We can get into a rut when things don't work out. You know, we try something we think we might do for a living and it turns out, for whatever reason, that people just aren't biting.

There's no traction, you doubt yourself; you feel you're wasting your time. You look at your bank account and it doesn't reflect your time and experience and you think, ‘what the fuck am I doing?'.

I've been there.

But what if you're taking stock too soon?

What if this thing you're doing, in isolation, is only one piece of the puzzle?

You could spend years going from one thing to the next and none of it stick.

Then suddenly, the last piece of the puzzle appears, in a chance meeting, a phone call, a book you find or something a friend says.

You realise that all those years trying to find ‘the thing' was actually ‘finding the thing'. It's just you were taking score too soon.

It all makes sense.

I tell my kids to try many things–go where you're drawn. In the absence of sufficient data, I don't believe there is better advice.

In fact, it's often the case that data leads us astray.

“I found myself in the position of that child in a story who noticed a bit of string and – out of curiosity – pulled on it to discover that it was just the tip of a very long and increasingly thick string…and kept bringing out wonders beyond reckoning” 

Benoît B. Mandelbrot

Read The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick