How to know when your life goals are right

When I was in my second year at Georgia Tech, my girlfriend at the time asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I had just spent a few weeks that summer at the World Cup in France with my sister. We travelled across the country, ate amazing food, met interesting people, visited fascinating cities, and joined the world in a mutual celebration of soccer. It was a life altering experience. So without thinking too hard about it, I responded that I’d like to live all over the world, learning new languages, exploring different cultures, and meeting different people.

This was not the right answer, or at least not the one she was looking for. She wanted stability for a family, a big house, a yard, security, and all of the other signs of success that young Americans dream of achieving. I remember feeling a little silly and irresponsible, thinking that backpacking across Europe was a something you did after high school or college, and not a life ambition. I was going to have to grow up, and so were my dreams.

Twenty years later I was married to an entirely different woman with a family, a big house, a yard, and security. We were very stable. We had achieved our dream, the dream, at a reasonably young age, but there had, of course, been compromises. I had commuted huge hours for years to get to work, my wife had been working in a job that she had become increasingly disillusioned with over the years, and our savings weren’t what they should been considering how hard we worked. The stress caused both of us to be short-tempered, and we occasionally fought over things neither of us really cared that much about. We needed a vacation.

Getting away

My wife is Polish, and every other year we’d make a summer trip to Poland to visit her family and visit another destination while we were already in Europe. My wife noticed that Wrocław, Poland had just been declared Europe’s best destination in 2018, so we decided that it would be a perfect place to spend a week.

We got an AirBnB right on the old square. It was summer, people were everywhere, the food was amazing, and we fell in love with the place. Spending a week in this beautiful foreign place reminded me of my youthful dream of living, working, and exploring places like it for my entire life. A dream that I thought I had outgrown.

For the first time in decades, I stopped to look at my life, what I had and what I truly wanted. I had a big, beautiful house in a very desirable location, but I felt more alive in a tiny apartment that was a two minute walk from 50+ restaurants and bars. I had a convertible sports car in my garage, but I didn’t even want to own a car at all. I just needed one to get to work. We’d lived in the same city for 20 years (stability!!), and we had stopped exploring it long ago.

I was outwardly successful, but unfulfilled. I had spent the previous two decades perfectly executing a carefully planned strategy to achieve someone else’s dream. I didn’t really need any of the things that I had, and in order to get them we had sacrificed the things that were truly important: family time, international travel, language classes, etc.

Iterative planning

It is often said that “execution trumps strategy”, and this is true. A great strategy counts for nothing if you can’t realize it. What is also true is that executing the wrong strategy, no matter how perfectly, is equally useless. Building the perfect product that no one wants is an excellent way to make a large investment disappear. Often business leaders miss a giant opportunity as it zooms by them while they are focused on executing their current strategy, not realizing that what they are trying to achieve no longer matters.

Markets and technology change fast, and focusing on what you think you’re supposed to do, or what the rest of the industry is doing, can blind you to what you really should be doing. There are a few really effective techniques for cutting through the clutter of information and assumptions and getting at the true core of the problem. I have personally used both First Principles and 5 Whys to help me understand a problem, decide on a goal, and formulate a strategy. But that’s just the first step.

Once you’ve done all of the hard work to determine your ultimate goal, and plot a path to get there, you have to periodically and objectively re-apply these frameworks during your journey to evaluate your progress, your approach, and whether the destination still makes sense. During this evaluation it’s critical to avoid the Sunk Cost Fallacy and Confirmation Bias (First Principles thinking can be especially helpful here) to ensure that all of your efforts are the best investment the company can be making at that time. If you decide that it’s not, then it’s important to have the courage to learn, adjust, and move on. This unemotional detachment from a goal and a plan is often what spells the difference between a successful project or startup and failure.

Life pivot

After returning from our trip and having taken this long, hard look in the mirror, I found a remote-only job 3 months before the first Coronavirus case was announced in the US. We sold our big, beautiful house, and moved to Wrocław in the middle of a pandemic. My life is now so much smaller and quieter, but it’s filled with the things that I care about. The clutter has been removed and everything is simplified.

My Polish is coming along nicely, but I only have another 16 months to master it because we plan on moving again next summer after 2 years in Poland, and then again, and again… It turns out my plan to be a digital nomad was just ahead of its time, and not a childish dream after all. My teenage self didn’t get a lot of things right, but it did seem to know itself. Without all of the clutter of other people’s dreams and expectations, just knowing what made me happy and inspired me, I was able to come up with a goal that was truly aligned with who I was and what I wanted. A great example of First Principles thinking.