“You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that it looks different than you imagined”.
That was my dad’s wisdom in a nutshell at my wedding. I can’t recall how many times I have come back to this nugget of gold. It encapsulates so many truths.
For one, the possibility: yes, you actually can have it all. And no, time and circumstances are only part of the equation.
Second, the condition: the inevitable gap between imagination and reality.
Third, the acceptance: accept the gap and you’ll be able to see what you actually received.
Similarly, but with a slightly different twist: if you love what you get, you always get what you love.
As I have written before, I had set out to become head of department of a plastic surgery unit at a university hospital, to increase my zone of influence and better the health care system from within, for healers as well as patients. I mapped out a ten year plan with a start-with-the-end-in-mind backward planning process (C-tree). I checked all my boxes and achieved my goal after 9 years and 9 months.
Except it was a position in Denmark, a country I only knew from vacation and whose language I couldn’t speak.
Definitely different than I imagined. And in many ways, so much more. Everything from work-life balance, if you like that concept, to agency, to what daily life with a family actually looks like here.
More than a decade earlier I spent a lot of time working through my relationship issues in all of their flavours and colors. At one point I went through an exercise where I described my ideal partner: looks, traits, character. I got pretty detailed. I always imagined her to be from a different country, and that I wouldn’t marry.
I put in the work, made sure that I am less of the idiot I had been before. And suddenly I found myself asking a wonderful woman if she wants to marry me.
She also was from southern Germany, like me.
I’m not sure I like Mick Jagger’s popular “wisdom” that you can’t always get what you want. He left out the most important word: “right away.” Life didn’t subscribe to Amazon Prime, and delivery times are significantly longer. But it does deliver, if you accept the wait.
We overestimate what we can achieve within a year and completely underestimate what we can achieve in five. And we all have that time. We fear someone else is faster and further. Some are. But most people sprint, show momentum, and die off quickly, because their timeline was too short to hold focus.
Once we look at our whole life, the distortion gets even bigger. We have decades at hand. Enough to pursue multiple careers and develop mastery in multiple areas, if we feel drawn to that.
The Professional Amateur
I have become a professional amateur jazz saxophonist in my wedding band just by keeping playing for over 20 years.
The phrase sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not. “Amateur” comes from the Latin amare, to love. The amateur does the thing for the love of the thing. The professional does it for money, for obligation, for external validation, for any measurable result. A professional amateur brings professional discipline, practice, standards, consistency, to something done purely for love. That doesn’t make it a second-tier version of the real thing. It might actually be the best way to do anything.
Why? Because the amateur position has advantages the professional lacks. A professional saxophonist must play to survive: what the venue wants, what the market rewards. A professional amateur plays whatever the hell he wants. That freedom is not a consolation prize. It is the whole point.
Where is the difference to a hobby, then? Can “professional amateur” coexist with “second career”? If I go all-in on saxophone after my current career, do I stop being a professional amateur and become just a professional? Does crossing that line change the thing itself? My dad’s wisdom would say: yes, it changes, and yes, it’s still worth it. But I would have to accept it will look different than I imagined. A second career in music probably won’t look like the fantasy. It will look like work, because it will become work. But you would also get the perks of mastery.
We often look at ourselves one-dimensionally. As if proficiency and mastery only adhere to our professional work. We hold so many roles by definition, depending on our profession, lifestyle, family and social situation, our interests. Apply the long horizon to all of these and you begin to see that you are so much more than that one thing. That one profession, that one label you picked for introducing yourself to strangers.
The Valve System
Instead of looking at all areas of your life as competing for your time and attention at the same time, I see them as valves of different sizes that open and release at specified times. Everything that wants to get done needs a time and a place. As long as that is in place, you reduce the risk of too much pressure building up, or burning out.
Obviously, the valve size is not arbitrary. The thing you are currently pursuing to mastery, your current C-tree, has the biggest valve. Learning karate for the past six months has the smallest, as of now.
The question that should determine every adjustment: which of my identities is generating the most pressure right now, and is that pressure productive or destructive? Productive pressure is creative urgency, the thing that keeps you up because you’re excited. Destructive pressure keeps you up because you’re anxious. They are physiologically similar, but they feel different in the body. Learn to tell them apart, because productive pressure should get a wider valve, and destructive pressure usually needs something else entirely: a conversation, a boundary, a hard look at what you’re actually afraid of. Or at why you are attached to that identity in the first place.
The hardest part of the valve system is not logistics. It’s psychological. The reason we try to do everything at once is not poor planning.
It’s fear.
Fear that if you close the valve on something, it will die.
Fear that the window will close.
Fear that someone else is getting ahead while you wait.
The valve system only works if you genuinely trust that every identity will get its turn.
That you have enough time.
This is not a scheduling insight. It is an abundance insight. You have to believe there is enough life for all of it. Most people don’t, and that is where the shift happens.
We usually have quite a good idea of where pressure is building. What we lack is sitting down, listening to it, and adjusting our planning accordingly. I have weeks where hospital issues press so much that I have to rededicate spaces originally planned for something else. Other times I have creative spurts, in writing or in music, where I plan with my wife and family how we can best accommodate them. Sometimes that includes night or very early morning shifts that don’t feel like sacrifice, because of what the activity gives back.
But you learn to live with unfinished business.
What is the smallest viable valve? Not everyone can carve out a Monday morning. If you can’t, the question becomes: what is the minimum attention an identity needs to stay alive? A monthly afternoon. A quarterly weekend where you go deep on just that thing. The point is not the size of the slot. The point is that it exists, on the calendar, non-negotiable.
An identity with no valve is an identity you are slowly killing. And you will feel it as pressure, somewhere in your body, whether you name it or not.
What helps me tremendously is sitting down and writing out specifically what is pressing, what wants to get done, what feels too big. Break it into substeps and you begin to see where they might actually fit into your life.
You might also realize that the abstract idea you were idealizing is not what you still want, now that you look at the worldly details. Then go kill that identity. Let it go and make space for other things. I have a graveyard full of identities I outgrew.
We do not have to choose between our different identities. All we have to do is become clear about where we want to go with them, then allow them to develop over different timelines, and with outcomes different from our current expectations.
The Two Forces
My dad’s wisdom is about surrender: accept the gap between imagination and reality.
The valve system is about control: schedule the identities, manage the pressure, adjust the valves.
These two forces look like opposites. But the valve system is what makes surrender possible without resignation. You don’t surrender by giving up on things. You surrender by giving each thing its proper time and then releasing attachment to the outcome. You are not alternating between surrender and control. You are using the little control you have to create the conditions for meaningful surrender.
I lived this without naming it. My ten-year plan to become department chief was all control: backward planning, checkboxes, nine years and nine months of execution. And the outcome was surrender: Denmark, not the country I had in mind. The valve system is what let me hold both. I recently wrote about the same dynamic in The Micro Reset — surrendering to the surgery’s outcome inside an environment of total control.
Where to Start
When you feel pulled in twenty directions, pick the one identity that gives you the most energy right now, not the one that sounds most impressive. The one where you are most curious.
If you genuinely don’t know, walk yourself through this quick exercise: write down every version of yourself you’ve ever wanted to be, then circle the one you’d be most disappointed to never try. That’s your starting valve.
For me the breakthrough came when I gave myself a single, non-negotiable Monday morning slot dedicated to just one of those identities, the writer, for three months. Instead of that undefined ruminating urge to write with nowhere to go, I suddenly had a place and a time. I collect thoughts and ideas throughout the week, then sit down and use them, or not, on those mornings. It was never so much about the outcome. That part is nice, no question. It is the relief of finally being able to live out that part of me.
And whether this develops into a second career, who knows. My timeline is long enough.
To more in life
Nicco
