ELE Personal Development & Wellness: You Never Know Where Things Will Lead You -

By Katherine Pham, ELE Personal Development & Wellness Writer

Our ELE editor, MJ, and I were in a casual conversation about our plans for our passion projects when we both shared a reflection of our journey that was common between us, and it’s something that I often say to my clients.

You just never know where things will lead you.

I, like anyone else who is running a business, have a plan of activities for how things will go and lead to growth.

>Build brand awareness.

>Create content.

>Run regular events.

They all have their own objectives that feed into the bigger plan of my vision and where things will end up, and for the most part, what I put in, I get back in return. It’s a simple formula really.

Effort of input = value of output.

However, there’s one other factor that comes into play and is where there is a lot of hidden value. From our outputs, there can arise opportunities that you just never could have pre-planned.

For me, one of the best examples of that is how I became an ELE writer.

In building my own business, I thought writing blogs would be a way in which I could raise my profile as a life coach. Once I got over the initial anxiety attacks of having to actually show up and share myself, it became something that I have ended up enjoying and wrote a blog roughly once a month.

When ELE came across my blogs and happened to also be in the market looking for a new writer, I got the offer to write with ELE! I happily accepted as it allows even more exposure for my work and am now a happy resident writer of this super cool ezine.

I’ve also gotten offers to work with businesses and their leadership team, as someone I knew had seen that I had been running training and workshops and brought me into the business to help them grow their business!

Our ELE editor has gotten offers to collaborate from the most unexpected places in her own journey, simply by doing what she loves doing!

A non-work related example of ‘you never know where things will lead you’ is a friend of mine who one day decided to take up salsa dancing. She just thought it would be good fun, however, what she has ended up with is a passion that brings her lots of pleasure and she has now organised some of the world’s largest social dancing events! She is fulfilled in ways that she couldn’t have imagined and it was all by following a little impulse to do dancing classes.

So the formula for the value you get is actually

Effort of input = value of output*n

Where n is the value of unplanned opportunity which will inevitably come your way.

OK, a bit maths-nerdy, and not at all a proven formula but just because I haven’t proven it (personally), doesn’t mean that it’s not true.

It might be a bit cliché but the writers here at ELE can definitely attest to it. Follow your impulses and get started on the things that you’ve been wanting to do as you never know what amazing things can result from it.

There is always a guaranteed return in starting your endeavours, whether in life lessons, skills, relationships and even money and it will lead to amazing opportunities that you could never have imagined.

Hey, but don’t just take it from us.

Take it from Steve Jobs, one of the most successful souls that has walked the earth. In his commencement address at Stanford in 2005, Steve Jobs shares deep and inspiring lessons from his life.

Jobs tells the story of him dropping out of his university degree to instead take classes that he just had an interest in. He decided to take up calligraphy classes. It had absolutely no real practical application in his life at that time but he did it anyway.

Later, when he created Apple, he remembered his calligraphy class and built fonts and type facing into Apple. He jokes that since Microsoft always copies Apple, if it weren’t for this, no person would have known or had font types on computer.

He finishes the story with this quote which has stayed with me ever since.

“Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”