A question from the TEDx Cary panel has stayed with me over the past few days.
What the world is calling you to do?
Someone asked how you learn to recognize what the world is calling you to do instead of just setting more and more goals. It’s a deceptively simple question. Most of us have been trained to do the opposite. We’re encouraged to plan carefully, set ambitious targets, measure progress, and then repeat the process again the next year.
Planning is useful. But planning is not the same thing as listening.
The poet David Whyte captures a moment most of us recognize but rarely pause to experience. It is that quiet instant when we first wake up and something deeper within us remains before the routines of the day begin. In his poem What to Remember When Waking, he writes:
There is a small opening into the day
that closes the moment you begin your plans.
Then he offers a line that feels both simple and slightly unsettling.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
That idea has been on my mind
Partly because of the question from the audience, but also because of the moment I am currently experiencing professionally. After many years working in the same industry, I feel less urgency to invent the next step driven by sheer ambition and more curiosity about recognizing where the true invitation might be.
For the past year, I have been intrigued by the first-mile data problem in industrial systems. The more I explore, the more it becomes clear that the real challenges are not in the polished world of dashboards and AI models. They are at the messy edge where operational systems produce data that is incomplete, inconsistent, and hard to structure in ways organizations can trust.
It is not the most glamorous problem in the technology world. But it is foundational.
So instead of pushing toward a new destination, I find myself doing something slightly different at this stage of life. I am focusing on where that problem truly needs to be solved and where my experience can genuinely be helpful.
In other words, the work now is less about chasing the next role and more about recognizing the invitation.
That idea closely relates to a reflection I recently wrote about in another nugget, which discusses how certain moments in life arrive when long preparation quietly meets true necessity. Not as a declaration of ambition, but as a reminder that the most meaningful work often comes when experience and need finally align.
Trees understand this better than we do
For years, sometimes for decades, the most important work in a tree’s life happens underground. Roots grow deeper. Systems become stronger. Stability develops in darkness long before any visible growth impresses anyone passing by.
By the time the trunk thickens and the canopy spreads wide enough to offer shade, the visible strength is simply the result of invisible work that has already been done.
Relevance often works the same way.
It grows slowly through accumulated attention, experience, and quiet preparation. Then one day, the conditions change, and the work that has been forming beneath the surface suddenly becomes useful.
When that moment arrives, the question is not “What goal should I set next?”
The better questions might be something closer to this:
- What problem keeps pulling my attention back again and again?
- Where might my accumulated experience actually carry weight?
Those questions tend to point toward invitations rather than ambitions.
And invitations feel different.
They do not come as grand announcements. Most of the time, they arrive as an ongoing curiosity, a problem you can’t quite stop thinking about, or a sense that a particular piece of work keeps quietly returning to your mind.
Stay whole.
