A Letter from Chris Suarez
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
“You have no idea why the two men are chasing you or shooting at you, but you continue to run. Turning the corner while bullets whir by, you are confronted with two doors.
If you choose the black door on the left, go to page 97.
If you choose the green door on the right, go to page 53.”
Yesterday evening while putting Lilly to bed we decide to read one of her all-time favorites - a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. We flipped from the front of the book to the back of the book to the middle of the book, creating new stories with different climaxes and various endings. This particular book advertised “42 different endings” on its cover. And the more possible, the more exciting the books seem to my daughter. Why? Because children love choices. Children love options. Children love mysteries. Children love controlling the outcome. And so do most adults. Yet, somehow along the way, we seem to put the “Choose Your Own Adventure” back up on the shelf and take down the textbook or the manual.
I couldn’t help but think about how relevant this bedtime story was to our lives and businesses. Too often we start our careers on page one, plodding our way through the first chapter, only to begin the second chapter, boring our way through the third, and at some point, finally getting to the predetermined conclusion that someone else wrote for us years in the past. We allow every choice to be made for us. We allow every page to be turned right after the next.
Too often our business and personal life becomes an exercise in acceptance as opposed to a challenge of choice. Certainly, I believe in, and am an advocate of, being willing to do the mundane. To be good with doing the boring. To get comfortable in consistency. But this does not mean we have to be plodding our way to a predetermined outcome. It does not mean being comfortable with ending up where everyone else ends up by default.
The world and most industries are better because entrepreneurs and thinkers were willing to do things differently, think about things in new ways, take unexpected and unexplainable risks, ask new questions, and choose brand new adventures. When we stop and unpackaged why we do certain things in a certain way, too often we find that the underlying reason was to solve a problem that has actually been solved for decades. So much about our current business environment, education system, time management, wealth strategies, and even family dynamics are based on the past. Colonization. The Industrial Revolution. The Great Depression. The Digital Revolution. If left unchecked, these chapters will become your book. You will turn the pages in order, from cover to cover. On a good day, you will end up with an ending that you are happy with. On a bad day, you will feel like you spent reading - and unfortunately living - someone else’s 95 or 96 pages.
So, choose your own adventure. Flip to page 53 some days and see where that door leads. And remember, it’s not much of an adventure without other characters. I’ve never read a book or watched a movie with just one main character and no supporting cast. We all need co-stars in our book - other characters, partners - to help us through our adventure. But you are the hero. Joseph Campbell wrote about this in his 1949 classic, The Hero with A Thousand Faces. The hero always chooses his or her path. We choose those that we want to go down the path with. The adventure is yours to take or make, ride or drive, allow or choose.
Chris