After university, I trained, and qualified, as an accountant. But I soon had it confirmed to me that, while I have letters after my name that tell you otherwise, an accountant I am not. Being an accountant and being me: not the same thing.

Looking back, my decision to dive into the world of numbers still leaves me utterly bemused. Accountants like predictable, consistent, orderly things. Accountants like formulas. And, with a core strength of creativity, a loathing of routine, and a craving for adventure, there could not have been a career path I was more ill-suited to follow. But, follow it I did.

And, several years into a blossoming career (I may not have like it, but I was good at it) I felt like I’d made my bed, and now I was going to have to lie in it. What other option did I have? I was in too deep and I knew nothing else.

What I knew for a fact was this: If I was going to live out my lot as an accountant, I needed what I did, and who I am, to align. And, to get to that place, I figured I needed to develop a love affair with formulas. I needed to make life predictable. I needed to embrace the routine and celebrate the mundane.

So, I developed formulas for pretty much everything. My life became a spreadsheet of increasing complexity. Formula by formula, I tried to reach that place where who I was and what I did were in tune. In my mind it was simple: if I apply enough formulas to my life, surely there will come a point when I like them?

But, there didn’t. No matter how much formula-making, and formula-following, I did, there never came a point when I liked them.

The problem was that I’d got the process back-to-front: I was trying to make myself become what I did rather than making what I did line up with who I am. And trying to shoe-horn who you are into what you do, when the two do not naturally align, ends badly.

So, eventually, I accepted defeat. I admitted that formulas and I were never destined to like each other. Through a traumatic twist of events, I left accountancy and found myself with an opportunity to forge a new path. I seized that opportunity and, perhaps for the first time, I stopped trying to make life predictable, and embraced the chaos and creativity that, deep down, I had always been seeking.

However, as time passed, without realising, I began to fall back into the formula trap. As I pushed deeper into my adventure of becoming who I really was, signing up for course after course, reading book after book, I slipped into ‘life by formula’ again.

What I came to realise is that, in the messy, chaotic world of becoming the person you really are, formulas simply do not work. Because life is not a formula.

But that doesn’t mean those formulas you’ve learned can’t help you—they can. It’s all about context.

You are unique, and your life is your own, so no one-size-fits-all formula will ever be the golden ticket to transport you where you want to go. But they do offer you golden nuggets. Your job is to eat the meat and spit out the bones, as the saying goes, of what those formulas serve up.

Take every formula you’ve applied, every tip and trick you’ve tested, and examine it. For each element, ask what fits with your values, and what jars. What feels ‘right’, and what leaves you uneasy. Then take hold of what fits, and cast aside what does not.

Nothing you learn in life is ever wasted if you choose to look within it and find the value. I apply this principle every single day in my own adventure and with coaching clients. Because it works. I encourage you to not cast aside the experience of the past, but to use it, learn from it, and take from it what can move you forward, leaving behind what cannot.