Find Your North Constellation

Alt. Title: How to Trust the Direction Before Knowing the Destination

It’s early on the island of Sandhamn in the Stockholm Archipelago on the first Monday in September. One of the hardest single-day endurance events on the planet is about to begin. The Sun has yet to rise, and there is a palpable, nervous energy in the air among the athletes who qualified for the event. Teams of two will race across some 70 kilometers, running across twenty-five rocky islands and swimming in rough, cold water until reaching the finish line on the island of Utö. This is ÖTILLÖ, The Swimrun World Championship.

The race begins with a short 1.3km run before reaching a wide beach, where teams will transition to the first swim of the day. It also happens to be the longest, at just over a mile. The water in the Baltic Sea is cold (ice cream headache cold), brackish (it sort of tastes like slightly salty lake water), and dotted with tiny white jellyfish (but don’t worry, they don’t sting). As the Sun rises, there’s a glare off the water bright enough to remind you that this is just the first of many, many challenges to face. If all that wasn’t awesome enough, this first swim of the day is so long that athletes can’t even see the island that they are swimming toward. To account for this inconvenient fact, the race directors use a strobe light to help athletes see the direction they should go. While it can be unnerving to swim without being able to see the landmark you are headed toward, teams just swim to the strobe light until they spot the flag placed at the swim exit. As land finally comes into view, they adjust their sighting and head straight toward it.

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As a performance coach, sport metaphors are a big part of my game. (No pun intended.) There’s something instructive in the idea of having to swim toward a yet-to-be-revealed destination that applies so often in arenas outside of sport. I think it’s a particularly apt metaphor for anyone struggling with what to do next.

The self-help aisle of your local bookstore is full of titles about finding our purpose, our calling, our “North Star.” The one clear, fixed direction that tells us exactly where to direct our efforts to achieve our goal. It’s a nice and tidy idea. It’s also, in my experience, mostly fiction. Most of the time, when we are deciding on a new course or a goal that really matters, we don’t start with a single visible point to swim toward. We usually (hopefully) get a sense of a general direction and a lot of open water. Often, the question isn’t how to find your North Star. The better question is: what to do when you can’t see it… yet.

One approach is to start by focusing on finding your “North Constellation” rather than requiring your direction to be fully formed before proceeding. A general bearing, just enough to tell you which way to start swimming. William James, one of the founding fathers of American philosophy and psychology, spent a good portion of his career making the case that orienting ourselves toward a general direction and believing that the outcome will come into view might be the best way forward.

Faith Before Fact

All the way back in 1896, James gave a lecture called “The Will to Believe.” His argument went something like this: there are certain decisions we can't wait to make until we have full proof, because waiting is itself a choice, and often the costlier one. Some options are what James called “live,” meaning they’re genuinely open to you, and “forced,” meaning you can’t dodge the decision by refusing to choose. Think of committing to a relationship, or leaving a stable job for an opportunity with a closing window. Neither is hypothetical, and neither lets you off the hook by simply waiting. When you’re standing in front of a live, forced option and the evidence simply won’t arrive in time, James argued it’s not irrational to commit anyway. Rather, it’s the only rational thing left to do.

He went further. In certain cases, he said, believing in an outcome is part of what makes that outcome possible. A team only wins if, at some point before the final whistle, they play like they believe they can win. A relationship only deepens if, at some point before you have proof the other person is trustworthy, you extend trust anyway. James called this the case where “faith in a fact can help create the fact.” Swim toward the strobe light long enough, with enough conviction, and eventually the island you’re swimming toward is revealed. You didn’t need to see it first. You just needed to have faith that it was there in the first place.

That’s what belief in the process actually means, and it’s easy to get wrong. It isn’t confidence that the island will appear because you want it badly enough. It’s trust that steady, forward progress is the mechanism by which it appears at all.

A World Still Being Made

The second half of James’s thinking that matters here is a concept he called meliorism. He was arguing against two lazy defaults. Optimism, which assumes things will work out regardless of what we do. And pessimism, which assumes nothing we do will matter anyway. James thought both were a way of letting yourself off the hook. Meliorism sits in between. The world isn’t fixed for better or for worse. It’s unfinished, and whether it improves depends on whether people actually get in the water and start swimming toward the strobe light.

This is the part of James’s philosophy that turns the first swim at ÖTILLÖ from a nice metaphor into an actual strategy. The island doesn’t appear because you waited long enough or hoped hard enough. It appears because you swam toward it. Your effort is one of the conditions that makes the destination real. Stand on the beach waiting for certainty, and the destination never resolves into anything, because resolving it was never going to happen from the beach.

Put James’s two ideas together, and you get something like this: when the goal isn’t visible yet, it’s rational to commit to the direction anyway, and your commitment is part of what brings the goal into view. Not blind faith. Directed faith, followed by the work. (Swimming or otherwise.)

What If You Can’t Even See the Constellation

Sometimes the problem isn’t that you can’t see your destination. It’s that you can’t find any direction in the first place. No strobe light, no bearing, nothing to swim toward. This is a different problem than the one James spent most of “The Will to Believe” solving, and it’s worth addressing because the answer isn’t necessarily more searching.

James lived this version of the problem before he wrote about it. In his late twenties, he spent years in a genuine paralysis: sick, depressed, and stuck on the belief that free choice might be an illusion, which meant that nothing he did mattered anyway. He didn’t have a specific North Star, let alone a general North Constellation to head toward. He didn’t even believe direction was a real thing a person could have. He would later write in his diary that he’d reached a crisis and made a decision that had nothing to do with picking a goal. “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” Not a destination. Not even a direction. Rather, a decision that choosing was possible in the first place.

That’s the real answer to what to do when you can’t find your North Constellation to orient toward. You don’t force yourself to see stars that aren’t there. You make a smaller, prior decision: that trying is worth something, before you have any proof that it is. James later sketched something close to a ladder for building up to that decision, a series of small steps rather than one big leap. You start by admitting that something isn’t impossible. Then you decide it might be true and worth trying. And finally, you become willing to act as if it were true and see what happens. Each step asks for a little more conviction than the last, and none of them ask for certainty.

There’s a version of this at the start of the first swim at ÖTILLÖ, before anyone is sighting a strobe light or swimming toward anything. It’s the moment a swimmer commits to getting into the cold water in the first place. That decision has nothing to do with navigation. It’s just the decision that getting in is worth doing at all. Everything else, the direction, the destination, only becomes available once that first decision is made.

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So how do we actually do this? Below are a few practices worth incorporating into your approach to goals when there are no clear directions or destinations. (Luckily, jumping into the Baltic Sea in early September is optional.)

Pick a Constellation, Not a Star

A North Star implies one fixed point: a specific job title, a specific number, a specific outcome. A constellation is looser. It’s a small set of values or directions, durable enough to steer by even when the specific destination hasn’t revealed itself yet. Curiosity, craft, integrity, connection. Pick two or three that matter to you, and let them be what you move toward when the goal itself is still unclear.

Check If the Option Is Live and Forced

Before you commit to a direction without full certainty, borrow James’s filter. Is this option actually live, meaning you could genuinely see yourself choosing it? And is it forced, meaning waiting is itself a decision with real cost? If both are true, you’re not being reckless by committing. You’re doing the only rational thing available to you. If neither is true, it’s fine to keep gathering information.

Swim the Stroke in Front of You

You can’t will an island into existence by staring at it. You will bring it into existence one swim stroke at a time. When the whole distance feels overwhelming, narrow your focus to the next single action in front of you. That’s meliorism in practice. The world, and your goals within it, get built incrementally. The bigger the goal, the smaller the steps that you’ll need to take to achieve it.

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James’s framework gives us a way to ladder our efforts: start by finding your North Constellation, then trust the process until your North Star comes into focus. Ultimately, it comes down to self-belief and faith. Not faith as wishful thinking. Faith as strategy.

At ÖTILLÖ, some swim legs are longer than others, the water is colder than you’d like, and teams spend a lot of time not knowing exactly where they’re headed. In Swimrun, as in life, the island keeps showing up for the people who keep heading toward the light.

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Three Book Recommendations:

The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, William James

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, William James

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert D. Richardson

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Three Fun Facts about Swimrun:

You swim with your shoes on and run in your wetsuit.

You are tethered to your partner with a 3-meter paracord.

No two races are alike.

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Thank you for reading this edition of Rhetorical Exercise. I hope you found it both useful and entertaining as you strive to perform your best at the things that matter most to you.

Peace and love,

Chris