I remember quite vividly the moment I proposed to my wife Jae, 4 weeks after knowing her.
I had met her on a retreat I ran. She came as a participant, joining this retreat with a guy she knew from Instagram, whom I later learned she presented to her mum as the guy she would marry (jokingly, that was).
I had previously taken on a challenge from my coach at the time to just share myself on social media. I didn’t know shit about marketing and positioning at the time, so I would just share what I was thinking and up to. One day it was a dance video (I was still active as a dancer), and the next day philosophy, another day a coaching inquiry.
I had no clue that my future wife was reading and following along, until the moment she signed up for my first retreat (I thought it would be cool to run one, so I did, and 11 people signed up), where we would end up falling in love.
I had just quit my apartment to travel, and lived out of a backpack, and also just gotten out of a relationship, but didn’t know I would go from breakup to proposing then.
There were so many things my mind told me didn’t work, like I was just fresh out of a relationship, Jae was younger than me and I always had older girlfriends, I didn’t know her well, I was leading a retreat, and on and on it went.
But luckily for us, I didn’t listen to my mind.
And when the retreat was over, I asked her to meet in Vienna.
So we did. Every day for 2 weeks. And just one week after the retreat, I had a dream in which I bought her a ring, and the next day, that’s what I did.
There was absolutely nothing reasonable about my decisions at the time, yet they have been the best of my life.
We ended up getting married in the same place I ran the retreat, exactly as we had jokingly said we would 1 day before I proposed to her.
Reasonable? For sure not.
As well it wasn’t reasonable to start a coaching training, 1 year after I just started my training as a massage therapist.
Yet it led to 10x of my earnings in 7 years.
There were many unreasonable choices I made, and in retrospect, they have been most rewarding.
Now I still apply reason, and I think on consequences, make calculations and do risk adjustments.
Yet I also am open for the unreasonable hinges, when the heart speaks so to say.
Even when I didn’t end up with what I thought I would get, I ended up with a stack full of lessons I could have never gotten otherwise.
I think far too often we can get stuck in reason, especially when we have been dealing with risk for a long time (which business owners do a lot) or we have managed to get some results, and now try to hold on to them.
Nothing wrong with that, yet it will also leave us on the predictable, already known path, and I don’t know about you, but for me, often what I wanted wasn’t on the already known path.
Not saying you should, or even need to, yet you could have a look at when was the last time you made an unreasonable choice?
For me, if I stayed in reasonable, I wouldn’t be married, wouldn’t live in Switzerland, wouldn’t know the amazing family of my wife, wouldn’t have launched a business with others, wouldn’t have closed it, wouldn’t have started coaching business owners as a 26 year old at the time, wouldn’t have kept writing online after no traction at all, wouldn’t have traveled the world to learn from people I was inspired by, wouldn’t have bet on myself over and over and over again.
What have been the unreasonable choices you made that have led to incredible results in your life?