Progress and punctuated equilibrium

Almost done with my first year in graduate school, as strange and unlikely as that seems. In the scale of my life's successes so far I have probably never made so much progress in such a short time. A year ago at this time I had just quit Dillard's and was moving into my apartment here, with no job, and no clue what I would do next. I knew that if I was still working at Dillard's by the time I reached my 2010 birthday, my life-expectancy would be considerably shortened, and that there were really no better opportunities for me if I stayed in Longmont, so I leaped blindly off the metaphorical cliff, all the way towards unemployment in Fort Collins. Actually that seems to be a pretty common thread for me, leaping blindly towards something better, from high school in Pueblo to a first undergrad at CU, from physics to psychology, from post-graduation unemployment to my second degree program, and just about all the major decisions I have made since then. It's an exciting way to live, for sure- spend a few months considering all your options and thinking a lot, and then immediately implement whatever radical changes have resulted from all that deliberation. It drives everyone around you crazy, for sure, and can make for a lonely life sometimes, since without incremental changes or at least a lot of discussion and planning, few people from any one stage of your progression keep up with you very well. Even those who might really like to tend to lose track of where you are and what exactly you are up to after a while.
A model or framework from recent political science classes, which comes from other sciences originally describing evolution, is that of punctuated equilibrium. No doubt it is not a perfect model for describing the personal evolution of individuals, but it does apply rather nicely to lifestyles like mine. Of course, there are also other approaches to change, for instance incremental change, adjusting in small doses to changing environments, without the huge dramatic shifts I am so fond of. There is also the possibility of a sort of negotiated planned change, where if one has lots of people in one's life, one might develop changes in concert with those other people. These could be radical or incremental changes, but by being coordinated with other people, they produce little or no upheaval among surrounding people. I suppose this would be equivalent to states developing their own policies, but within the context of negotiated plans and goals. There may be isolated cases where the original biological evolution idea might allow for this dynamic too, but I doubt it. People plan, and can choose the direction of their own evolution somewhat, as well as the direction of evolution of their states, but evolution is not directed.