Compass

A stable orienting direction used to choose locally when the endpoint can't or shouldn't be fully specified.

After the company sold, the question you'd deferred for a decade arrived with nowhere to hide: what now? Every attempt to answer with a concrete destination, the foundation, the second startup, the sabbatical, feels arbitrary, because you genuinely cannot know from here who you'll be in five years or what will matter then. Some terrain shouldn't be mapped in advance.

A compass is the reference shape for that terrain: a stable orienting direction or quality used to choose locally, when the endpoint can't or shouldn't be fully specified. Use it when the landscape is open-ended, transformative experience may change your preferences, and ongoing judgment matters more than endpoint control. Yours might be: move toward aliveness in service of something beyond yourself, while staying answerable to close relationships and reality. Each concrete choice, this project or that one, this city or that, gets tested against the direction rather than against a destination. What changes: you can make confident local decisions without pretending to know the ending. The spec's central warning: a compass degrades into an inspiring slogan that never constrains anything. Pair it with a current decision, an anti-direction (away from prestige-chasing), a next experiment, evidence, and a review cadence, or it's just a poster.