The Butterfly Effect is widely known to be the cause and effect of your choices in life. Something seemingly small can have a great and lasting effect later on in life. I have been very fascinated by it and love doing research on it.
Each day, each decision we make can and will have an effect on our future. You hear stories of people who do something irregular than their norm and all of a sudden things start to change for them. For example, a man who has been in the same dead-end job that he hates for years and breaks his routine by actually leaving for lunch instead of staying.
He goes down the street to a local deli shop and has an encounter with someone that owns a business in the field he is very interested in. The conversation goes well between the two. Three days later he decides to go out for lunch again at the same spot as before. He runs into the business owner that he previously met and they talk it up again. This encounter turned into a job offer from the owner and now his life has changed. He is now in a job that he enjoys and is happier.
Take ownership of your path
When we relate The Butterfly Effect to our everyday lives we can create our own version. Making good and healthy decisions, versus careless and reckless ones. I choose to do the things in my life that make me happy. Taking ownership of what I want and doing my best to make things happen are key to how I want to end up later on down the road. What’s the title of your movie?
Sometimes accidental things turn into amazing solutions. Like how certain inventions have come to life.
Examples:
Goodyear rubber: Charles Goodyear In 1839 accidentally dropped some India rubber mixed with sulfur on a hot stove and so discovered vulcanization.
Microwave Oven: In 1945, the heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a chocolate bar he had in his pocket.
Matches: In 1826, John Walker, a chemist in Stockton on Tees, discovered through a lucky accident that a stick coated with chemicals burst into flame when scraped across his hearth at home. He went on to invent the first friction match.
X-ray: Wilhelm Roentgen, Professor of Physics in Wurzburg, Bavaria, discovered X-rays in 1895—accidentally—while testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass. His cathode tube was covered in heavy black paper, so he was surprised when an incandescent green light nevertheless escaped and projected onto a nearby fluorescent screen. Through experimentation, he found that the mysterious light would pass through most substances but leave shadows of solid objects. Because he did not know what the rays were, he called them ‘X,’ meaning ‘unknown,’ rays.
Coca-Cola: In 1885, Atlanta banned the sale of alcohol, so Pemberton created a purely coca-based version of the syrup to be mixed with carbonated water and drank as a soda. The result was a perfect beverage for the temperance era — a “brain tonic” called, Coca-Cola.
Conclusion
The Butterfly Effect shows that small things can change things in the future.
“If this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis… then the future, just like the past would be present before its eyes.”
P.S. Laplace
