This Is Not What I Expected

When I left my tech job on a quest to discover what I wanted to do in my life, the last thing I expected was to launch a website that looks like the one I’m soft-launching today (I’m still tweaking just about everything, hence the caveat).

In the last post, I talked about letting our true desires guide us to our dream life. The obvious follow-up is—how do we know which desires are true? The answer is we often don’t. I didn’t, and it was a long, fascinating, and often difficult journey to figure it out, but it made me who I am today. 

I identified my true desires by following many desires that turned out not to be true. The key was to trust my intuition when something felt off and let it go: Take the lessons I learned (mostly about myself), add an item to my mental “not this” list, and move on. Sometimes it was a “maybe this, but not quite this way”, so the next experiment was clear. Sometimes it was a dead end, and the clues to the next experiment took a while to emerge. But I kept listening, and they eventually did.

This is now my way of life. I stopped trying to plan what my life would look like more than a few months into the future. Instead, I focus on the things that speak to me in the present, knowing they will lead me to the next step and truly living life as an adventure. This isn’t for everyone, but regardless of our personal situation or how much stability we crave, we can always look at our lives and see what small steps we can take to move toward what seem like our true desires. Whether they are or not—there lies growth. And possibly the path to some wildly unpredictable places.

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