Have you read the Intro to Module 2 yet? If not, go back and do that now! (Remember: When accessing each module’s content, start by clicking on the “Module 2″ button directly rather than beginning with “Section 2.1″ from the drop-down menu.)
HEY THERE, AMAZE-PERSON– welcome to Module 2!
To get started, watch the video below in which I’ll tell you a little bit about the story of my own career path, how I discovered the E & E process, and what’s behind it.
One of the most difficult things that people have difficulty grasping about the E & E process is that fact that you can start taking steps toward your truest career path without knowing exactly where you’ll end up.
You don’t have to– and often can’t– plan your way all the way to the endpoint.
Here’s what I mean by this…
“Five years ago, did you know that you were going to end up marrying Gretchen?” I asked my newlywed friend Rob, my eyes wide with curiosity. “I mean, how did you figure it out?”
Rob set his frothy pint o’ beer down on the table and looked at me with disdain.
“Therese, I’m not trying to insult you here, but your questions are so freaking STUPID! I’ve already told you a million times– there’s no possibly way I could’ve know that I’d marry Gretchen. Five years ago I hadn’t even met her yet! I didn’t even know that she existed!”
“You mean you started out without knowing who you’d marry at all?” I asked in dismay. “And you’re saying that… you didn’t plan to marry her from the beginning?”
“Well… of course not. I mean, how could I have known?”
I chewed thoughtfully on my gardenburger patty for a couple of minutes, slowly digesting what Rob had just told me.
His amazing wife, Gretchen, didn’t come into his life through careful thinking or planning. He hadn’t, after some hard-focused brainstorming session, finally thumped his fist on the desk and exclaimed, “I finally know— it’s GRETCHEN who I should marry!”.
In fact, no amount of brainstorming, analysis, thinking or planning could have resulted in the answer of “Gretchen”– not ever. Instead, the answer came about as the culmination of a chain of events that he never could’ve foreseen.Finding your career and your life path, it turns out, isn’t all that different than finding a hot and funny and amaze wife named Gretchen. Although you might have always known that you wanted a hot and funny wife, you had no clue what the “right” hot and funny girl was gonna end up looking like or how or when you’d find her.
In other words, although you might have an idea of the qualities you’re looking for in a mate, you don’t start off knowing the exact person you’re gonna marry, and no one expects you to.
In fact, to hold someone up to this expectation would be ludicrous.
So why do we expect this when it comes to our careers?
THIS is what I meant in Module 1 when I said that the happiest people I know didn’t start off with a specific endpoint in mind. They couldn’t have possibly “thought” or planned their way into their specific situations simply because– well, because the chain of events leading up to their current situations was utterly unforeseeable.
We cannot think our way into marrying Gretchen, because there’s no possible way to foresee the series of circumstances that will lead up to our encounter with Gretchen.
In this sense, it’s not that our thinking or planning are invalid. (In fact, thinking and planning about the TYPE of person we want to marry is very much recommended.)
It’s just that, when it comes down to the specifics– when it comes down to HOW those qualities will end up culminating and WHAT the end result will look like and HOW or WHEN we’ll end up coming into it– well, we’re not psychic.
That’s right– we aren’t psychic. Simply put, there’s just no possible way to foresee the circumstances that might come our way and where we might be led from there. There’s no way for us to know who we’re gonna end up marrying.
MY Gretchen is The Unlost.
For all the thinking and analyzing and agonizing that I did post-college graduation, there’s no possible way I could’ve foreseen the circumstances in which I find myself today, six years later– sitting on a patio far from home, sipping a strawberry smoothie whilst writing a weird blog called The Unlost and creating an e-guide to help people find their truest paths.
There’s not a chance in a million that I could’ve dreamt this up six years ago, and yet I feel closer to living my truest path than ever before.
For better or for worse and more often than not, we find ourselves in our current situations not due to careful planning, but instead due to a series of circumstances, twists and turns— through “chance encounters,” people we know, and long chains of events that build one upon another.
Cal Newport, one of my fave authors and one of the smartest guys around, will totally back me up. In a 2010 blog post, Newport tells the stories of two fulfilled and accomplished individuals: an astrobiologist and a surfer:
“If I actually sat down and said I had planned any of this, I’d be lying through my teeth.”
So begins an interview with Andrew Steele, the astrobiologist who was launched to scientific fame in 1996 when he debunked the evidence for life on Mars identified in meteorite ALH84001.
As Steele recounts, his transition into astrobiology was unplanned. He had just finished a dissertation on high resolution bacteria imaging when he heard the news that a “geezer from NASA…thought he found life on Mars.” He realized his imaging skills could help settle the question, so he called up NASA and got a piece of the meteorite to test.
“Did you do that Ph.D. hoping you’d one day change the world?”, the student continues.
“No. I just wanted options.”
“You didn’t know you were going to go into this at a young age?”, the student persists.
“No. No. I had no idea what I was going to do. I object to systems that say you should decide now what you’re going to do. That’s BS. Don’t close doors.”
An interview with Al Merrick, the founder of Channel Island Surfboards, provider of surfboards for many of the sport’s top athletes, expressed similar sentiments to his young interviewers.
“People are in a rush to start their lives, and it’s sad,” he drawls, his voice soft with surfer cool.
Merrick had been a successful amateur surfer growing up, but his path took him far from the breaks, through two years of college and a failed stint as a flower grower and a boat builder, before he returned to the sport and started shaping surfboards. The fiberglass skills he picked up in boat building, combined with years of competitive surfing, gave him an edge.
“My designs worked, so I started making them for better surfers,” he explains.
“I didn’t go out with the idea of making a big empire…I set goals for myself at being the best I could be at what[ever] I did.”
Still don’t believe me?
Think back to your own past. A year ago (or five years ago, or ten years ago), could you even have guessed that you’d be where you are now? If you’re like most people, your answer is probably, “Heck no,” which once again disproves the myth that we can necessarily “think” our way into the “endpoint.”
So rather than planning our way into our paths, guys, we evolve our way into our paths.
Rather than thinking our way into the answers, we live our way into the answers.
And we don’t have to stumble our way there by accident– we can find our way into our truest paths by using E & E, a process that’s been proven time and time and time again.
Ready to learn more about E & E? Let’s continue on to Section 2.2: An E & E Overview.
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Next: Move on to Section 2.2: An E & E Overview.