The Three Questions That Changed My Life

One of the habits that changed the direction of my life started, strangely enough, because of a decision I sometimes regretted making.

When I started my electrical apprenticeship in the early 1988, I learned I’d also have school two nights a week.

At the time, I was training hapkido five nights a week.

And for whatever reason, I decided that if I couldn’t train five nights a week, there wasn’t much point in training at all.

Looking back, that sounds ridiculous.

Maybe it was some OCD thinking kicking in—if I couldn’t do it completely, I wasn’t going to do it.

So I quit hapkido.

For years, part of me regretted that decision.

• What would have happened if I hadn’t stopped?
• How much better could I have gotten?
• Where would my martial arts journey have gone if I’d just kept training?

But regret is kind of stupid when you think about it.

The choice was made.

It’s done.

Hopefully you benefited from the choices you made.

Hopefully you learned from them.

And if you’re lucky, maybe you did both.

Because quitting hapkido accidentally created something else in my life that may have mattered even more.

I suddenly had a few open evenings.

Two nights were apprenticeship school.

But on some of the other nights, instead of ending up at a sports bar or a strip club with the guys from work, I’d find myself sitting in a café.

And I started journaling again.

There was no grand system.

I wasn’t trying to become a productivity guru.

I’d just sit there with my notebook and think about my life.

What was going on?

Why was it going on?

What did I want to do next?

Around the same time, something happened at work that changed the way I looked at everything.

The Building Had a Blueprint

I was a third-year apprentice working on the Roybal Federal Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

One day I was looking through the drawings for the project—and not just the electrical drawings.

• Structural
• Architectural
• Plumbing
• HVAC
• Engineering

Even the landscaping drawings showing where the trees and plants would eventually go.

I was looking through the prints to find out where I was supposed to install the VFDs but in the process I fell down a rabbit hole of all kinds of prints.

Think about that.

We were still building the damn thing, and somebody had already decided where a tree was going to be years later.

Before most of what I was looking at physically existed, somebody had thought it through.

They had a picture of where they were going.

And they had drawings showing how to get there.

That’s when something clicked.

We had a blueprint for the building.

But when I looked around at the guys I worked with, it didn’t seem like many of them had a blueprint for their lives.

Now, I want to be careful here, because this is easy to get wrong.

These weren’t losers.

They weren’t lazy.

They worked hard.

They made good money.

Some of them were incredibly skilled craftsmen.

They were good men doing honest work.

But if you asked where all of it was going—what they were building, what the work was supposed to create, where they were headed—a lot of them didn’t seem to know.

And then came the uncomfortable question.

Did I?

Three Questions

Those nights in the café and those lessons from the jobsite eventually came together into three simple questions.

Where am I?

What’s actually going on right now?

Not where I wish I was.

Not where I think I should be.

Not the story I keep telling myself about my life.

Where am I, really?

On a construction job, you have to know where the job actually stands before you can figure out what needs to happen next.

You can’t work from fantasy.

You have to see what’s actually in front of you.

How did I get here?

What created the situation I’m in?

What went right?

What went wrong?

What was outside my control?

And most importantly:

What was my part in it?

That last one mattered more than I expected at the time.

Because if I had some part in creating where I was, then maybe I had some power to change where I went next.

This isn’t about blaming yourself for everything.

It’s about taking responsibility for whatever portion was actually yours—because that portion is the only part you can do anything about.

Where do I want to go?

On the job, we always had somewhere we were trying to get.

Finish this install.

Pass this inspection.

Hit this milestone.

Get this part done so the next crew could come in.

Then finish the building and move on to something bigger.

Why shouldn’t my life work the same way?

Where do I want to go from here?

That’s the whole system.

1. Where am I?
2. How did I get here?
3. Where do I want to go?

And then, naturally, one more question shows up:

What’s the blueprint that gets me from here to there?

It’s a GPS, Not a Perfect Plan

I’ve been asking some version of those questions since the late 1980s, if not my whole life, and I give that one simple habit an enormous amount of credit for most of what I’ve been able to enjoy in my life.

But here’s what I want to be honest about, because this is where people get the wrong idea.

It didn’t mean I always knew where I was going.

I didn’t.

It didn’t mean I never made bad decisions.

Obviously I did.

And it definitely didn’t mean I followed some perfect master plan.

Life doesn’t work that way.

I got lost.

I hit walls.

I changed directions.

Sometimes what I thought I wanted turned out not to be what I wanted at all.

But that’s exactly what a GPS is for.

A GPS isn’t useful because you never make a wrong turn.

It’s useful because when you do make a wrong turn, it helps you figure out where you are and gives you a way to start moving in the right direction again.

That’s the whole point.

You don’t need to have the entire route mapped out before you leave the driveway.

You just need to know where you are right now, understand how you got here, and pick the next direction.

The route can get redrawn. That’s what it’s for.

The Part I Wouldn’t Recommend

Maybe that’s the quiet irony of taking a break from hapkido all those years ago.

I gave up something that mattered to me because I told myself if I couldn’t do it perfectly—five nights a week, no exceptions—then it wasn’t worth doing at all.

I wouldn’t recommend that decision to anybody today.

It was all-or-nothing thinking, and it cost me something real.

But the empty space that decision created led me to cafés, and journals, and questions—and eventually to a practice I’ve carried with me for more than three decades.

So I can’t honestly regret it.

I benefited from it.

I learned from it.

Hopefully both.

And the full circle is this:

Young Chuck thought getting off the perfect path meant the journey was ruined.

Older Chuck knows getting off course just means it’s time to reorient and keep going.

🥋 Dojo Drill

You don’t need a fancy system for this.

A notebook works.

A blank document works.

Ten quiet minutes works.

Write down three questions:

1. Where am I?

Describe your current reality without judgment and without bullshit.

Not the version you tell other people.

The actual truth.

2. How did I get here?

What circumstances, choices, habits, luck, other people, and systems brought you to this point?

And what portion of it is actually yours?

3. Where do I want to go?

Don’t try to solve the entire journey from here.

Just establish direction.

Point the compass.

Then ask one more thing:

What’s a single next move that points me that way?

Not the whole blueprint.

Just the next step.

Because that’s all a GPS ever gives you anyway.

It doesn’t shout the entire cross-country route at you at once.

It tells you where you are, then it points you toward the next turn.

More than thirty years later, whenever I feel lost, overwhelmed, stuck, or unsure what comes next, I still come back to the same three questions I started asking as a young apprentice sitting alone in a café.

1. Where am I?
2. How did I get here?
3. Where do I want to go?

You don’t need to have your whole life figured out.

You just need to know where you are, understand how you got there, and decide where you’d like to go next.

Then you can start drawing the blueprint.

📚 Leader’s Library

​​​Turning Pro​ by Steven Pressfield​​​

Why?

Turning Pro is about the moment you stop waiting to feel ready and start treating the work that matters to you like a professional would—with consistency, commitment, and responsibility.

Turning pro doesn’t mean you suddenly become an expert.

It means you stop letting mood, fear, distraction, and Resistance decide whether you show up.

You may still be a beginner. You may still screw things up. You may still have a long way to go.

But once you decide the work matters enough to practice it seriously, you’ve already changed where you’re standing.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck