When you can’t decide which idea to focus on

I don’t need soap, but now I have to have them all. (Image by Erich Westendarp)

I can tell you exactly why I don’t teach music lessons anymore (except just for fun).

It’s the same reason that I chose to teach music lessons instead of pursuing a career as a singer/songwriter: I get more out of it.

I am putting my energy and effort where it has the most leverage. If I put an hour into helping small businesses, I get a much higher return on investment than I do putting that same hour into music education.

I learn more, I earn more, and my work has a bigger impact. Plus, believe it or not, it’s more fun.

Now, there are all kinds of reasons why someone could second-guess my choice. For instance, what’s more important than nurturing young minds? But I don’t think the math is that simple. For one thing, getting out of teaching music myself frees up the resources for me to mentor other music teachers.

More broadly, though, I refuse to believe that I owe anyone anything with my career. And I can no longer get behind the notion that I have a fixed identity or a certain role to play. I have no special God-given gift or specific purpose on this earth. I’m just me, and I have the freedom to choose what I want to do.

Honestly, I loved teaching music lessons. However, I didn’t love being broke. No matter how many lessons I taught, I pretty much stayed that way. Theoretically, I could have doubled or tripled my hourly rate, but I have yet to find a client who is happy to pay double or triple the going rate for their six-year-old’s piano lessons. Instead of trying to solve that problem, I looked to other ways of bringing up my income.

There are certainly lots of ways I could have gone, but I’m fine with the path I picked. I have let go of the idea that there is some right answer out there. We get to make whatever choice we want based on the criteria we select. We get to decide what is most important to us and where we’re not willing to compromise.

When we have a lot of ideas for what you could do and we’re trying to choose between them, we can get bogged down by a lot of pros and cons. We can get lost imagining all of the possible futures and weighing them against each other.

To simplify this process, we might temporarily ignore all of the ideas we have and instead return to the question of what we’re trying to accomplish. Then, we can take the action that moves us toward that outcome, which might not even have appeared on our list of ideas.

For a long time, I thought my work had to involve music. Desperate for something that was a more reliable source of income than my existing music-related business, I came up with lots of additional business ideas that involved music. However, they all had weaknesses similar to my existing projects. They didn’t solve my problem. It was only when I looked past music that I found the way forward.

It may be that we’re having such difficulty selecting from among the array of possibilities we’ve gathered for ourselves because none of them do what we need them to do. Maybe they represent perceived moral commitments or passionate interests but there is no clear path to profitability; on the other hand, they might all be dazzlingly lucrative without bringing us joy or fulfillment; or, perhaps, they are too big or too small to fit.

We have no obligation to the ideas we’ve curated, and no responsibility to the world to turn any of them into reality. If we can’t figure out which project to dedicate ourselves to, we can feel free to scrap them all.

If we wish, we can venture forward with any concept we’ve come up with. The quality of our execution over time is at least as critical as the quality of the idea itself. But it’s equally acceptable, having grasped the magnitude of the commitment necessary for success, to opt out. That’s wisdom, not laziness or fear.

Ideally, we find a project that has the perfect marriage of qualities we’re looking for. Lots of upside, minimal downside, ticks all of our boxes. It’s okay to wait until we find it. Having said that, it’s also okay to begin with something less than perfect in the meantime and see where it leads.

When you can’t decide which idea to focus on, you can pick one at random, you can throw them all out and start fresh, or you can just keep doing what you’re doing. The fact that there is no right or wrong is a bit terrifying, but it’s also liberating. Day by day, you can move closer not to where you think you’re supposed to be, but to where you want to go. Your light will shine just as brightly from there as it will from anywhere else.

And if you’d like help sorting out the possibilities, I’m here.