#23: Momentum Starts At Your Own Pace

Click here to join 440+ Substack subscribers receiving fortnightly extended posts.

The Dreaded Question

I have to ask you a question:

• Where do you see yourself in the next five to ten years?

Most people’s approach including myself would be to reverse engineer from where they’ll want to be and explain the path in getting there.

But why is this question so difficult?

The confidence in making resolutions is unrecognisable when asked to project a couple years further.

We shudder, get tense, and make a surprised face every time, but why?

It’s almost as if we’re having an out of body experience and we have a duty to look at our lives from a distance, trying to make sense of what exactly we are doing all of this for.

If you know your answer to that question, let me know in the comments, but I’m not here to extract an answer out of you.

Instead, I believe that we could have a concrete answer through reflecting on our actions within our personal life.

You probably have an idea of where you want to end up when you hit a certain milestone.

Whether that’s marriage, starting a family, retiring, there’s an ongoing background narrative that has software updates as we go about our lives.

It puts us at ease as we’re adamant that amongst the uncertainty of the future, we have certainty that we will eventually get to where we want to be.

But something we often miss is this.

Life happens in the in-between.

So when we’re asked for a hypothetical checkpoint in our lives, we’re not being asked to create a new milestone, we’re being asked about what is happening in the in-between at that point.

It is a grey area, but requires a view of what is going on in the current season of your life.

However, because we treat five years from now as any other checkpoint, if you’re not prepared for this question you’ll probably sell yourself a horrible estimate of what the near future looks like.

It’s because you feel pressure to have this grand plan that your current trajectory should align with.

So what could you do now to make this question easier?

I want it to be so easy that you could stretch your arms right after you wake up and form a strong, constructive answer.

Let’s premise the section with this:

• What in your values gives you an incentive to reach this ultimate goal?

I ask because there has to be something foundational about your actions today.

Here I’ll touch upon the six human needs that was popularised by the entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker, Tony Robbins :

1. Certainty: assurance you can avoid pain and gain pleasure.
2. Uncertainty/Variety: the need for the unknown, change, new stimuli. (It’s what makes life worth living).
3. Significance: feeling unique, important, special or needed.
4. Connection/Love: a strong feeling of closeness or union with someone or something.
5. Growth: an expansion of capacity, capability or understanding.
6. Contribution: a sense of service and focus on helping, giving to and supporting others.

All of your actions are rooted within these needs, and when you initially answer the question of where you want to be in the next five or ten years, you project the needs you currently prioritise while battling the underlying needs you truly seek.

In plain terms when you were growing up you may have prioritised significance and had an unrelenting hunger for growth.

After this has formed a solid foundation and you get older, your focus may shift to feeling more love and connection as well as contributing to something bigger than you.

The gap between your old and new priorities is that instead of creating a workaround to feel loved or have a greater capacity to contribute, you now value those things more and want to ensure they become a part of your typical life.

You no longer rely on the assumption that being significant would warrant more love, or that selflessness in your contribution makes you deserving of love.

It’s a shift from projecting what you think others expect of you to tapping into what your heart and mind is telling you.

Back to the dreaded interview question, and although you may not currently be in a transition period, in five or ten years’ time that may change.

Within that journey, will you ignore what’s calling to you and pour yourself into more workarounds as opposed to going for what you truly want?

As you sit here today, the initial answer will be through the lens of what you value most now, but think of the underlying purpose of your actions.

It’s that dream of retiring parents, building opportunities for the less fortunate, teaching those that come after you…

In his conversation on The Diary Of A CEO , Tony Robbins said this:

“If you’re missing growing and contributing, you will not feel fulfilled.”

It is within our nature to want to thrive and give back.

When it comes to cultivating slow momentum through 1% days and devotion over discipline, the question is no longer how fast you’re going - it’s whether the ladder you’re climbing is against the right wall and whether you are familiar with the destination.

You’re zooming out and questioning the frame you have found yourself in, or in the case of the ladder, the ladder you find yourself climbing.

Where you want to be is not a question of milestones; it’s an inquiry into whether or not you acknowledge the deeper meaning behind your current actions.

To read the full exploration, click here.

Want to read more? Explore my Table of Contents page.