Take Time For Big Decisions

In The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, it is suggested to spend a lot of time thinking about the main decisions in life. As in years.

The big decisions in early life are then listed as:

These three decisions will determine a lot of your life and can easily turn it one way or another. They can create pivotal moments in our life.

Many people probably spend too little time with such big decisions. I probably did.

Work/Job

Maybe you get into a job or field because you’re vaguely interested in it, or because you’re obviously skilled at something and others encourage you to follow that path, e.g. by offering you a job or suggesting you to study this or that.

I could certainly have spent more time about what subject to study, or how to move forward after my bachelor’s degree, then after my master’s degree. Once I had started studying, I just kept moving forward. BSc, MSc, PhD. I had ideas about changing universities, for example, but ended up walking the whole path at the same familiar place, once I got used to it.

At least I had about a year to think about what to study between high school and going to university. Half a year of military service and the other half travelling. I sometimes think such a year might have helped me to move forward after each of these steps.

Relationship

Maybe you start a relationship soon after the last one ended, because you felt miserable alone. You can’t stand it and don’t reflect much on what had happened. So you end up with someone else a few weeks or months later and then a similar story unfolds that you had with your last partner.

Location

Maybe you live in a city for the sole reason that you’ve found a job nearby. And you end up staying because it gets more and more familiar. But there was never much pondering about where you would really like to live if you had the option to choose.

J.R. Parrish writes in If I’d Known Then What I Know Now that you should choose where to life, before worrying about your job. You’d find somethign once you’re there and being happy about the place you live at is so much more important.

I now think that for more people than do realize it, it is possible to find a job that is not linked to a fixed location anymore. If you find a job or a way to earn a living that is location-independet, that you can do remotely, you can later decide where to life or switch places more often to your liking. That’s a huge opportunity that is opening up to more and more people these days, not last since the more widespread acceptance of remote work due to so many being forced to work from home since the COVID-19 pandemic started.

Taken together, spending lots of time pondering big questions that can have a huge influence on the rest of your life, seems like sound advice.

· work, job, remote work