#70 - The Road to Nowhere

Decent advice to my younger self

The road to “nowhere” is probably taking you somewhere. Think about how freeing this idea is?

One of the more taxing aspects of my 20s was this constant pressure to “achieve” something at a young age. If I’m honest with myself, half of my sleepless nights were caused by this underlying root. And while those sleepless nights may have led to some powerful ideas that ended up being game-changing, those ideas were only discovered after much… wasting time at 2am, when an idea came forth and that changed my world (…maybe a little bit, maybe a great deal). But it’s the process of exploring a question, going through the mental maze and hitting dead ends, and turning around and trying to find your way, maddeningly trying to find your way until — sometimes out of nowhere — you exit the maze.

In other words, the process of thinking and getting stuck is maybe a necessary condition to real progress. It’s the struggle that propels you to think harder and to find a new part of the maze to explore. And most of the time, the exploration won’t lead you anywhere. But sometimes, after enough effort and time, you’ll find your way.

And even if you don’t fully find your way or fully discover the answer, the process of trying will bring you closer, and that’s progress towards something.