Here is a great litmus test for your primary focus: go brag about it and watch people's reactions.

If you get jealousy, excitement, or "I want to join that" energy — you picked right. If people just nod politely? You picked something too safe and too small.

When your plan falls apart:
The real test is not whether things go wrong — they will. The test is how fast you stop mourning Plan A and fall in love with Plan B.

A party planned for years got hit with a tornado watch and something called dirty rain. The turning point? Shifting from "we have to do a backup plan" to "the rain plan IS the plan."

Once the team fully committed, they got more excited than they had been about the original.

The lesson:
The more you invest yourself into a new direction, the more you fall in love with it. Real commitment pulls you forward — and sometimes the thing you resisted most turns out to be the best thing that ever happened.