Last night, my husband and I had an argument. He thinks I’m taking on too much. And, to be fair, I can see why.
I’ve changed direction quite a few times in my career. I started in engineering, moved into business, spent some time away from corporate, started ACCA, and eventually decided that I wanted to build myself properly in finance and return to corporate. So I did.
At the time, the direction felt quite clear. I wanted to become very good at what I do. I wanted to build a proper career in finance. I could see myself progressing through corporate, taking on bigger responsibilities and seeing where that could take me over the next five or ten years.
Then, less than a year after returning to corporate, I started building Fallow Lane. That was never part of the plan.
I didn’t return to corporate thinking I would eventually build a publication. I didn’t start ACCA because I wanted to write about finance. Fallow Lane came from everything that happened afterwards. From learning more, working again, asking more questions and slowly discovering that there was something here I wanted to explore.
But from my husband’s perspective, I understand the concern. I had only just committed myself to one direction. Now I was adding something else. At some point during our argument, I found myself wondering:
When do you stop changing direction and simply stick to the plan?
I didn’t really know how to answer him. Because the strange thing is, I don’t think my original plan was wrong. I meant it when I made it. I genuinely wanted that future. But I also mean what I’m saying now.
And while thinking about it afterwards, I realised I’d been looking at almost exactly the same problem somewhere else.
In NPV.
What are we really saying when we calculate NPV?
When a business considers an investment, it has to make a decision about something that hasn’t happened yet. It forecasts the cash flows a project might generate, discounts those future cash flows back to their value today, and compares that value with what it has to invest.
If the NPV is positive, the investment is expected to create value. And that is just it: expected.
Nobody actually knows what the cash flow will be three or five years from now. Customers could change. Costs could increase. A competitor could enter the market. Technology could change the industry entirely.
And yet businesses still invest. Because waiting until the future becomes certain isn’t really an option. By then, there would be no investment decision left to make. Investment itself requires us to give something up today for something we believe will create more value in the future.
A positive NPV isn’t really saying:
We know this will happen.
It is saying:
Given what we know today, this appears to be worth doing.
That distinction suddenly felt very important to me.
I meant it when I made the decision
When I decided to pursue ACCA and return to corporate, I made that decision using the information I had at the time. I had spent time away from corporate life. I missed parts of it. I wanted deeper financial knowledge, progression and responsibility. Given my circumstances and ambitions then, I could see a future there.
So I invested in it. Not only money, but time, early mornings, exams, work, energy and attention. If I could somehow have calculated the NPV of that decision then, perhaps it would have been positive.
But something happened that I couldn’t possibly have put into the original forecast.
The investment itself changed the information available to me.
The more I learned about finance, the more questions I started asking. Eventually, the questions stopped being only about finance. They became questions about business, decisions, work, time and life. So I started writing about them. The writing became an idea, and that idea became Fallow Lane.
I couldn’t have included Fallow Lane in my original five-year plan.
How could I have forecast an ambition I hadn’t discovered?
And it wasn’t only Fallow Lane. Being back in corporate reminded me of what I value about it, but also allowed me to understand its trade-offs in a way I couldn’t while standing outside it.
I had more information now. But there was something else I hadn’t considered. I wasn’t only receiving new information.
I was changing too.
What if the investment changes the investor?
For me, this is where the comparison with NPV becomes fascinating.
We often imagine a decision as though there is a fixed version of ourselves standing at the beginning. We decide what we want, choose a direction, and then the measure of success becomes whether we can stay on that path long enough to reach it.
But is that really what happens?
We learn things we couldn’t have understood from the outside. We discover new abilities, different priorities and opportunities we couldn’t have predicted. Sometimes we even develop ambitions that wouldn’t have made sense to the person who made the original plan.
The investment doesn’t only produce an outcome. Sometimes it changes the person evaluating the outcome.
And that creates a problem. Because if the person making the forecast has changed, perhaps the forecast isn’t the only thing that needs updating. Perhaps what that person considers valuable can change too.
But surely we can’t change direction every time we learn something new
This is where I hesitate.
Sometimes things are simply hard. Almost anything worth building eventually becomes boring, uncomfortable or uncertain. If every difficult period becomes evidence that we chose the wrong path, we may never stay long enough to discover what it could become.
Persistence matters. But I’ve started wondering whether there is an opposite mistake that we talk about much less:
At what point does sticking to the plan stop being persistence and become refusing to respond to what you’ve learned?
I think I’ve sometimes been so conscious of appearing indecisive that my instinct has been to suppress the possibility of changing direction.
Stick with it. You chose this. Finish what you started. Prove that you can stay.
But if following the original path gives us information we couldn’t possibly have had before we followed it, are we really supposed to ignore that information in the name of consistency?
And if an ambition develops because of everything we’ve learned along the way, is pursuing it really evidence that the original direction failed?
I’m not sure it is.
The new direction may only exist because of the old one.
A good decision doesn’t require a perfect forecast
Perhaps part of the problem is that we judge old decisions using new information. We look backwards with everything we know today and ask why we didn’t know it then.
Why did I choose that career? Why did I leave that job? Why did I spend years building something I eventually walked away from? Why didn’t I know what I wanted?
But perhaps the better question is:
Given what I reasonably knew then, did the decision make sense?
A company could approve an investment based on reasonable assumptions and later discover that the world has changed. That doesn’t automatically make the original decision irrational. But neither does the fact that the original decision was rational mean that every future decision must remain the same.
Those are two different questions.
The decision we made then should be judged using what was reasonably knowable then. The decision we make now has to use what we know now.
That sounds obvious when I write it down. I’m not sure we always allow ourselves to live that way.
Then what are we actually trying to optimise?
And this is where NPV eventually stops helping me.
In corporate finance, at least theoretically, the objective is clear: shareholder wealth maximisation. In life, I’m not sure we have anything so neat.
Career, money, security, freedom, family, time, achievement — the value we place on each can change as we change. So perhaps the difficulty isn’t only that our forecasts change.
The thing we are trying to optimise can change too.
I don’t know what to do with that yet. Maybe that is a question that can only be understood by continuing to make decisions, talking to people who made different ones, and seeing what those decisions eventually became.
Maybe the answer changes. Maybe there isn’t one answer at all. For now, I think the question is enough.
In business, we call the objective shareholder wealth. But what is the shareholder wealth of a life?
