No Idea

They say that if you want to know what you should do with your life, you should remember what you wanted to be when you were six…

In my case, that would have made me a grower.

My grandfather was one, in Sebaldeburen, a tiny village in the north of the Netherlands. He grew vegetables, but I already had a slightly different business model in mind. I wanted to grow garden plants. A huge place, full of greenhouses and plants, with a restaurant where people could eat and spend the afternoon.

I was six.

Looking at the garden centres of today, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea.

I never became a grower.

At fifteen I started my first little company, BBP, matching part-time workers with businesses. This was before temporary employment agencies became what they are today. Later I became a headhunter, built a recruitment platform that became number one in the Netherlands and, remarkably, still is. I became a hotel manager, invested in start-ups, lived in New York and later San Francisco, moved to Barcelona and somehow ended up in Portugal.

Looking back, it almost sounds like there was a plan.

There wasn’t.

And perhaps that is one of the nicer things you discover when you get older. Most people have no idea what they are doing either.

We make plans, write business cases, set targets and pretend we know where we will be in five years. But life has an irritating habit of coming up with better ideas.

When I arrived in Portugal, I thought I was approaching the quiet part of my career. Slow down. Enjoy life. Good food, sunshine, family, maybe a glass of wine.

Well, I got the enjoying part right.

The slowing down didn’t quite work.

Today I do around five restaurant tastings and reviews a week. I travel, taste, photograph, talk to restaurant owners and chefs, chat with the people serving the food, hear their stories, study the menus and then sit behind my laptop trying to turn all those impressions into a story. It is hard work. My head is constantly switched on.

And I absolutely love it.

I sometimes recognise that same curiosity in my ten-year-old son Elyas. He loves eating out, wants to know things, asks questions and looks at the world as if there is always something new to discover. I hope he never loses that…

Now my restaurant reviews are also appearing in The Portugal News. Another new chapter I never planned.

Maybe that is the point.

At six I thought I would grow plants. At fifteen I connected people with jobs. Later I built companies, managed hotels and invested in other people’s ideas. Today I write about restaurants.

What comes next?

I honestly have no idea.

And perhaps that is the best thing I have learned in sixty years: you don’t need to know.

We spend half our lives pretending we have a plan. Careers, businesses, relationships, five-year strategies. But most of the interesting things in my life happened when the plan changed.

So maybe we are all just making it up as we go along. Trying things. Getting some right. Getting plenty wrong. Opening another door.

And somewhere inside me, that six-year-old boy is still there, dreaming about his enormous greenhouse full of plants and a restaurant.

Come to think of it, he may have understood life better than I do.