Chosen Path

When I reflect on my path, there are often people who arrive at a similar point to me. Path making is so complicated that they normally veer off. I bump into others and have fun memories of the portion of the path we have shared, but it is very unusual to stay in a similar place. Life happens. 

I have learnt to hold lightly to the teams that I am a part of, no matter how much I like them. To hold lightly to the friends that live nearby. Unless it is your life partner, where you have made a commitment to make the hard decisions, and do the work, to forge a path together. With others you care about, paths can cross, fade, reconnect, or run alongside. 

I am fortunate to have a deep bench of friendships, but everyone is wrestling with their own struggles. I do not see enough of anyone. 

Some have taken very traditional career paths. They have built skills and knowledge around a long-term goal of a role they want. They have a clear picture of where they want to be. Others respond to choices life presents, as life presents them... still building, but with less premeditation. Some choose incredibly simple lives, massively reducing what they spend and living more contemplatively. Others have chosen noble professions, but are grappling with financial struggles. 

Some people’s paths are harder to identify with, because there is insufficient overlap. 6 degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. A chain of “friends of friends”. The further along that chain, the harder it can be to understand other people’s decisions. This is true even of immediate friends with no chain to obscure. 

We make different choices, and our choices frame future choices.

Red Pill on Blue Pill

Shifting Winds

When you make choices, you narrow future choices. When you get on a path, you seldom get an opportunity for broad re-evaluation. An opportunity to say, “right, I am going to start from scratch.” 

When attempted a clean slate in 2014, I removed the stake in the ground of where I physically had to be. Normally that stake is your job. If you have kids, their schools. If you have a house, you can rent it... so maybe that is a medium rare stake. You can also change jobs and schools. The change is not a trivial one. 

I packed up a single week’s worth of clothing, carrying my world on my back. Australia and New Zealand chose themselves as my first destination because of a wedding invitation. 

Ironically, just before I left, I met my future wife. She was heading in the opposite direction. She is an Anthropologist and was transitioning from being an academic to engaging with the corporate world. She was shifting from living for the love of learning to a pragmatic and purposeful engagement with applying ideas. 

When I came back, we had to figure out a balance of two visions of the future. A challenge in building autonomy is our decisions impact others, particularly if we want to share our journey. 

How do we agree on the stakes? Our choices are path-dependent, and what happens affects what happens next. We are never in complete control. There is an element of randomness to it all. Within those constraints and shifting winds of change... we get to have an influence on the direction.

...and he's off

Big Picture

No one has a view of the whole picture, or the ability to process it. We do not know in advance what the correct destination is, or what our future choices will be. We make our choices based on what we already know, with a limited glimpse forward of the possible consequences of our actions. There are individuals whose choices go against the grain, but if you look at a big enough picture, prejudices and bias starts to show. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky opened up the field of Behavioural Finance and the study of cognitive biases. When you look at groups and group decisions, you can get a sense of how our processes work. This doesn’t mean we aren’t individuals. But we are individuals who don’t live in isolation. Our choices are affected by the choices of those around us. They are affected by the constraints of physics, time, and our very human limits. Context is everything when grasping at the randomness, ambiguity, and complexity of wrestling with personal choices and understanding. 

Big Picture

 

Who Are You?

The thing you are (currently) doing does not define you. Knowing who you are, is the heart of choosing a path. The practice of Neti Neti (Not this, Not that), is realising that you can’t be something temporary. Problems should not be valued in and of themselves, or you are not really trying to solve them. You are making yourself a permanent part of the problem and extracting rent. You only genuinely try solve a problem if you feel a sense of ownership. Then it is worth your while to make your role in the problem redundant. Redundancy becomes something worth celebrating. If you make yourself redundant and there is no commitment to you as a person, then you are let go. They’ll say, “I paid you. It’s fair”, and lose no sleep. But that is not the point. Value is created over very long periods of time. Real meritocracy starts with the grunt work of building foundations. If you are building something long-term, there needs to be a deeper commitment. Participation, while you are involved, becomes all about ego and identity. Real wealth is created when you have a significantly more stable self-definition to reinvest in. When you have a path that learns, builds, and creates in a way that is connected to what really matters to you. 

Self-Definition

Going Wild

Everything has gaps and holes. That is the key idea behind biodiversity and wilding. We are wild. We are rough on the edges. We don’t know, and we don’t have full insight, and we try, and we make mistakes. It is that imperfection that allows us to drive forward as an active participant in the chaotic change. If you want to be someone who decides, you need to build the skill to do the emotional work required for self-reflection. You also need to know yourself and the level that you want to go to. You need resources. You need guides, and you need to guide yourself. You need commitment, because if you are going to do the work, you are going to need to do the repair work. No risks or actions can be taken without regular maintenance, repair work, and downtime. The five core points of yoga are proper exercise, proper breathing, proper diet, proper relaxation, and proper mental health. We focus on our actions/choices, but the support/foundation that allows you to make choices is just as important. 

Free-ranging Longhorn Cattle

Choosing Decision Makers

To outsource your decision-making, you need to develop trust. I like to believe in a world where we can have open conversations. The reality is that you can’t just decide to be honest, and vomit truth on someone. Truth needs unpacking. Trust is built. Both need time. It is dangerous to outsource decision-making, in part because we attach responsibility to the decision-maker. We attach identity to the decision-maker. We attach respect and blame. To outsource decisions, you need trust and confidence. Trust that the other decision-maker has your best interests at heart. Confidence that they have the competence to do what it is that they claim they will do. The decision about who to hand over responsibility to, is as important as the actual skill and knowledge required to make the relevant choice. Evaluating decision-makers is a skill in and of itself. Badly evaluating decision-makers allows you to pass on responsibility, and have a target to pin blame on should things go wrong. It does not solve the problem. 

"The Scapegoat"

William Holman Hunt (1854)

 

Greener Pastures

I am on the job hunt after a gap from the corporate world. I stepped off the ladder in August 2014 with the intention of letting my engine be the breadwinner, while I focused on things that did not make money. My motivations for returning are complicated. I am also returning to South Africa. Again, a complicated decision. There are always trade-offs, and the grass is seldom greener on the other side. Or if it is, it is because of the fantastic manure you cannot see at a distance. I am not naïve about the challenges of a corporate environment. You can also sell the entrepreneurial world too hard. A lot of people who have rejected the world of money, and the world of work, to pursue their passion… struggle. We hear stories of the successes, but unfortunately not all good ideas are good business ideas. Often advice is what the giver would do in that situation, but forgets that it would not be the giver in the situation. What we know is the world is random, complicated, and ambiguous. The best you can do is put yourself in a position to be able to change your mind.

The Cotswold Way