How to Stop Drifting Through Life & Start Directing It (Vision, Anti-Vision, & Values)
5 Big Ideas, 3 Reflection Questions, 1 Takeaway
We’re bringing together three powerful conversations that show you how to stop drifting and start directing your life - not through motivation or resolutions, but through clarity.
You’ll discover how vision and anti-vision work together as a push-pull system, why your values need to be operational filters instead of inspirational words, and why writing it all down is what transforms vague ideas into actionable direction.
Last week, we published an essay called Excellence is a Direction You Face, Not a Destination You Reach — a complete framework for getting clear on who you’re becoming. This episode is the raw material behind that essay: three conversations that show this framework in practice.
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🖐 5 BIG IDEAS
1. Clarity Doesn’t Arrive - It Emerges Through Articulation
Most people carry around a vague sense of who they want to become. They feel it in quiet moments. They catch glimpses of it in conversations that stir something. But vague feelings produce vague results.
Clarity doesn’t exist in your head. It emerges when you pick up the pen and start writing. When you force yourself to put actual words to the person you’re becoming, the person you refuse to become, and the principles that guide you between the two.
This is where most people stall. They nod along with the concept, maybe feel a spark of motivation, then go back to their lives without ever doing the actual work. Not because they don’t care, but because “get clear on your vision and values” sounds simple in theory and overwhelming in practice.
But here’s what Mark England taught us with Kidlin’s Law: any question sufficiently worded and written down is half answered. The act of writing it down creates space. It slows the story down. It turns the kaleidoscope in your head into something you can actually see and work with.
2. Vision and Anti-Vision Create the Channel Your Life Flows Through
Your vision is who you’re becoming. Your anti-vision is who you refuse to become. And most people only think about the first one.
But the push away from your anti-vision can be just as powerful - sometimes more powerful - than the pull toward your vision. Because sometimes the threat of becoming someone you don’t want to be creates more urgency than the promise of becoming someone you do.
Robert Glazer gave us the tunnel analogy: imagine driving through a pitch-black tunnel. Without being able to see the lines on the road, you’d inevitably drift into one wall, overcorrect, hit the other, and repeat this painful process until you emerge - car scraped up, shaken. Now imagine the same tunnel, brightly lit. You’d stay in your lane without thinking about it.
The lines on the road are your vision and anti-vision. The light is your awareness of them. And awareness requires articulation.
Together, they create the channel your life flows through. Not rigid walls that trap you, but clear boundaries that keep you from drifting somewhere you never intended to go.
3. Real Values Are Operational, Not Aspirational
Most people’s “values” are nice words on a wall that don’t actually help them make decisions.
Integrity. Authenticity. Family. These sound important, but they’re too vague to be useful. When two good options compete, when sacrifice is required, when no one’s watching—how do these words help you decide what to do?
Robert walked us through the core validator test: a real value is something you’d uphold even when it costs you. If it only applies when convenient, it’s a preference, not a value.
And real values need to be specific enough to guide action. Not “integrity” but “I do what I say I’ll do, even when no one is watching and even when it’s inconvenient.” Not “family” but “I put the collective first - in work it’s the team, at home it’s the family, in decisions it’s what serves us, not just me.”
The shift from vague one-word values to specific operational filters is what makes them actually useful. Better questions lead to better answers. Better values lead to better decisions. Better decisions lead to a better life.
4. The Work Is Writing It Down - Not Just Thinking About It
Questions kept in your head stay half-baked. They swirl. They take up space. They create overwhelm without creating clarity.
When Mark guided us through Kidlin’s Law, he showed us why writing things down is both the easiest thing to do and the hardest thing to do. It’s simple. But most people resist it because it requires you to commit to something specific enough to be tested.
Writing forces precision. It exposes the gaps between what you think you believe and what you can actually articulate. You can’t hide behind vagueness when words are on paper staring back at you.
And here’s what happens when you get your questions, your values, your vision out of your head: the tension comes down. The breath loosens. The overwhelm decreases. You become more sensitive to the subtle feedback life gives you because there’s less noise in the way.
Draft it. Craft it. Supercharge it with breath and reflection. But start by picking up the pen.
5. Without Clarity, You Drift - And Drift Is Rarely Dramatic
Nobody wakes up one day thirty pounds overweight with a clear sense of when it happened. There was no single meal, no one skipped workout, no obvious turning point. It was years of tiny drifts - imperceptible decisions across impossible numbers of days.
The same is true for who you’re becoming. The gap between the person you are and the person you want to be doesn’t open because of one catastrophic choice. It widens slowly, invisibly, one small decision at a time.
And the cruelest part? You’ll be busy the whole time. You’ll have things to do, places to be, responsibilities to manage. Busyness is the perfect camouflage for drift. It feels like progress. It looks like a full life. But activity isn’t the same as alignment, and motion isn’t the same as meaning.
With clarity, something shifts. You still face hard decisions, but now you have a framework for making them. You still encounter trade-offs, but now you know what you’re trading for and why. The noise quiets - not because there’s less of it, but because you know which signals matter.
🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS
1. If you became the best version of yourself, what would that person look like - and can you actually describe them?
Not what you’d have accomplished or what you’d own. Who you’d be. How you’d carry yourself. What would characterize your relationships, your work, your health, your mindset? If you can’t picture it clearly enough to write it down, you don’t have a vision—you have a vague feeling.
2. What’s a decision you’ve been avoiding because you don’t have a clear framework for making it?
Job change? Relationship question? Where to spend your time? Often indecision isn’t about lacking information - it’s about lacking clarity on what you actually value. What would it look like to write down your options, define your values, and make the call?
3. What questions are currently swirling in your head that you haven’t written down yet?
About your career, your health, your relationships, your direction. They’re taking up space, creating overwhelm, draining energy. What would it feel like to get them out of your head and onto paper where you can actually work with them?
🔑 1 KEY TAKEAWAY
Excellence isn’t a destination you arrive at - it’s a direction you face.
You’re not chasing a moment when you finally “make it” and everything clicks into place. You’re building a system for navigating life’s complexity with clarity instead of chaos.
That system has three components: your vision (who you’re becoming), your anti-vision (who you refuse to become), and your values (how you make decisions between the two). Together, they create the channel your life flows through.
But here’s the part most people miss: none of this is real until you write it down.
Not think about it. Not talk about it. Write it. Because clarity doesn’t exist in your head—it emerges through the act of articulation. Through asking the hard questions, writing down the answers, refining them as you learn, and living them until they become part of who you are.
The work reveals what was always there. But it stays hidden until you begin.
A new year is here, and with it comes the familiar pull toward resolutions and fresh starts. But resolutions fail because they’re built on sand instead of bedrock. They’re outcomes without understanding. Goals without clarity about who you’re becoming or who you refuse to become.
This year, do something different. Do the deeper work.
If you want to go deeper on these ideas, we encourage you to read the full essay that inspired this episode: Excellence is a Direction You Face, Not a Destination You Reach. It walks you through the complete process - how to define your vision, articulate your anti-vision, identify your values, and turn all of it into a living document that guides your decisions.
The essay is the blueprint. These conversations are the raw material. And the work? That starts with you picking up the pen.
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