Don't Follow the North Star
Finding the Magnetic North.
I miss the career I left behind.
The joy of learning from the mission-driven founders I supported as a venture capitalist and impact investor. The camaraderie of brilliant and beloved colleagues working to make the world a better place. The mental and material ease from earning a comfortable living doing stimulating work that I believed could help others.
But what I miss most is the certainty.
Throughout my career, I was certain that my overarching goal in life was to have the most positive impact on others possible. I was certain that maximizing impact was my North Star, the criterion by which I should make all my decisions. I was certain that if I followed that North Star wherever it took me – from building a poultry farm in Zambia to making private equity investments at a global firm – I would find meaning and fulfillment.
And that is the incandescent allure and fiery downfall of a North Star. It feels certain, true, infallible. So most of us follow it.
Our North Star
It looks different for each of us, but our North Star is always a variation on a theme. Make the most money. Be the most intelligent. Be the most beautiful. Garner the most influence. Wield the most power. Have the most impact. More simply, it is to have the most success, however we choose to define that.
Our North Star is easy to follow because it’s simple. It’s a clear, defined target in a confusing world. Like Polaris, the actual North Star, it is a bright, shiny object, high in the sky, clear for everyone to see.
And that visibility makes it even more tempting. Because everyone else is looking at our North Star, too. We’re all running a race to see who can reach it. And our proximity to our North Star often matters less than our lead against the person right next to us, navigating toward the same beacon.
I followed my North Star for nearly 15 years, and it led me deep into the thick forest of finance, which never felt like home. After suffering through a second deeply misaligned professional partnership, I started to question the possibility of having large-scale impact at all, much less having that impact while being happy.
So I gave up my North Star. And I realized I didn’t need a new one, a new external target to follow to the ends of the earth, a new version of certainty.
No, what I needed was a new way of navigating.
A New Way of Navigating
A compass does not point north. Or at least not to the north you’re thinking of.
The North Star guides to one end of the Earth’s axis of rotation, called geographic north. But a compass guides to an entirely different north, magnetic north, which is the point at which the Earth’s magnetic field points downward, the product of the churning of Earth’s molten core.
These two norths are hundreds of miles apart, and that is the smallest of their differences.
So as I gave up my North Star, I found that a Magnetic North is what I’ve needed all along.
The long-time North Star navigator in me wants to give you a quick, pithy definition of my Magnetic North. Something clear and visible and imitable.
But unlike the North Star, Magnetic North is invisible and internal. It is felt, not seen. In the pursuit of curiosity that led to this very writing, I have been searching for a force that only I can feel and that most won’t understand. Something that, like poles of a magnet, pulls me because a fundamental part of me is attracted to a fundamental part of it. There’s no shiny external goal, no beacon to follow, just the firm tug of an inexplicable attraction.
Magnetic North further defies crisp explanation because it is constantly changing. Unlike Polaris, which will remain the North Star well beyond our lifetimes, the Earth’s magnetic north has already wandered hundreds of miles in an irrational pattern in my 36 years.
And so too meanders my Magnetic North, and I have come to embrace uncertainty and the challenge of navigating toward a moving target. It was always folly to think of a single, unmoving definition of success for my life. It left no room for life’s inevitable feedback loop, for learning about myself and the world and what parts of myself and the world make sense together.
So navigating by my Magnetic North defies succinct definition. It is a process of constantly testing where my own churning molten core is pulling me. And it has already surprised me.
Navigational Surprises
When I entered this year of exploration, I wanted to find conviction. Specifically, I wanted to find a career path about which I had an endless well of self-motivated curiosity.
As I adjusted my instruments and listened to where I was being pulled, I realized that my strongest conviction has nothing to do with work. I feel pulled to community and family and being closer to both. For someone who has lived at least 800 miles from my family for over half my life now, it is a shock to realize that my Magnetic North is pulling me to prioritize moving closer to home over the various professional paths that would lead me further away. And it is strange not to be able to offer a clear rationale for what’s pulling me, other than that it feels right.
That’s the beauty and mischief of the Magnetic North. It pulls you where you’re supposed to go and leaves you nothing to explain yourself with other than, just maybe, happiness. And that is a fine trade for the certainty of a North Star.
Got Curiosity?
Things that are helping spark my curiosity
Literature reviews: As a clinical research assistant, I’ve started to be pulled into doing literature reviews for papers my colleagues are writing. This is essentially a process of finding the right keywords to pull up the most relevant journal articles for a potential paper topic and doing a quick review and synopsis. (Basically fancy Googling using a database of research studies.) I just completed one on a measure of borderline personality disorder (the MSI-BPD), and it was the most fascinating set of articles. There was even one trying to posthumously diagnose Vincent Van Gogh’s psychiatric maladies. It’s been an accelerated way to see a lot of research and better hone my interests. For anyone with access to similar databases, try searching for some terms of interest. It’s wild the directions it will take you!
That’s Curious!
Something I’ve been curious about this week
What is north? As you can tell above and from my musings on theoretical physics in the past, I have really been leaning on science to offer analogies for life and spirituality. I fell deep into the rabbit hole on the definition of north. There’s many more norths than even geographic north and magnetic north, and even these two are more dynamic than I could capture above. Here’s one short primer on a few of these norths in case your Magnetic North is calling you to read more about magnetic north. :)