I want to share with you a version of myself who would have made no sense to her own five-year plan.
For most of my early career,
My path was pretty straightforward.
I got my business degree,
Went into corporate,
And spent years working in marketing and business leadership.
My work was strategic,
Structured,
And very much connected to what I had studied and what I had built my career around.
And then,
Somewhere along the way,
I started getting really excited about things that didn't seem to fit that path at all.
Personal transformation,
Neuroscience and consciousness,
Even quantum science.
Then coaching came into my life.
And from there,
Teaching,
Writing,
Sharing ideas,
And creating content.
If you had asked me years ago how all of that would connect to my business degree and corporate career,
I probably couldn't have given you a very convincing answer.
It wasn't a straight line.
But looking at it now,
I can actually see that it all connects to something that has been part of me for a very long time.
Learning,
Understanding people,
Communicating ideas,
Knowledge sharing,
And helping people see things differently.
I just couldn't see the full connection while I was living it.
And that's really what I want to talk about today,
Because I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to know where something is going before we're willing to follow it.
We want to know whether it's practical,
Whether it will lead to something,
Whether it fits into a career,
Whether it makes sense,
Whether it will eventually pay off,
Etc,
Etc.
And I understand why.
Nobody wants to spend years going down a path that leads nowhere.
But I think we're sometimes asking excitement to do a job it was never meant to do.
Excitement doesn't necessarily tell you where you're going.
It can simply tell you where to look next.
Let me say that again.
Excitement doesn't necessarily tell you where you're going.
It can simply tell you where to look next.
Think about walking into a dark room with a flashlight.
The flashlight doesn't show you the entire room.
It shows you what's immediately in front of you.
You don't need to see the other side of the room before you take a step.
You just need enough visibility to know where your next step can go.
And once you take that next step,
You can see a little more.
I think following excitement can work in a similar way.
Something catches your attention,
You become curious,
You explore it,
And that exploration gives you information you didn't have before.
Maybe you discover that you actually want to pursue it.
Maybe you need someone.
Maybe you learn something that changes how you think about your work.
Maybe it leads to another interest.
Or maybe you discover that it isn't for you at all.
And now you know.
And that matters.
Because we often think clarity needs to come before action.
But a lot of the time,
Clarity comes because of action.
You don't always figure out the next step by sitting still and thinking harder.
Sometimes you figure it out by taking the step you can actually see.
This is also why I think we have to be careful about dismissing something simply because it seems unrelated to what we're doing now.
You might want to take a class that has nothing to do with your career.
You might become interested in a subject that doesn't seem useful.
You might want to start writing,
Creating videos,
Learning an instrument,
Practicing a new sport,
Traveling somewhere,
Or having a conversation that you can't quite explain your interest in.
It doesn't necessarily mean that thing is going to become your new career or lead to some major opportunity.
You may not.
But it doesn't have to have an obvious purpose before you're allowed to explore it.
Sometimes we only understand the significance of something.
After we've lived through the next few steps.
This is where I think the idea of a bridge of incidence is useful.
Not as a way of trying to predict what is going to happen,
But simply as a way of understanding how life can connect things that didn't appear connected at the time.
You have one experience,
It leads to another,
That leads to a person,
An idea,
A decision,
Or an opportunity.
And eventually,
You can look backward and see how those things became part of the same story.
But you couldn't have drawn that line at the beginning.
You had to live it first.
And I think this is true for a lot of the path we end up taking.
Think about someone who takes a class simply because they're curious about it.
And that class introduces them to a new field.
Or someone who starts a site project with no clear business model.
And through that project discovers a skill that eventually build a career around.
Or someone who moves somewhere because they feel drawn to the experience.
And that move introduces them to people and opportunities they never would have encountered otherwise.
The point isn't that every one of these decisions lead to something bigger.
The point is that you can't know what something is connected to until you allow yourself to experience it.
And this is where I want to make an important distinction.
I'm not saying,
Just do what feels good and everything will work out.
I don't believe following your excitement is a guarantee of money,
Success or some predetermined outcome.
But that's not the point anyway.
Simon is not a business strategy.
It's not a five-year plan,
And it's not a guarantee that something will work.
Sometimes you follow something you're excited about.
And discover that it isn't actually what you wanted.
Sometimes,
It leads nowhere obvious.
Sometimes,
The value of the experience is simply what you learn from it.
Or the joy you experience while being fully immersed in something that excites you.
And sometimes it does open a door you couldn't have seen before.
You don't know which one is going to be.
And that's the point.
If you require certainty before you move,
You eliminate a lot of possibilities before you've even had a chance to discover them.
So instead of asking,
Where is this going to lead?
I think a more useful question is,
What is this showing me right now?
What am I curious about?
What am I excited to learn?
What keeps getting my attention?
What do I want to explore?
And then,
What is the next step I can actually take?
Not the entire plan,
Not the final destination,
Just the next step.
Because sometimes the excitement isn't pointing you towards some future outcome at all.
Sometimes,
It simply brings you more fully into the present.
You try something because you're interested in it.
You immerse yourself in it.
You enjoy it.
You become curious.
And for that moment,
You're not worrying about whether you will eventually become something useful.
You are actually experiencing your life.
I think that's actually so much more important.
Because we can turn almost anything into another form of optimization.
Even excitement.
We can start thinking,
Oh,
How can I use this?
What would this lead to?
How can this make money?
How does this fit into my bigger plan?
And suddenly,
Something that would simply bring us joy becomes another thing we have to make productive.
Maybe we don't always need to do that.
Maybe sometimes the experience is enough.
And maybe sometimes that experience will lead somewhere we couldn't have predicted.
That's why I don't think the goal is to follow every impulse.
It's to pay attention.
Notice what genuinely interests you.
Notice what makes you curious.
Notice what gives you energy.
And then,
Use your own discernment to decide whether there's something worth exploring.
You don't have to commit your life to it.
You don't have to know what it means.
You don't have to know where it's going.
You can simply take the next step and see what you learn from being there.
Because the path often becomes clearer after you've started walking it.
And when you look back later,
You may see connections that were completely invisible when you were standing at the beginning.
Not because you have the whole plan.
But because you were willing to follow what was interesting enough,
Meaningful enough,
And alive enough to take you to the next place.
So if there's something you've been pondering upon lately,
But you've been dismissing it because you can't explain where it's going.
Maybe you don't need to figure that out yet.
You can ask yourself.
What am I genuinely curious about?
What keeps getting my attention.
And what's one small step I could take to explore it.
You don't need to hold back.
You just need to know where you're looking next.
And sometimes.
.
.
That's enough.
Now,
Go be yourself.
