If you don’t know where you want to be, how do you know which direction to head?

For me, mindfulness is all about deciding where you want to be. It’s a question that’s easy to put off and hard to answer. And you can’t google it, because no one knows the right answer but you.

A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine told me he was going to Harvard Business School to get an MBA. We finished undergrad together a few years ago, and he’s been in the workforce since then. Until now.

I said my congrats, then asked him my favorite question: “Why?”

Why are you going back to school?

He told me he likes school and he misses college. That he knew he’d have more fun in the next few years if he was in school rather than in a cubicle.

“Why?”

Because, he said, in college he had way more free time.

I pointed out that he was committing to spending a ton of money just to buy some free time (when he wasn’t doing schoolwork) and that he could certainly buy himself a lot of free time with that same money without having to go to class.

He told me that he’d make more money after Harvard with a shiny new MBA on his resume. I’m sure he’s right.

But he’ll make that extra money at a job in an office, like the job he hates so much now that he’s willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars for an excuse to take a few years off.

And it probably won’t feel like extra money with a fresh pile of student loans to pay off.

I’m not saying that MBAs are a bad idea, they often aren’t. But in the case of my friend, an MBA is a very bad idea.

And like any bad idea, he has it because of bad thinking, or more specifically – too little thinking.

If he sat down and committed himself to really thinking about what he wants, I’m confident he’d make a different choice. I recognize that he has a thorn in his side (he hates his job), and he just reached for the nearest aspirin instead of getting to the root of the problem and grabbing some tweezers.

But to save himself an afternoon of thinking, he’s instead committed himself to years of school and decades of loan payments. And the thorn will still be there tomorrow.

Why does this matter to you?

We all have a limited amount of time on this planet, and a limited amount of force to shape our world. The force you apply (assuming you apply any at all) will shape the world. It’s up to you to make sure that enough of your force is applied the right way to shape your world into something you like.

It’s about effective (doing the right things) vs efficient (being good at doing things).

It’s about making decisions. Because no decision is always the wrong decision.

You can’t get what you want if you don’t know what you want.

These feel like corny truisms. They’re so obvious. But ask yourself – are you paddling towards your destination, or just in a random direction? Are you paddling at all?

What do you want your life to look like in 30 years – in an ideal world?

What did you do today to make that life a reality? If you don’t know exactly what it was, and you didn’t spend a good chunk of the last week doing it – it’s probably not going to happen.

So let’s talk about how we choose a direction.