Live the Questions
This is my favorite quotation of all time:
"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
- From Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Again and again, I've returned to this passage and thought about what it means to live the questions—so much so that "Live the Questions" was a contender when I originally named my business!
As a coach, I am a professional question asker.
One of my favorites to ask clients is: What do you want to be known for?
It's a daunting question. It feels BIG and important and complicated to find the answer.
But what I've discovered over a decade of coaching people through navigating their careers is that it's not so much about finding the answer as it is about holding the question.
It's about learning to sit with it and ask it again and again, finding your way into successive answers that likely won't make sense looking forward but will have a cohesive, common thread someday when you look back.
Steve Jobs said:
"You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
"Connect the Dots" was also a business name contender. I think that's my cohesive, common thread revealing itself. Here I am, holding that question and living my way into the answer.
So I'm curious: What do you want to be known for? I'm not asking about Your One, True, Enduring Purpose For The Rest Of Your Life because that is impossible to know right now. But today, in this current chapter of your life, what comes up when you consider that question?
Ready to connect the dots of your career path thus far? Book a 1:1 Career Mapping Session.
