MODULE 1: INTRO

“I’ve got to figure it out,” I lamented to myself in between sips of my delicious vanilla bean latte.

“What’s wroooong with me? Why don’t I know what I want to do with my life? And who the HELL are all are these superfreaks who seem to have it all planned out?”

It was the spring of 2006 and I was a college grad without a clue.

At the time, this uncertainty made me want to vomit with anxiety. In the years since, though, I’ve come to discover something insanely interesting and helpful, something that I wish I would’ve known back then:

You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going in order to get somewhere great.

It doesn’t matter who you are— it doesn’t matter if you’re fresh out of high school, a recent college grad, or an “adult” who’s stuck within a job or a path that’s not your own.

Regardless of our age or occupation, most of us suffer from “shoulditis,” the horrible affliction in which we’re convinced that we “should” have it all figured out.

“I should know what I want to be when I grow up.”

“I should know exactly where I’m going.”

“I should have my life figured out by now.”

And so on and so forth…

But what if the “shoulds” are a myth?

What if we don’t need to know the endpoint in order to discover our paths— in fact, what if this uncertainty was an advantage rather than a disadvantage?

YOU DON’T HAVE TO KNOW THE ENDPOINT

Guys, our logical brains want to have everything planned out. Our crazybrains think that if we only do enough analysis, we can think our way into the answers, into the “perfect” job or career.

Even worse, our crazybrains think that if we can’t think our way into the answer, we’re screwed.

Thing is, this just isn’t true.

In the years after graduation, I began talking with lots of people. I sought out people who were insanely fulfilled with their life paths and who were super happy OMG!,  and I began asking them simple questions– questions like “How did you find your path? How did you know that this was what you were “supposed” to do?”

And I found that almost all of them had a really strange answer:

“I didn’t. I didn’t know.”

HUH?

At first I was like, “This must be a fluke,” but over time it was proven time and time again: Many of the happiest, most awesome people I knew didn’t start off with a grand plan. 

Most of them didn’t start off with a clear vision of what the endpoint would be, and yet they ended up doing insanely fulfilling, passion-igniting, made-for-them things.

They disproved– no, CRUSHED the myth that in order to “find your path,” you’ve got to figure everything out right away and have a clear vision of what the endpoint will be.

THE MYTH OF THE GREAT IDEA

While driving from my hometown of Boise, Idaho to Seattle earlier this month, I listened to lots of gangsta rap an audiobook of Jim Collins’ and Jerry Porras’ Built to Last (for the seven-millionth time). The book is based on a six-year research project designed to determine what separates enduring great companies from similar companies that failed to become great.

During the course of their research, the authors found something that really surprised them, which they dubbed “The Myth of the Great Idea”:

Few of the visionary companies began life with a great idea. In fact, some began life without any specific idea and a few even began with outright failures.

– Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, authors of Built to Last

The authors tell the story of Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard, the founders of HP, forming a company in their garage without any clear product idea. In their early years, they produced products that varied from automatic urinal flushers to bowling foul-line indicators to fat-reducing shock machines.

Masaru Ibuka, the founder of Sony, started off with a rice cooker that failed in the marketplace.

J. Willard Marriott, founder of Marriott Corporation, began his business by opening an A&W Root Beer stand– he just didn’t know what else to do at the time.

In fact, almost none of the great companies in the research study began life with a great idea or a grand vision of the product they’d create. All they knew was that they wanted to build a great company.

BAM!

Guys, the evolution of a great personal path isn’t a whole lot different than that of a great company (Nerd alert! Nerd alert!).

It’s not our job to figure it all out right now. It’s not our job to come up with “The Great Idea.”

We don’t have to know exactly where we’re going— we don’t have to begin with a “great idea” or a “grand plan” in order to build a great life—in fact, no matter how we try, we often can’t.

No matter how we try, we’re often doomed to failure from the start IF we try to “think” our way into the answers using the conventional method of career planning, which I like to call “Think really hard and figure things out!”

The way I see it, there are four major failures inherent within the conventional method of figuring stuff out (all four of which this course will address).

Throughout this module, we’ll take a look at each of the four failures in order to understand why “normal” methods for finding a fulfilling career path often fall flat.

Then I’ll introduce to you an alternative– and infinitely more effective– way to drop the “shoulds” and to forge a path of your own: E & E, the process that you’ll be learning about and practicing for the remainder of this course.

Let’s gooo!

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Next: Move on to Section 1.1: Internet Shopping