I don't really have a vision…
In other words, I'm "directionless".
We were meant to take off from Bali by 7 pm. Hotel checkout was at 1 pm. If you’ve ever had six dead hours in an airport with a fifteen-month-old, you already know where this is going.
The Tujuwan Lounge is a small, low-key space in the middle of the terminal, the kind of lounge that begs you to sit still, lower your voice, and behave like a civilised adult. My daughter received this memo but immediately rejected it. She had decided that this was a racetrack and every stranger was an audience. She wouldn’t stop running and screaming.
I left her with her mother to battle with. Pulled out my laptop, found a corner, and tried to look like a man with important things to do.
At some point, I went to the toilet. And I was gone maybe fifteen minutes. When I came back, my wife seemed to have made a new friend. It was a woman, mid-thirties, Australian, passionate in the way that her hands moved faster than her words. She’d come to Bali for business and was developing some kind of gaming product in Australia.
She was fascinating, and it’s not even because of what she was saying, it’s how specifically she was saying it. She painted a very detailed picture. Where her new product is now, where it’ll be in five years, what the Australian gaming market looks like, and how she intends to be the number one woman in gaming in Australia within the next five years. She had timelines, milestones, and probably a Pinterest board for the company’s tenth anniversary.
I sat there for about forty-five minutes, genuinely amused. That level of specificity about the future felt almost alien to me.
After she left, I turned to Mimie.
“That was very specific”, I said. “I love that she has such a clear vision.”
Mimie looked at me, then asked in a cheeky way, “What’s your vision?”.
And just like that, in a small airport lounge in Bali, with my daughter trying to climb a stranger’s luggage in the background, I was ambushed by a question I had the wrong answer to.
“I don’t really have a vision.”
Which is, I’ll admit, a ‘huh?’ thing to say when you lead people. If I don’t have a vision, what exactly am I pointing at when I say “this way”? What do I want them to believe in? And what’s on the whiteboard?
I sat with it for a while.
Let me add some context...
I have an easily distracted excited brain. Not in the trendy, “oh, I’m so ADHD” way people say on Twitter. I mean, I genuinely struggle to care about the same thing for a long period before getting drawn into another fantasy. My priorities shift week to week. I find different things fun at different times. I have a constant itch to start something new or difficult, and then, once I’ve figured it out and the puzzle is solved, I lose interest. On to the next.
Monotony is where my enthusiasm goes to die.
I probably have 10 different things I’m involved in whenever you see me, and by the time you see me next month, I might have added 2 more things… and a new weird obsession.
I could start a farm in Kigali next Tuesday because the people there are nice. I could take up tailoring because robots will need clothes in the future and someone has to be ready. I once stayed up all night because I found an AI tool that lets you design houses, and I needed to see what mine would look like on the moon. And I’ve not had a good sleep for like two weeks just because I found an interesting nextjs boilerplate to build a fun directory.
So, unlike that lady, I find it practically impossible to pick one thing and stay loyal to the course for five years. Which makes it difficult to define a “vision“.
And… as it seems, this apparent chaos has made me weirdly competent at a lot of things.
There’s hardly a niche on the internet I don’t have at least a working theory about. There’s no single tag you could pin on me that would be accurate. No role that could hold me without sounding incorrect. Which is why, when people ask “what do you do?”, I genuinely don’t know where to start.
All of the above. None of the above.
Maybe I’m just a directionless fool?
But I’m a happy one, though. A happy directionless kid who just wants to have some fun and gather as much knowledge as possible from this vast world.
And whatever this chaotic, curiosity-driven, slightly unhinged approach to life is, it seems to have worked well for me so far.
So I say this with my full chest: being easily distracted is an underrated superpower. It’s just terrible for investor decks.
But what about the people I lead? Fair question. If I don’t have a grand five-year destination pinned to the wall, how’d they be motivated?
My school of thought leans towards the idea that I’d rather inspire people to seek knowledge than inspire them to follow my vision. Because if a vision is truly that important, and maybe it is, then everyone should have one, independently.
I know that’s not how the world works. We need north stars. But I also think there’s something quietly powerful in saying, “I don’t know exactly where we’re going, I don’t even know where I am going, but if you follow me, you’ll likely be better than not.”
Maybe that’s naive. But it’s honest.
So, do I need a vision?
I thought about this on the flight home. Mimie was asleep. The kid was miraculously asleep as well. The cabin was dark. And I had that rare stretch of silence where you can actually hear yourself think.
I think having a vision that specifically dictates what you want to be doing in five years is a beautiful idea, but is it actually realistic? Considering AI will displace all of us next week.
And maybe it’s fine, for people whose brains work that way. Mine doesn’t.
But I also think “I don’t have a vision” isn’t entirely true. It’s just that my vision doesn’t look like a destination. It's more like a standard.
Wherever I am, whatever the game looks like, whatever strange thing I’ve wandered into next, I will do it well. I will be excellent at it. I will bring energy, ideas, and an embarrassing amount of enthusiasm.
And when I look up five years from now, wherever I’m standing, I know three things will be true:
I’ll have a lot of money,
a lot of knowledge,
and a lot of stories to tell.
And conventionally, that might not pass for a vision because it’s not a compass pointing north. But it’s a promise to myself that I’ll be interesting no matter which direction I walk.
Oh… and I want a farm one day. A big one. Lots of animals. About fifty dogs, some horses, and a few robots to help run the place. It’s the one thing that stays constant, no matter how many new obsession cycles I’ve been through.
So maybe that’s my vision. Maybe the whole time, it was just a farm with fifty dogs and a robot named something ridiculous like Abidoshaker.
And honestly, if that’s the most specific I ever get, I think I’ll be just fine.