The Way Forward.
I think there comes a time in everybody’s life when you realize that the infinite possibilities of youth are starting to diminish day by day. The day you realize that it’s too late to become a footballer, a ballerina, or an astronaut.
And as you get older, the day after today becomes more and more certain. There are fewer possibilities of what may happen because you’ve already experienced a lot. Also, all the decisions that you made in your life point to a specific direction (at least they would do if you’re living in a coherent manner).
This reduction in the number of possibilities is not necessarily a negative thing. We can’t always remain potential, at some point we have to become something.
And yet we don’t have to give up and expect that every day will be the same. There is a middle ground somewhere. If we can keep the childlike excitement and curiosity about life, each day can be different, and we can make meaningful progress in our lives.
We are able to change jobs, to move to another country, to get that divorce that’s been in the back of our mind. However, as we get older, change becomes more scary because we’ve invested more in a specific area of our lives, and changing it feels like throwing everything away.
However, this is typically less painful than we think in hindsight. Also, a lot of the experiences and skills that we gain in one part of our lives often can transfer across to different parts of our lives.
For instance, I worked incredibly hard on my first business, which was a consultancy called Mäd. In the end, it didn’t work out, and I had to close it after 8 years.
Does that mean that I’m a failure? Does that mean that all the effort that I spent growing and maintaining that business went to waste?Obviously the answer is no, it shaped me into the person that I am today. It gave me plenty of connections, and I used it as a trampoline to jump and go on to higher and hopefully better things.
However, at the time, it really felt like it was a devastating loss.
And so while we think of our lives – how they will be in a year from now and five years from now – it can be quite scary because the future is so nebulous. Very often, we don’t have clarity on what the right decisions are, but we know that we have to make some type of decision. And when we do make a decision, that’s going to close a whole bunch of options to us. Right? If you’re going to study physics, you’re not going to become a footballer.
But we shouldn’t fight this because it’s a natural part of growing up. We’re going to be closing 99.9% of all the options available to us in our lives. We’re going to ignore and just focus on a very, very tiny sub-section.
We will be much happier if we accept this reality.
