The 3 Elements of making the best life decisions: Part 1
This is a chapter from Rich Dad Engineer.
After walking away from a company I once loved, I didn't know where I'd go next. In the following few chapters, I'll share the story of how my entrepreneurial journey started before my mind was ready. It was as though a force of the universe pulled me in. Through this story, I want to introduce three elements I’ve found crucial in making life-changing decisions. They’ve helped me make some of the best decisions in my life, and I hope it's helpful to you as well.
I have made several life-defining decisions, including selecting a college, relocating from Japan to the United States, getting married, joining a startup, and starting my own business. I noticed a pattern in my mental process with three key elements: calling, signs, and a trigger. Let me begin with the first element: the calling.
The First Element: Calling
While we strive to be analytical at work, personal decisions often come from a deeper, more intuitive place and are filled with emotion.
You may recall from the previous chapter that I was upset because I couldn't bring my daughter to the office. I was disheartened that the culture we had built at the startup was starting to disappear.
But emotion alone isn’t enough to guide us forward. We need to undergo a state of soul-searching, where the mind and heart engage in a tug-of-war. The mind senses the heart’s unrest, and it begins searching for a better place. Perhaps you are feeling bored with your current job or are not seeing opportunities for career advancement. So, the mind would prompt you to look up job openings or schedule coffee appointments with old friends at different firms.
While your analytical mind is busy listing the pros and cons of the discovered options, your heart is intuitively sensing what feels right and wrong. And you often find your mind and heart disagree. The mind is good at persuading you with reasons, while the heart screams for the idea you love or hate.
Have you experienced a moment when your heart suddenly became heavy with the most reasonable idea the mind proposed? You'd find zero energy to execute the perfect plan. On other occasions, you may have lost some sleep because your heart was too excited about a wild idea that your parents or spouse would disapprove of. This tug-of-war of heart and mind will continue during the soul-searching.
In my case, my mind took a reasonable step of searching for another startup. It had to be a startup. I knew I didn't fit in a large corporation. Before the startup, I worked for a Fortune 500 company as a software engineer. I performed well as a young engineer, but I couldn't tolerate the bureaucracy after working there for a little over four years.
I had a meeting with one of the top leaders of Coinbase. I also met the data science team of Airbnb. It was long before they became publicly traded companies, and my life would have been very different if I had joined one of them with their stock options. It was the golden age of Silicon Valley startups. My inbox was filled with invitations from other well-funded startups and even from top-tier venture capital firms, such as Greylock and Sequoia.
Despite the tempting offers, my heart felt heavy. None of the options was the right move for me. I was so tired of working late nights for companies owned by other people. My heart wanted to focus more on family.
"How can I be a productive member of society and earn a living, not missing any precious moments with my daughter?" I wondered.
That seemed impossible after working hard at the startup.
Working long, exhausting hours had become my default mode. I didn't know any other way to do things. But I was also aware of the talent war among tech companies that favored my position as an engineer. The market for a startup veteran like me was heating up. I also had friends in VCs who would occasionally contact me when they needed my perspective for their investment decisions.
"Maybe—just may be—I could be an independent consultant for other startups and VCs." Only after this wild imagination landed on my mind could I feel my heart beating louder again.
It didn’t look like a calling at the time. It felt more like a whisper. But it was the beginning. In retrospect, this was my calling, and my heart had already sensed that.
But how do I make it happen? The heart was unable to find the steps towards the calling. It's the mind's turn to fill the gap. That’s where the second element comes in: the signs
💡 I'm curious. Have you ever lost sleep over a wild opportunity? What did you do with the idea? Did your reasoning mind shut it off, or did you go with the heart? What was your mental process?
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