Holding The Vision That Guides Your Puzzle
choosing what matters to YOU
I read a rather depressing article by a graduating Stanford Business School student. That age may be one of the absolute hardest to navigate as AI matures. As they faced the reality that their chosen path in life may not even be a path in a year they were left with the glaring question “what do I really want to do?” I’ll quote Buckminster Fuller again -
“What is it you were thinking about as a child before someone told you you had to earn a living?”
Dreaming is easy for some, harder for others. The realities people are in can often be very hard to pivot from. Presence is the way through. The Puzzle shows the way. Holding what’s important to you actually guides your presence. While you’re immersed in the application of YOU to the world, your subconscious is constantly looking for ways to connect you to what’s important to you. That choice, what’s important to you, is what makes us all so unique and amazing. So, how do we create the Vision that our subconscious can use to guide us to the meaning we want?
I have tried all the things to organize my life and find meaning - purposes, values, BHAGs, Ikigai, etc, etc. I want to move towards the things I love, with ease, without putting blinders on and missing things I don’t know I love yet. Here’s how the Puzzle helped me.
Step 1 - What’s important to you, right now?
Make a list of all the things you have to do, want to do, and are doing in between. Which ones are important to you?
The first time I did this it included things like:
Supporting co-workers, creating value at my companies, spending time with close friends, taking care of parents, healthy sex life, intimacy with my wife, quality time with my kids, writing, art, meeting new people, exploring philosophy, and more.
We can’t remember all these things on a day-to-day basis, usually, so I started looking for common threads - a bunch of them are related to friends & family, so that could summarize a part of the list. Vocation could be used to describe work things. Self-expression is also a thread for me. But what is it I want out of ‘vocation?’ When I sit with these things I’m able to dig deeper and deeper to find the essence of what’s important to me. To make it all look kind of like a puzzle, which is the best way to see how connected many of the things are, here’s how I drew it (definitely not focused on the art or piece integrity haha) -
Anytime I feel lost or wonder if I’m focusing on the right things I’ll pull out my Puzzle Vision and check my activities against it. But on a day-to-day I’d only have to remember “fulfilling experiences & meaningful relationships.” Now, as my philosophy and experiences have evolved I’ve changed my center pieces some. My North Star, if you will, is:
“Connection & Meaning”
With those two words I’m able to apply presence in all my experiences and know that it’s pushing me in the direction I want. And direction is all I want. I don’t want a prescription of what to do. I don’t want a particular goal - “$100 million company!” “Kids going to great colleges” “Travel whenever I want” - all these things are land mines for becoming disconnected from ourselves and our path. Articulating a specific journey is a dangerous way to create your best journey. You will grow and change along the journey and your best journey will change. Our journeys are unique and they’re created as we apply ourselves to the world and reflecting on how that felt. Not by drawing a path and following it.
Find what’s important to you, dig deeper. Why is that important to you? Money is currency, what do you want to DO with the money? What experiences bring you fulfillment? Do they feel hard or easy? Are they worth doing if hard or are there other parts of your puzzle where fulfillment comes easy? Try doing more of those, even if you only have time for a little. Then go apply yourself, fully, to everything, even the things you don’t want to do. Reflect, adjust, reapply. chop wood. carry water.