Question 150: What’s the one thing you want
to achieve most in life?

Sunday, October 18th, 2026

My wife and I use the free version of an app called Paired. Each day, it gives us one question to answer independently, and once we’ve both answered, we get to see what the other person said.

This was one of the questions.

Beyond how valuable it is for your partner to know what you still yearn for and desire in life, I couldn’t help but think about how important this question is for leaders.

What’s the one thing you want to achieve most in life?

The answer probably changes depending on the season you’re in.

Earlier this year, I realized that I had finally “exited” what I think of as the start-up phase of my life. I’m married. We have kids. We bought a home. I have a career I love. I’ve built habits and routines that serve me well.

A lot of the things I spent my younger years trying to build are now in place.

So what’s next?

Don’t mess it up!

Or, perhaps more intelligently, compound.

Charlie Munger spoke often about the extraordinary power of compounding, and I’ve increasingly started thinking about my life through that lens.

Lean into the good things. Keep doing them. Protect them. Give them enough time to compound.

That’s easier said than done. It took enormous discipline to build many of these things, and maintaining them requires discipline too. But it’s still a lot easier to keep something good going than to continually start over from scratch.

And when I zoom all the way out, I realize that the thing I want most in life is going to require decades of compounding.

The likelihood that I achieve it is probably slim to none.

For some strange reason, that excites me instead of frightening me.

God willing, I have a few more decades ahead of me to keep building toward a world where our work becomes part of the head, hand, and heart of America’s public education system.

My aspiration is that one day PRACTICE becomes part of America’s legacy and story—the way institutions and brands like baseball, GM, Apple, Harvard, and Disney have become woven into our cultural fabric.

Writing that down feels appropriately audacious.

I’m decades away from knowing whether any of it will materialize. It will require steadfast commitment, unwavering discipline, an extraordinary group of people, and, of course, a lot of luck.

But I’ve realized that the through line underneath all of it isn’t actually PRACTICE.

It’s reaching my God-given potential.

I don’t know exactly where that pursuit will lead me. But it feels like the direction worth chasing.

So I’ll leave you with the same question that unexpectedly made its way from an app I use with my wife into this Learning Loop:

What are you going after?

And maybe the harder question:

Are you bold enough to say it out loud to someone significant in your life?