I was raised to believe there was a formula.

Follow the rules. Work hard. Be responsible. Do the sensible thing.

Do all of that, and eventually, everything will pay off.

I believed that.

I think part of me still does.

The funny thing is, I don’t remember ever actually having a map.

There was never a career I had been dreaming about since I was ten. I wasn’t determined to become a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher. I didn’t have my life mapped out in five-year increments.

I just figured I would find out along the way.

And for most of my adult life, that’s exactly what I’ve done.

I’ve made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time. Then I learned something, adjusted, and made another one.

Sometimes those decisions turned into entire chapters.

I spent seventeen years in restaurants.

And I loved a lot about that chapter.

I had fun. A lot of fun, actually.

I met people who changed me. I learned how to lead. I learned how to build teams and systems, solve problems, develop people, communicate, and make decisions when everything around me was moving at approximately a thousand miles an hour.

I learned humility.

I learned when to stop talking and listen. How to take a step back and evaluate. How to seek to understand before deciding I already understood.

I learned that leadership doesn’t mean knowing everything.

You can be decisive and still listen.

You can be confident and still change your mind.

You can have years of experience and still learn something from the newest person in the room.

I became really good at what I did.

I could have kept going.

And that’s something I’ve thought about a lot, because people still ask me whether I miss it.

I don’t.

That doesn’t make those seventeen years a mistake.

It doesn’t mean I wasn’t successful.

It doesn’t mean I’m ungrateful for the people, the experiences, the opportunities, or the person that chapter helped me become.

It just means I didn’t want the life at the top of that particular ladder.

So I climbed down.

And that was scary.

Because we’re taught so much about climbing.

We’re taught to get the promotion. Make more money. Take the next position. Keep moving up.

Nobody talks quite as much about what happens when you’re halfway up the ladder, look around, and realize you don’t particularly want to go where it’s leaning.

Being capable of going farther isn’t the same thing as wanting to.

So I took the uncertain path instead.

I stepped away. I became a mom. I spent time raising my son.

And when I was ready to figure out what came next, I walked into an industry I knew almost nothing about.

I learned it.

I earned a professional license. I learned new systems, new language, new rules, new technology. I started building a business on the side. I started writing again. I started asking bigger questions about what I actually wanted my life to look like—not just what I wanted my next job to be.

And somewhere in all of that, I started realizing something.

Maybe I’m not behind because I don’t have one perfectly straight career path.

Maybe I’m not supposed to fit neatly into one of the boxes we were given when we were kids.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Maybe that’s the wrong question.

Because I’m 38, and I’m still becoming things.

I’m an operations person.

I’m a writer.

I’m a leader.

I’m a mom.

I’m an entrepreneur.

I’m a person who loves learning new things and apparently has very little fear of deciding, “Well, I don’t know how to do that yet,” and then figuring it out.

And I don’t know exactly where all of those pieces eventually lead.

That’s the truth.

There are people who seem to have a map. They know the destination, identify the road, and start driving.

I’ve never really had that.

Most of the time, I feel like I’m standing in front of a blank piece of paper with a pencil in my hand.

But maybe a blank page isn’t the same thing as being lost.

Maybe it means I get to draw the map.

And when I look backward, I can finally see a trail that I couldn’t see while I was walking it.

Restaurants taught me how to lead.

Leadership taught me how to listen.

Motherhood changed what I was willing to trade for a career.

Real estate taught me I could walk into something completely foreign and learn it.

Building a business is teaching me to trust myself.

Writing is reminding me of a part of myself that was there long before I knew what to do with it.

None of those roads were wasted.

They got me here.

So no, I still don’t have the whole map.

I’m not sure I ever will.

But I’ve gotten pretty good at finding the next trail.

And maybe that’s enough.

Maybe you don’t need to see the summit from where you’re standing.

You choose a direction. You take what you’ve learned with you. You pay attention to the trail beneath your feet.

You climb.

And when you get high enough to see a little farther, you decide where you want to go next.

Then you keep going.

One chapter at a time.

Start the next chapter.