The Gap Between Where You Are and Where You Want to Be Isn't as Large as You Think
I stopped waiting for 'someday' the moment I realised my daughter was watching. Here's what I'm teaching her about living now instead of deferring everything to a future that may never come.
Marcus Hahnheuser
6 min read
Most people treat five-year plans like prophecy. They set rigid goals, tie their identity to outcomes, and defer the life they actually want until they've checked every box.
That's garbage.
The gap between where you are and where you want to be collapses the moment you stop asking 'Can I do this?' and start asking 'How do I do this?' - and you do it now, not in five years.
What Feeling Are You Actually Chasing?
Close your eyes. Imagine no constraints. No fancy house, no car, no private jet.
What feeling do you actually want? To be content? Happy? Loved? To be providing value, teaching people, helping others?
Once you've got that, ask yourself: what can I do today to feel a little more like it?
Last week, we booked that family staycation at a five-star hotel on the Gold Coast. We went to Skypoint twice, hit the beach four times in two days, ate good food. We didn't wait for some future version of ourselves to deserve it.
We travel internationally once a year with our daughter. Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan. We got our open water scuba diving licenses because we wanted to explore the world. Not in five years. Now.
My wife Shanshan and I had a coffee about a month ago on a Sunday. We were at a cafe having our weekly couples time. I raised something I'd been carrying for a while.
"I don't want to just follow the status quo in our goals," I said. "I don't want to just chase a singular set of objectives or objects and sell myself the lie that I'll be happy once I've achieved everything in that list."
We both come from separated families. We've built everything from ground zero. And we've realised that the only way to discover who we want to be - and show our daughter what's actually possible - is to stop deferring life to some future state.
These conversations over time have changed how we operate. Instead of waiting for C-suite roles in corporate jobs, we created two companies where we're directors - one in consulting/professional services, one in property development. Now, instead of just scaling from zero and hoping for the best over time, we're working to also acquire a small business in the trades space.
The businesses aren't the point. The feeling is.
If you want to wait five years, you never really wanted it in the first place.
The Shift From 'Can I?' to 'How Do I?'
When we bought our first investment property, we didn't know what the exit path was. We knew we were negatively gearing it. We knew we couldn't keep it going forever.
But we defined our risk mitigation plan and figured it out.
That's the operating system change. Risk becomes something you mitigate, not something that stops you.
These days, when an opportunity of experiences comes up - travel, business, whatever - it's not about whether we can do it or what people will think. It's about why wouldn't we do this? What's the worst that can happen?
A lot of the time, the issue is us thinking things would be worse or thinking we'd be better off waiting. But we've both realised there's a lot more power in taking action yourself than hoping someone else will do it for you.
That property decision taught me something I carry into every move now. I didn't wait until I had the perfect plan. We moved when we had enough information to mitigate the downside. And that's how I've approached every transition since - from startups, property development to M&A, from government to working across various service type organisations. The businesses changed. The feeling didn't.
Each move taught me something. Each move let me operate closer to the mode I actually wanted - dynamic, complex, building systems that don't fall over when I'm not there.
What Your Daughter Is Watching
I'm one of five children. Neither of my parents, in my entire life to date, had travelled overseas.
My father passed away without ever doing it.
I was sorting through his things after the funeral when that reality landed. No passport. No stamps. No stories about waking up in a different timezone and figuring out the currency.
Just a life spent in the same radius he was born in.
If I want my daughter to live her best life and know what excellence looks like, I need to model it. We need to do it ourselves.
The biggest fear I have is that she'll look at us and think, 'Oh, I should just do the status quo like them.' We want to challenge the societal norms that exist today, because there are so many better ways to do things.
The average benchmarks for everything are average for a reason - they've got the good and the bad mixed in. If you're going to do something, you do it right. And that means saying no to a lot of things.
At its core, it means shifting your question from 'I can't do that' to 'How do I do that?'
That's what I'm teaching her. Not by telling her. By showing her.
The Riskiest Thing You Can Do Is Not Take Any Risks
You don't need everything at once. Chase what gives you that feeling and gravitate in that direction.
As you do, more opportunities start to appear. You meet more like-minded people - people who already experience what you're after, or who enjoy what you're chasing - and you learn from each other along the way.
When I look back at the property purchase, the business moves, the travel decisions - none of them were about ticking boxes. They were about asking: does this get me closer to the feeling I'm chasing? Now, I also ask if this shows my daughter what's possible?
If the answer was yes, we figured out how.
That's why the gap collapses faster than people expect. You're not chasing a rigid destination. You're making micro-corrections toward how you actually want to spend your days.
When the plan breaks - and it will - you're not fragile, because the plan was never the point.
What's one thing you're deferring to 'someday' that you could do a scaled version of this month, and what's actually stopping you from booking it today?
Delivery leader, entrepreneur, and dad based in Brisbane. Writing about what I'm learning across digital delivery, AI, business acquisition, and trying to be present while building for the future.
Marcus Hahnheuser