My Next Direction

I'm writing this without getting into specifics because I'm in a transition of sorts. I'm currently in one place but am working toward being in another, which requires some changes on my part. One of those changes has been spending less time on social media and blogging. This wasn’t intentional; I just haven't had the time to sit down at the keyboard and type.

Without going into specifics, some of the changes I'm undergoing are a result of the realization that what I'm doing isn’t working. I need to be doing better, and I need to come up with a plan to get there. But that's the main problem: figuring out what exactly "there" is. Where am I going?

This has required some soul-searching to figure out what it is that I want. It’s one thing to want things to be different, but it’s an entirely different thing to have a plan to get there. I'm reminded of Alice in Wonderland asking the Cheshire Cat which way she ought to go. He asks her where she wants to go, and she tells him, "Nowhere in particular." The Cheshire Cat then tells her that in that case, any direction she goes will be just fine. Or, as I think it was more accurately stated, "any road you take will get you there."

The problem I’m dealing with now is that there are too many roads ahead of me, and I need to pick one.

The Value of Focus Something I've always told my children—and anyone else who will listen—is that you can do everything in life. You can be the astronaut, the firefighter, the stunt car driver, the kayaker, or whatever you want to be—but you can't do it all at once. You have to pick one thing and run with it until you've achieved your goal, and then you can switch to do another. If you try to do everything at once, you'll drive yourself crazy and won't get the same results as if you had focused all of your attention on achieving that one thing first.

I’m now in a position where I have to take my own advice. I need to pick the direction I’m headed or where I want to go and find the road that gets me there. I’ve always admired people who knew from childhood what they wanted to be or do. They somehow managed to get there and stick with it for the rest of their lives. It must be great to have that sort of mental clarity about your purpose in life.

Unfortunately for me, I've never had that sort of clarity. Everything is too interesting. As my history shows, I have not taken a straight path to get where I am now. I have been all over the place. I'm not complaining—it's been a great adventure, and I've enjoyed much of it. Some of it has been a bit of a grind. In a couple of those instances, the experiences were awful. But even those bad moments taught me something about myself. They demonstrated that if you put your focus into what you're doing, you can make more progress than if you spread yourself thin.

This is what I've been doing lately: trying to define exactly what I want and why I want it. Once I figure that out, I'll need to start building the road to get there.

The details of my situation don't matter; the lesson is what’s important. I know what needs to be done and how to do it—I've done it before. I believe anyone who does the same will most likely be successful to some degree.