A Map Drawn in the Dark

Ten years ago, I left a Fortune 500 company to start my own business. I was young, restless, and convinced I had it figured out. I had a plan. I had ambition. I had the kind of energy that mistakes confidence for clarity.

That business failed. So did the next one. I pivoted into the United Nations, finished an MBA somewhere in between, and landed in a life that bears almost no resemblance to the one I was so certain I was building.

If you had shown me a photograph of my life today, I wouldn't have recognised it. Not the muscles bulging through my shirt. Not the international career. Not even the way I think. The person I was in 2016 had the same values - undefined as they were - the same core, but he was navigating with a map drawn in the dark.

I think about this often. Not with regret, but with a kind of humbled awe at how much can change in a decade. We are terrible at imagining long time horizons. A year feels graspable. Five years, maybe. But ten? Ten years is long enough to become someone your current self wouldn't predict.

And that's the part that both unsettles and excites me.

We like to believe we're steering our lives. That if we set the right goals and build the right habits, we can architect our future selves with precision. And there's some truth to that. I didn't become someone who values his health by accident. I hired a coach, showed up to the gym when I didn't want to, ate better, and did it again day after day until being fit wasn't something I aspired to. It was just who I was.

But intention doesn't always travel in a straight line. The businesses I started with such conviction taught me more in their failure than they ever could have in success. The career I have now wasn't planned. It was discovered, through collision after collision with reality. I didn't decide to become this person early on. I became him by paying attention to what remained after everything I thought I wanted fell away.

So here I sit, trying to write about who I'll be in 2036. And I notice the familiar urge to project forward, to sketch a clear destination, to describe the man I'm working toward.

He is someone at peace. Fully aligned. A person whose inner world is steady regardless of what shifts around him. That's the target. That's what I practice for.

But I also know this: if I actually get there, if I arrive at some polished, complete version of myself, something has gone wrong. Because the whole point is the practising. The closing of the gap between who I am and who I could be. Not the closing of the gap itself, but the daily act of reaching across it. If my future self looks back at me now and doesn't see someone who still had growing to do, then I stopped somewhere along the way.

This is the tension between stillness and becoming that I can't resolve, and I'm starting to think I'm not supposed to.

The world will change in ways I can't fathom. Artificial intelligence is already reshaping how we work, think, and relate to knowledge. In ten years, the landscape of careers, industries, entire economies will look nothing like it does today. I don't know what my job will be. I don't know where I'll live. I don't know which of today's certainties will seem quaint by then.

But I know this: if everything external is subject to disruption, then the only ground worth tending is internal. Not goals. Not plans. Not titles. The question that survives every upheaval is the same one I'm sitting with right now: who do I want to be?

Not what do I want to achieve. Not where do I want to arrive. Who.

And the answer, for me, is someone still practicing. Still closing a gap he knows will never fully close. Still curious about who he's becoming, even — especially — when he can't see the shape of it yet.

I'm writing this down so that one day, a future version of me can look back and see the distance. Not to measure progress against a plan, but to witness the quiet accumulation of a life lived on purpose. One day, one choice, one small act of alignment at a time.

I wonder what he'll think of me.

I hope he's proud.

Until next time,

Ric