“What’s next?” Simone Biles took to social media recently to question this very common question. “You guys really gotta stop asking athletes what’s next after they win a medal at the Olympics,” she tweeted.
My Inc. colleague Bill Murphy Jr. didn’t think much of that complaint, noting that people always ask athletes about their plans, and that it’s hard to feel sorry for someone who’s fielding questions while wearing their seventh Olympic gold medal.
Whether or not you think Biles is right to complain about anything at this moment, she absolutely has a point about the knee-jerk way we all constantly ask each other about the future. Publish a book and before the ink is even dry, people will start asking what your next project is. Reach a big goal, one you’ve been working on for years or even decades and “What’s next?” will be one of the first questions you hear.
We can all recognize how wrong that question was. And yet, there’s something almost as wrong that most of us routinely do: We ask small children what they want to be when they grow up. Even at the age when we have to choose a major in college, or a first job to apply for, most of us have little or no idea what our lifelong professions should be. If all goes well we may be working at these professions for most of our adult lives. Does it really make sense to ask four-year-olds how they plan to spend 40 years?
These may seem like harmless questions, but they’re not. Every time you ask a child what they want to be later on in life, or you ask someone who’s just had a big triumph what’s next, you are pushing that person to think about the future instead of the present moment. It’s just as important to stop asking yourself this question, at least not all the time. For many of us, especially if we’re entrepreneurs, constantly focusing on the future becomes second nature. Being in the present moment becomes a struggle.
Once, in a conversation with my husband, I heard this sentence come out of my mouth: “Someday, I’ll learn to be in the present moment, but I don’t know when that will be.” I didn’t recognize the irony until after I’d said it. As the years go by and it’s clear that more of my career is behind me than ahead of me, living in the present moment seems like a better and better idea.
Which brings us back to Biles and her request for people to stop asking athletes about their plans. “Let us soak up the moment we’ve worked our whole lives for,” she wrote in a reply to her first tweet. Biles is 27, young in almost any other context, but old for her particular sport. Whatever she may do next, her career as a competitive gymnast is certainly more behind her than ahead of her. When a reporter asked if she would ever vault again in competition after the Paris Olympics, she said that she would definitely not do her incredibly difficult version of the Yurchenko Double Pike, called the “Biles II,” again. And it sounded like she might be done with Olympics altogether. “Never say never,” she said. “But I am getting really old.”
However old you are and wherever you are in your own professional journey, Biles is right. Sure, you need to make plans and work toward your goals. But if you’re constantly living in the future, you’ll miss the most joyful and meaningful moments of your life.
In my book Career Self-Care: Find Your Happiness, Success, and Fulfillment at Work (New World Library, 2022), there’s a whole chapter on mindfulness and the many benefits of learning to live in the present moment at least some of the time. Taking a break from asking “What’s next?” of yourself or anyone else is a good start.
