I've written about this before, but when you write 365 days a year, you tend to repeat yourself. So here it goes.
When we were moving to Dubai, I had a last-minute "what in the hell are we doing here" moment. It was somewhere between the moving truck picking up our boxes in Seattle and the flight to Dubai. I was sitting in a business class seat. It was dark outside, everyone was sleeping. My wife and son were seated to my right, both asleep. I could hear the engines humming as I scrolled somewhere over the place where the Barents Sea meets Russia.
I was starting to get emotional. We had one-way tickets, nine suitcases, and a whole new life ahead of us. Then all of a sudden, I came across a static image that read:
"What if it turns out better than you could have imagined?"
That was it. That was the sign I needed to stop stressing about the future. I needed that sign to stop looking in the rearview and thinking about the life we had left behind — the job I had resigned from, the people I knew, the world as I had known it.
I had spent so much time in the previous days playing out everything that could go wrong that I didn't take the time to think about what could go right. After all, there was nothing in my history that said I would allow this process to be a failure, so why would that start now?
Turns out, the move to Dubai — and the subsequent move back home eventually — was the best career move I could have ever made. I never would be where I am today without this bold decision, and I just wish I had seen that sign sooner.
It made me realize how often we sabotage our own opportunities by defaulting to the worst-case scenario. We tell ourselves we are being "realistic," but in reality, we are just protecting ourselves from disappointment. The problem is, that same protection keeps us from fully stepping into the experiences that could change our lives.
I've come to believe that almost nothing in life unfolds exactly as we picture it. Sometimes it is worse, sure. But a lot of the time, it is better. And when it is better, it is almost always because we gave it the room to be better. We stopped gripping so tightly to our fears and allowed ourselves to step into possibility.
The truth is, most of the best chapters of your life will not announce themselves before they arrive. They will show up disguised as hard choices, sleepless nights, and moments where you wonder if you have lost your mind. And then one day, you will look back and see that those were the moments that made you.
So the next time you find yourself on the verge of something big and your brain starts feeding you every reason why it could go wrong, stop and ask the better question: What if it all goes better than you could have imagined? And then give yourself permission to find out.