Off The Well-Worn Path

Most people choose the well-worn path for their lives. It’s a path that many have walked before and many will walk after. This path has detailed maps, clear signs along the way, and guardrails firmly in place. People choose this path because they genuinely want it, they choose it for its reliability, or they choose it out of social need or pressure. The well-worn path: college degree, storybook career (doctor, nurse, lawyer, accountant, engineer, financial analyst, police, fire, etc), marriage, house, kids, bigger house, empty nest, retirement, grandkids, sunset. This is an excellent path. If you’ve chosen it, and you’ve found success in it, you’ve accomplished something incredible. Anyone on this path will tell you it isn’t easy, but the rewards are immense.???

If you’ve been successful on the well-worn path, this post isn’t for you. This post is for people, like myself, who find themselves on a different path, either through circumstance or choice. Perhaps you were on a well-worn path and got knocked off by a break-up, divorce, or firing. Or maybe you were never on the well-worn path in the first place. Either way, you’re making your own way now the best you can without a map, signposts, or guardrails. To you, I’d just like to say:

?“Welcome! We’re out here together. We’re gonna figure this out.”

I don’t have signposts for you. Or guardrails. What I have is a suggestion on how to orient yourself so you can find your way using the core advantages afforded by life off of the main road: time, flexibility, and potential. When you’re not consumed with the responsibilities of the well-worn path, even if you’d like to be, you have a surplus of time and a lot of room before you hit the ceiling on your potential happiness. Simply put, you’re not where you want to be, you don’t have a lot depending on you, and as a result, you have bandwidth to spare. In this position, you have an incredible combination of resources. Here’s how I’d suggest orienting yourself to deploy them effectively. Speaking from experience.??

Use your time to observe, your flexibility to experiment, and your dissatisfaction to drive constant improvement.???

When you’re on the path less traveled you can spend much of your time in observation mode. You aren’t in a crowd of people anymore, or perhaps you never were, you’re on the edges. From here you have a view of the crowd that nobody else can see. You also have more bandwidth to make observations because you aren’t consumed with the responsibilities of the well-worn path. You get to watch people live the life you want or make mistakes that you’d like to avoid. You can collect a huge amount of data through observation.

Once you’ve collected your initial data, it’s time to design some experiments. Without much depending on you, you’ve got a tremendous amount of flexibility to run experiments. So try new things. Maybe you want to date different kinds of people, start a new career path from the bottom, live in a big city or out in the country, lose weight, eat better, learn an instrument, etc. Choose an experiment and run it.??

Running experiments will yield more data. You’ll learn new things. About yourself, what you like and don’t like, and what you’re good at or what you’d like to improve on. Running experiments gives you new information. Take that information and design new experiments. Iterate. Learn. Keep going. Let your dissatisfaction with your current place in the world drive you to constantly learn and improve.?

Stay in rhythm. Observe, experiment, improve, repeat. Make this your mantra. Your source code. You don’t even need to commit to a particular direction or goal. You can use this process to find your goals. The key piece is that you keep moving. Always forward. Don’t let yourself stagnate. If you don’t know what you want, you just know that you don’t want to be where you are, that's fine.?

Observe, experiment, improve, repeat. Your path will emerge.??