I’ve noted how this research profoundly changed me and what I think about how life works. And one of the most significant transformations is my appreciation for the inevitable fog of life. Fog, I came to understand, is a common human experience, even for people who otherwise seem to have great clarity about what to make of their lives. And if episodes of fog enveloped even people in this study, none of us should judge ourselves harshly when we wake up one day to find ourselves befuddled and confused in the fog.

As you’re wondering through the fog, you use the compass as you take a series of iterative steps toward having all three elements come together into One Big Thing.

And that is a key phrase: “iterative steps.”

The people in this study surprised me with the extent to which their lives were so often unplanned. Their lives were organic, unfolding, iterative, adaptive. They were like explorers adventuring into a vast unmapped territory, making discoveries and adapting a to whatever they hit along the way. Culling through tens of thousands of documents on the people in this study, I was continually struck by how their lives went down paths and ended up in places that they never expected. The path out of the fog lies in a series of small steps, a highly iterative, often unplanned approach that I think of as simplex stepping through life. And it is to this idea of simplex stepping that we now turn.

Across the study, we can extract a more general pattern: When lost in the fog, simply take what looks like the next best step. Not a big step, but a small step. Then reassess, step again, reassess, step again, reassess, step again. Keep moving in steps. And one day, the fog will begin to lift and the cumulative effect of all those steps will become clear.

The lives in our study show the great utility of moving in small steps when otherwise befuddled and uncertain. You don’t need to have the answers for what to do with the rest of your life. You just need to begin simplex stepping. You might get a long way down the road before you even know where you are going.

Simplex stepping works in part because it allows you to take small steps, to get moving. And movement creates energy that fuels more movement, a feeling of momentum even if you don’t yet know where that momentum is taking you. If you just sit in the fog doing nothing and hoping the fog will clear on its own, you might never get to the other side. As Richard P. Carlton, former CEO of 3M, once put it: You so often get where you are going by stumbling, but you can only stumble if you’re moving.

Beware the urge to judge people under the arrogant and ignorant assumption that you can see them and their lives in their entirety.

People can be in a phase of life where they are simply out of frame, with exquisite encodings hidden from view. Or they might be deploying their encodings into something private and personal, largely invisible to all but those who know them well. Or they might be in the fog, simplex stepping in small unseen steps toward something spectacularly unexpected. Life’s not done until it’s done, and there remains always the potential to discover encodings that had previously been unseen and to summon the full force of inner fire into a stunning result.