What’s your favourite ice cream flavour?
Are you a gooey chocolate kinda person? Or the sorbet sweet-enough-to-kill-your-tastebuds sort?
For Charlie it’s white chocolate that hits differently. And for Karl it’s a wild combination of lemon sorbet mixed with Mövempick caramel ice cream.
But, how many flavours have you actually tried before? How can you know that walnut is your favourite flavour if you’ve never tasted it before?
Maybe it’s 5. Maybe it’s 10. Maybe it’s even 100.
And now think about how many flavours are out there scattered across ice cream parlours from Barcelona to Beijing. An almost infinite amount right?
Yeah, and you’ll never be able to try them all.
But, the least you can do is to try a few.
Otherwise how can you know it's your favourite?
Choosing the right life isn’t so different
Tasting life’s many ice creams is so important.
Because the more things we experience, the better we get to know ourselves. Each time learning more about what we like and don’t like. Both personally and professionally. On a superficial level and on a deeper value-based level.
Karl: This really hit home when I first dived down the personal development rabbit hole in my early 20s, where I wrote down my core values as Ambition, Success and Freedom.
As the years passed by and I tasted the different environments and careers from the suited and booted corporate consulting to the free-spirited entrepreneurs and cultivated hipsters, I started to experience nuances in my preferences and abilities.
I realised that ambition and success, while being great values to hold, were also grounded in the wrong motivation. I was trying to win at all costs, resulting in a back injury and burnout. But, once I experienced more of what life had to offer I realised that ambition and success lacked the grounding of the deeper elements of life that really mattered to me. Through the process I came to adapt my values to Family, Contribution and Growth, which still continue to evolve today.
The lesson: While your taste buds are evolving, decide to experiment with the infinite combination of ice cream flavours out there. Even mix the flavours together. Add on some sprinkles. And ask for that chocolate dipped cone. Otherwise how will you know?
Play for decades and not days
It can be easy to think that today will never end.
And that somehow the present will extend forever - and that with it the people, places and priorities in our life will remain forever constant.
But, as hard as we might try to moisturise our ageing away, cling dearly onto our relationships and push through for that one more promotion, the reality is that we’re getting one year older.
And that we’re not the same person we were 12 months ago.
So, when we make today’s choices we must consider tomorrow’s realities.
For no matter how hard we search for this perfect balance, we must recognise that each lifestyle comes with its own compromises.
We can’t have it all. And that’s okay. As long as we actively decide on the trade-offs we make and realise that they might not remain the same in the future.
Charlie: This is a reality that I often struggle with.
As someone who loves to squeeze every last drop out of all aspects of life, I’ve recently had to come to terms with the fact that while I’m investing my time into expanding my career and achieving my sporting potential I can’t give a new relationship the attention it deserves.
I simply don't have the time, energy or headspace.
I recognise that next year my priorities might change. But, for now I’m content in the sacrifices that I’m making and the life I’m leading.
Questions for you: Are there any compromises you’re knowingly making in your life? Are they the right ones for you right now? And how might they change in the future?
Maintain our many life pillars
At any one point, especially as multipotentialites with our enormous range of interests, there will be many parts to our lives: our career, community, partner, friends, family, health and leisure just to name a few.
Each one, like a pillar within an acropolis, will be supporting our life to ensure we’re healthy, happy and aligned to who we are.
If one falls apart while the others remain sturdy we often feel able to take on the challenge ahead of us.
But, if a few start to crumble at the same time, the structure begins to become unstable and everything can quickly become overwhelming.
Karl: This happened to me in January 2022 when I had to face the turbulence of building a company in the midst of a challenging parental divorce and a personal struggle with health issues all at once. It’s safe to say my acropolis was caving in.
But, rather than just letting it happen, I decided to focus firstly on steadily building up the core pillar of health before casting my attention elsewhere. If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. Even though I had to sacrifice career progress and take a massive step back, it was critically needed to build my health pillar up before attending to the others. Now, my acropolis is slow and steadily rebuilt, bigger and sturdier than ever before.
Charlie: My acropolis was at its weakest when I moved home after a breakup back in October 2022. I went from living with a partner in a city full of friends with a career that paid well to living by myself in the countryside with no clear direction for my work.
What kept me going was my core pillar of Ironman training which I religiously followed each day, investing over 15 hours a week, every week. It kept me sane, becoming my outlet for the stress, introspection and emotions that I was working through. Which, after 5 months, led me back to London with a new role, flatmate and level of fitness, clear in the direction I was heading in and resilient to the challenges that lay ahead.
As we both reflected on our shared experiences we came up with a list of questions we use to check-in with our pillars that you might find useful:
How do your pillars look right now?
Which ones are core to everything else?
Can their structure explain how your life feels right now?
And what can you do to improve your situation?
Conclusion
Life won’t always progress in a linear way. Sometimes it will squiggle to the left and right, bringing twists, turns and setbacks we’d never even considered. Other times it’ll require us to evolve as a person and embrace the ever changing versions of ourselves.
This journey is a lot easier to handle once we let go of wanting life to always remain the same. Instead, we can choose to get excited about everything that is ahead of us, accepting that we never truly know what each day, week, month and year will bring.
By embracing reality not as a linear path but a squiggly doodle, we can allow ourselves to face what can be linearly interpreted as life’s challenges, detours and setbacks - as a part of the exciting journey that is life (and ice cream).