The Movie The Big Short does a great job of explaining a complicated thing simply and with feeling. I’ve always been really fond of that movie, even though its subject was the background anxiety of much of my young adulthood, having graduated highschool in 2009. 

One of my favorite moments in that film is when someone involved in the background of Michael Burry’s firm, Scion Asset Management, comes in to the office to give him some shit. Michael suggests that his shorting of the housing market was correct, but just “a little early.” This character responds emphatically that that is the same thing as being wrong.

Being too early is the same thing as being wrong.

So is being too late, I’d imagine, but that much is obvious.  

I don’t particularly care about the timeline of centi-millionaire short sellers, but that bit of wisdom holds true for things a bit more in my scope. Like multi-generational living, parenting, retirement, home schooling, and baking. These are all things I care about a great deal, and not being too early or too late is important to them. 

It’s easy to fantasize, and it’s easy to regret, functions of misbegotten earliness and tardiness each. It’s tough to nail things, timing wise, and harder still to be sure you’ve done so, or even to be pretty confident. The trick then, I think, becomes the making of choices you’re happy with as you fantasize about them, as you embark upon them, and as you look back at them. Easier said than done, of course. But that’s the goal. 

When I’m making a table I’d like to enjoy the process of making it as much as I enjoy sitting at the thing. That way if I don’t finish, or the table gets broken or spilled on, I’ll still know it was time well spent. 

We ought to have goals that are purely good, I think. Pure and good, that’s first, with no regard whatever for how impossible they might appear to be, or be in fact and in process.