I was recently introduced to this wonderful TED Talk by Skankar Vedantam. And while I encourage you to set aside 15 minutes to watch it, the TLDR is that you can’t actually know what your future self wants. For example, take a moment and think back about when you were ten years old. What did you want to be when you grew up?

I was going to be a professional tennis player. 

But then, around age twelve, I seemed to realize I wasn’t even five feet tall yet nor was I training at a full-time tennis academy.

As Vedantam points out, looking back at our past helps show us how much our best laid plans have changed. So why do we assume it will be any different in the future?

When we begin to accept that the person we will become in the future will be different than anything we can imagine today, building optionality into our lives becomes the only goal that really matters.

According to Wiktionary, optionality is defined as a quality or state in which choice or discretion is allowed. Embracing optionality allows us to make our best guesses about an unknowable future while relieving the pressure of having to establish set-in-stone goals. It also eliminates the need to be “right” about those goals. 

We are hardwired as human beings to be certainty seeking machines. And while we might not be able to change our wiring, we can proactively remind ourselves that building optionality is the best way to handle the future uncertainty we will encounter in our lives.

Here are three ways to start building more optionality into your life:

1) Create more personal & financial breathing room

If you’ve set up your personal and/or financial life in a way that everything has to go exactly to plan in order for it to work out, you’re doomed from the start. Instead, make sure you’re building in plenty of breathing room. 

On the personal side, create open space in your life, whether that’s in your work life and/or in your family’s calendar. On the financial side, this can mean having enough in your cash cushion to shrug off the curveballs life will inevitably throw your way – things like an expensive car repair, replacing your air conditioning, and/or dealing with a larger property tax increase.

2) Keep it simple

It’s so easy for our lives to become overly complicated. In fact, that’s what is bound to happen if we aren’t proactive about keeping things simple.

On the personal side, this might be committing to using a family calendar. When you can wake up and quickly see who's got what and know where they need to be and when, your day becomes much easier to tackle. Compare that to waking up and trying to remember the seventy five things everyone needs to do today when the only place that information resides is in your head!

On the financial side, keeping it simple might require some work upfront but it’s time well spent. Rather than trying to keep track of your four old retirement accounts and three different brokerage accounts, spend the time consolidating them into one retirement account and one brokerage account. And if you don’t have a flexible financial framework in place that allows you to quickly model different “what-if” scenarios, make necessary adjustments as your life changes, and provide you with financial comfort and confidence to enjoy living your best life, then perhaps we should talk.

3) Get clear on your values and what really matters

When you’ve taken the time to get clear on what matters most to you and why, you’ve created a natural filtering system. This system allows you to say “yes” to what really matters and “no” to pretty much everything else. And the more you work at this, the more you realize saying “no” is really about creating optionality to say “yes” to those things that really matter to you – whatever those things might end up being in the future.

Now look, I realize that the middle of the holiday season might not be the best time to start embracing optionality and doing the necessary work to make it a reality. But go ahead and put it on your (new?) family calendar for early January. After all, it’s the only “goal” that really matters 🙂

Happy holidays from my family to yours! I hope you get to spend it doing the things you enjoy with the people you care about the most.