What you don’t know you will have
The spin cycle of a modern washing machine means that wringing, whether by hand or mechanically, is no longer necessary. But no matter what, you’ve got to get the water out of your clothes. (Miami University Libraries)
Even as a college student, the only practical career I could visualize for myself was to be a teacher.
I didn’t know much about other careers, and my obsession with music precluded my pursuit of even learning about them. So when I went to college, it was to study music education — a worthy compromise.
I never could have imagined where I’d end up. After all, when I was a kid, there was no Internet.
I mean, let’s really think about that. For all practical purposes, there was no Internet until the tail end of my senior year in high school — and even then, it was just AOL via a screechy dial-up connection. Any career that required connecting with people beyond my local area or helping them find ways to connect with people beyond their local area — in other words, the work I do now — was out of the question.
That’s one of the reasons that I get impatient when people spend a lot of time angstily pondering what they want to do with their lives, no matter their age. The thing I always come back to is that they can’t possibly know where their choices will lead them. Our future disappears over the horizon at a certain point, and all we have are the choices we can make today.
We don’t know what we will have in the future. We don’t know what opportunities we will encounter, the knowledge and experience we will gain, and the skills and expertise we will develop.
We will become who we are as a result of our choices, but we simply don’t have access, at the outset, to the long-term implications of that.
That means that our lives unfold as a series of experiments, and we will continually create new hypotheses based on the results of those experiments.
That’s very different from being responsible, at the beginning, for how it will all turn out. We can only pick the right answer for right now.
My life path has taken a number of twists and turns even in the past five months. I knew, this past spring in Atlanta, that I would change as a result of closing the school I had run for ten years. But I didn’t know how I would change. So I could make plans, but the plans would be designed to help me figure out what I wanted to do next.
Importantly, I didn’t wait to take action. I figured things out from taking action. Some of the things that I figured out didn’t surprise me at all — but some of them really did.
The path I’m taking now is the direct result of knowledge and skills I’ve developed in the past several months, which were, in turn, gained as a result of things I did over the several months before that — things I didn’t know, a year ago, that I was going to do.
It’s beginning to look as though most of the work I will do and the revenue I will create over the next several months is going to come from an entirely new business. I did not see that coming.
This week, I went to a talk given by a small business owner whose previous talk I saw a year ago. His business has changed so dramatically that if hadn’t recognized the speaker, I would have never known it was the same business. He mentioned the frustration of feeling like he wasted a couple of years doing the wrong thing, but he also acknowledge that he had to go through the learning process in order to get to where he is now. He couldn’t have known where he was headed until it was time to know.
As difficult as it is to reckon with uncertainty, it’s also what makes life interesting and even joyful. We might as well enjoy the process of building our capabilities and designing our future. Though it might not all work out the way we were expecting or hoping, it’s also distinctly possible that many aspects will work out better than we ever could have imagined as a result of the new assets we will enjoy. I guess we’ll find out.
