It’s a question so rarely asked it almost feels silly to ask it.

Some situations and some jobs work to eliminate our freedom of choice. Prison, medical school, 8th grade–there are settings where time, tools, and options are severely limited.

But even in these settings, we have more choice than we realize.

And for the rest of us, particularly freelancers and entrepreneurs, our agenda is wide open.

Who decides what you will eat tonight, or what you will do after dinner? Who decides who you will call on, what you will learn next, which posts you’ll read (or write)? Who decides what tone the conversation will have, what your priorities are, and what you’ll worry about when you walk the dog?

There’s the agenda of the next five minutes as well as one for the next five days. And the process of getting to five years from now is so fraught or uncharted that we hesitate to even talk about it.

It may be that the key building block to success (and even to happiness) is getting your agenda aligned with your goals, your dreams, and your fears.

TINA!

This is what Margaret Thatcher said about her draconian free market policies.

It’s an easy thing to tell ourselves about compliance to any dominant system. But it’s incomplete.

The complete sentence is, “There is no alternative unless we’re prepared to endure short-term discomfort as we push back against the dominant system.”

So the real question isn’t, “what’s the alternative?”

The question is: “Can we create the conditions to cause this system to change enough for us to do the long-term work we’re proud of?”

Systems don’t like to be disrupted. Persistent systems push us to believe TINA.

We all make them from time to time.

You might not know what you need to know. This is where experience is created.

You might have an identity that pushes you to make those choices. If you’re determined to act like the person you have assumed you are, the choices come with the role.

Or, you might prioritize short-term benefits over the long-term costs of a bad choice. In this sense, the difference between a good choice and a bad one is simply which timeframe we’re considering.

Built into the idea of ‘choice’ is the agency and freedom to choose. But we waste that power every time we fail to realize we’re making a choice.

And there are two common reasons for this: we don’t believe we have the freedom to choose, or we’re not clear about what we’re trying to accomplish in the first place.