By Jason Feifer
You are six steps away from your goal. So am I. So is everyone.
And I mean it! Regardless of our circumstances, career paths, or past accomplishments, we are all six steps away. But here’s the kicker: We can never see more than one step ahead.
This is a little mental trick I came up with recently as a way to help a friend of mine. He’s stuck in his career, working a job he hates but unsure of what to do next. “How do I know what direction to move in?” he asked me. Should it be music, which is his first love? Or tech, which he’s interested in? Or content production, which he’s developed a knack for?
He’s been asking me this for months. But because he can’t decide which step to take, he’s instead taken no step at all. He’s stayed in place. And so, in effect, he’s chosen to continue being miserable in his current job.
We’ve all suffered some version of this, haven’t we? We become paralyzed by opportunity. We fantasize about making a change but fear that our fantasy won’t match reality. It’s a torturous kind of paradox, really. We become trapped by our own escape plan.
As I grasped for a way to help my friend, I reflected upon how zigzagging my own path was. I moved between jobs that seemed unrelated to each other. There’s no way I could have planned it all out -- literally nobody, myself included, would have once predicted that I’d be running a magazine called Entrepreneur. And yet, the result is undeniable: I’m happy and fulfilled…and yet, at the same time, still have much more I want to accomplish.
That’s when it hit me. Nobody can see the pathway ahead of them. We’re all blind. But the people who succeed are the ones willing to walk in the dark anyway.
And so, I developed my theory of the six steps.
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