Six months ago I was feeling frantic about selling my business. I realized that I didn’t want to be running this business five years from now so I felt that I needed to sell it immediately.

Six months later I’m in the same situation - I know that I don’t want to own this business in five years but the frantic feeling is gone. What’s changed over the last six months?

There has been a shift in my perspective on how our lives change over time. Rarely does our life completely change course in one day. When it does, it’s probably a tragic change and not something we hoped for.

Instead, life unfolds with one small change leading to another. It is a chain of events and moments of awareness that eventually bring us to a new phase of life.

The frantic feeling about selling my business stemmed from seeing what I wanted in the future and expecting to arrive at it immediately.

Direction is more important than speed.

Now I feel like I’m pointed in the right direction with how I’m thinking about the next phase of my life. I don’t want to be running this business 5 years from now, but I don’t know what I want to do instead.

To sort out what it is that I do want to do I’ve spent time getting very clear on what my core values are and how I define success for myself.

Being aware of these key pieces of information sets a direction for my life. 

Every day I write out my four core values, what I’m grateful for and what I will focus on for that day. This recalibrates my course of direction every single day. In the moment it may not feel like major changes are happening but it’s incremental growth strung together over time.

I’ve let go of the need for life to change immediately and replaced it with the habit of establishing my course of direction every day. The direction that I’m headed is more important than the speed at which I get there.

Define your core values.

The first step for setting a direction is to get clear on what you value in life - the essential qualities and traits that you want to live out in your life. These are the values that represent the person that you are and who you want to become.

I’ll admit that I was skeptical about what benefits would come from defining my core values. But I had heard enough smart people talk about it that I trusted that there was something to it.

It turns out, they were right. Going through the process of defining my core values and then reflecting on them every day has been more rewarding than I imagined.

They become a filter that life can get sifted through to help me stay focused and make better decisions. I look for opportunities to live into my core values and I avoid things that go against them. My core values act as guardrails for my life. 

Define success for yourself.

Success is not one size fits all. If we’re not clear on how we define success for ourselves we’ll end up pursuing a default path that is determined by the world around us. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that has a very narrow view of what success looks like.

We have to step back and remove ourselves from the default path to be able to get clear on what we want from life. But this doesn’t mean what we want our life to look like in the future. What do we want our life to look like every day of the week? Success isn’t an eventual destination we work towards. If we define success as a place we hope to arrive at we will never arrive there. There’s a strange phenomenon with humans - once we attain a goal we immediately set the next one. We’re really bad at being able to enjoy success in the present moment.

With that in mind, we should create a definition of success that allows us to enjoy the journey as much as the destination. It’s about what a successful day looks like today and not in the future.

When we frame it like that we start to remove things like wealth, status and possessions from the definition of success. There’s no problem with aiming for a number in the bank or a lifestyle you desire. But we’re fooling ourselves to think that if we put our heads down and grind until we get there we’ll be happy once we achieve it.

“I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.”

This line comes from one of my favourite books, The Lion Trackers Guide To Life by Boyd Varty. This has been a mantra of sorts for me as I pursue a path with an uncertain destination.

I know that setting my bearing every day around my core values and my definition of success will lead me in the right direction.