Category: Direction Matters

If your goal is to wander, get lost, find your way back around, lean into serendipity, and surrender to the universe—then by all means, figure it out as you go.

If your goal is to arrive at a specific destination, in a timely manner, following an optimized route—then, figuring it out as you go is a bad strategy. You would want to invest in research, planning, and coaching instead.

We all have goals in life.

And while you might think one of the above mentioned ways might be better for attaining any one of your life goals than the other… the reality is it’s probably better to approach all of your goal pursuits from more of a hybrid perspective.

All optimized and no wander leaves little room for serendipity, awe, or surprise.

All wander and no optimized leads to missed targets and wasted time, energy, and effort.

Take a look at some of your life goals. Where do you land on this spectrum?

Work meetings are to a business what GPS is to a traveler.

Each business has a direction and a target. The meetings keep us heading in the right direction to reach the target. Along the way, however, things change.

…People change, resources change, clients change, markets change, situations change, etc.

Without a meeting of the minds of those who run the businesses, it’s inevitable that their direction and ultimately, the target they hit, skew.

Work meetings discuss recent wins (so as to reinforce and double down on them), recent failures (so as to learn and adjust from them), upcoming events (so as to plan proactively for them), and overall strategy (so as to further improve and develop the actions taken by the team), amongst other things.

We’re all familiar, if not intimately so, with work meetings.

My question for you is: how familiar are you with family meetings? Spousal meetings? Muse meetings?

…Because just as work meetings are to a business what GPS is to the traveler, so too are family meetings to the family or spousal meetings to the spousal relationship or muse meetings to the art/creative gifts you share with the world.

Without them, deviations from the once clear direction and target become inevitable.

It’s nothing short of impressive how much time, energy, and resources we pour into work meetings.

…Maybe it’s time to appropriate some of that time, energy, and resource into other (assumingely equally if not more important) dimensions of our lives as well.

The problem with not looking inward and becoming aware of our thoughts is that it’s hard to adjust our life direction fluidly and in accordance with our innermost wisdom if we don’t.

And the problem with most of the thoughts we initially become aware of when we kind-of-try, is that they’re only the superficial layers. They’re the surface-of-the-pond-thoughts that are distorted by the viral videos, click-bait headlines, tabloid storylines, meaningless games, empty entertainment topics, and so on.

It’s as though our life’s GPS is at the bottom of our mind’s pond, facing upward, and we’re trying to read what it says, but we can’t see past the ripples, bubbles, and breaks in the water on the surface caused by the firehose impact of modern media.

We must sit. We must let the pond settle. We must focus our inward gaze on what’s being shown underneath. The answers are there. Our inner GPS is always working. It’s simply a matter of, can we read it? Or, maybe more appropriately, are we willing to do what’s necessary to bring it’s directions into view?

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P.s. Looking for specific, actionable ideas that’ll help you understand your life’s direction? My 30-Day guide will help.

Today, I was asked to write down what I want my personal legacy to be… in one sentence.

After a few moments of reflection, here’s what I came up with: An honest, hard working, generous guy who loved the people in his life, the work he did, and the gifts he left behind.

The benefit of seeing that written out now… is that I can live it forward rather than trying to figure out what I spontaneous chose to do looking back—after the fact and when it’s all over.

Spontaneous wandering won’t lead you to your highest, most realized personal legacy. You have to envision what that looks like now and use it as your life’s GPS from here on.

Do you have a life/legacy GPS?