You Can't Shape Your Future, If You Don't Know Your Past

If you don’t know about your past, you can’t shape your future. Now go. Learn where you came from. ~ Kemal, The Protector S1, E5

You can't shape your future, if you don't know your past. This applies to most things in life — and can apply to a person, to an organization, to a company, to a country, etc... Sometimes we get too caught up in the present, that we forget to look back to the past, to figure out where we should be going or what we should be doing.

For instance, the whole human race has come so far. From barely being able to survive in the wilderness, to building out amazing skyscrapers, to even flying out to the moon and back. It would be such a shame to let all this collective knowledge and progress go to waste by only focusing on the present.

A lot of the problems we have now, have already been encountered in the past — they just look a little different. For instance, a problem with addiction to books in the past, morphed into addiction to television, then to computers, and now in its most potent form yet, addiction to smartphones. Like it was mentioned in the The Social Dilemma documentary, these are the same problems that we've encountered before. They've just taken on a different form.

But not every problem we encounter today needs to be solved by a new app or new gadget or even new technology. Sometimes, all we need to do, is look to the past for answers.

From the standpoint of personal self-improvement, you should look to the past, study it, find out where you failed and where you succeeded, and use that to figure out how to shape your future.

Tags: #Reflection #SelfImprovement

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