Photo: Nathan HIndman

When did you lose your way?

Bill Green
Aug 26, 2017 · 6 min read

If you’ve interviewed for a job recently or even been on a first date — and let’s be honest, it’s the same thing — you’ve probably gotten the question that everyone hates: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

I doubt anyone has ever given a truthful answer to that question. Well, that’s not true. I gave an honest answer to that question once to an interviewer who made my skin crawl a little. I didn’t get that job. More recently when asked the question, I give a canned but somewhat glib answer hitting the highlights of the past few years and adding that if asked the question five years ago I could never have predicted my life now.

There is another reason I can’t give an honest answer to this insidious question, and I don’t think I stand alone when I admit the truth: I don’t know. I don’t know where I will be in five years because I haven’t given myself permission to think about where I want to be in five years. Instead I focus on my daily duties as a husband, father, small business owner and the many other hats I wear. Sound familiar?

Photo: Nathan Hindman

A friend recently asked me the five year question, which I thought about and replied that I honestly didn’t know. I asked if it was something he was thinking about, and he surprised me with his answer. Not only did he have a pretty clear idea of where he wanted his career to be in five years, he had successfully restructured his job responsibilities to help make it a reality, and even broken it down into daily goals — i.e. to be there in five years, he needs to do x, y, and z every day. Think about that. Do you know one action that you must do every day to create the life you want in five years? If you do, you have my admiration. If you don’t, you’re not alone.

A speaker at an event I attended recently posed the following question: If you had 1o times your self confidence, personal energy, autonomy, self discipline, alacrity, and passion to make a difference, what would you do with it and where would you be in three years?

This is a very different question to everyone’s least favorite interview question because you aren’t trying to convince anyone of anything, but rather answering to yourself: if all barriers and restraints were removed, what would you do with yourself? Again, I had no answer.

If, like me, you can’t answer this last question, let me pose one that I bet you can answer: When did you stop dreaming? That is a question I can answer. If you can’t find a date on your calendar that is circled with red ink with the words “the day I gave up my dreams,” I wager that you can find a general time period — a time where you stopped looking at the horizon and focused wholly on what was in front of you.

The map doesn’t matter

Self-help speakers like to talk about maps because they can sell you one. I’m pretty sure every self-help guru has told audiences large and small that you can’t reach your destination without the right map. That’s not entirely true. Most places in the world have people who will be kind enough to give you directions if you ask. I remember being told by one person I respected that even the best sailor will end up on the rocks without a good map (and I concede that recent history bears that out), but no one, no map, no self-help master, can tell you where you want to go. You have to decide that on your own.

Rather than repackaging platitudes as wisdom, I spoke to someone who knows something about how to get where you are going, particularly in a parts of the world where roads come and go, and maps are more of a general suggestion of where a road or mountain might be than the turn-by-turn directions to which we’ve become accustomed. Nathan Hindman was the navigator of the only American team ever to win the Outback Challenge: Morocco — a grueling multi-day off-road race through Morocco. He guided his team to a victory won not by seconds or minutes, but by hours. My question to Mr. Hindman was simple: How?

Guidance from an expert navigator

He told me that you can’t win an event like that against some of the best drivers and navigators in the world by that kind of margin just by driving skill or following in another’s tracks. You do it by going where no one else went. So how do you look at the broad expanse of desert and get to where you are going faster than anyone else, and do it day after day?

His advice on how to win an off-road adventure race is also some of the best I’ve heard for creating the life that you want to live, rather than stumbling into walls like a drunk in a dark room.

Photo: Nathan HIndman

“You don’t have to take the same path as everyone else,” Hindman said. “You first have to figure out where your destination is for each stage of the race. Only then can you figure out what your path will be. Understand there isn’t really a right or wrong way to get there. You don’t necessarily know what roads will or won’t work. Just because they were viable for someone else doesn’t mean you can follow them. In the desert, windstorms move literal mountains of sand. One day I plotted what I thought would be the fastest route, but because of sandstorms earlier in the week, the road went straight into a mountain of sand. There was no way over it. We had to go back and find a different route. You have to have a destination in mind and constantly be asking yourself ‘is this path or this action going to get me closer to, or farther from, my intended destination?’ Anything you do that is a step toward your destination is the right thing to be doing.”

And therein lies the problem. Over time, my sense of duty supplanted my sense of direction. I feel a bit like the kid who ran away from home, but just kept walking around the block because my parents taught me that I wasn’t allowed to cross the street without a grownup.

The question

So now I pose the same question to you: If you had 1o times your self confidence, personal energy, autonomy, self discipline, alacrity, and passion to make a difference, what would you do with it and where could you be in three years?

Write this question on a note card and carry it around with you. Think about it for a few days. Think big. Find a destination way out on the horizon. How you get there is tomorrow’s problem.

Today, just ask the question that too many of us don’t give ourselves permission to even ask: what do you really, deeply, truly want? By the power vested in me, I give you permission to pursue it.

First place, Outback Challenge: Morocco. Photo: Nathan Hindman
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Bill Green

Written by

Communication strategist, writer, photographer, adventure traveler.

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