Walking by Remembrance
It is a wet spring morning in Bulgaria. Most May mornings here the light is already summer by ten. Today is more Irish than Bulgarian — not much rain, not much wind, only the cold wet that takes its quiet time settling in.
I woke at five. The birds were singing. I felt the wave again — the small daily wave of becoming that comes when I am awake to meet the sunrise. First as a gathering, the way a cat lowers herself before the leap, silent, holding a pressure that has not yet decided to release. Then the leap, and the tension turning all at once into a flow that lasts as long as the holding did.
Then the play can begin.
Today the play is subdued. Not shining, but bright. The near distance is sharp. The mountain through my window is wrapped in fog — the right slope barely visible, the left vanished into the sky, gone from the horizon though I can still see it inside me.
So many mornings I have watched the dawn come crimson down the folds of that mountain. I can see those mornings now, whole and arranged inside me, while the window in front of me shows nothing — no slope, no peak, no evidence. A guest arriving here this morning would think the horizon ended at the white roof of the tallest building and the fir tree on the ridge. The view, within its scope, is clear. It is only the main actor who is missing.
And yet the ordinary things stay in their places — the roof, the tree, the path — and these are the milestones that mark the way to the mountain I remember.
So today’s exercise is an exercise of remembrance.
In remembrance of Molly — a teacher I have been studying for months, who is no longer here to teach. In remembrance of where she was pointing, and where we are still meant to go.
The teacher who is no longer here
Molly Gordon died in June 2025. I wrote about this two days ago, in a piece called The Sites Are Gone, and I will not repeat that here. The necessary outline: she was a coach for renaissance people — multi-talented, multi-interested, self-employed practitioners whose visions did not fit any linear system — and she ran Shaboom Inc. for more than two decades, one of the founding-generation Master Certified Coaches of the International Coach Federation. Her sites have folded since her death; her voice remains, in fragments, on YouTube and LinkedIn and other people’s podcasts. I have been studying her for months.
Yesterday, while editing the Sites Are Gone essay, I instructed my editor to replace the phrase shiny things with Bright Shiny Objects. The capitalization arrived in me already-formed, as a proper noun. As if I had just coined it.
This morning I went looking for a quote of hers — an entirely different one — and opened a blog post she had published on April 19, 2010, titled How to make someday happen now: the art of goal setting. In the second paragraph, sixteen years ago, in her own sentence: This makes you vulnerable to Bright Shiny Objects.
The phrase was not mine. The capitalization was not mine. It was hers.
She published the post on April 19, 2010. I began this writing run on April 19, 2026 — the same day of the same month, sixteen years apart.
I have nothing clever to say about this. I will note the symmetry once, and move on. Some things ask only to be noticed.
What this means, structurally, is what I want to write today. The vocabulary I thought I was building has been quietly arriving in me from someone whose work I have been absorbing for months. The student takes the song into her own mouth, sings it, and only later — sometimes much later — finds out whose song it was. This is what the holder-frame predicts. The idea is free. The voice walks.
And the method — the goal-setting method Molly built across twenty years of practice — is sitting there in the same post. Still working. Still pointing at where we are meant to go. The fog has eaten the original site (shaboominc.com will not load anymore), but the questions are still there, archived by other people who knew their worth. They are mundane objects on the path. They are still milestones to the invisible mountain.
So this is what I will do today. I will walk the questions, in my own voice, and report from the walking. The method is hers. The walking is mine. The mountain we are both pointing at, neither of us owns.
The fairgoers and the exhibitors
Before the questions, a frame I have to put down first, because it is the engine under everything else.
Renaissance people, or ADHD people, or multi-talented people — most of us. These are the ones who got praised for an essay and a solved math problem, for a song and a dance, for an athletic achievement and a scientific project. The world was wildly interesting, and we were so, so curious. Why hold ourselves in a single space when the fair of science and art and sport had so much to offer? Why stay in one place when we could experience and explore everything?
The problem is that if we keep exploring forever, we stay in the audience. We never cross over to the stands. We remain the guests of the fair, never the hosts — never the exhibitors behind the curtain, in one room, in one corner, who make the fair possible and make the fair so fun.
At some point, the wish to make that crossing arrives. From passer-by to performing artist. From consumer to producer. From taker to giver. The pleasure of exploring gives way, slowly, to the satisfaction of sharing who you are with the world.
The Renaissance person, somewhere along this arc, becomes full. Often without knowing it, she is already overqualified, already ready. The wish to share surfaces and will not quiet.
Sharing has a price. The price is staying in one place. The price is letting go of the pleasure of further exploration in exchange for the satisfaction of the giving.
At this stage, the question is no longer how to get more, be more, shine more. The question is who, of all the selves you have rehearsed across the years of exploration, you have come to be best — the one you like being best — and how to share that one with the world.
So this is why we choose to settle.
If you are not at this stage yet, you might choose not to force it. Or you might check whether you are already at this stage, and you simply have some thoughts of resentment, some resistance. Remember: sometimes the magnitude of the resistance equals the magnitude of the eruption.
Check where you are. Do you really want to continue exploring, or do you really want to transition into sharing? If the latter is true, then no matter what the resistance is, stay here and continue. Otherwise, happy exploring.
This is the question that has to be settled before any goal-setting will work. The method that follows is only for the fairgoer who is ready to step behind the stand. For anyone still in the discovery years, it would be early.
The question Molly did not ask
Molly’s method begins with a five-year horizon. Before I get there, I want to put down one question that she did not include — and that I now think has to come first.
Sit at the end of your life. Look back. What is your greatest regret?
Take a moment with this. Not as a thought exercise — actually sit with it. The regret will come if you let it. In my experience, and in the experience of the people I have walked this with, the regret is almost always about what you allowed to be deferred. The work you did not do. The presence you did not give where it was needed. The body you did not honor. The location you did not move to. The conversation you did not have. The voice you did not raise.
You will know your own. You do not have to write it down. You only have to let yourself see it.
The end-of-life view collapses all the strategic reasons for the deferral into a single question: Was it worth what it cost?
This question belongs at the very front of the method, because it is the only question that disables the explorer-mind’s defense. The explorer can always argue not yet, not yet, one more option first. The end-of-life view cannot be argued with. The regrets are already written by then. The only question is which ones you are still able to unwrite.
After this question, the five-year horizon is no longer abstract. It is now a measurement against a regret you have already named. Now the method can do its work.
The why-drill
The greatest-regret answer is rarely the root. It is the surface — the layer that is socially safe to admit. Under it sits a deeper regret. Under that, a deeper one. The work, if you want the question to do its full work, is to drill from the surface to the root.
The technique is old. The Toyota engineers called it the Five Whys — ask why? about each cause until you reach the underlying mechanism (Ohno, 1988). Practitioners of inner work often go further: ten, fifteen, twenty whys, until the drill hits bedrock.
You do not always know in advance how deep your bedrock is. You know you have hit it when one of two things happens: the answer stops changing under further asking, or the body shifts. The shift is somatic. A breath that releases. A tightness that drops. Sometimes tears. The body recognizes the root before the mind does.
Here is a worked example. The surface regret is universal enough that you may recognize it.
— What is my greatest regret? The book I never wrote.
— Why? Because I never started it.
— Why didn’t you start? Because I never thought it was good enough.
— Why did it have to be good enough first? Because I was afraid of being judged.
— Why were you afraid of being judged? Because in my family, being judged was the punishment for taking up space.
— Why was taking up space a punishment? Because there was only so much space, and it belonged to someone else.
— Why did you accept that? Because as a child, I had no other option.
— Why are you still living by it now? Because no one has told me I am allowed to take the space.
— Why are you waiting for permission? Because I am still asking the wrong people.
There. The body shifts. The drill has reached a place where the answer to the next why would be because I have not yet given myself permission — and that is no longer a regret. It is a present-tense action waiting to be taken.
The surface regret was the book I never wrote. The root regret was I am still asking the wrong people for permission to take the space. Those are different problems, and only the root one can be solved.
This is the work the why-drill does. It converts a wistful regret into an actionable present-tense diagnostic.
A note on doing this alone. The drill is harder to run on yourself than it sounds. The mind has a strong tendency to stop early — to settle for the second or third why and call it the root. The function of a coach or a thoughtful friend in this work is not to give you the answers. It is to keep asking why when you want to stop. The witness holds the drill open. Without a witness, most of us drill three levels and call it done.
If you do not have access to a coach, two practical substitutes work reasonably well. The first is to write the dialogue out longhand. Ask why in your own writing voice. Refuse to end the dialogue until either the body shifts or you can answer the question what would make me put this down? The second is to set a timer — twenty minutes at the very least — and not allow yourself to stop drilling until the timer ends. The artificial constraint stands in for the witness’s persistence.
Once you have the root regret, the five-year horizon question is no longer abstract at all. It is now: what is the version of my five-year life in which the root regret is being unwritten as we speak?
Now the method can do its real work.
The five-year horizon
Molly’s four questions, in her order. The order is the teaching. Walk each one in turn.
What do I want my life to be like in five years?
The first question asks for texture, not strategy. What does the morning look like? Who is in the house? Where is the house? What is on the desk? What does the body do at noon? What does the inside of the head sound like at the end of a working day?
This is not a vision-board question. It is a sensory inventory. The texture has to be specific enough that the body has somewhere to stand when the three-rooms test arrives in the next section. Vague answers — I want to be happy and successful — give the body nothing to read.
Write the morning. Write the room. Write the work. Write the body. Write the silence after the work.
How much will I need to earn to sustain that way of living?
Money as the carrier of the texture, not as the goal. The number is the smallest one that buys the morning and the location and the freedom you just wrote. It is not a vanity number. It is the rent on the life.
I have my own number for this. I am not publishing it here. The point is not the number; the point is that the number exists, and that it can be derived from the texture rather than imagined as an aspiration. Most goal-setting reverses this order — pick the number, design the life around it — and produces lives whose owners cannot quite name why they feel hollow.
What would my business look like to fit with that?
The business as a fit to the life, not the other way around. Most goal-setting reverses this. Pick a business, optimise for revenue, fit the life around it. Molly’s order says: the life is the constant. Everything else flexes to serve it.
This is the single most countercultural move in her method. Everything in the surrounding business culture says the business is the constant; the life flexes to serve it. The whole burnout literature is the documentation of what happens when that priority order is held for a working lifetime.
Who do I need to be in order to have that kind of business?
Identity as the load-bearing layer. Diets don’t work, identities always do. The question is not what skills you have to acquire. The question is who you have to be.
This is also where the body re-enters as data. The version of you who runs the business you just imagined — what is her morning like? What does she wear? How does she stand when she walks into a room? How does she answer when someone asks what she does? The identity has a body. The body either is, or is not, the one you currently inhabit. The gap between is the work.
The three rooms
Come up with three scenarios for your life: wildly successful, minimally acceptable, and a sweet spot somewhere in between. The wildly successful scenario will give you vertigo. The minimally successful scenario will leave you feeling somewhat resentful and deprived. The sweet spot is where you can really imagine yourself being, with a good, healthy stretch.
This is the body-as-barometer test, sixteen years before I learned the name for it. Three architectural spaces. Three postures the body adopts. The body’s response is the data.
The instruction is not to think about the three rooms. The instruction is to stand in each one — close the eyes, build the room in concrete sensory detail (the desk, the inbox, the audience, the income, the morning, the body), and then place yourself inside it and read what the body does.
The wildly successful room. Build the largest version of your work that you can imagine — the maximum audience, the maximum income, the maximum visibility, the version that the ambitious part of you secretly wants. Now stand in it. For me, the room with thousands in a hall, holding the energy of a stadium, makes the floor tilt. The vertigo is precise. It is not that the room is bad. It is that the self who would belong in it is not me. The scale is borrowed.
When you stand in your own version, watch for the body. The vertigo is the body reporting that the room is structurally beyond the self that is currently in it. Not forever beyond. Now beyond. The vertigo is not a verdict — it is a measurement. It tells you the room exists, and is not yet yours.
The minimally acceptable room. Build the smallest version of your work that you could live with — the version where the bills are paid, the day passes, and nothing more. For me: the writing happens but no one reads it, the books come out cheaply and find no readers, the channel exists with no audience, everything I make funnels back into trying harder. The shoulders drop, but not in the right way — the drop is heavy, not light. The taste is the taste of having paid the rent of the small life with the part of yourself that wanted more.
When you stand in your own version, watch for the resentment. The resentment shows up in advance of having lived the small life. The body can taste a life that has not happened yet and report on its preferable suffering. Trust this signal. The resentment is the body’s report that this version is not survivable — not because it would kill you fast, but because it would kill the part of you that needed something larger.
The sweet spot. Build the version where the work meets the people who needed it, the income carries the texture you named in the five-year horizon, the audience is large enough to mean something and small enough to know by name. The breath settles. Not because the room is safe. Because the room is recognisable. You have not been in it yet. But you have been being prepared for it.
When you stand in your own version, watch for the recognition. The stretch is not comfort. It is not safety. It is the body’s report that this room is sized to grow into without breaking. This is the calling-shoal, at the level of a future life: not yet here, already recognisable.
The body has already chosen. The mind is still catching up.
The flight plan
Back up from five years to three years. Then to one year. Same destination, viewed from progressively closer distances.
The flight plan is the structural protection against Bright Shiny Objects. A Bright Shiny Object is a destination-substitution dressed up as a waypoint. When you back the five-year sweet spot down through three years and one year, every new opportunity gets tested against a single question: does this put me at the intermediate location I need to be at, or does it deflect the trajectory?
You also get to repeat the three-rooms test at each timeframe. Vertigo, resentment, and stretch are just as informative at one year as at five.
At three years, the picture sharpens. The catalogue is established. The teaching practice has a daily cadence. The face has been shown enough that it is no longer terrifying to show again. The mistakes have been made early enough that they have become teachers. The platforms — the ones that fit the work — are populated.
The earning at three years has its own number, derived from the texture in the same way the five-year number was. The sources of that earning are more honest at three years than at five, because by then the experiment of which sources actually work has been run.
Body-check the three-year picture. Each of the three rooms can be re-entered at this closer distance. Where is the vertigo room at three years? The resentment room? The stretch room? The body’s reading at three years is usually more discriminating than at five — the rooms are closer, the body has more to react to.
At one year, the picture becomes a daily texture — wake time, writing time, walking time, working hours, break, more work, teaching, sleep time. The honesty of the schedule is part of the discipline.
If you have a day-job, the day-job income is part of the one-year picture. It is the buffer that lets the new work develop its own voice without being forced into premature monetisation. The buffer is not a compromise. It is the structural condition under which the new work can grow into its own form before having to feed itself.
The body at one year: the body that can carry the visibility this work asks for. The body-specifics belong elsewhere — there is a separate essay I owe myself about the body and the work, about which body-image goals are about the work and which are about a wound that has nothing to do with the work, and this is not that essay.
The signal that you are on track at one year is whether the daily practice has continued, not whether the metrics have moved. The metrics are downstream. The daily practice is the river.
From what? to how?
You can’t figure out what you want. You can only get in touch with the truth of it that already exists inside of you. That’s what you’ve been doing so far, and now you are ready to decide how you’re going to get what you want.
This is the load-bearing sentence of Molly’s whole method. The what is not constructed. It is located. Everything in the moves above is excavation, not invention.
My own version, in a single sentence I want to keep: I think I am made to dig deeply inside, find my way, discover my way, and share it with others step by step, and help them in the process.
That sentence does not answer the how. It answers the prior question of who I am made to be. The how — the resources, the work, the offerings — follows.
The resources are the things already in the room. Decades of inner work, if you have done them. The relationships that have shaped you. The career that taught you to think in its particular structures. The languages you can write or speak in. The body that has lasted this long. The people who actually support the work, named and unnamed.
The work that uses those resources is the work you already do well, sharpened toward the people who actually need it.
The sweet spot is where the resources and the work meet — the unit you can make today, daily, that compounds. Not the grandest version. The smallest unit that is recognisably the work, repeated.
Molly’s caution on this is sharp: if you hate to write, it doesn’t make sense to choose writing ebooks as a source of income. And: I’m guessing you are already over-qualified, so discard any option that requires you to get additional training. The whole point of the resource inventory is to stop pretending you need to become someone else before you can do the work. You do not. The work was already what you have been quietly preparing for.
The mindful community
It is vastly more effective to do this work with the support of a mindful community. Other people will see your gifts more clearly. They’ll also be able to spot patterns of distraction.
I have no mindful community.
This is the most honest sentence in this essay.
The body-as-barometer is reliable for direction. It is less reliable for naming — for seeing the gifts the operator is too close to see, and for catching the Bright Shiny Object pattern in real time when it disguises itself as inspiration. A mindful community is the external instrument that catches what the internal instrument cannot.
I will build one. There is someone within reach who can be asked for fifteen minutes a day — a daily check-in with someone else doing similar work, holding each other to the practice. There are existing communities I could join while building my own. The fact that the whole method assumes an outside witness, and that I have been trying to do it alone, is information I am no longer ignoring.
If you are walking this method, do the same. The lone version is the one that quietly fails. The witnessed version is the one that finishes.
Walking by remembrance
I look up from the writing and the fog is still on the mountain. The left slope is still missing. The right slope has only barely emerged through the wet.
If you stood at my window now, as a guest, you would assume the horizon ends at the white roof of the building and the fir tree on the ridge. You would not know there is a mountain.
But I know there is a mountain. I have seen it in every season. I have seen the crimson on its folds at dawn so many times that I do not need the dawn now to know what the folds look like. The fir tree on the ridge is in the right direction because I remember what is past it.
The method I have just walked is in the same shape. Molly is past the ridge. The post she wrote in 2010 is the fir tree I can still see. The vocabulary that surfaced in my mouth yesterday was a small wet branch I picked up on the path, not knowing where it had fallen from. The mountain — the work she was pointing at, the life behind the work, the questions that survive their teacher — is the thing I cannot see today, and remember.
The exercise this morning is the exercise of remembrance.
This is what is true about lineage in any field. The teacher is the mountain we cannot always see. The texts and the questions and the vocabulary are the trees on the ridge. The trees are not the mountain. They are the milestones that mean something only because the mountain is remembered.
When the teacher dies and the platform folds, the trees stay. The student walks toward them, and through them, toward the mountain she remembers. Sometimes the student does not even know whose mountain it is. She walks anyway, because the trees are in the right direction and the body knows.
I am the holder for this stretch. The questions are mine to ask now, in my voice. They will pass to whoever picks them up after me. Molly knew. The capitalization on Bright Shiny Objects was the proof, hidden in my own draft until I went looking for the source.
I might not see the mountain today. Yet it is there.
The remembrance is the promise of tomorrow.
Bibliography
Gordon, M. (2010, April 19). How to make someday happen now: the art of goal setting [Blog post]. mollygordon.com. Accessed via Internet Archive snapshot dated 2024-11-03. The four-questions-at-five-years structure, the three-scenarios body-test, the What? to How? pivot, the mindful-community coda, and the phrase Bright Shiny Objects are all drawn directly from this post and from her broader teaching across two decades of Shaboom Inc. Selected surviving public sources: YouTube — shaboomincchannel; LinkedIn — shaboom; X — @shaboom. She announced on her X account that she had entered hospice in mid-June 2025 and is widely reported to have died later that month. Primary websites (shaboominc.com and related properties) are no longer reachable as of 2026-05-15.
Bungay Stanier, M. Three scenarios — wildly successful, minimally acceptable, sweet spot [Coaching frame]. Credited by Molly Gordon in the 2010 post as the originator of the three-scenarios test she adapted into her method. Bungay Stanier’s broader work appears in The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever (Box of Crayons Press, 2016, ISBN 978-0978440749) and other titles.
Ohno, T. (1988). Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Productivity Press. ISBN 978-0915299140. The Five Whys root-cause technique was originally developed within the Toyota Production System by Sakichi Toyoda and codified in Ohno’s writing; adapted here from a manufacturing-engineering context into self-inquiry.