Happy Easter.
I’m old, and I’ve been around the block. The years have hewn off some of my sharp edges. Looking back, I can see that the piss and vinegar of my youth sent me in directions that I would not choose for myself today. I was so sure that I knew what I needed to do. To my credit, I stayed the course and was “above all else, true to myself.” But did that serve me in the end?
My conclusion on this question is split. On the one hand, yes, it absolutely served me. I had questions I needed to answer. I needed to test my mettle. I wanted to know what I was made of. The challenges I pursued revealed the answers to these questions. In that sense, I would not be as solidly certain of who I am today had I shied away from exploring and answering these questions then.
On the other hand, while my earliest efforts were rich in self-actualization, they were sparse in the conventional measures of success. As an example, I graduated class of 1993 from college in the San Francisco Bay Area. Had I stayed put and joined almost any company in Silicon Valley in the following year, I would have ridden the wave of the Dot Com boom. Instead I took a rust belt job in Buffalo, New York.
I think back on that time and feel as if I had blinders on. I had not been curious. I had not paid attention to what was happening all around me, right in front of my own nose. I was too stuck in pig headed perseverance to notice.
These days I think the wiser tack is to figure out where the Universe is flowing, and jump into the middle of that.