The Circle of Possibility: How to Decide What to Do With Your Life
I spent two decades and 28,000 miles chewing on a single question: how do you decide what to do with a life? The answer I arrived at fits on one page. I call it the Circle of Possibility, and it is the framework I walk audiences through in every keynote.
What is the Circle of Possibility?
The Circle of Possibility is a decision-making map built on three questions: what do I value, where do I set my flag, and what constraints must I embrace? Your values sit at the center. Your flag is a single concrete aim out on the horizon. The constraints are what you accept in order to reach it.
The premise underneath it is unglamorous: you have a limited amount of time and energy. That sounds like a depressing place to start a framework, but limits are what give days meaning. If your time were genuinely unlimited, every choice would be irrelevant and you would take the most comfortable option every time.
Most people live without this map. There is an expanse of possibility in every direction and no way to measure the value of the path they are on, so circumstance chooses for them. They probe half a dozen versions of themselves with lukewarm effort, then spend their forties holding onto every path they did not take as though it were equal to the one they did. "I could have been." "I should have." That is one of the harder thoughts to live with, and it is entirely avoidable.
Question one: what do I value?
Values are the characteristics of the life you want to live — not possessions, and not job titles.
Say to yourself: "I want a life of…" What three characteristics come into your head?
When I asked myself this at seventeen, after my friend Ann Marie died, the answer was travel, adventure — because I was timid and introverted and wanted to be forced out of it — and understanding the world. Those three words determined the next twenty years.
Most people get this backwards. They say "it's novelist or nothing," or "it's founder or bust," and mistake a flag for a value. If you were born in the sixteenth century you would feel no less purpose writing with a quill than with a laptop. Writer is a flag. Telling stories is the value underneath it. Confusing the two is why people who achieve the title still feel empty, and why people who miss it feel they have nothing.
Question two: where do I set my flag?
A flag is a single, concrete, values-based aim you can picture and measure decisions against.
For sixteen years I pictured the world walk as a flag jabbed into a distant mountaintop, flickering in the breeze. Calling it a "goal" was too fuzzy — I could not hold it in my head. A flag I could see. That let me be rigid about the destination and completely flexible about the route.
Three rules for flags:
The best flag is values-based. "Become the top salesperson" works if you want it because you value security for your family, competition, and early retirement. It fails if you want it because you feel pressure to want it.
The bigger the dream, the more values it must align with. A small flag can rest on one value. A sixteen-year flag needs to sit on everything you care about, or it will not survive the first hard winter.
One flag is enough. Three flags on the horizon means following one east on Tuesday and another west on Wednesday, and winding up somewhere in the middle. One flag gives you the ultimate decision tool: at every fork, ask only "does this get me closer or further?"
When I was recovering from the infection that nearly killed me a few years into the walk, questioning what I was doing out there, my flag held — because when I imagined my life without it, I imagined a life that did not fulfill a single thing I valued.
Question three: what constraints must I embrace?
This is the question people resist hardest, especially Americans. We are close to ideologically opposed to constraints.
But without constraints we leak toward the path of least resistance, because that is human nature. Constraints demand focus, creative problem-solving, and the acceptance of obstacles. Google's own innovation principle is that creativity loves constraints. Bodybuilders isolate a weak muscle and put it under stress deliberately.
I chose to walk rather than bike or drive specifically for the constraint. Walking meant I had to pass through every town. It did not matter if I was scared — I wanted to be forced out of my ignorance.
The unintended benefit was photography. It was the only hobby that fit into living out of a baby carriage. When I looked at Instagram to learn what made a successful photographer, the answer appeared to be mountains with a tiny human for scale. I was almost never on a mountaintop; I was usually passing through a modest village. That drove me crazy for a while. Then I understood: because I could not drive to photogenic locations, I had to find beauty wherever I already was. That constraint is the entire reason I learned to shoot architecture, portraits, and landscapes instead of one kind of picture.
Constraints come in two kinds. Inherited constraints you did not choose — your body, your obligations, the era you were born into. Make peace with those and search them for hidden benefits. Chosen constraints — marriage, living below your means, walking instead of driving — you apply deliberately for what they force you to become. Make peace with the first and put the second to work.
One test: a constraint rooted in your values is a constraint. One that is not is merely a restriction, and it will give way the moment it gets uncomfortable.
Why does this framework work when goal-setting usually fails?
Because it removes decisions rather than adding them.
Conventional goal-setting hands you a list to maintain. The Circle of Possibility hands you a single question to ask at every fork in the road. What book should I read? How do I spend this evening? Do I buy this? With a flag planted in your values, the answers become obvious, and boundaries stop feeling like deprivation — missing out on one thing is what opens your life in the direction you actually chose.
The compounding effect is the real payoff. Fewer choices make action easier. Easier action becomes cumulative. Progress accelerates, the path gets more defined, and the flag gets clearer as you approach it.
Key takeaways
The Circle of Possibility answers three questions: what do I value, where do I set my flag, what constraints must I embrace?
Values are characteristics of a life ("adventure"), not titles or possessions ("founder").
One flag beats several — its purpose is to simplify decisions, and multiple flags defeat that purpose.
Constraints force growth; a constraint grounded in your values holds, while an arbitrary restriction collapses.
The framework works because it subtracts decisions instead of adding obligations.
Tom Turcich walked 28,000 miles across 38 countries over seven years — one of only a handful of people to walk around the world. The Circle of Possibility is the framework at the center of his keynote. See keynote topics.
