The Best Path is the Wrong Question

Recently, I had the privilege of speaking to a room full of students about careers, space exploration, AI, creativity, and the future. The week before that, I participated in a speed mentoring event for college and graduate students. As expected, many of them wanted to know some version of the same thing:

What's the best path?

If I want to become X, what's the one thing I should do?

How do I know if I'm making the right decision?

What if I make the wrong choice?

These may seem like questions about their careers, but they’re really questions about certainty, with an undercurrent of fear. They are questions about how to avoid mistakes, unnecessary detours, wasted time, failure, and disappointment.

I completely understand the instinct. Our brains like certainty, efficiency, and familiar patterns.

Uncertainty takes energy, and change can feel unsafe - what if the grass isn’t actually greener?

Best not to risk it.

My personal journey is a circuitous one, for sure. I didn't plan to attend MIT, I didn't plan the roles I held at NASA. I certainly didn't plan to leave NASA, work in industry or become an entrepreneur. I could never have imagined the friendships, projects, opportunities, and

experiences that most shaped my life.

Some arose because I worked hard and pursued something I loved intentionally. Others because a door closed, a plan changed, or an unexpected opportunity appeared that I could never have seen until I was standing directly in front of it.

The only ‘trick’ to navigating your career as gracefully as possible, if there is one, is to stay

present enough to recognize the opportunities that are for you when they appear. And some of those opportunities may be ones you are meant to learn from, not master.

This doesn't mean planning is useless – trust me, I love a good plan. But somewhere along the way, many of us start believing that if we can just create the perfect plan, we can avoid uncertainty altogether. We begin treating life like a problem to solve rather than an experience to participate in.

We spend so much energy searching for the path with the fewest detours, roadblocks or dead ends. But growth requires discomfort. When we’re building capacity or a new capability, we have to re-calibrate our entire being and nervous system, challenge our patterns and beliefs, and gain a new perspective on our identity.

At the same time, I think many high achievers miss an important distinction. Not all struggle is growth.

There is a difference between the discomfort that comes from stretching into a larger version of yourself and the exhaustion that comes from constantly working against your own nature. One builds capacity. The other drains it. We live in a hustle culture where nobody feels what they have achieved is worth anything if it was easy. But that’s different from the belief that everything has to be a struggle to be deserved.

Over the years, I've watched incredibly talented people convince themselves that every difficulty should simply be met with more effort. If something isn't working, push harder. If you're tired, work longer. If you're overwhelmed, become more disciplined. That may work for a while, but eventually, many people find themselves successful on paper and deeply depleted in practice.

Overextension often masquerades as drive and dedication before it reveals itself as

burnout.

You reply to emails after hours, ‘absorb’ the work there aren’t enough bodies to do, you become the person everyone relies on when things are urgent, complicated, emotional, or undefined. And that role can feel meaningful because you are contributing in important ways. But it’s depleting and unsustainable.

This is why self-awareness is so critical. Understanding how you naturally think, make

decisions, create, contribute, and recover gives you information.

It helps you recognize your own signal:

• When a challenge is helping you grow and when it is simply creating friction

• When you're stretching into a larger version of yourself and when you're forcing yourself into a shape that was never yours

• When an opportunity is aligned with who you are and when you're pursuing it because it looks good on paper or meets someone else’s expectations

The students I spoke with wanted to know the best path. I don’t think that question has an

answer, and I also don't think life works like that.

I think life is constantly leaving us breadcrumbs. A conversation that stays with you. An

opportunity that keeps tugging at your attention. A closed door that redirects you. A quiet sense of energy or a quiet sense of depletion. A moment that feels strangely alive before it makes any logical sense.

But we have to be present enough to notice them.

That, to me, is the real practice. Not finding the perfect path but staying in tune enough with yourself to recognize what is actually yours as it appears, and whether you have the interest or the energy to engage with it when it does.

Even if you can hear your own signal and honor it, life will still include highs and lows,

successes and failures, starts and stops, and moments that make absolutely no sense until later. But when you are listening, those experiences are more likely to build capacity, deepen self-trust and help you become more fully yourself.

The cost comes when we stop listening. When we confuse external success with internal

alignment. When we override ourselves for so long that depletion become the only signal loud enough to hear.

There is no perfect path. There is only the path that keeps asking you to be present, responsive, and true to yourself as life unfolds.