Today is a deep cut. To keep you reading, this post is an analogy not actually about math.

I have been doing a lot of soul searching these last couple of weeks. I suppose that you could say that life hasn’t gone exactly to plan or maybe the way I had hoped. Math is used in science to describe or model life and the natural world. I have been thinking about what I want to change and I thought how eerie parallels some of issues in life line up with mathematical concepts.

The Equation of a Line

When you have a plot with one data point, what direction is the line going? For all you non-math types you can’t have a line with one point. A line can go in infinite directions and slopes when you only have one point.

The metaphor for life is without experiences there is not enough perspective to determine success or happiness. The only thing that you really know is where you are currently. You can have an idea and maybe even a plan to create the next experience, but that doesn’t mean that you will like it or it will be right for you. Not everyone has a supportive spouse to let you walk away without an income for over a year.

For me, I thought I knew where I was going with my life when I went to college. Once it didn’t materialize the way that I thought it was going to go, life happened more without direct deliberation than with it. I cruised along twenty some years until I figured out I wasn’t happy with my line. The problem is, I just realized that I haven’t done anything different to change the direction of my line in the last year and a half. I just hoped that it would change by itself.

Derivative Calculus

Now it is going to hard. What is a derivative? I think that the simplest definition is calculating a change. In application, you can either calculate a point on a line where a change has a particular value or you can calculate the value of a change at a particular point. I might have lost some people already here. I know that in my academic career, this is where I started to struggle with math. I took this class twice to get a better handle on the fundamentals of calculus.

Let’s put it into practice. Looking at your experiences (your line) at what point does a particular change occur. When does your life go sideways or when did the focus or desire change. The straighter the line, the easier it is to calculate or even see on a plot. Unfortunately, life has a way of having our experiences not line up neatly. This is why you need complicated math like calculus to figure it out.

I am pretty good at getting the equation setup, I might even muddle into the answer. That is all kind of useless without doing something with the data. I remember from my days studying Latin, the teacher saying there is no sentence without a verb. Action is required to communicate a thought just as action is required to make change.

Integral Calculus

I think that this one will be simpler; calculate the area under your line. What do you want the sum total of your life to be? Just like in math, positive experiences are additive and negative experiences are subtractive to get the total result. If you don’t like how it adds up, you have to go back to the other steps and make changes. Figure out where you went wrong step two and aim for different experience step one so that you can be more satisfied overall, step three.

So, the truth… I have unknowingly hidden in my Toolbox Fallacy. I like to analyze my situation and pretend that I am planning my next steps without any real results or changes. I have been fearful of moving onto my next professional career steps without acknowledging or even realizing that I was already in one. I have been doing small jobs and handyman work without embracing this might be who I really am.

I wanted to build a lifestyle business because I wanted a creative outlet with practical business deductions and control of my output and life. I already have a lot of that. My fear of failing (or running out of savings) has caused me to not put out effort in marketing and working on what is already paying working. I like the work, I like the freedom,

Don’t get me wrong, I still want to build a lifestyle business. Just maybe doing handyman type work isn’t what I am doing in the meantime but another point in my line.