Understood Backwards

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
– Søren Kierkegaard

Dear Reader,

It’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind.

That things should be moving faster. That you should be further along by now. That maybe the window has already closed, and the moment has passed you by.

This feeling has been coming up quite a bit recently, and I think almost everyone feels it at some point. It’s a heavy feeling – the kind that quietly drains your energy and your drive to keep moving. But most of the time, it’s a story we tell ourselves with incomplete information.

Because here’s the thing about being in the middle of your own life, you can’t see where it’s leading while you’re living it. What feels like a delay, a detour, or a wrong turn often only makes sense much later, when you can finally look back and see how one thing quietly led to the next.

I’ve been looking back at how things unfolded myself.

For years, I poured time, money, and energy into marketing that simply didn’t work. A lot of it. And in the moment, it was more than frustrating…  it was a hit to my ego.

All those resources down the drain, and this quiet voice asking, I can’t believe I did that. How did I get this so wrong?

But here’s what I couldn’t see back then. I was learning. Every failed attempt was teaching me something I’d need later. Today, I’m using exactly what those years taught me to build my own systems and this time, it’s working. The very thing I judged as wasted turned out to be the education I’m succeeding with now.

I just couldn’t look at it that way while I was in it.

And that’s the part worth remembering. The chapter that feels like it’s going wrong may be the one that makes everything after it possible. You just can’t always see it from inside the moment.

None of this means sitting back and waiting for things to happen. You still move toward what you want. You still set the direction. But you stay open along the way, receptive to the opportunities you didn’t plan for, and ready to act when they appear, even if they look nothing like what you expected.

Because sometimes the things that don’t make sense in the moment are quietly leading you somewhere better than the plan you started with.

My question for you this week:

Are you open to the new possibilities in front of you and do you have the courage to act on them as they appear?

Sit with that.

– Ken