Fact is, most people don’t really know where they’re going.
It seems like the tools for figuring it out are everywhere. You can buy books that will give you an idea of direction. But you can read them all and still have no idea.
All they do is give you a map to where they’ve been, and that really isn’t that interesting.
What you really want is a map to the unknown– a Wild West. A place that’s unexplored enough so that it’s exciting to go, but with enough markers so that there’s still some precedent.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been lost (with a smartphone doesn’t count), but when there are no signposts at all, it can get very scary. No markers of progress. Nothing to tell you if you’re doing it right or wrong.
All this and the sun is going down. It’s getting darker, which means you’re losing time if you don’t move.
Your real quest, when it happens, will feel increasingly terrifying. That is its nature. It is testing your resolve.
It gets more real the deeper you go, which means more at stake, more people invested, and more failure the bigger it gets. So every day a little scarier.
And yet most people still don’t know where they’re actually going.
It’s unfortunate, but the only real way to understand where you’re going is actually to build up your instinct.
That takes lots of data, which takes a lot of time.
But you can’t wait until you know. You have to go on a journey now– the biggest, most ambitious one you can find.
At least then you’ll be learning. Not the way people who work in corporations claim to be “learning” (which is bullshit).
Real learning happens from coming extremely close to error. Scars.
Last week I was climbing a tree. Up at the top was this beautiful, human-sized nest that an artist had made.
The higher you got the more the chance of breaking your bones if you fall. You feel this in your chest.
But it’s also the natural way of things, to climb.
Young people climb because it’s in their nature.
Older people don’t climb any more, but hopefully they did when they were young.
Have you climbed? Where did you go? Was it high enough?
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