Most People Don’t Lack Vision
I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it: most people don’t lack vision. They lack the ability to follow through on it.
That’s the premise Kent Julian has built his entire career around — and it’s also, not coincidentally, a large chunk of what I wrote about in Scary Good. So when Kent and I finally sat down to record, we got about two minutes in before realizing we’d been accidentally writing the same book from different angles.
Kent is a professional speaker, coach, and founder of Live It Forward. And the conversation we had about design over default, about golden handcuffs, about the slow and patient work of crossing the dream-to-do gap — it’s one I’m still thinking about.
What Living by Design Actually Looks Like
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: most people think they’re being intentional. And then they look at their actual calendar, their actual habits, their actual daily life — and it tells a very different story.
Living by design isn’t about having a perfect 10-year plan. Kent said something that I think is the most honest framing of it I’ve ever heard: it’s a lifelong pursuit, and you get better at it the longer you do it. What matters is that you keep paying attention — to what you do well, what makes you come alive, how you serve others best — and you let that awareness lead you somewhere better than where you started.
He told a story about his very first job decision out of college — three offers on the table, wildly different paths, one of them involving a salary so low he qualified for food stamps. He picked that one. Not because it was the smart financial move. Because he was self-aware enough to know which environment would let him grow into who he was actually meant to become.
The Golden Handcuffs Are Real
I want to be direct about something: purely financially-driven decisions almost always lead to regret. Not because money doesn’t matter, but because when money is the primary driver, you often end up somewhere lucrative and miserable — with fewer and fewer options the longer you stay.
Kent called them golden handcuffs. I’ve watched this happen to people I know. And the exit becomes harder the longer you wait, because you’ve built a life around a number instead of around a design.
You Can’t Guarantee the Outcome — Do It Anyway
Here’s the part of our conversation that hit me hardest. Kent spent three years journaling about what the second half of his life could look like, then three to four more years building his business on the side while still doing his day job well. And during all of that, he held onto three things he’d reasoned his way to:
You’ll learn things you’d never learn if you didn’t pursue this. You’ll meet people you’d never meet. And opportunities you can’t even imagine will open up — whether or not the exact thing you’re chasing materializes.
He called it a no-lose pursuit. And I think that framing is everything. Because the reason most people don’t cross the dream-to-do gap is that they’re waiting for a guarantee that doesn’t exist. Life doesn’t come with one. But if you do the work anyway — with patience, with intention, and with your eyes open — something good almost always happens. It just might not look exactly like what you planned.
Lead from Quiet
Before I let you go, I want to leave you with the thing Kent said near the end of our conversation that I keep coming back to.
Every morning, before the world gets in — before email, before social media, before everyone else’s urgency arrives on your phone — he spends time leading his life from quiet. Reading, journaling, thinking. Slowing down enough to design his day before the day designs him.
He was quick to say this doesn’t come naturally to him. He’s a high-drive, high-variety person who used to hate being alone with his thoughts. And he still does it every single day, because the version of himself that walks into the world after that quiet time is a better version than the one who doesn’t.
That’s design. That’s intentional. And it’s available to all of us — starting tomorrow morning.
Find Kent at liveitforward.com or kentjulian.com if you’re looking to book him on your stage.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Kent Julian on No More Mondays → careerbenders.com/episode-265
