Left to Right Thinking? — by Dan Lynn

By Dan Lynn

If you've read my "Right to Left Thinking" post, you know how my mind works. I start with where I want to end up — a specific goal, a real date — and I work backward to today. It's served me well for 40 years.

One time, a colleague named Elie Aslan showed me there's another way to live entirely.

Elie is an incredibly smart and deeply spiritual guy — he studies the mind, mindfulness, how we actually move through the world. One day he said to me: "You're a right-to-left thinker. You figure out where you want to be, and then you figure out how to get there. I'm a left-to-right thinker. I don't know where I want to be — I just let life take me there."

I'd never heard it put that way. My whole life is destinations and deadlines. And here was someone every bit as thoughtful, trusting the current to carry him somewhere worth going — and it did.

Then he said the part that really stuck with me. A right-to-left thinker, he pointed out, can get so locked onto the one goal that he walks right past better opportunities he never planned for. When your eyes are fixed on a single destination, you stop seeing the roads you didn't intend to take.

He wasn't wrong. But I'd add that left-to-right carries its own risk. Drift too freely, with no vision of where you're headed, and life will still take you somewhere — just maybe not somewhere you'd have chosen.

I'll be honest: I didn't change. I'm still right-to-left to my core. But Elie gave me something almost as valuable as a new habit — the knowledge that mine isn't the only way, and that my way has a blind spot. The planner has to remember to look up from the plan. The wanderer has to remember to pick a direction now and then.

So know which one you are. Then borrow, on purpose, from the other — because each one guards against exactly what the other one misses.