from having high aspirations, which seems to be what a lot of people think when they hear the word "idealism." There's another entry in here somewhere, and when I find it I'll write it.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

This LJ thread (across two journals) also coincided with some party conversation last night which coincided with the chapter I was just reading in the book Managing Humans. In that book (which I'm not if I'd recommend at this point), the current chapter I'm reading makes a strong point about incrementalists versus completionists. Both sets of attitudes have their merits but only in context. Either method of action alone doesn't scale very well, each person needs some of the drives of both.

[sraun]

I finally realized what was bugging me about your original post - I could go through and replace "idealist" with "fanatic", and it wouldn't significantly change anything.

This is not a bad thing - it does highlight one of the attributes of many idealists.

[scs-11.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear.

[carolf.livejournal.com]

Main comment is in jeff's journal. Synopsis:

Man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for?

Idealism and discovery are the two main sources of human progress. We need it. We could excel without fanaticism.