12. That’s about how many hours I spent in the testing center before I could scrape together a Princeton-worthy SAT score. 7200. That’s about how many hours I spent training in the gym before I could land a double back on the floor. 30. Thirty seconds. That’s all the time it took for me to know that he was the one who would change my life forever.
No excuses, no distractions. My life consisted of five things: school, gym, coffee, work, and on special occasions, a few hours of shut eye. For the first two decades of my life, I was under the impression that if I let anyone get too close to me or let my guard down for even an instant, I would lose control. At that point, I might as well throw up my hands and surrender because I would lose everything I had worked for. And for what, for a man who might be a nice accessory to have on my arm at the ballet, or even worse – a man who would actually expect me to give him my time and attention? As appealing as that sounds, I would rather not. That is what my list of plus-ones is for.
For as long as I can remember, I have always put my personal success first, and for me that consisted of an Ivy League education, a high social standing, an overflowing bank account, a flashy job, and the power to change the world. I knew what I wanted and I was not about to let any man stand in the way of making my mark on the world. But when I met the man at the coffee shop, I knew that I had been doing it all wrong. He wasn’t on the cover of GQ, and he didn’t take me out on a multi-million dollar yacht to pop some bubbly on a Friday night. He was actually quite the opposite. His hair needed styling, and his suit wasn’t properly fitted. He was socially awkward and stumbled to find the right words, as a deep shade of pink started to cover his cheeks. But when I looked into his eyes, I saw something that I had never seen before – I saw a real man. I saw a man who was more focused on what was inside my head than what was on my back, a man who was broken and flawed, with a glimmer of hope in his eyes. He was imperfectly perfect, and I wanted more.
As we spent more and more time together, this man changed the way that I saw the world. He made me realize that letting someone into your life doesn’t mean you have to veer off path; it means that they become a part of your journey. I had gone through handfuls of men in my life, and this was the first time that I felt a true intellectual connection. It was as if we were instantly on the same brain wave, and before we knew it, we were collaborating on ideas and helping each other to improve ourselves in every way. Rather than detracting from my productivity and pulling me away from my life plan, we helped each other grow both personally and professionally. It was as if I found my other half - and knowing what this felt like, it became crystal clear to me that two heads were better than one.
I have this vision for what I want my life to look like – next week, next year, five years from now, ten years from now, and in the distant future. There are so many things that I want to accomplish, all jumbled together in this convoluted brain of mine. Just as with anything in life, there are various different approaches that we can take in order to get what we want. Until a few years ago, I thought that trying to segment my life into different stages would set me up for the greatest possibility of success. If I wanted to start both a successful company and a loving family by the time that I was thirty, I used to believe that it would be most efficient if I was to focus one hundred percent of my energy on work until I accomplished the majority of that goal, and once I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel, I could move on to developing the more personal aspects of my life.
The problem with this mentality is that when you try to live your life in stages, you develop yourself unevenly and leave parts of yourself behind. If you have a set of goals that span across different aspects of your life that you want to accomplish by the time you are a certain age, you need to invest in horizontal rather than vertical self-development. In order to become the strongest possible version of yourself, you need to move each of your goals forward every single day. If you focus on bettering yourself in one aspect of your life while leaving the others untouched, you will be a person that is not whole, but a person broken into pieces. Every single day, you show the world the person that you are; every aspect of yourself is exposed, and you continue to grow based upon your overall level of self-development. You are only as strong as the weakest part of yourself. If you leave your personal life in the dust and focus singularly on career development, your personal development will fall behind and you will not be armed with the tools necessary to embrace the challenges that come along with high-levels of professional development. You cannot expect to be successful in multiple aspects of your life if you do not invest in all segments of personal and professional development.
Where do you want to be by the time you are 30? By the time you are 40? What type of relationship do you want to have? What type of career do you want? Where do you want to live? What do you want to invest your free time in? What will make you feel fulfilled at this stage in your life? Start with where you want to be at a certain benchmark in your life, and work backwards. If you want to be living in a different country, on a different career path, and married by the time you are 30, you cannot keep drudging along in the wrong industry, with a partner that you know you’re not committed to, and a blurry vision of your future, and still expect to accomplish your life goals. You need to be honest with yourself, and be realistic about what you can accomplish within a certain time frame. If you focus your full energy on career development until you are twenty eight, and intend to achieve the goals mentioned above by the time you are thirty, you cannot expect to suddenly pick up your life, move to a new country, and magically land upon the partner of your dreams all in the remaining two years. While I am a big believer in serendipity, I am also realistic. It is simply not feasible to spend eight years on work alone, while you keep pushing off every other aspect of your life, and expect to clump everything else into a two-year time frame. Personal development, even more than professional development, has a habit of being unpredictable. You never know how long it will take you to find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, or the perfect town to raise your kids in. So if you have these types of goals, you need to be progressing in those categories as much as you are progressing in your career development.
Opening yourself up to personal development does not mean that you are going to be pulled away from your career goals. If you find the right person to build yourself with, you can grow together and help each other to reach your personal goals that much faster. Instead of slowing you down, finding a life partner that you have a strong intellectual connection with allows you to better yourself in all aspects of your life; not only are you working towards the family that you want to build, but you are also forming an intellectual connection and partnership that will allow you to accelerate your career development as well. So take a step back, and look at what you really want. Don’t let the day-to-day chaos take you away from pursuing your life goals, whatever they may be. Make sure that every single day, you are taking actionable steps to move forward in every direction. As a result, you won’t be a person broken into many pieces, but rather a well-rounded, fully developed individual ready to take on the world.