Hallo fellow learn-it-all 👋 Greetings from Bergen 🇳🇱 In a week, it marks one year ago since I left the USA to live abroad. Since SEA, it’s been four months of nomading around the Netherlands. I’ve expanded my CV as a professional petsitter to include chickens and 50kg mountain dogs. Breakfast has been on the house the past week with free eggs. Photos of the cuties featured at the bottom. Now, let’s dive into letter 285 from a learn-it-all. Enjoy!
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Dear Planners,
I kinda hate you.
But only because you make me feel like there’s something wrong with not knowing.
Because of you, I’m misread as less ambitious. As less than.
As if curiosity is laziness, and confessing uncertainty is failure. As if having question marks instead of periods means I’m somehow behind.
My quibble with planners, then, is that there aren’t enough open questions, only close-minded declarations. Flights booked, countdown calendars ticking. That constant anticipation of what’s next snaps me out of the present.
You, with your calendars, color-coded to-do lists, and reverse-engineered five-year blueprints.
Me, with my Notes app full of fragmented observations, sprawling book marginalia, task lists on the back of a bank envelope, and my favorite note: “Things I want in life.”
A forward-thinking Dutch guy asked me a few days ago about my five-year plan.
After a breath or two sitting on a park bench with this dreaded question, I smiled and said, “In five years, I want to feel grounded, creative, curious, and connected.” He was left speechless like I’d answered a multiple-choice question with an option not on the exam.
Funny enough, as I was editing this letter, my dad texted me the exact same thing: “What’s the 5 year plan?”
Apparently, this question follows me across oceans.
I used to be a planner, though. Let me explain further…
One of my few regrets of 29 years could be that I didn’t change my college major.
After getting into the fancy schmancy Farmer’s School of Business at the one-mile-by-one-mile university enclosed by corn in Oxford, Ohio, I chose finance, without ever taking a finance course. I turned in that tiny yellow slip of paper to a counselor, promising I wouldn’t be one of the 75% who changed majors.
Finance sounded challenging and respectable. Math homework with neat little graph-paper boxes had been my most reliable subject in school (apart from geometry so don’t take me to play billiards).
And so botta boom botta bing. I rigged the boat straight into the storm with my signature on the dotted line.
My main drivers back then: get a return on the investment of out-of-state tuition, make my elders proud, and inspire my future self by doing something hard.
After signing that slip, I wanted to have integrity. For my words to align with my actions. I grew up believing the words of Vince Lombardi: “Winners never quit and quitters never win.” I was raised watching movies with underdogs like Rudy, Rocky Balboa, Danny Noonan in Caddyshack, Vivan in Pretty Woman, and of course Andy in Devil Wears Prada. So following suit, struggling in advanced placement college courses in high school beats easy A’s any day. And then even after studying abroad in Amsterdam and marveling at an start-up brewer impressed by my knack for marketing beer to Americans, I stuck to my “Specialized Asset Management” internship in Detroit.
A few years later, in Chicago, after my first big-girl salaried consulting job and I parted ways (okay fine, I got laid off), I read Seth Godin’s The Dip in 2020. That bald guy with canary-yellow glasses shook everything up like a bottle of cheap André champagne. “Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other,” he wrote.
Godin gave me permission to quit. His writing on letting go of the sunk cost freed me. But he also warned that what pays off in the long term can suck in the short term. There’s long slog between beginner’s luck and real accomplishment. That’s The Dip: the stretch where most people give up and the few who push through become scarce and valuable.
In retrospect, college majors don’t matter that much. But that experience left me with a question:
When do I stay true to my word? When do I let myself change my mind?
And here’s the thing: I don’t avoid planning. I plan like a scientist. Constant questioning, seeing what seeds of dreams sprout.
An answer expires just like the milk jug in the fridge, but a question stays alive like a Twinkie in the pantry. It’s packed with tasty preservatives lasting a whole lifetime.
One of my recurring questions revolves around my core value: “How can I feel more connected?”
Subconsciously, living in Hawaii made me feel cut off from the rest of the world on that remote island. So I moved to Southeast Asia, curious what connection might look like there. Long story short, Thailand didn’t go as hypothesized. My health declined in more ways than one, so I left.
My ideas usually start as hypotheses. I test small. Each experiment is a guess about what might unfold. Where planners draw rigid Gantt charts, I test the waters before signing any binding contract. (I added a clause to my year-long English teaching contract in Chiang Rai that said I could leave after six months at will.)
Planners might call this approach to life chaotic. I call it co-creation.
Life decisions get made with my feet planted here, not stuck in promises my past self thought were sensible. Because direction in life grows from the soil of where I actually stand, not just from what’s mapped in my head.
And so I call myself a Type C person.
This means walking a pathless path. We don’t take the default route lined with neat little boxes to tick. We follow a thread of curiosity through the terra incognita.
Type A needs control.
Type B just vibes.
Type C needs connection to life as it actually unfolds.
We are tuned to different winds rather than directionless. Type C notice the ripples on the water and wait for the breeze to fill their sails instead of trusting an outdated forecast. While Type A chases what looks prestigious on LinkedIn and Type B drifts like a tumbleweed without intention, Type C navigate by what lights them up.
My planning looks like sandcastles. They’re solid enough to play with, soft enough to let the tide remold. I trust that what looks uncertain is often where something beautiful begins.
So no, dear planners, I don’t really hate you.
I just can’t live inside your lines. I’m too busy questioning rules, doodling in the margins, testing hypotheses, and walking my pathless path one tiny experiment at a time.
The five-year plan is to keep living the questions.
What values will guide my life in the next five years?
📖Reading
I’m still chipping away at reading Stephen King’s Memoir On Writing. Here’s a resonant page on page 183:
“When I’m asked why I decided to write the sort of thing I do write, I always think the question is more revealing then any answer I could possibly give. Wrapped within it, like the chewy stuff in the center of a Tootsie Pop, is the assumption that the writer controls the material instead of the other way around. The writer who is serious and committed is incapable of sizing up story material the way an investor might size up various stock offerings, picking out the ones which seem likely to provide a good return. If it could indeed be done that way, every novel published would be a best-seller and the huge advances paid to a dozen or so ‘big-anem writers’ would not exist (publishers would like that).”
I read The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin. The Dip is the long stretch between beginner’s luck and real accomplishment. It is the long slog between starting when it is exciting and fun and mastery. Only the people who invest the time, energy, and effort can power through the Dip. In economical terms, the supply of these experts is scarce so they are of high demand. The Dip creates scarcity which creates value.
Quitting is not the same as failing. It’s better than coping and carrying something on, Quitting frees you up to excel at something else. Decide in advance by writing down what the circumstances are that you’re willing to quit.
Failing happens when you give up, when there are no other options, or when you quit so often that you’ve used up all your time and resources. It’s easy to wring your hands up about becoming a failure. Quitting smart [and strategically], though, is a great way to avoid failing.
Questions to decipher your Dip:
Is my persistence going to pay off in the long run?
When should I quit? I need to decide now, not when I’m in the middle of it, and not when part of me is begging to quit.
If I quit this task will it increase my ability to get through the Dip on something more important?
Are you avoiding the remarkable as a way of quitting without quitting? If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.
Across my Monday in Manhattan, I remember walking home to the Upper East Side captivated by the smiles of retirees handholding and walking at their own pace of life. Chillaxed unaffected by the high-paced environment.
In contrast to this couple, I feel like a chameleon. I let it get to me. I’m someone who learned Type-A tendencies. I chose to sit in discomfort on a Type-B island to see what life looked like without the rigidity of a plan. I’ve quickly found I can re-adopt the Type-A tendency much quicker to mirror that of a thriving person in New York City.
I do not know which box I fit in.
I propose that I am Type-C. Someone who would rather define their own box than feel the need to shrink herself into an all-defining tendency.
🎬 Rewatching
Letter 4 of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letter to a Young Poet” (Jen’s Final for Acting 101 2/13/23)
🎧Listening
Blue Skies by Willie Nelson
This song came to me while I was walking through Oosterpark a couple days ago.
I couldn’t stop smiling and hummed it for about an hour home after. I also listened to many versions of it on the train. Willie’s is my fave.
Blue skies smiling at me Nothing but blue skies do I see Bluebirds singing a song Nothing but bluebirds all day long
Never saw the sun shining so bright Never saw things going so right Noticing the days hurrying by When you’re in love, my how they fly
Blue days, all of them gone Nothing but blue skies from now on
🔍Dutch Word to define
Liefert: Sweetheart.
Some synonymns are Schatje, Lief, Lieveling, Liefje
Nala (or Naltje) this past week has been my liefert <3
🌟Quote to inspire
“Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
My audio engineer got back to me with the polished audiobook. Now I just need to listen to the 2 hour and 23 minute file, request edits, add sound effects or music and then my dream of creating an audiobook will be completed! You can still preorder it here.
I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.
If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.
Keep on learning 😁
Tot snel 🌺 🌺
Toodles :)
P.S. #1 - I coach writers. I guide them to find their voice, build a writing rhythm, and have fun hitting “publish.” Let’s chat.
"Dear Planners,
I kinda hate you."
Killer opening lines. : )
i totally relate. trying to find the balance between manifesting my destiny and also letting my destiny guide me.