Driving Cars
I had a good friend text me in August asking me how I celebrated “the big day.”
I asked him if he would mind clarifying since I didn’t have the slightest clue what he was referring to. He responded with a screenshot of an annually recurring event in his calendar titled Jarred quits investment banking.
I appreciated the humor and thoughtfulness of the gesture given how familiar he had been with the triumphs and tribulations that characterized my experience as an investment banker. But beyond making me chuckle, it got me thinking about what my decision to leave my Wall Street cubicle in pursuit of greener pastures represented in the broader context of the journey (or dance) that is the adventure of my life. It also got me thinking about the role that values play in mediating actions and outcomes.
So here goes.
If (1) our values are the rules that we use to decide how to act and (2) how we act and what we do dictates where we go then (3) our values determine what we ultimately become.
One caveat. Our values only determine what we become to the extent we embody them. Unembodied values are nothing more than ideas — figments of our imagination. And while imagination is great, it alone will not get us where we want to go.
Quick disclaimer: in the coming paragraphs, I plan on getting metaphorical about the metaphysical (and making several bad puns). So if that’s not your thing, consider this your lifeline. If that is your thing, hop in and buckle up, let’s go for a ride.
If we are the drivers of our cars, then our values are the GPS systems (ideally) propelling us towards the worthiest of all destinations — the truest version of ourselves. The road ahead will certainly be treacherous, but as the ones sitting behind the wheel, there appear to be a few things we can do to try to maximize our chances of a successful road trip (life). I’m going to talk about two.
(1) The first is to recognize that we, and we alone, are the drivers of our cars–the sovereign and autonomous determiners of our destinies. And while we are sure to encounter many hailstorms and unexpected detours, we must acknowledge that there will only ever be one person wrangling the steering wheel, stepping on the gas pedal, and pumping the brakes.
(2) The second is to continuously assess the instructions that our GPS is spewing at us–ensuring that the values dictating our decisions are guiding us in a direction we deem worth heading towards.
The art of living then lies in (1) internalizing our role as the one, true chooser of our choices and (2) wielding the almighty faculty of choice to determine when we should continue on our current trajectory (abiding by the latest GPS directions) and when we should recalibrate (charting a new course towards truer pastures).
Any success we can hope to achieve in either of these realms (establishing a sense of agency and making decent decisions) will largely depend on the questions we ask (or don’t ask) ourselves. After all, the unexamined life is not worth living.
It is not sufficient that we simply do things. Simply doing things is nothing more than wandering. And while I am not opposed to using wandering as a GPS calibration tool (not all who wander are lost), I am opposed to using it as the core navigation strategy.
When we find ourselves consistently doing things, it is important that we ask ourselves where we might end up (and who / what we might become) if we continue to do these things. And once we have an understanding of what that place (and person) might look like, we must then ask ourselves if we have any desire to arrive there.
I say “any” desire because desires are tricky–they’re not always our own.
We have a peculiar tendency to borrow desires from others (and then think that we didn’t). This tendency leads far too many good soldiers to spend their lives working at jobs they hate so they can buy things they don’t need in order to impress people they don’t like — a modern-day tragedy.
There are many kinds of dangerous desires, but the most dangerous by far are the borrowed ones that we don’t think are borrowed.
Figuring out what we truly value / desire is hard. It is tempting to look for shortcuts — to see what others did to get where they wanted to go — and then try to follow suit. And while that is not an unequivocally bad strategy, it tends to bring about a few issues.
The first is that we might not actually want to end up where the people whose desires we are borrowing ended up. We wouldn’t photocopy Jim’s MapQuest directions that he used on his road trip from San Bernardino to Portland and expect it to get us from Houston to Jackson Hole. Yet many of us choose to live our lives according to values that aren’t true to ourselves in hopes we will arrive at a destination we deem worthy.
Our actions, guided by our values, propel us toward some destination. And if we operate on borrowed values, we will arrive at a borrowed destination. I subscribe to the notion that it is better to live our own path imperfectly than to live another’s perfectly. That is to arrive at a (potentially) ungrandiose-seeming destination of our choosing rather than a rad-looking one that we don’t actually care much for.
Don’t get me wrong, I see the appeal of the former. Rad-looking stuff seems rad and making decisions is scary. When we decide where we truly want to go (what success looks like), we also implicitly decide where we do not want to go (what failure looks like). Some people might opt into (or be eternally distracted into) never deciding where they want to go. And while, on paper, this gives them a 0% chance of failure, it also gives them a 0% chance of success. I would argue these people fail by default.
Tomato tomáto.
Discovering what we truly value in life is often an iterative process of discovering what we do not value. This process (for better or for worse) cannot be done from the ivory tower — we must jump into the arena. We must do so however on our own accord. We must do so because we actually want to, not because someone tells us that we should want to. Suggestions from others can only get us so far.
I generally think that advice is overrated and that questions are underrated. Advice is a print-out of MapQuest directions from someone who most likely wants to arrive at a different destination than we do. Questions, on the other hand, are the tools that we can (and should) use to discover what our truest destination looks like and then to determine if our GPS is currently set to direct us there.
The problem is that questions are scary and advice is comforting.
Questions often lead us down paths that involve us admitting to ourselves that we have spent the last [insert scary number] years of our lives chasing someone else’s dream.
Advice often leads us to running comfortably on our hamster wheels. It might even allow us to run very skillfully on our hamster wheels. But the thing about the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat (or a hamster).
I think that part of our resistance to exploring life’s key questions — the answers to which stand to determine the trajectory that ultimately defines who we become — is a lack of urgency. Most of us act like the clock isn’t ticking — like we have all the time in the world.
I won’t claim to know what lies beyond, but there’s a decent chance this is our only shot. As Drake would say: our one dance.
Every person has two lives and the second begins the moment they realize they only have one.
We can choose to leave our destiny to chance — to spend this life driving blindly towards some destination and hope that we like it once we get there. Or we can choose to ask ourselves if we truly want to end up where we are heading. And if the answer is no, grab the steering wheel, quit our job in investment banking, and get ourselves trekking back in the right direction.
We will need every ounce of courage we are able to muster along the way. The courage to not only ask the right questions but to trust our answers. Not to trust that our answers are correct, but rather to trust that there are no such things as “correct answers.” And to know that choosing not to ask ourselves these questions is most definitely still a choice (a bad one I would argue).
Even with the right questions and answers, it is not enough to know…we must do. The universe doesn’t give us what we want in our minds, it gives us what we demand with our actions.
So here is to making sure we are driving in the right direction. Not because we can or we should, but because this is probably the only road trip we’ll ever have.
The world will ask us who we are, and if we do not know, it will tell us.
Here is to asking ourselves the questions that will enable us to discover who we are. And when the world comes beckoning — and it most certainly will — here is to telling it (not with our words but with our actions) who we are.
Others can walk our path with us, but no one can walk it for us.
Onwards.
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