Seventeen years ago, I became a financial advisor. I'd love to tell you there was some grand vision behind it, but that would be a lie. There wasn't one. I had a job. I was a W-2 employee with a boss, going to work every day trying to follow the marching orders. The goal was simple, go to work, do well, pay the bills, and maybe get a little ahead. At 29, I wasn't envisioning the business I would someday own or understanding what this career would eventually mean to me. And I certainly wasn't thinking about what it would teach me about the very thing I was being paid to help other people with. Planning for a future you can't fully see yet.
I didn't know what it would turn into. And quite frankly, I didn't know what I would turn into either.
Direction Before Understanding
Recently I listened to a podcast episode featuring Joby Martin, and he used a phrase I haven't been able to shake: "Direction over vision."
Those are his words, not mine, but they’ve replayed in my head more times than I can count. Because that phrase might be a better description of the last seventeen years of my life than any plan I could have written when I started. There wasn't a master vision. There was a direction. Go to work. Work hard. Take care of people. Treat them the way you'd want to be treated. Take the next opportunity when it feels right. If something isn't right, be willing to change. And no matter what, keep going.
One step led to another. Employee became advisor. Advisor became business owner. The business grew, and my responsibilities grew with it. My family grew with it. Even then, I'm not sure I fully understood where it was all headed. I could see pieces of it, success, independence, financial security, freedom, but I didn't understand what those things actually represented. Maybe I wasn't ready yet.
What Did I Actually Want?
Success is more easily defined earlier in life, usually with one word: more. More income, more clients, and more growth. I'm not saying anything is wrong with that. I still want to grow and succeed, and I'm probably just as motivated today as I’ve ever been. But what "more" means has changed considerably.
Financial security, at its core, was really about the ability to take care of the people I love. Independence wasn't about escaping anything; it was about having control over my decisions and the freedom to make choices I believed were right. A successful business didn't just mean a bigger one. It meant building something I could be proud of, something that took exceptional care of people and eventually gave me more say in how I spent my time. And freedom? I couldn't quite define it then. Today it looks like doing meaningful work and still making it to my kids' games. It looks like dinner with my family. It looks like being present when someone needs me.
Maybe my priorities have changed over the years. But the more I think about it, that's probably not quite right either. Rather, I think I've finally started to understand what my priorities were trying to tell me all along.
Sometimes I Need to Hear My Own Advice
I've spent most of my adult life-giving advice, particularly financial advice. Across a desk, over the phone, and more than once on a soccer sideline when I thought I was talking about something else entirely. And I can't count the number of times I've said something to someone else only to realize later that the person who needed it most was me.
I've told players to stop worrying about the last play and focus on the next one, then gone home and obsess over something I couldn't change. I've told clients not to let fear drive a long-term decision, then find myself wanting certainty before taking my own next step. I've told people to trust the process, be patient, and keep moving forward and then recognized, somewhere after the fact, that the message wasn't only for them.
That's been a humbling realization. Apparently, I'm reasonably good at giving advice. Taking it is another story.
Here's what I've also learned from sitting across from people in uncertain moments: I can often see their situation more clearly than they can, not because I'm smarter, but because I'm not standing in the middle of the storm. I can take the longer view, remind them of their plan, and help make the next decision without pretending anyone knows exactly what comes after. But when life puts me on the other side of the desk, I want all the answers too. I want to understand how the pieces fit together and know that the decision I'm making is the right one before I make it. And slowly I'm learning that those answers aren't always available. Sometimes they're just not supposed to be yet.
The Plan Was Never Going to Be Perfect
I keep coming back to Joby's phrase. Direction over vision. I don't think it means vision doesn't matter. I think it means we're rarely capable of fully understanding the vision from where we're currently standing. At 29 there's no way I could have understood what I know at 46, not because I wasn't capable, but because I hadn't lived it yet. Success would have meant something different. Family would have meant something different. Time definitely would have meant something different.
There's a direct parallel to financial planning here, and I think about it often. We ask clients to imagine a future that might be decades away. When do you want to retire? What does retirement planning look like for your life? Those are worth asking, but I've become increasingly convinced that nobody at 40 can perfectly describe what their 65-year-old self will actually want. How could they without living the years in between?
So why do I plan at all? Because planning establishes a direction. It helps you make the best decisions based on what you know today, build in flexibility for what you don't, and create a structure that can evolve as your life does. The goal was never a perfect plan. It was a living one, something that gets revisited and adjusted as your understanding of what you actually want continues to grow. That's true in financial planning and, I'm increasingly convinced, in life more broadly.
The families I've watched build real financial confidence here in West Virginia aren't the ones who had the most perfect plan at the start. Whether they're in Bridgeport, Morgantown, or anywhere across the Mountain State, the ones who get there are the ones who stayed committed to the direction, made adjustments when circumstances changed, and kept moving forward even when they couldn't see exactly where the road was leading.
Keep Going
So what would I tell the 29-year-old who thought he had simply found a decent job?
Work hard. Take care of people. Do the right thing. Listen more than you talk. Be open to changing your mind when you learn something new, and don't confuse being busy with being successful. Don't become so focused on the future that you miss the people standing beside you right now. And when you can't see where the road is leading, don't assume you're lost. Pay attention to the direction.
Psalm 46:10 has taken on new meaning for me lately. "Be still and know that I am God." For someone wired the way I am, being still might be the hardest instruction to follow. My instinct is always to do something, fix something, figure out what comes next. I want the GPS - the destination, the route, and preferably an arrival time. But maybe faith doesn't always work that way. Maybe being still doesn't mean doing nothing. Maybe it means accepting that you don't have to understand everything before trusting the direction you're already moving in.
The route isn't always visible. But the direction is enough to keep going.