Your Future: The Crossroads of Should and Must

Stop everything you are doing. Leave this page...

Take 20 minutes to read one of the wisest, most profound posts you'll ever see about your career — and your life. Read The Crossroads of Should and Must by artist Ella Luna.



She covers...


Why "choosing Must is scary, hard, and a lot like jumping off a terrifyingly high cliff where you can’t see anything down below” — and yet you still gotta do it.

Section 1: Choosing Must creates the kind of work that puts ripples through the universe

Section 2: Choosing Must often requires a leap of faith

Section 3: Choosing Must is a daily practice, a recurring choice

Among her closing sentences: "When we choose Must, what we create is ourselves....And today, you get to choose."




When you come back to this page — (I promise to make it worth doing so! ) — your head reeling with realizations, popping with possibilities... Let's drill deeper into that crossroad — to the profound truths that will determine your future:

> Most of the amazing future of work, that could be yours, depends on you choosing Must over Should

• "I must follow my passion."

• "I must be true to who I am."

• "I must speak up."

> Most of the crap and stupid stuff, that will hinder you, is because you chose Should over Must

• "I really should attend that stupid meeting."

• "I really should reply to all those emails."

• "I really should suck it up and sacrifice family time because..."




Let's dive deeper into...

What is the crossroad you're facing today, right at this moment?

While there are infinite variations, I have found there to be three major categories. Most of us fall into one or more of the following...



1. "Everything is pretty good. If Only..." Even in the best of situations, there's always something bugging us, or pulling at us, like a cross-wind that keeps blowing us slightly off course, making us work just a little harder than we think we should. 



What I've found: Most of us reach first for a How To solution. An app. A tool. A set of "do this, then do that" instructions. Good move! Do that! Simply Google "How do I..." and you'll find tons of resources. But also dig deeper. The 80/20 Rule applies here: Eight out of every ten "If only's" you're experiencing need to be addressed through introspection: "What am I doing, or not doing, that's causing those crosswinds? What's within my control and power to change?"



If you do that introspection, you will find that you will use those tools and those how to's differently. That, mostly, what was required was a shift inside of you. (e.g., Most email overload can be addressed by a personal decision about who/what really really matters, and simply using filters accordingly.)



2. "It's time to take control. To change who has control of my time, my life." With disengagement scores consistently between 60% to 80%, clearly most of us feel this way. And yet... We keep staying disengaged! Blaming the economy, or our boss or our company. Stop that! Stop that now!! Take control, dammit! It's your life!



There are many ways to do this. Among them...

• Don't Fight Stupid: Simply stop over-investing in what matters to others, but doesn't matter to you. Stay laser focused on your top three priorities this year ... and accept that you'll get dinged occasionally for doing so. Fear not: You'll be happier in the long run.

• Divorce Your Job: This doesn't mean quitting. (At least not right away.) It means embracing your disengagement, AND actively doing something about it. Even if that's behind the scenes, while sticking it out at your current job. A dear friend, Ayelet Baron, is a perfect example of this. She speaks about how she fired herself from Cisco, but only after all that she was doing for them took a toll on her health and more. In a recent post, Making It Real: What Are You Doing? she provides a great checklist of questions for getting unstuck and moving on. 

• Become an Activist Within The System: In the past few years, there has been an explosion of communities formed to create change from within. A sampling: Change Agents Worldwide, WorldBlu, Rebels at Work, HR Rockstars, Work Hackers, Management Innovation Exchange, Great Workplace Culture Initiative. Becoming an activist in communities like these will not only help make things better for all of us, but you will also find an immediate, personal, return on your investment. For either Don't Fight Stupid or Become an Activist: You will find that community members will give you the support you needed to spur yourself into action sooner, rather than later.



You may stay in your current job. Or you may find a different, better job. Believe it or not, that's not what matters. What matters is the refreshed, revised, reinvented attitudes and beliefs and actions you bring with you to work.



Whatever you do, learn from me and Ayelet, and my friends John and Rick. Don't wait until you get a severe wake-up call! My wake-up call was the death of my mom 20 years ago. Ayelet's was what business stress had done to her health. Rick was overextending himself with international travel until his wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. John was one of the last people to leave American Express's headquarters on 9/11, across the street from the towers, risking his life to ensure that all his co-workers were safe — only to be downsized by Amex a few months later. Do not wait for that kind of wake-up call! Take control before that happens to you.



3. "There's a song inside me that I've just gotta sing!" Do you have something inside you — a song, a painting, a book, a product, an idea, a passion — that makes your heart beat faster? That fills you with joy every time you think about it? Then now is the time!



There has never been a better time for you to strike out on your own! Sure, it's going to be a lot... A LOT... of hard work and struggle. (Here's an infographic on how two guys went from not being able to pay their rent to running a $10 billion company, Airbnb. Theirs is no overnight success story! They worked very hard, with next to no income for a long time.)



But if that song or painting is inside you, the hard work won't be what you'll remember. As Ayelet says: "The clock is ticking. We will never have this minute back again. What are you going to paint on that canvas?"





And to bring it all back to where we began... From Ella Luna...


If you believe that you have something special inside of you, and you feel it’s about time you gave it a shot, honor that calling in some small way — today.




Because there is a recurring choice in life, and it occurs at the intersection of two roads. We arrive at this place again and again. And today, you get to choose.