At Vibewire’s June FastBREAK, Lauren Anderson, former Managing Director at Brightest Young Minds and currently the Projects Director at Collaborative Consumption responded to the question: ‘What Now?’

The truth is that, I think for our generation, ‘now’ is a very difficult concept to grasp, and is almost always skipped over in favour of the future. What do they always say about us; the ‘instant gratification generation’, always thirsting for more, more, more? We crave the next experience as though we are adrenaline junkies looking for the next hit of adventure.

We also cram in as much as possible. We are a multi-tasking generation. For example, throughout last year I was juggling full-time work in a management role with the role of Managing Director of Brightest Young Minds (BYM) ruling my after-hours, as well as completing an intensive graduate certificate as an external student. All of this while purchasing an apartment and undergoing a two-month kitchen reno, which only took so long because we were trying to do ourselves! I am consequently very handy with an allen key. And I fit an international holiday in there somewhere as well. It’s not all stress and hard yakka, but it’s constant.

It’s not to say that I’m not in favour of the slow movement – but I know that everyone in this room wants to ‘get somewhere’ and sometimes getting there slowly is not an option when the goalposts of our ambitions shift so often. So we are forced to live a life that balances countless, and most often contradictory tasks. How many young people have a ‘secret life’ – the person they are and the projects they are involved in AFTER they leave work?

The danger with this, as I found out, is that it can become a relentless pursuit to ‘have things on your plate’. As an example, the day after I resigned from my exhausting role of MD of BYM, I volunteered my support to another similar organisation. And once I received my Graduate Certificate I was suddenly enrolling in a Masters programme – at the University of Adelaide no less!

But all this meeting people, learning things and getting home from work to start ‘working’ has finally caused the shift I was hoping would be just around the corner.

I came to Vibewire’s March FastBREAK to hear from some amazing young people on the topic, ‘Are You Ready?’ It was a truly inspiring event, and so I walked away thinking about the topic I was being asked to present on, ‘What now?’ I thought to myself, ‘Yes, I identify with this topic, but I want to give myself a challenge. I want to walk into the Powerhouse Museum at the end of June with an envelope in my hand containing my letter of resignation from work – that’s a real what now!’

As it turns out, I needed to whip out that letter a bit prematurely – about two weeks after the March FastBREAK event I got an email presenting an opportunity I just couldn’t refuse – in short, a dream opportunity that I feel like has been almost 2 years in the making as I built my skills and experiences in every spare minute I had. So I gave my notice two weeks later, finishing at the place I had worked for the last two and a half years, the day before we jumped on a plane to New York City. I literally stepped off the plane a couple of days ago, and yesterday I officially started as Projects Director of Collaborative Consumption.

But is that to say that the last two and a half years have been a waste, working somewhere that didn’t completely fulfil me? This is where the ‘now’ is so important. If I had always been looking forward to the day I could move on to a new experience, I may have missed the rich and challenging things I was exposed to in my job. Every step along the way has so much to teach you. But if you focus on the end goal you might get there and find you have missed a lot of valuable lessons along the way out of impatience and frustration because those emotions are so much easier than accepting each experience for what they are.

And surely we need to look at ourselves if the moment we book tickets for one holiday we are already thinking about the next one? Like the satisfaction of buying the tickets was as fulfilling as the holiday itself but for a much briefer moment. You might laugh at that, but I’m pretty sure I have been guilty of doing that on more than one occasion.

So maybe Eckhart is right and there is a lot of power in ‘now’ – but I also know that for our generation, we can’t afford to sit still because we have the weight of all the previous generations’ expectations and ambitions to carry.

I know we all spend so much of our day consumed with what’s around the corner for our careers, our travel, our relationships and lives in general.  I am fully in support of forward planning and knowing what your goals are no matter how amorphous they are or how often they change completely. But I guess my message is that these plans are at the mercy of so much more than we can have control over. The most opportunity we have to be in control of our destiny is in the decisions we make every second, every minute of the day. And these moments are the ones that can send us off on different and even more exciting paths.

So officially, for me I don’t really know what ‘now’ holds

All I know is that now is what we’ve got and I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.