Choosing Between Hard Choices

What to Do When You Have to Choose Which Opporunity to Kill

My wife will sometimes say something of profound wisdom. Last night, I explained to her I'd have to wake up at 4:50 on a Sunday to get everything I wanted done. Naturally her eyebrows shot up and she gave me the "I see you doing something crazy that you don't see in yourself." look. Now, sometimes that's a false positive. Don't be afraid to go your own way if you have conviction. But when your sage of a wife has something to say, you should at least here her out.

I had been lamenting all of the amazing opportunities I had show up at the same time. Each was a small dream in its own right. What was I to do? Oh mercy. I'll just have to do it all.

So she says:

"Steven, I think you have too many plates."

"Like, I'm spinning too many plates?"

Because that metaphor evokes me spinning many plates with great skill and finesse. I'm handling it, even if it's a precarious position.

"No," she says, "Like you have all these plates of delicious food and you keep eating from each of them, but you never finish any plates."

Oof.

The master chides the disciple. She's right though. Isn't the master almost always?

I knew immediately that she'd found a fatal flaw. One that has literally caused two businesses to fail on me already, and yet here I was repeating the same mistake. I know you need to focus on something, and yet, theses aren't your run of the mill opportunities. They are each things I have been dreaming about for years. I've sunk over a thousand hours, unpaid and often unrewarded, into each of these skills in the hopes of one day making it big. They both align strongly with my values and long-term goals.

Worst of all, after the gift clarity from my wife, I know that they are mutually exclusive. If I eat from all of these plates at once, I will finish nothing.

What do you do when opportunities comes knocking on many doors at the same time? What do you do when you have to choose which dream to kill?

How do you choose between hard choices?

Are you ready? Are you ready for the actual, 100% practical approach for choosing between them? Okay, here goes:

It's doesn't matter.

wait what?

Yep. That's right. There is no right choice, but there are right choices. What I just described were both right choices, but neither is the "right" one. They check all the boxes:

• Forces personal growth
• Rapidly accelerates toward long-term goals
• Invokes a sense of joy and feeds a passion
• No terminal events possible (can't recover from a mistake i.e. jail, death, etc.)

Here's why it doesn't matter:

The Path

Realize that it doesn't really matter which opportunities you choose and which you kill. A right choice is anything that puts you on the path. The hard truth is that, in the long, long view -- when you zoom way out on your life -- as long as it put you on the path, you made the right choice.

Maybe you're more worried about making the wrong choice than making the right one. That's human nature. Fortunately, you know when you have left the path and you know when a choice is not on the path. All humans have this intuition. It's that pit in your stomach. It's that sinking feeling after forcing a false smile, of feeling like you should be enjoying something that you have secretly grown to resent. It's feeling bored and daydreaming of, no, lusting after the choices you could have made.

If you choose wrong, it's okay. No harm has been done. You can get back on the path at any time and you are not worse for straying -- as long as you learn from your mistake, it is as if you were on the path the whole time. That's the beauty. As long as you honestly strive to be on the path, you cannot stray from it.

There are not multiple paths. You can't "pick" the wrong one for you. There is only one. There is only on and off.

That's because the path is two dimensional. It goes from where you are now, then up and to the right over time like a chart. Anything that doesn't move you up and to the right over time is off the path. The path is growth, positive change, progress. When you zoom out, it doesn't matter what you do, as long as its on the path.

It doesn't matter which one you choose, as long as they are both on the path. Just pick one. They both lead to the same place.