When I grow up, I want to be..

Looking Back, None Of It Made Sense

If you had asked me at 16 where my life was headed, I would have been spectacularly wrong.

Not slightly wrong.

Completely wrong.

There was no version of the plan where I would spend time in the Merchant Navy, do stand-up comedy, start a business, and eventually find myself making films.

Looking back, it feels like a strange sequence of choices.

The funny thing is that none of them were part of a master plan.

If anything, each chapter made the next one less predictable.

The Navy didn't lead naturally to comedy.

Comedy didn't lead naturally to entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship didn't lead naturally to filmmaking.

And yet, here we are.

For a long time, I thought successful people had a map.

A clear destination.

A neat trajectory.

But the more people I met, the less true that seemed.

The entrepreneur who wanted to be an artist.

The artist who secretly wished for more stability.

The corporate executive who started over at forty.

The comedian who approached his craft with the discipline of an athlete.

The filmmaker who thought more like a businessperson than an artist.

Interesting lives rarely moved in straight lines.

They wandered.

Not aimlessly.

But curiously.

What looked like randomness from the outside was often curiosity from the inside.

Someone followed an interest.

That interest led to a room.

The room introduced them to people.

The people opened another door.

And suddenly a completely different life became possible.

I don't think planning is overrated.

I've spent enough time in the real world to know that plans matter.

But I do think we underestimate curiosity.

Because plans can only take us toward destinations we already know exist.

Curiosity introduces us to destinations we never knew were possible.

Most of the things that shaped my life weren't on a checklist.

They were conversations.

Experiences.

Detours.

Accidents.

Rooms I almost didn't enter.

I've also noticed something else.

Almost every meaningful opportunity in my life came through people.

Not applications.

Not some perfectly designed roadmap.

People.

Every significant project I've worked on came from someone who knew me, worked with me, met me somewhere, or was connected to someone who did.

Which means most of the opportunities that shaped my life weren't sitting on a spreadsheet.

They were sitting in rooms.

Rooms I had to enter.

And that's why "getting out" feels so important to me.

Getting out of familiar circles.

Getting out of the version of yourself you've already decided you are.

Getting out of the plan.

Not because plans are useless.

Plans are incredibly useful.

They give us direction.

But life has a habit of introducing variables the plan never accounted for.

A conversation.

A detour.

A chance encounter.

A new interest.

A room you almost didn't walk into.

I've come to believe that planning and pivoting are not opposites.

The best plans leave room for discovery.

They leave room for changing your mind.

They leave room for becoming someone you didn't know you could become.

The older I get, the less interested I become in having the perfect map.

And the more interested I become in moving.

Because every major chapter of my life started when I stepped into a room that wasn't part of the plan.

And almost every good thing that followed came from there.

Not when everything went according to plan.

But when life had enough space to surprise me.

so when I grow up..I just want to let life happen to me!