But the more I discussed the study with a wide range of people, the more I came to realize that cliffs appear to be a universal part of the human condition. The long arc of a life is never perfectly smooth. Look closely enough, and life is fractured, diverted, kinked, disrupted, severed, and transformed along the way. Look closer still, and people can find themselves reeling from cliffs and wandering in the fog, only to emerge in places they’d never imagined. Which brings us right to the cusp of another prevalent element of our human experience, the subject to which we now turn: 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.

The cliff can be like being jolted out of a deep slumber by a screeching fire alarm. Gaining clarity and coming into frame can be more like waking up without an alarm clock; at some point, you are aware that you’ve shifted from sleep to wake, but you only recognize that fact after the shift from sleep to wake already happened. Or think of it as being out on a long walk that starts in the fog. As you ramble, the fog gradually lifts. There comes a moment when you realize that you’re already standing in bright sunshine with a long clear view. You know it happened (“I’m standing in the sun!”) but might not be able to pinpoint the precise instant that it happened.

This study shows that there are fog phases of life and there are clarity phases of life. In the fog phases, we see simplex stepping as a highly functional method of navigation. In the clarity phases, we continue to see simplex stepping at work, but we also see more big decisions and life commitments. In both phases, we have action and movement, not just sitting in a room and contemplating.