If You Carry On Your Current Path, What Will Happen?
Prefer to listen rather than read? Listen to the podcast episode covering this same topic here → The Quietly Disruptive Business Podcast
Questions are like mirrors. They don’t give you answers but instead, they show you what you already know but haven’t spoken out loud yet. With this in mind, there’s one question that I think might be the most important question you can ask yourself in business. It’s deceptively simple and profoundly revealing in equal measure: if you carry on your current path, what will happen?
Most founders answer this quickly with the optimistic, rose-tinted version, the one they’ve been telling themselves. But I’d like you to sit with it properly and find the honest answer. Because where you want to go and where you’re actually heading are not always the same place.
Where This Question Comes From And Why It Works So Well in Business
Full disclosure: this question isn’t mine. It comes from the Odyssey Plan, a life design exercise developed by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans at Stanford’s Life Design Lab. The exercise asks you to map out your life exactly as it is — not the version you’d like it to be, but as it actually is — and then imagine where you’d be in five years if nothing changes. It was created to help people figure out their lives, but I’ve found it to be one of the most confronting and useful questions you can ask in a business context, because in business we spend so much time planning where we want to go that we rarely stop to honestly assess where we’re actually heading.
When I think back through my own career, I can see how valuable this question would have been at multiple points. In my early days as a social media manager, I threw myself into every trend, every algorithm hack, every post — doing everything I could to keep up for my clients. If I’d asked this question back then, I would have realised much sooner that social media was something I could do but it wasn’t my path. I spent years doing it because I thought it would get me where I wanted to go, when in reality it was just making me go around in circles. Later, as a brand strategist, the same question would have shown me that I was ignoring my own priorities — constantly putting my dreams on hold to chase someone else’s, rather than building the life and business I actually wanted.
The Gap Between Intentions and Actions
The reason this question is so powerful is that it asks you to confront your actions rather than your intentions. It’s not asking you to feel bad about where you are. It’s asking you to get honest about where you’re going.
Most founders know what they intend to do. They intend to work with better clients next year. They intend to raise their prices when the time is right. They intend to pivot to the business they really want to build when the conditions are better. But intentions don’t produce a future — actions do. The only way to work with better clients is to go and find them. The only way to raise your prices is to update them. The only way to bring to life the business you really want is to say: I’m doing this now. Not later. Not next year. Not someday. Now. If the actions haven’t changed, the future won’t change either. The only way to change where you end up is to change the things you’re doing to get there.
Are You Moving Or Moving Towards Something You Actually Want?
It’s so easy to feel busy. Doing the same things day in, day out, you’re moving somewhere — or at least it feels like it. But this question isn’t asking whether you’re moving. It’s asking whether you’re moving towards something you actually want. Where will you be in three years if absolutely nothing changes? If you stay on the same path with the same clients, the same services, the same habits, the same ways of working — where will you end up?
I hope, when you sit with that, you find yourself heading somewhere you genuinely want to be. The place on your vision board, or the one that’s clear in your mind’s eye. And if not, take it as a gentle nudge — a sign that a few course corrections are needed. Even small steps can change the direction of a journey. It’s like adjusting the sails on your boat as you cross the ocean. It changes the destination, not the whole journey.
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
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