The Time Between

Most people spend infinitely more time working than actually thinking about / figuring out / searching for / waiting for the right thing to work on.

On a small scale, this might be ok for day to day work. You generally want to focus on high leverage activities, the kind of work that may move the needle, but when in doubt, just doing a lot of work can beat overthinking it too much, sometimes.

But at a macro level, on a multi-year scale, I think spending (investing) the time to choose what to work on is extremely important, even if that time between heads down work does not feel at all productive, efficient, or even particularly directed.

It may take many months, even more than a year for the right opportunity to present itself, and you will know it is right because it will be obvious — you won’t even think about it. You will not question whether it is right. Rather, you will think about how to make it happen. If it doesn’t actually happen, then it wasn’t actually right, but don’t assume that unless/until you have properly persisted. The most right things to work on may require significant persistence.

If you’re going to work on something basically by default for 2 years, 5 years, 10 years or more, does it seem right to spend only days, weeks, or at most a month or two (8-16% of 1 year) choosing what that main thing you’ll be working on will be? I don’t think so. If it does happen that quickly, great, but most of the urgency is arbitrary and is likely to result in settling — settling in regards to the thing you’ll spend most of your life working on for the next x years. And your work life may only be 4-5x long, maybe even shorter.

It’s hard to justify this time in advance. But you have to really believe in it, because it’s not free. You’ll be burning money. Resisting opportunities. Turning down good ones because they aren’t great. You have to trust it will all be obviously worthwhile in retrospect without being able to foresee how or why or where you’ll be after this time.

Without knowing what you are going to be working on, you have to believe it is worth waiting for, and buy yourself that precious, maybe unproductive, maybe inefficient, maybe even directionless time to find it.