What do you actually want? I had no answer

In 2018 one of my coaches asked me what I wanted. Not for dinner. Not which series to put on. What I wanted for my life, and from it.

I had nothing. I sat there, a man who had made a career out of asking other people that exact question, and I could not answer it. It was the first time in about five years I had not been sure.

That is the part I want you to sit with, because it is the part men get wrong. I was not lost. My businesses were fine. My marriage was good. My kids were healthy. I was in decent shape. By every external measure I was doing well, and I still could not tell you what I was aiming at.

You can run a long way on momentum before you notice you have stopped steering.

Because most of us answered it once, properly, and then never went back.

About five years before that conversation I had spent a five-hour flight writing a fourteen-page document longhand. I called it a whole life manifesto, which sounds grander than it was. It was a list of what I wanted by the time I turned 40, sorted into career, family, health and the rest of life. Write a book. Take the family travelling. Help ten thousand people with their health. Speak on stages.

What made it work was not the ambition. It was that I had clarity, and clarity is a perishable good.

Here is the sequence that mattered, and the order is the whole trick.

Most men do this backwards. They start with the how, because the how is where the dopamine is. A new program, a new app, a 5am routine, a plan. It feels like progress and it costs nothing, because you never had to decide what you were actually for.

Research on goal setting backs the ordering, and has for forty years. Locke and Latham established that specific and difficult goals outperform vague intentions reliably enough to be one of the more durable findings in organisational psychology. But the finding that matters more for men our age comes from Sheldon and Elliot's self-concordance work: goals that line up with your own values get sustained effort over time, and goals adopted out of guilt or outside pressure do not, even when you achieve them. The second kind produce the specific and familiar feeling of hitting a target and feeling nothing.

That is the difference between a goal and a should. Your calendar is probably full of shoulds.

When my coach caught me without an answer, I did not journal about it for ten minutes and move on. I want to be honest about the scale of what it took, because the scale is the point.

Christie and I unplugged. I got on a scooter and rode three hours through the Balinese mountains to Lovina, on the north coast, then spent two nights and three days on a beach on my own with a notebook, working out what I wanted.

I came back with a full notebook and reread it for days before I trusted it. And I felt fantastic, because I had clarity again.

Now, I am aware of how that sounds. Most men reading this are not going to Bali. I am not prescribing Bali. I am describing the conditions, because when I look at the two times this actually worked, five years apart, the conditions were identical and none of them was the location.

I have written this line more than once and I keep coming back to it because it is the most accurate thing I know about our decade.

It does not feel like avoidance while you are doing it. It feels like being responsible. One more project, one more quarter, one more push, and then I will get back to myself. Every individual instance of that trade is defensible. That is exactly what makes it dangerous, because a decade of individually defensible decisions adds up to a life you did not choose.

Somewhere in that decade the thing you would have to reckon with gets bigger, and the reckoning gets easier to postpone. In your thirties it was a gap you could step across. In your forties it looks like something that needs a running start.

It usually is not. It looks that way because you have been not-looking at it for eight years, and anything unexamined grows in the dark.

In 2015 I left an eighteen-year career to go full time on the book and the family. I want to be clear that I was frightened, more or less continuously, for about a year.

Not vaguely uneasy. Properly afraid, at every stage. Deadlines, juggling the work and the family, the editing that never ended, and underneath it the two questions that do not have good answers: what if this does not work, and what if nobody cares about what I am trying to say.

What I did with it was not clever. I stopped trying to resolve the fear and went back to the only thing I had complete control over, which was thirty minutes a day.

Doing that daily did not make the fear go away. It gave me enough room to see the path in front of me, which turned out to be all I needed.

And here is the part I would not have believed at the time: the year I was most afraid was the year I got the most done. Fear that shows up when you move toward something you have chosen is not a warning. It is the sensation of the thing mattering. Waiting for the fear to clear before you start is how you spend a decade not starting.

If you dig through my old posts you will find me saying I wanted to impact 100,000 people by 2020, and in another one, a million. Both dates are long gone and I am not going to quietly edit them out.

I overshot on the headline number and undershot on nothing that mattered. The direction was right and the arithmetic was aspirational, which is what happens when you write goals with three coffees in you at 35,000 feet. I would rather leave the record visible, partly because it is honest and partly because it is the useful lesson: the number was never the thing. Having an answer at all was the thing.

Ask yourself the big question. Whatever you want is one decision away, and the decision is not the how.