Open any door

You’ve heard the saying “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” Or maybe you’ve heard the more modern version spoken by Morpheus in The Matrix, “I can only show you the door, you’re the one who has to walk through it.”

Opportunity abounds, and you face choices every single day about how to invest a slice of your time in walking through one of those doors. But… Which one should you walk through?

Any door. Literally choose any door. You ready?

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.

—Lewis Carroll

That’s an ambivalent way to think about goals, but I love the implicit bias to action in it. Any road will get you there, but you know what won’t get you there? Not choosing a road.

Now, you probably do know where you’re going, at least mostly, but you have a lot of options for what next step to take. What if I told you that it doesn’t matter? At least, not as much as you think it does.

In Buddhist teachings, there are 84,000 doors that all lead to enlightenment. Literally 84,000. The purpose in knowing this is to free you from “analysis paralysis.” There is no way that you can know which door is the “absolute best door.” Choose any door.

As my own coach tells me, the value is in taking an action. You don’t reach a goal by thinking about which door to open, or which road to go down. Just pick one.

It might work out (great!), or it might not (you learned something!), but the work of deciding is not work toward your goal.

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