What's Next
What do you do when you accomplish all your goals? Or more importantly, what do you do when you don’t?
My friend recently asked me this question, so I’ve spent some time trying to come up with a clever answer, and I think I have one.
I got it from YouTube.
What’s Next?
One of my favorite videos is this clip from P Diddy:
There are multiple gems in this video, but one of the things he says at the end is something I always think about. And no matter where you are in life, it’s a question that’s always worth asking.
What’s next?
Prescribing Prioritization
Whether you’ve already accomplished your dreams or are still fighting for them, What’s Next forces you to recalibrate. To figure out what you should focus on. What you should prioritize.
It’s a very relevant question — not just for me personally, but for the broader macro environment too. Globally, things are falling apart. Real people are protesting massive inflation, food shortages, bank runs, and other tangible problems. And when things are this dire, it’s pretty easy to lose hope and feel helpless. As individuals, we are no match for nation states, governments, and other abstract political aparatases. If we can’t personally make much of a difference, what’s the point, right?
People are entitled to their own way of thinking about these things, but I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it. You have to focus on what’s in your locus of control. The things you can actually do to solve these problems. What you can control.
Controlling the Controllables requires you to recognize what is in your locus of control, but crucially, it also entails actually acting on those things you can control. As I said in my last post, your words cannot be vacuous.
You need to make — and then keep — momentum. Funnel it towards productive activities. Once you solve one thing, you move on to the next.
Right now, this question of What’s Next is important because things aren’t going well. But even when they are, you have to keep asking it. Otherwise you’ll end up back in the bad times.
That’s what this P Diddy video reminds me of. Keeping the momentum rolling.
The Right Reasons
I’ve never been one to talk much externally about what I’m doing. I’ve never felt the need to show people the extra work I did (and continue to do). And whenever I’ve spent time with someone who’s excellent at what they do, I’ve seen the same mindset. There’s a quiet confidence to all the work they’ve done and are doing, but there’s no braggadocious chest thumping.
Lately, I’ve seen a lot of people do the opposite, and it’s extended from sports to everything else. Everyone is promoting how smart or great or special they are.
“Here’s all the stuff I’m doing, here’s all my hustle, here’s how great things are going.”
Maybe societally we’ve gotten a bit too obsessed with ourselves. The Greeks called this hubris, and it was one of the primary reasons why so many people ended up stumbling, failing, and even dying. They drank too much of the Kool-aid.
The problem with all this chest thumping is that it shows that people are doing things for the wrong reasons. They aren’t motivated by the right things. And when things inevitably get hard and difficult, these people get in trouble because suddenly all the things driving them disappear, and they don’t know what to do next.
To be clear, sometimes people do have the right mindset, and bad things outside their control happen. But they seem much more equipped to handle them than the people who are focused on showing their success.
No one else can say whether you’re doing something for the right reasons. Only you can answer that. But deep down, everyone knows the answer.
The good thing is that we can actually modify our reasoning. You could be motivated by money, but if you approach it in a reasonable way you can channel that to positive outcomes. If you don’t, then when things go wrong, you’re left without a steady source of fuel to continue forward.
I’m pretty young, so maybe my advice is not that relevant to you. I also know that I don’t have this all personally figured out. Most people don’t. It’s a continual process that has to happen. And this process will have lots of twists and turns and ups and downs. It’s usually uncomfortable.
This is where P Diddy’s question comes into play. Because it’s what makes you identify how to move forward, no matter what’s going on with the rest of the world.
Sometimes you can’t solve the Big Problems, but you can always work to improve your status quo. I always think of Jocko Willink in situations like this. He very much embodies this type of mindset, even if he uses different words to verbalize it.
Asking yourself what a Navy SEAL would do might be overkill, but there’s a tactical reason I’m saying this. It forces you to inhabit a different mindset, one that you likely don’t lean into very often. And usually, when things are going poorly, a change in mindset is all you need in order to start working to make things better.
At the end of the day we’re each living our own lives, with our own challenges, and our own adversities. School doesn’t overtly teach us how to handle all these things, so that means we have to learn it on our own. And that often entails some growing pains.
A good amount of people are probably going through some pretty large growing pains right now. And unfortunately there aren’t many easy ways out of it. But if you ask yourself what you can do next, then you can figure out how to start getting out of it. Figure out what’s reasonable and realistic. And then go do it.
What about me?
You might have figured out why I decided to write this. Yes — there’s a lot of things going on with the world right now, and I think this message is important. At the same time, it’s quite relevant for me. My friend who asked me the question about accomplishing all your goals did so because I did just that — I accomplished what I wanted to do. And he was genuinely curious to hear how my life would be different now.
So I told him the truth: that I have new goals to accomplish now. That this was just step one of a much larger vision.
I’m not sharing this to bang my chest or brag (hopefully the section above emphasized the importance of not doing that!) — I share it because I’ve accomplished a Big Goal before, and I ended up failing in almost every way:
I had a clear goal in middle school and high school, which dictated almost every decision I made: I wanted to play lacrosse in college. I accomplished that, and then I established goals for college. Pretty audacious ones too.
I didn’t accomplish any of them. I didn’t even score a goal or get an assist.
I haven’t spoken to many people about this, not because I’m dejected of not having any points — I haven’t shared it because I’m embarrassed of what it showed me about myself.
Everything I thought I was, wasn’t really the case. And it’s horribly humiliating to see yourself reach a point where you can’t really recognize who you are or what you’re doing (or failing to do).
I’m writing this because for better or for worse, this was arguably the biggest failure of my life, and it stretched on for four years. It’s completely changed me, and that’s why I’m writing about it. To share what I’ve learned.
What’s striking to me is that all of this is almost identical: I had a big goal of joining a group, I did it, and in turn established new personal and team goals.
As that piece hopefully illustrates, I failed the last time this happened, and that’s not an option this time. And that’s crucially important, because our team has audacious aspirations for what we can accomplish with American Dynamism. And the stakes are much higher, because the problems we’re trying to solve touch all of us.
Failure is only failure if you don’t learn from it, and I am maniacally focused on making sure that this time things go differently.
Extending the Embers Experiment
One of the problems I had in college is that even though I asked myself What’s Next, I didn’t do a good enough job of seeing the situation clearly. I wasn’t mentally attuned enough. Which highlights one important difference: I wasn’t writing back then.
When I recently told my family and friends my personal news, a lot of them asked me if I was going to keep writing. Especially since we are building so much over at American Dynamism.
I have new priorities now, but one of the things I’ve shared with family and friends is that writing is how I got this job in the first place. Sure, some of the posts I’ve written are directionally applicable to what I do now, and others illustrate that I’ve been thinking about American Dynamism for many years, even if I had a different name for it.
But in reality it’s much simpler than that. Writing is mental alchemy. It forces you to think. To grapple with hard questions, and often the act of writing helps you unearth answers. Especially the ones that you’re afraid to admit to yourself.
Writing helped me recognize what my new calling was. It’s one of the many reasons why I joined the American Dynamism team.
My job isn’t to publish a new piece of writing every week, it’s about finding and backing the best people in the world building world-changing companies. But in order to excel at that, our team needs to think — deeply and empathetically. We need to think about Where We’re Going, and what’s the best way to get there. We must understand how we can build the future so that when we meet someone who is doing just that, we double down and give them all the help they need.
In other words, we need to think about What’s Next. And part of knowing that is understanding where we’ve come from and how we got to where we are.
This is a bit of a long-winded way of saying that I will still write and share Embers. I cannot guarantee that I’ll continue following a weekly publishing cadence, but I will continue sharing what I learn and what ideas I’m tinkering with.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to publish next after sharing my announcement post a month ago. Before I joined this team I had less than 30 email subscribers, and in a single day I blew substantially past that.
I’ve always been grateful that people decide to read what I write, and one of the many reasons I took time off between posts is that I wanted to make sure that I don’t waste this opportunity, both on my new team, and also with a larger audience. I wanted to make sure that I built out a new system so I avoid some of the problems I faced in college. That meant pausing publishing while getting acclimated.
But as I spent more time thinking, this question seemed so pertinent. Not just for me, but our team, the world, everybody. And now that we know What’s Next, it’s important to figure out where we’re actually going.
Back to (Building) The Future
When you’re driving a car and someone else is giving you directions, the natural question you ask is a simple one. “What’s after that? What’s Next?”
Another way to think about What’s Next is to ask it in the literal sense: Where Are We Going?
We ask this same variation of the question whenever we get in a car. And when it comes to driving, we usually know the answer. But oftentimes when we get out of the car and navigate in the real world we don’t have that same clarity.
Life isn’t exactly a highway. It has a lot of twists and turns, but it doesn’t have Google Maps GPS guidance.
When you’re driving, You have to keep your head up so you can see the road, avoid obstacles, and determine which routes to take. And once you start doing that, everything else starts falling together.
So when we talk about approaching some of these Big Problems, this is what I think about.
The past few years and months reminded us that things can always get worse. As we enter the second half of this year, it's important to recognize that. But even if they do, the title of this piece is the question that will guide you.
We're here for a reason, so we might as well make finding solutions to today's problems part of that answer.
The American Dynamism team is marching ahead to the future with ferocity. And so are the founders that are solving our country’s and our world’s problems. They’re making the American Dream more attainable for everyone.
Building the future was never supposed to be easy. And as I’ve experienced, there’s never a guarantee you’ll succeed. But this is what we must do next, and I'm excited to continue meeting founders who are showing us Where We're Going.
Why? Because Where We're Going... well, you know the rest.
