The 3 Elements of making the best life decisions: Part 3
This is a chapter from Rich Dad Engineer.
"The heart can feel the wind of outer intention, but it is not capable of putting up a sail to harness the mind's force. The will of the mind however, can put up a sail. Will is an attribute of conscious awareness." - Vadim Zeland.
In my case, the calling toward entrepreneurship came first. My heart screamed for what I wanted. Then my mind started to notice external signs that supported it. As I described in the previous chapter, the more signs my mind noticed, the more I found myself taking small actions—at first without even realizing it. Each step was so small I didn’t recognize it as progress.
You may have experienced a similar process. For example, long before you get a job offer and send a resignation letter to the employer, you'd have already put in countless efforts. Searching on the web, writing down the salary you want, and having a conversation with your significant other...you might not remember most of those tiny actions later. But everything contributes to achieving your dream outcome. This is the result of the heart and mind working together.
Each life unfolds in uncharted territory. Without a map, we often feel like we’re navigating in the dark. So we take small steps and probe the surroundings. When we take action and make some noise, we'll hear back a resonance. Trust the resonance guiding you towards the right direction. Think of a bat flying in a cave. Bats use echolocation to locate obstacles and prey. They emit ultrasound waves and hear them bounce back from the walls and even from small insects.
After navigating in the dark like this for a while, you'll encounter a decisive moment: The trigger, the last of the three elements of decision-making. It happened to me through a conversation with a great friend. Let me share my story with Joelle.
The Third Element: Trigger
Joelle and I spent four years building up the startup we worked at, and I had always admired his creative mind. We had different roles: Joelle was the creative director, and I was a senior software engineer.
Four years later, Joelle left to start his creative agency. I stayed longer at the startup and took a new role as the company's first data scientist. Doing data science with the product I built was exciting. But the idea of starting a consulting company was growing in me at the same time. So I contacted him one day.
Joelle invited me to his office at WeWork in San Jose. It was a corner office at a premium location, far nicer than anything I had ever worked in. Inside was tastefully decorated and furnished. I was shocked to hear that he didn't pay a penny to stay in that office. He told me that he found a way to stay there practically rent-free!
"How did you do it?" I asked.
He said he helped produce the grand opening event for WeWork, a branded and designed event for the local branch, in exchange for a year's rent valued at $50,000. Joelle understood very well that business is about exchanging value, not money. I didn’t realize then that this was the beginning of a real lesson in entrepreneurship.
I was ready to learn more when he said, "Come see my clients with me."
Joelle took me to a couple of meetings with his business clients. He first took me to a local antique store. The store was filled with designer furniture and decorations that looked expensive. After the visit, Joelle told me how much they were paying for his creative work for marketing. I was stunned—the rates were two or three times more than I would have guessed.
The next client was a local coffee shop. Joelle did equally fine creative work for them as for the antique shop. He surprised me even more when he said he wasn’t taking any payment this time. He was doing a favor for the owner whose business had just started. Joelle didn't hesitate to help people. He valued building a long-term relationship.
I was intrigued. Something in me shifted—this was the first time the excitement of business felt real and personal.
We returned to his office from the field trip. It was time for me to share my half-baked business idea with him, though I felt far from ready. It was just an idea, and I was far from being ready to quit my job.
Just as I finished sharing, another client of his came in for a business meeting with Joelle. He owned a well-established local real estate business. He looked wealthy, and his face was full of a smile, just like a confident businessman. Joelle introduced me to the businessman. Then what he said next stunned me:
"Daigo has a data science consulting business."
What?! A jolt of panic ran through me, but I forced myself to stay composed. I went with the flow and introduced myself as a data science consultant.
That was it. That was my trigger. I was introduced to a stranger as a business owner, and he believed it. In that instant, something clicked—the identity settled in my mind, too. I'm a business owner. It's official. No going back from there. My course was set.
I felt as if an external force had pushed me past a point of no return. I had no idea what to do next, and nothing around me had actually changed. But inside, everything had shifted—my worldview, my direction, my sense of who I was. That small trigger moment was enough for me to figure out the rest and run the business successfully for the next decade.
In the next chapter, I'll summarize the 3 elements of making the best life decisions and dig deeper into what's blocking us from taking a bold step.
💡 I was lucky to have a friend like Joelle. On the surface, he pulled the trigger, not me. But my mind had taken so many small steps before the trigger. So I went with the flow. We may not always have external help like this, but we'll always reach a point of no return when we start an adventure. So here is my suggestion:
Share your idea with someone you trust this week. Speaking it aloud makes it more real. One thing I had been doing before my trigger moment was exactly that—talking to close friends about my next chapter. Those conversations helped me recognize the signals I might have otherwise ignored and forced me to clarify my own thoughts. By putting your ideas into words, you invite the world to resonate with them. And the trigger you need often arrives from the outside—in a form you could never plan or predict.
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