Is that all there is?

About this Video:

Have you ever worked toward something for years, convinced that reaching the finish line would bring clarity or satisfaction? I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. After selling my business, I expected to feel accomplished. Instead, I found myself asking different questions.

In this video, I explore what that experience taught me about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. We spend a lot of time collecting information, but wisdom seems to come from paying attention when things don’t go according to plan. If you’re navigating change, uncertainty, or a major life transition, I think you’ll find something worth reflecting on here.

Transcription:

Is that all there is?I remember asking myself that question after I finally sold my food service company.

Years of negotiations, a deal that almost happened then blew up, then somehow came back from the dead.

And when it was finally done, paper signed handshakes all around. I felt nothing.

Actually worse than nothing, I felt completely alone.

The phone stopped ringing, not gradually.

Nobody needed my opinion anymore.

Nobody was calling with a problem that I needed solving.

I wasn’t the owner.

So who was I?

Here’s what I figured out.

Looking back, I had missed the entire journey.

I was so fixated on closing the deal.

I’m getting to the finish line that I never once looked up to know is what was happening around me while I was running the race.

And that’s a problem because wisdom doesn’t live at the finish line.

Wisdom lives in the journey.

Now I want to make a distinction here.

They think matters a lot.

Knowledge and wisdom aren’t the same thing.

Knowledge you can accumulate, you can read it, download it, Google it at 11:00 PM when you can’t sleep.

I had plenty of knowledge going into the sale negotiation.

I understood deal structures.

After all, I’d worked with business owners on exits for years.

But wisdom, wisdom is earned and you earn it almost exclusively by paying attention to what’s actually happening and in front of you, especially when it’s uncomfortable.

During that first sale attempt, the buyers were running a classic good cop, bad cop routine right in front of me.

One guy was pleasant and encouraging.

The other showed up later with demands that made my stomach drop textbook negotiated, and I never saw it coming.

Why?

Because I wasn’t curious about what was actually happening.

I just wanted the deal done.

That’s knowledge without wisdom, and it costs me, you know, there’s a passage I keep coming back to WH Murray from his account of the Scottish Himalayan Expedition he wrote.

The moment one definitely commits oneself and providence moves to a whole stream of events issues from the decision.

Raising in one’s favor, all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have believed, would’ve come his way.

A whole stream of events.

That’s the journey, that’s what he was describing.

I committed to selling my company, but I never noticed the stream.

I was standing right in the middle of it, water rushing past my ankle, staring at the far bank, trying to figure out the fastest way across.

The stream had everything in it.

People could have told me what to expect.

On the other side, signals about my readiness to let go, questions about what I actually wanted next.

I wasn’t paying attention, so I learned almost nothing.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting.

A while back, I went through cancer for the first time and it was a really big deal, and somehow I got the journey right.

Maybe it’s because cancer doesn’t let you focus only on the destination.

You can’t sprint forward. on better.

You’re at the mercy of the process in a way that business never quite forces you to be.

So I paid attention.

I asked questions, not just what’s the prognosis, but real questions.

What does this treatment actually do?

Or what should I expect?

What have other patients learned that doesn’t show up in the medical literature?

I watch every step.

With curiosity, not just anxiety, and I learned things.

I couldn’t have gotten any other way about my own resilience, about which relationships were real, about fear, and specifically about how fear shrinks when you look directly at it instead of trying to outrun it.

That’s wisdom, not information, wisdom that came directly from paying attention to what was unfolding.

One step at a time.

The journey through cancer, even with all its difficulty, was more meaningful than almost any destination I’ve ever reached.

I couldn’t have said that about the food service sale because I never let that journey teach me anything.

So how do we actually do this differently?

I don’t have a tidy framework for you.

What I have is a few things I’ve been practicing imperfectly that seem to help.

first.

Curiosity as a default.

When something unexpected happens, ask, what is this trying to show me before you ask, how do I fix it?

Second, slow down enough to notice Wisdom requires actual contact with what’s happening.

You can’t receive what the journey is offering you if you’re moving too fast to feel it.

Third, ask better questions, not just, how do I get there?

But what does this moment have to teach me?

And fourth and probably the hardest one, be willing to say, I don’t know, stay in the uncertainty when without forcing a premature answer.

The hero doesn’t get to skip to the hard middle.

Neither do we.

You know, I am back in cancer world right now.

It’s more complicated this time, but I’m trying to do what I did the first time.

Pay attention, ask questions.

Notice the stream and understand, is that all there is that question used to feel like disappointment, like arriving somewhere and finding it smaller than you’d hope.

Now I think it’s just the wrong question.

The better one is this.

Am I actually here for what’s happening right now?

That’s the one I’m still working on.

I’d love to know where you are with it.

Drop a comment, send me a note.

Come find me at the long strange trip.com.

Hey, we’re all figuring this out together, and thanks a lot for stopping by.

I hope to see you back here again next week.