Inertia is Hard

16 Apr 2015

Inertia of a heavy object is a hard force to oppose and life can feel heavy.

I had a good gig at Microsoft. They treat their employees really well on every metric, my managers were great, my coworkers were all good people, and I worked on Outlook, a product that ~10% of the world uses (kinda made that up, but I don’t think I’m far off). But I was unhappy for reasons that don’t really matter (in fact, like love, you don’t need reasons though having them will help you in the future). After a year or so, I didn’t know exactly what kind of life I wanted and so I let inertia take over. I stayed for another year. I didn’t take the time to really think about what success looked like for me and as a result wasn’t able to visualize my future life.

However, attempting to visualize every element of a possible future life and how it compares to your current situation is an impossible task! You should have a direction to life, but you’ll never know specifics. I was using this lack of assurance as a reason to stay where I was; unhappy and inertia bound.

I have learned more about my goals and desires in the past 2 years of failing than I have at any other point in my life. I would never know what I know now if I had simply tried to imagine my future life.

So I encourage you to go out and fail. You get to decide what kind of life you live. In life, as in love, if it’s not a resounding fuck yes, it’s a no.