"The seat you randomly chose today is the seat you’ll sit in for the rest of the term."

That was the cold open from one of my college professors at the first class of the quarter. And he was right. About me and most of the 200 others in the lecture hall that day.

People heavily rely on prior choices and habits when it comes to seating preferences, meaning the seat you choose on the first day is a good bet for where you’ll sit every day thereafter.

Some psychologists attribute it to reducing cognitive load, others to reducing social anxiety or vulnerability, but the fact remains: there is gravity to our seat selection.

But what if I were to tell you that the effect seems to extend well beyond the relative mundanity of the seat you occupy and into the deeper realms of your entire life?

Your first year of school, you’re told to choose a line of study. So, you choose one. Maybe because your parents did it. Maybe because your friends in the seats around you are doing it. Maybe because it sounds good. Whatever. No matter the reason, you choose something. And that something sets you on a path.

A few years later, your job opportunities are dictated by that choice. You choose a job that fits your line of study. You may like it. Or you may not. But you choose it, nonetheless. Because it fits.

You work, get promoted, maybe change companies, but always within the same industry. It’s what you know. It’s what you think you’re good at. What you’re qualified for.

By year ten, you can’t imagine a change. You can’t start from scratch. So it’s more work. More promotions. A new title, but the same arc. You put your head down, blink, and wake up at 65, ready to retire, wondering where the time went.

The seat you chose on the first day was the seat you sat in for the rest of your life.

The Gravity of Life

Your life has gravity.

It’s light at first. You start out feeling like the range of paths in front of you is limitless. But with each choice, each proverbial “seat” you choose to sit in, the gravity builds. Even if you like the path, it can start to feel confining. Limiting. Almost claustrophobic in a way.

I’ve come to believe that life gravity takes on two forms: there’s the external gravity you feel, and the internal gravity you don’t.

External gravity comes in the form of sunk costs. The feeling that you’ve spent years building a version of a life that can’t be abandoned now. It’s your salary. Your expectations. What other people think of you. Your resume. The identity you’ve formed around all of that. With this type of gravity, you can see the alternative paths, but struggle to make the case to leave your own.

You’re probably aware of this gravity. You’ve felt it in your life and seen it in others’ lives. It’s real and challenging to override. But because of your awareness, it is possible.

The more challenging type of gravity is completely imperceptible.

Internal gravity builds as you progressively lose the ability to see the alternatives in front of you. It’s where all traditional guidance breaks down, because you can’t “be brave!” or “take the leap!” when you can’t even see the life you’re leaping for.

And there’s real science to support the existence of this type of blinding gravity:

In 2013, a group of researchers at the Visual Attention Lab, a collaboration between Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, asked 24 trained radiologists to ​review chest CT scans​ for the appearance of lung cancer nodules.

On the final scan, an image of a gorilla, 48 times larger than the average nodule, was inserted into the scan image. 83% of the expert radiologists (20 out of 24) failed to see it. More damning was the fact that eye-tracking data showed the majority of the radiologists who had missed the gorilla had actually looked right at it.

They saw it, but not really.

The radiologists weren’t blind. Their attention had just been specialized and refined over years of dedicated effort to find one specific thing. It worked exactly as designed for the task they were trained for. It found what they were looking for. But missed what they weren’t.

It’s called inattentional blindness. The term was coined in 1992 by cognitive psychologists Arien Mack and Irvin Rock to refer to the mental lapse where you fail to notice an unexpected event or object in view because your focus was trained on a specific task.

Inattentional blindness is the source of your internal gravity. Each year you spend narrowing in on one thing is a year that builds the gravity that blinds you to everything else. It’s a sort of gravity you never even feel. Because it’s not that the change feels too heavy. It’s that it never occurs to you in the first place.

You can’t choose a door you can’t see.

But this isn’t a piece about leaving. It’s not about reinventing or changing. It’s a piece about making sure you’re living a life by your own design. It’s about recognizing the difference between staying on a path you chose and staying on a path because you stopped being able to see anything else. You’re in the same place, but living a completely different life.

In other words, the goal isn’t to escape gravity. The goal is to know that you’re always able to.

Which raises the obvious question: How do you do that? How do you maintain your vision (or even strengthen it) without drastically changing anything about the life you have?

My answer is simple:

Side quests.

Why You Need a Side Quest

Broadly defined, a side quest is any pursuit outside the main quests of your life.

I think most people have two main quests:

1. Professional Quest: The primary career or business track.
2. Personal Quest: Building a loving, supportive “home” (family, partners, relationships, kids, etc.).

So, a side quest is really anything that exists outside of those:

• Hobbies
• Side projects
• Physical endeavors
• Adventures
• Artistic pursuits
• Learning journeys

Telos is an Ancient Greek word meaning purpose or goal. Telic activities are those done for a purpose or goal, while atelic activities are those done with no specific end in mind. Importantly, side quests are inherently atelic.

Or at least they begin that way.

They start with a simple spark of interest or curiosity. A pull that draws you in. They feel inherently nostalgic. Like a return to the youthful beginner’s mind. A new puzzle to solve. A rabbit hole to go down.

And while they may not seem important, they are. These side quests open your field of vision. You see new things. Expose yourself to new, unexpected stimuli. Inputs you didn’t plan. Ideas and people you’d never encounter.

None of that is inherently or immediately valuable, but a broader field of vision promotes an awareness of the doors that exist all around you.

Sometimes, the side quest reveals a door worth opening.

It certainly did for me, though perhaps not in the way I’d have guessed. The newsletter you’re reading is a byproduct of a side quest that became the main quest.

I had barely written before 2020. I took a creative writing class my last year of college as a credit filler. I had never published a single piece of writing. Frankly, I didn’t even know I liked writing. Stuck at home when the pandemic started, I drafted a short story to try to explain what was happening in financial markets to a few friends who had asked. It was fun. I enjoyed solving the puzzle. So, I did it again the following weekend. It was fun again, so I came back for more.

Fast forward to today and it would be easy for me to paint some lovely picture of a grand strategy behind all of this. A plan to leave the path I was on, start a newsletter, write a book, and become an author. But that doesn’t do justice to my lived reality.

I had been blind. I was going to blink, wake up in 40 years, and have spent my entire career in finance. It was all I knew and all I could see. My environment, my friendships, my entire life was built out around it. In my free time, I worked. When I hung out, it was with friends in finance, and we talked about, you guessed it, finance.

The side quest opened my eyes to a vast array of potential pathways available to me that had nothing to do with the one I was on.

It wasn’t grand strategy at all. It was just a simple side quest.

You need to become a beginner again. Join a run club. Learn the piano. Take up painting. Try woodworking. Plant a garden. Teach yourself to cook. Whatever. It slows you down. It’s a small atelic rebellion in a world that wants you to do everything with some purpose in mind.

You need a side quest. You need a puzzle that has no purpose at all. You need a new challenge.

Not because it will cascade into something life changing. Though it might. Not because it will unlock doors. Though it could.

But because it will open your eyes to a reality that’s been hiding in plain sight:

A reality that being subject to physical gravity is mandatory, but being trapped by life gravity is optional.