The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [19]
Sure, there are a lot of risks of following your passions—the risk that you’ll have to move back into your parents’ basement as an adult, for example, or face near death as a “starving artist.” But, as Randy Komisar points out in his book The Monk and the Riddle, there are also a lot of unacknowledged risks to not following your passions, of sticking too close to the beaten path in the name of safety and predictability. These include:
“[T]he risk of working with people you don’t respect; the risk of working for a company whose values are inconsistent with your own; the risk of compromising what’s important; the risk of doing something that fails to express—or even contradicts—who you are. And then there is the most dangerous risk of all—the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.”3
Randy is a partner at the legendary Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. A serious meditator and student of Buddhism for many decades (and a fellow graduate of my alma mater, Brown), he’s one of the only people in Silicon Valley who could talk with equal authority on structuring multihundredmillion-dollar rounds of private equity financing and the finer points of Buddhist philosophy.
I talked with Randy at his office on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley. He told me that, a lot of the time, people put off taking any steps toward living a more fulfilling life, with the idea of “keeping their options open.” Yet, according to Randy, the idea of “keeping your options open” is an illusion.
Randy pointed out to me that the words “decision” and “decide” stem from the roots “cise” and “cide,” to cut off and to kill, also the roots of many other words related to cutting and killing, such as “incise,” “concise” (cutting out nonessentials), and “homicide.” Thus, a decision is to cut off, or kill, other possibilities.
“People feel like, unless they’re affirmatively making a decision, they’re not making a decision. They think, ‘How can you fail if you’re not making any decision, not cutting off any possibilities?’ The reality is, you’re making a decision all the time. You’re making a decision not to follow a path that might lead you to fulfillment.
“Even though the choice to do something you don’t love, to ‘keep the options open,’ may seem like a passive decision and therefore less risky, you can’t pretend you’re not making decisions. So the real question is ‘What risks are you taking by those decisions you’re not making?’ Not making a decision to create a fulfilling life now is in fact a decision—it cuts off certain paths in the future. The biggest risk is what we classically refer to as the middleaged crisis. You become forty-five years old and realize that you’re not the person you wanted to be. You haven’t accomplished what you thought you were going to. The reality is that the vast majority of people today, even when they are on their deathbed, find that their regrets largely center around things they didn’t do, not things they did do.”
Randy calls the safe-and-narrow path, which pretends to incur no risks but which incurs the biggest risk of all (regretting your life at the end of it), “The Deferred Life Plan.” In his book, he gives a simple formula for living this infelicitous Deferred Life Plan: “Step one: Do what you have to do... Step two: Do what you want to do.... The lucky winners may get to step two only to find themselves aimless, directionless. Either they never knew what they ‘really’ wanted to do or they’ve spent so much time in the first step and invested so much psychic capital that they’re completely lost without it.”4
So, according to what I’ve described so far in this chapter, we face a serious dilemma: Either we follow our passions and purpose, and incur a significant risk of ending up as a starving artist, or we follow a safe, predictable, boring path, and incur a significant risk of ending up full of regret in our lives.
Neither option sounds very palatable. Is there a way out of this bind? Is there a way to combine