![]() Without knowing it, I had embraced a question that would shape my decisions: “How do you design a life that doesn’t put work first?” Staring at those four items, in that order, was scary. Since 2013, this list pops up on my phone at 8:30 a.m. My final list included four items: health, relationships, fun & creativity, and career. This simple decision was my first conscious commitment to exploring the possibility of a life not centered around work. Next, my head told me to list “career,” but my heart told me to list it last. After recovering from my health challenges, I would do anything to stay healthy. I followed his example and created a daily calendar entry of priorities for my life. I remembered how he had a list of words that reminded him of what he values, something that popped up on his calendar every morning. I wanted to design a career that worked for me and decided to start with a simple commitment, one inspired by a talk from Earl Jones, an MIT alumnus who had shared his leadership principles with my class in grad school. Not because of the contradictions in other people’s lives, but because it makes it difficult to live in contradiction in your own life. Once you ask these questions there is no going back. Are they happy? What kind of pain or challenges are they dealing with? Is this how they want to be spending their time? Rather than participating in meetings as a good team member, I observed them as a visiting anthropologist. – David WhyteĪfter returning to work, I felt like I had gone through a major transformation, but to my colleagues, I appeared back to normal. ![]() It takes conscious acts by individuals to test these edges. These boundaries, however, should always be tested to see if they are actually still real. If there are clear boundaries to behavior within a given field of endeavor, then there is also great freedom to adapt and imagine within those lines. I started to push the edges of that reality and wasn’t sure what would happen. It wasn’t enough of a feeling to make me do anything dramatic, but it threw me off just enough that I was forced to pay attention to my life in a different way.Īs I started to pay attention, I slowly came to realize the reality that I had been living in was an invisible bubble, one of my own creation. When I returned to work after regaining my health, I had discomfort that could only be described the way Khe put it, as a pebble in my shoe. Eventually, this convinced him to embark on his own pathless path. Slowly, he became more curious about that feeling and realized that despite his external success, he had become a “passive participant” in his life. When he got raises or promotions the discomfort would subside but never disappear. It’s a little bit like having a pebble in your shoe, where you’re walking and something is off, and it’s mildly uncomfortable.” He reflected, “It definitely wasn’t a sudden realization. However, it took him a long time to make that decision. Fifteen years into a successful career in finance, he walked away to find a new path. Pebble in My ShoeĪs I recovered from my health challenges, I entered a phase of restlessness typical of anyone that eventually makes a life change.Ī friend, Khe Hy, provides a perfect description of this phase. My conclusion from this is simple: beyond the headlines of dramatic life changes are almost always longer, slower, and more interesting journeys. Experiencing this makes it easy to spot these kinds of phases in other people’s stories and I’ve done my best to highlight them in my writing and podcast. On my way toward leaving my job, I never had a clear picture of my next step. People want to hear about bold acts of courage, not years of feeling lost. Choosing to leave full‑time work was not a single bold decision but a slow and steady awakening that the path I was on was not my path. Even now, several years after doing so, when people ask about my journey, I’m more confused than you might expect. The ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn’t mean anything. If you’re interested in reading more or purchasing the book, jump on over here. It’s been read by over 25k people worldwide. This is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of my book, The Pathless Path.
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