A Harvard Career Counseling exercise asks people to write their 5- and 10-year goals, then shade their calendar for time spent on them. Most find almost none. That gap, uncomfortable as it is, can shift how you spend your days.
Chapters
So doing something novel is always good to make something memorable and remarkable. And I also like the insight that it's not always positive moments. So one of the most popular courses at Harvard is actually run out of the Career Counseling Center. And one of the things that they do with audiences like you, and especially those of you that want to be entrepreneurs, is they say, what are your goals for the next 5, 10 years? And everybody writes down their goals. And then they have this exercise where they say, OK, take out your Your calendar, your phone, whatever mechanism you use to keep your calendar, look at the last 2 weeks. Shade in the times during those last 2 weeks when you were pursuing that 5-year, 10-year goal. And people do that exercise and it's like, oh no, it's like I had nothing in the last 2 weeks pursuing that 5-year goal. That's not a positive delight, moment of delight, but it is a profound moment because we realize that how little unless we take time, how little we are pursuing the goals that we say that we want to pursue in the course of a normal existence, and so I think defining moments are moments that change our trajectory and move us towards goodness, but they're not always positive.