Where Is This Taking Me?
Are You Moving Forward or Just Moving?
I’ve become fully convinced we spend a concerning amount of time confidently heading in the wrong direction because “I’m working hard” gets confused with “I’m getting there”. Movement often feels like progress until we check the destination we’ve arrived at. Busyness, how hard we’re working and even what we’ve achieved aren’t reliable indicators of progress…
Direction has been heavy on my mind this week. HEAVY! For context, I started a second job driving an Uber alongside my day job recently and on one of the first drives I was confident I knew better than the GPS, only to end up on an unnecessary motorway.
Cue awkward apology and prayer that the customer wasn’t in a hurry. Luckily, he saw the funny side and we ended up having a good conversation but goodness me, I kept wondering, “how much time have I wasted?”, “I could have picked up another passenger and made more in that time”, “will he give me a 1-star review???????”.
It did leave me thinking about how confident we can get that we’re making progress simply because we’re moving. No self-awareness, no review of results, no looking back at actual progress, just the most basic conclusion: movement = progress.
Sadly, in life we don’t get a notification that we’re moving in the wrong direction. More often, we just have a random awakening and question what we’ve been doing with our lives. Not anymore though; today we delineate between movement and direction. Just because we have a dream destination and we’re moving doesn’t necessarily mean we’re heading in the right direction.
Everything is determined by direction. Everything.
One Degree Off Course
Travelling on a flight one degree off course at the point of departure is almost completely negligible, but over a sustained period of time and/or distance, the difference between intended destination and where we arrive can be staggering.
As jarring as I find clichés, this one rings true when we’re able to get past the surface. The direction we’re headed in determines our actual destination, not our wishes, hopes, dreams or intentions. We can want, hope and pray for the right things and completely miss them.
It’s at this point some of us get mad, lose heart and even blame God. We don’t realise that wanting and wishing were never the important factors to getting what we want from life. The direction we’re heading in is the important factor.
It’s rarely ever one big, dramatic turn that impacts our destination, it’s often loads of small, seemingly trivial but explainable and justifiable “small” turns that are a few degrees off the right path. Or sometimes we just drift off course.
No one wakes up and thinks to themselves, “today is the day I begin to sabotage my career, relationships and life”. It’s the small decisions we make which are perfectly fine in isolation that accumulate and compound over time. We need to pay attention to direction.
This is what makes the flight analogy so poignant to me. The pilot doesn’t need to do a massive turn to miss the destination and in parallel, passengers likely won’t even notice they’re going off course. The sky…still looks like…the sky…if the window is even open at all.
Drifting off course feels harmless because it doesn’t require any decision-making whatsoever. It just happens and we literally just realise we’re off course. For me, this is why self-awareness is important and the humility to course-correct.
We shouldn’t wait until we’re completely off course to start making better decisions and course-correcting. Don’t get me wrong, there’s no “perfect journey”, we just have to keep making adjustments to ensure our direction remains aligned to our preferred destination.
Where is This Taking Me?
I’m a big fan of telling myself the truth, asking hard questions and generally doing my best to be self-aware. Ironically, self-awareness made me realise that most times questions asked are around speed and distance covered vs distance from goal. Rarely ever about direction.
“Where is this taking me?” serves the role of a compass on our life journey. Most self-awareness questions focus on the past like things that happened to us, the effort we’ve put in, errors we’ve made, what we learnt, etc, but this shifts our focus right now to the future.
We would have to take stock of our current position and extrapolate what our lives would look like in future. I submit to you, this is the best way to identify a small shift off course while it’s still relatively “straightforward” to fix. By the time the typical backwards-looking self-assessment questions catch it, we likely would have already reached the wrong destination.
Ask the question of our careers and we’ll notice how quite a few of us climbed quickly or otherwise, towards a title or role we never actually wanted, just because climbing felt like progress. The pay cheque however compensates so we end up settling for the career we didn’t want in the first place.
Ask it of a relationship and we might notice two good people heading towards different destinations unintentionally. No one sits down and decides “I want something different from my partner” or “I want to be less close”; rather, we absorb an experience and our nervous systems quietly recalibrate out of self-preservation. This could make it hard to catch if the question isn’t consistently asked.
Something that makes the wrong direction interesting in relationships is that it may not immediately result in it ending. Rather than outright withdrawing energy we would typically pour into it, we likely would redirect that energy - into work, a hobby, friendships, etc.
Interesting because they haven’t actually checked out, they’re just investing elsewhere which could ultimately lead to the end of the relationship. It’s not done out of spite - regardless of how it feels - it’s an adjustment or response to stimulus.
Whose Responsibility is MY Direction?
Imagine confidently ignoring the route the GPS provided because we “knew better”, ending up on the wrong motorway and claiming we weren’t responsible for it. This is what we do with our lives - we get information/counsel/wisdom, sometimes even obvious signs but we ignore them because we’ve mistaken momentum for progress.
We realise we’re heading in the wrong direction and refuse to take accountability for it. This isn’t to suggest that life doesn’t sometimes force our hand but I believe if we truly searched our hearts we would realise that we are responsible for the majority of our consequences.
No one else is permanently responsible for your 🫵🏾 direction. Loved ones can flag it, our faith can guide it and people that hold us accountable may ask us the question if we aren’t asking it of ourselves, but fundamentally, the ongoing responsibility of asking “where is this taking me” and being honest about the answer is ours and ours alone, every single time.
Concluding
Circling back to the Uber story I started this newsletter with, what I didn’t mention was I also got a ticket for doing an illegal turn. There are few things I hate more than parking tickets, driving fines, etc. It literally feels like I’m throwing away money for free. I also feel the same about paying interest or cash points charging us to withdraw money but I digress.
Going in the wrong direction can be costly and the further along we are, the more costly it is. And it’s not just the cost of the course correction; there’s also the opportunity cost - not the cost of what was lost, but what we never actually got.
“I could have picked up another passenger and made more” - that was the opportunity cost of that Uber ride. I’m not suggesting we dwell on things that could have happened or grieve a life we could have lived; I’m suggesting we consider the full cost of the wrong direction.
With Uber, I could quantify it - how much time and distance were added to the original journey plus other fares I could have claimed in that time - so it stung enough to make sure I check the map faster next time. But life’s wrong turns aren’t an easily itemised bill.
We can’t generate an invoice for a career, relationship or family we never had but that doesn’t mean the cost doesn’t exist. It just means we’ll never know for sure what it was. Truthfully, that’s okay, but we want to do our best to ensure we don’t look back on lives with the thought, “I wish I had…”.
Many thanks for reading and for your patience! And as always, make a decision that future you is grateful for.
Have a great week!
CT
