When doing what makes sense keeps you from doing what matters.
Being reasonable has probably served you well. You’ve built a business, established a reputation, made difficult decisions, and learned when to push forward and when to exercise restraint. You’ve also become quite adept at explaining why certain ambitions should wait.
The reasons for waiting are usually quite convincing. We’re already working on a rebrand. We just changed the logo. We’re rethinking our advertising, shooting new content, preparing for a speaking engagement, or getting ready for a board meeting. Once that’s behind us, we’ll have time to look at the bigger picture.
Of course, by then there’s another initiative underway. And I understand why. These are real commitments, often involving considerable investment and people who are counting on us to deliver.
But I sometimes wonder how much more valuable those efforts might be if we examined what we’re trying to accomplish before committing to how we’re going to accomplish it.
Because being busy making improvements can feel remarkably similar to making progress. And the distinction gets harder to ignore once you’ve committed the time, money, and energy.
I understand the temptation. I’ve made some spectacularly reasonable decisions myself, a few of which I now regard with considerably less enthusiasm.
The people I work with have often reached a point where their experience, capabilities, and ambitions have outgrown the arrangements they’ve created around them. They’re successful enough to continue as they are, which makes it remarkably easy to postpone what they actually want to pursue.
Success can make postponement feel like good judgment.
And postponement has a price, even when nothing appears to be going wrong. We keep accepting opportunities that no longer excite us, investing in directions we’ve lost interest in pursuing, and making commitments that leave less room for the work we actually want to do.
Perhaps the most unsettling part is how gradually our ambitions adjust to accommodate our decisions. We stop talking about certain ideas. We become less inclined to explore possibilities that might complicate an otherwise successful arrangement. Eventually, we can find ourselves defending a future we’re no longer particularly enthusiastic about.
All perfectly reasonable, of course.
When the Conversation Changes
One of the pleasures of my work is spending time with people who have a lot to say, much of it genuinely fascinating. I hear about businesses they’ve built, ideas they’ve championed, decisions they’ve made, and plans that have been waiting patiently for their turn, rather like passengers at an airport whose flight has been delayed so many times they’ve started making friends with the furniture.
What interests me most is what happens when we consider all of it together. Experience takes on new significance, seemingly unrelated ideas reveal connections, and ambitions that once felt beyond reach begin to look like natural extensions of everything that came before.
This isn’t always a comfortable exercise. Assumptions get challenged, difficult choices come into focus, and I have little interest in telling someone what they want to hear when they’ve come to me to explore what’s possible.
But I love watching the conversation change. People become more animated, speaking about what they want to pursue with the conviction they once reserved for explaining what they’ve already accomplished.
There’s a palpable sense of relief in recognizing a direction that feels right, even when pursuing it will require considerable effort. The choices are still theirs to make, but they’re approaching them with a sense of ownership rather than obligation.
The Luxury We Can’t Afford
We tend to regard time spent examining our direction as a luxury, especially when there’s so much already in motion. Yet the decisions that shape our future are being made in the middle of all that activity, through the projects we approve, the opportunities we pursue, and the resources we commit.
A fresh perspective may sound like a nice-to-have. Knowing that those investments are taking us somewhere we actually want to go is considerably more important.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that time doesn’t necessarily make our decisions easier. It simply makes some of our options unavailable.
There will always be something that makes waiting seem sensible. Meanwhile, the decisions we’re making today are shaping a future we may not have stopped to reconsider.
And if an ambition has survived everything we’ve found to keep ourselves occupied, perhaps it’s worth taking seriously.
After all, you’ve put an enormous amount of effort into making your business, your career, and your ideas work. It seems only fair to ask whether they’re still working toward the future you want.
If you’ve been waiting for the right time to consider what’s next, perhaps a conversation is a reasonable place to start. Let’s talk.