Life stories are messy. They don’t have an obvious arc that can be told in one simple story. They are layers upon layers of stories, stories of all kinds. Our life stories include unfinished stories, stories that take unexpected left turns, funny stories, nostalgic stories, healing stories, hopeful stories, inexplicable stories, stories we tell, stories we hide, partly made-up stories, stories about relationships, stories where we’re the hero, and stories where we’re the villain. We’re far too complex for simple story arcs to ring true.
Sometimes when we’re frustrated by what’s happening or not happening in our life, we don’t understand why things aren’t going according to plan. And then later, we look back and see with complete clarity why things happened the way they did, and we’re grateful.
A Story Like This
Ever since I shut down my last business, a medical equipment finance company, in late 2015, I’ve felt jaded, cynical, and unambitious. I haven’t jumped into anything new, at least not a fully committed way, even though jumping right into the next big thing is my M.O. There are multiple reasons for this hesitation, which is a whole other story. However worthwhile the reasons, I’ve still been frustrated at my own lack of motivation to start a new business over the past few years. I’ve been disappointed at my lack of career progress and financial abundance. I haven’t understood why my trajectory seemed to stall out.
Then the COVID pandemic hit. I see now that if I were the owner and CEO of a small business right now, I’d be struggling and stressed. There’s a high likelihood that it would have gone out of business during this crisis. I’d then have to lay off my team, and I might have lost everything yet again. I’ve witnessed several entrepreneur friends go through all of this recently, and I don’t envy any part of it. I’m so grateful to not be a CEO and business owner right now.
Message from Another Me
I don’t believe in fatalism or destiny, but I do believe in a quantum universe with infinite forking paths. I also believe in time as an illusory construct. Perhaps a version of myself from an alternate, parallel universe already lived the path of starting a business in, say, 2018, and crashing it in 2020. Perhaps that business-crashing version of myself, which, in my spiritual worldview, shares a soul with me, sent a warning to the other alternate-reality selves to not go down that path because it sucked. The message passed along through our common soul to this universe’s version me, a few years earlier in the timeline.
My subconscious response was to dampen my motivation to start a business, though without consciously understanding why. Further, the few times I’ve gotten excited about some new entrepreneurial opportunity or another, things just didn’t quite work out for whatever reason. It all just felt so frustrating, and that’s not a feeling I normally tend to dwell in for long. I usually just pick a cool idea or project and get to work. But not this time, and now I see why. I avoided a particularly crappy outcome, instead forking down a different and hopefully better path.
Renewed Ambition
Perhaps this is all a story I’m making up with the benefit of hindsight. That is, a sort of spiritual historical revisionism, a narrative corrective lens, a vocational backspace button. So what if it is?
Regardless of why, I’m now experiencing stronger ambition, motivation, and passion than I have in years. In recent years, I’ve wanted to learn Unity software and educational game design, but it felt always like homework, a slog. I couldn’t motivate myself to actually learn much or stick with it. But now I’m finally deeply enjoying the online Unity course that I’d attempted to take three times before. I’m really digging the educational game design books I’d bought but never enjoyed reading. I’m hashing out ideas for educational video games and new businesses. The timing just seems right for me now.
The market timing seems right too. Schools are closing. Education is changing. Esports are booming. The world is going virtual, virtually overnight. Learning to design educational video games and develop in XR has a bigger and brighter near-term potential than it did a year ago. Perhaps my alternate future selves are now saying, “Yeah, this path is a good one. Go for it!”
Accept and Enjoy
I’m not going to discuss my current business ideas here or predict that I’ll get these ideas off the ground, partly because I know they’ll evolve and partly because I don’t want to dispel the energy I currently have for building them. But more importantly, these specific ideas aren’t even the point. The point is to remember to not get too upset when things aren’t working out. We’ll likely look back years down the road with nothing but gratitude and relief that we didn’t get what we thought we wanted. We’ll see more of the story, and rewrite it yet again as we continue to evolve. This is how I finally came to understand that it’s really for the best that I didn’t start a business in recent years, just as I’m now grateful I didn’t make it into the NFL as young athlete (yet another story for another day).
We can adopt that high-level perspective right now. As in, we can pretend it’s 25 or 50 years down the road and we’re looking back on our life. We can see the perfection from this vantage point, and accept that every difficult or mysterious step along the way was absolutely necessary. Even though we may not know all the details yet today, we can rest assured there’s beauty in the process, that we’ll get where we’re going whether we anxiously fight the process or enjoy the ride.