For as long as I can remember I wanted to live in the woods. Not in a creepy way. I wasn’t longing to grow a beard in total isolation and talk to a deflated volleyball. Rather, I felt a calling to wake up amongst towering trees and raw nature that wasn’t overly manicured and ‘perfectly’ trimmed back to the point of unrecognizable oblivion. I wanted wild.
And yet, the majority of my adult life I resided by concrete landscapes. San Jose, California is not the most picturesque place in the world, but it was where my career thrived and my friend base had developed. It’s a big pond with quick currents and tends to push people to either step up or be stepped over.
Living in Silicon Valley is like being in a fast-paced, tech-focused bubble. It’s highly competitive and outrageously expensive and attracts some very driven and intelligent people. It feels like you’re living in fast-forward. Innovation breeds here. People are racing to test the limits of how far they can go and as a result, it’s impossible not to be influenced and inspired to push harder, learn more, and grow.
People feel stressed out but as long as they are making headway on their pursuit of success, they feel alright. Because, after all, progress equals happiness. They continue to hurl their body forward trying to win the marathon and beat out the fellow runners on their career track. They know if they stop, they’ll fall behind so they push their body beyond its limits at the expense of the occasional burnout.
After so many years of living in SJ, I started to notice something. When we only chase success, we risk looking back on our lives and realizing that we completely missed the point. Achieving success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. If we are so focused on our future goals and the next career finish line (the next promotion, the next raise, etc.) we become blind to the joy and beauty in the journey.
In competitive environments like the Bay Area, it’s difficult not to compare how you are doing with other people. It’s naturally something we do as human beings and many times it drives us to push further than we would have otherwise done. When we do this, we are under the destructive misconception that we are all participating in the same race. Life is not a marathon–it’s a trail run, and everybody’s path is different.
The key to accomplishing the elusive combination of fulfillment and success is to strive to compete with the best version of yourself and to be grateful for the growth along the way.
A couple of months ago, my husband and I decided to veer off course. We are in our mid-30s and both work in tech, but for the 15 years we’ve been together we’ve shared dream to eventually end up in Lake Tahoe. A life event of losing a baby after years of trying to conceive shook us awake and made us question why not now? What were we waiting for?
You see, disappointment tends to either crush people or drive them.
The pain and disappointment of miscarriage drove us to take action and carve our trail. We sold our home in San Jose and moved within two months, the wild within us calling us forward on our journey.
Some folks were worried, warning us of the career suicide we were about to embark upon. Initially, that was a concern, but we believed that living in an environment that inspired us would be reflected in our work and help us to shine. So far, it’s proven to do just that. I start each day with gratitude, and I feel my heart thanking me for listening to it and giving it a chance to guide me. Over the years, I’ve moved more than 30 times, and for the first time in my entire life, I feel at home.
So many of us place our dreams high on the shelf of “someday.” We set five or ten-year plans and then the years pass by quickly with our hearts waiting patiently along the sidelines. We delay taking action out of fear that shows up in the form of excuses.
If there is something you feel called to do in your heart, a dream so vivid it practically haunts you, I beg you to have an honest conversation with yourself and ask why not now? And if not now, when? What would happen to you laced up and finally decided to step forward on the path that you and you alone were meant to take?