Who Decides What Matters?

For what felt like always, I told myself I wasn’t a morning person.

I preferred staying in bed for as long as possible and could be up and out the door for work within ten minutes. The idea of getting up at 5am sounded ridiculous to me, and anyone who willingly did it was clearly wired differently.

Then, one Dry January, I decided to force the issue and start getting up early.

Really early.

And what do you know, I loved it.

I loved the peace and stillness before the world revved into action. I loved reading a book with a cup of tea while everyone else was still asleep. I loved frosty sunrise dog walks listening to the birdsong, and I loved the uninterrupted focus that came from working before the emails and messages started arriving.

Most surprising of all, I found that a good start to the day helped me ride out the rest of it, even when it nose-dived into stress and frustration.

That was the first time I realised some of the stories I was telling myself didn’t hold up to scrutiny.

It wasn’t mornings that I had an issue with. It was the cumulative effect of too many late nights, poor sleep and overconsumption. The story had become part of my identity simply because I had repeated it for long enough.

That discovery seems small now, but it opened a much bigger door.

If I could be wrong about something as simple as mornings, what else had I accepted without questioning? What beliefs had I inherited from old habits, from other people, or from a younger version of myself that no longer existed?

Those questions became a regular feature in my journal.

What did success mean to me?

What did happiness mean?

What did I want from work, relationships, and the next ten years of my life?

The deeper I looked, the more I realised that many of my answers were surprisingly vague. Not because I hadn’t thought about them, but because I had never properly defined them for myself.

I think this is more common than we realise.

The news tells us what to worry about.

Advertising tells us what to want.

Social media tells us who we should aspire to be.

Friends, family and lovers all carry their own ideas about what constitutes a good life.

None of this is necessarily malicious. It’s just part of being human.

We learn through observation. We mimic. We adapt. We fit in.

The problem is that if we never stop to question these influences, we can find ourselves living according to definitions we never consciously chose.

Success, productivity, security, love and freedom all mean different things to different people. Yet many of us move through life assuming there is a standard definition we should be aiming for. We inherit ideas from our parents, our peers, our workplaces and, increasingly, from the endless stream of content flowing through our phones.

The question is whether we ever stop to examine those definitions and decide if they still make sense for us.

You don’t need a dramatic midlife crisis to realise something is off. In my experience, it happens more gradually than that. A quiet feeling that something no longer fits. A sense that you’ve been moving in a particular direction for years without really understanding why.

The process wasn’t dramatic for me, but it wasn’t always comfortable either. Questioning long-held assumptions has a way of unsettling things before it brings clarity.

As I spent more time reflecting and journaling, I started to see which parts of my life felt aligned and which parts no longer did. That understanding changed how I made decisions.

It influenced my relationship with alcohol. It gave me the confidence to leave the agency I had co-run for over fifteen years and build a solo career with more autonomy. It finally pushed me to stop talking about hiking in Nepal and actually go. It gave me the courage to start writing openly and, eventually, to build Mission 52.

None of those decisions happened overnight.

They emerged gradually from a clearer understanding of what mattered to me.

And that clarity came from slowing down long enough to pay attention.

Not to the world.

To myself.

That’s why I think reflection matters.

Not because it makes us more productive or promises some kind of enlightened existence. For me, it has simply become a way of checking that the life I’m building is actually mine.

Modern life is incredibly good at telling us what to want. Perhaps that’s why understanding ourselves has become so important.

If we don’t take the time to define what matters, there are plenty of people, platforms and algorithms ready to do it for us.