What Are You Destined For?

Big topic to touch on a Friday in August.

Yesterday, I listened to “Like I Love You” by Justin Timberlake, and a lyric struck me.

The lyric went:

You know, you think about itSometimes people are just destinedDestined to do, what they doAnd that's what it isNow everybody dance

This tricked my mind, because, of course, JT is destined to do what he does. You're listening to his song twenty years after it came out. The song is confirming your love for such icons, but what about “regular people”? What are we destined for?

Many of us are on the journey to figure that destiny out. Few of us were pop stars at 14 or any equivalent, like JT was.

The problem here is not the lyric or even the underlying message of such artists. What I've begun to spot is my own mind's reaction to everyday things, because my immediate biased-brain screamed, “Sh**, what am I destined to do?”

But then I had a moment of truth: it's perfectly normal to find your path on the fly, or even build it after finally falling in love with something. Seldom do we know what we will do for the rest of our lives at 14 like JT when he joined NSYNC.

Same thing happens in business: Did every unicorn founder do it at 19 years of age, or did we get tricked into believing this by the media memes and Harvard case studies?

Our mind is dealing with something called survivorship bias here. We look at the winners because the rest are nowhere to be found. Measuring ourselves against the visible top of a distribution whose bottom is invisible is the best way to drive ourselves crazy with social comparison and FOMO.

When was the last time you caught yourself in a moment of truth?

Friday thoughts - have a great weekend!