What are you building towards?

Five-years-from-today will eventually be here. For me, I’ll be.. um.. [counts on fingers] yeah, I’ll be 40 years old.

The thought of turning 40 is a wild one, but no more wild than the thought of turning 16 back before I could drive, or turning 21 back before I could legally drink, or turning 30 back before I ever thought, “I should probably have my shit together by now.” I eventually turned 16, 21, and 30. The future just keeps on showing up, doesn’t it?!

I’m sure much will be different in the world five-years-from-today. New tech. New cultural trends. My son will be 5(!!!). Maybe we’ll have another kid. Maybe the Browns will be a perennial powerhouse and the Buckeyes will be fighting for the chance to play in the PopTarts Bowl.

But much more will be the same than different five-years-from-today, especially on the individual level. I will still be me. I will still want to do the certain things I enjoy and that matter to me. These certain things were all true for me at 30, so I imagine they will remain true at 40, too.

If five-years-from-today will eventually be here and I will still be me, then what could I be doing today that my five-years-from-today-self would appreciate? What’s something that takes five years to learn or create? I think these questions are important for us to consider.

I’ll go ahead and share what I’m working on for 2029-Nils. This is obviously unique to me, so that either means you can stop reading now or you can continue on if you’re curious about something as personal as my own hopes and dreams haha.

My five-year project.

Five-years-from-today I’d like to be helping lots of people do two specific things:

1. Figure out the direction they want to take their career. I recently started doing this in the form of a career clarity workshop I host every month. The workshop on July 31st will be my third one.
2. Begin moving forward in their new direction. I’m in the early stages of development with this, but I have ideas for how an online community might be a great solution.

A bit about the workshop concept

It’s always bothered me that we’re expected to choose our career path when we’re just 18 years old. I wouldn’t say I was a total dumbass when I was 18, but I was certainly more of a dumbass then than I am now (still part-dumbass today, though!).

Choosing a career is no small decision. It’s how we spend so much of our precious time. It’s also one of our greatest opportunities to affect change both in our lives and the lives of others.

For these reasons, I designed a program that helps people re-figure out what they want to do for their careers. It’s called Taking Back Monday and it’s currently a free, monthly workshop where I take people through nine exercises to figure out what direction they want to take their work-life. It takes less than 3 hours to complete and it all happens live over a Zoom call.

The TBM workshop is pretty good today (IMO!). What I need to do now — and for the next five years — is make sure people know it exists. I’m working on that.

A bit about the community concept

It’s one thing to know what you want to do. It’s a-whole-nother thing to actually do what it takes to move forward in that direction. That’s because there’s a lot working against us as we try to do something new. Here are just some of the challenges newbies must conquer:

• No deadline. There’s always tomorrow when it comes to changing careers.
• Being bad. If you’re going to do something new, you’re probably going to suck at it before you’re good at it.
• Doing what matters. It’s easy to focus on the fun or feel-good stuff rather than the hard stuff that actually moves you forward.
• Betraying your current community. Author Steven Pressfield has a great line in his book The War of Art where he says, “The?highest?treason a?crab can commit?is to make a leap for the rim of the?bucket.” [chef kiss]

For these reasons, I want to build a community that:

• Offers accountability to help combat the challenge of no deadlines.
• Showcases examples of people who went from not-good to pretty-good to help those who are still in the not-good part of their journey.
• Provides visibility into how others are progressing to help demonstrate what type of efforts really matter.
• Offers a new community to people who feel like they may be leaving an existing community behind.

All of this is subject to evolution via experimentation, but I thought it would be fun to put my flag in the ground today and say this is what I’m working towards for Taking Back Monday and my future that absolutely will arrive five-years-from-today.