Big Decisions

Once, as an exercise in my leadership class, I tasked my students with writing six-word memoirs. They were struggling, so I decided to help them out with an example. I wrote several drafts, but the one I presented was, “Big decisions were made for me.”  That is a pretty good summation of the major turning points in my life.

It’s not that I lacked agency; it’s just that at key inflection points, my option sets were limited, and alternative paths were unappealing. I went to Texas State because they offered me a full-tuition scholarship, and I couldn’t afford Rice and couldn’t justify paying for UT. I went to work at Deloitte because it was the only offer I received out of graduate school. I left there when the partnership and firm strategy became untenable. There are many, many more examples of decisions that didn’t really feel like decisions at the time.

The decision that had the biggest impact on my life was more of the same. When I graduated from Texas State, I moved to Hawaii. That simple choice made all the difference in everything that came after. The circumstances surrounding that decision were challenging. It was 1988, and the Texas economy was still reeling from an oil crash and the savings and loan crisis. There were no jobs available, and I had connections on Oahu. I had a college friend who was living in Waikiki that offered me a place to stay, and a former boss secured me a job offer at a large hotel on the beach.

I figured I would stay for six to twelve months to ride out the recession back home. Four years later, I was still there, in a relationship with my future wife and with enough experience to secure a spot in the MBA program at the University of Texas. In hindsight, my marriage, my children, my professional career, and my love of the tropics can all be traced to that one simple decision that didn’t feel like a decision at all. The alternatives were unattractive, and the open path to Hawaii was laid before me.

I think that life is like this for many people. We want to believe that we are in charge of our own destiny. The reality, though, is that circumstances often dictate the directions we choose, and there is more luck involved than we would care to admit. Big decisions were made for me…and I am grateful for that.