The path to my Must started with a recurring dream about a white room.

Concrete floors, white walls, and a mattress on the floor. That was it. And I would visit this room practically every night. One day, a friend asked the question that would forever change the course of my life: “Have you ever thought about finding your dream in real life?” I hadn’t, but later, I began to wonder…

Craigslist, I thought.

As I scanned the tiny photos of apartments for rent, I felt ridiculous. But then, I saw it. The white room. There it was, literally right there on the computer screen — my dream— in a tiny image just 72 x 72 pixels big.

And, just like that, my journey began.

Growing up in Texas, I had a vague idea of what it meant to be “called” — in the grand sense of the word — although I had never experienced it for myself. Moses was a favorite story of mine, because Moses was the last person on earth we would choose to lead thousands of people to the promised land. He was quiet; he had a stutter; and yet, Moses was called.

“Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before,” modern philosopher Joseph Campbell wrote. But recently, someone asked me a question, “But what if I don’t hear the call?” he asked. “What if I want to hear it but I can’t? What do I do then?”

And two ideas came to mind.

At Mailbox, we adopted a well-known practice from Amazon to write our future press release. That’s right, we wrote a real press release about a nonexistent product — the one that we wanted to exist in the world. We envisioned the headlines. We dreamed of what would happen if all of our wildest dreams came true. We even taped it inside of a magazine and put it on the coffee table. Most of us do this kind of big scary dreaming with our products, or our companies, but very few of us do it with our lives.

Roz Savage, a management consultant in London living “the big life” was 33 when she sat down and wrote two versions of her obituary:

The first was the life that I wanted to have. I thought of the obituaries that I enjoyed reading, the people that I admired… the people [who] really knew how to live,” she says. “The second version was the obituary that I was heading for — a conventional, ordinary, pleasant life. The difference between the two was startling. Clearly something was going to have to change… I felt I was getting a few things figured out. But I was like a carpenter with a brand new set of tools and no wood to work on. I needed a project. And so I decided to row the Atlantic.

Back at Mailbox, it was 8 a.m. on Thursday, February 7, 2013 when we popped the first bottle of champagne. There were 13 of us, and we were all wide-eyed, staring at our monitors, watching as nine months of work on the iPhone app was released into the world. As I looked around at the incredible people in that room, and watched the live ticker grow and grow, I knew that this moment was one of the highlights of my life. But, in the very back of my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder what any of it had to do with my dream of a white room.

Choosing Must raises questions that are scary, big, and often, without an easy answer in sight. Here are three of the biggest fears I’ve heard, and what to do about them.

01

Money can be a bridge to the freedom of exploring Musts. And it often doesn’t require much. But it does require determination. Money can be used to buy you a day, a week, month of time to work on a Must, which may amount to nothing. Or it can be used to buy a sweater, a suit, a car — the value of which is obvious and low risk.

Of course, the best way to make money is to figure out what you love and then give yourself to it. Because the people who consistently choose Must over Should find a way to make it work, and, once they take the leap, they find it’s easier to make money doing what they love than they ever imagined.

02

Finding our calling doesn’t mean we need to quit our jobs. And it also doesn’t mean we need to book a one-way ticket to a faraway magical land where there’s no cell service. As someone who did both of those things, I know first hand that it’s easy to pack a small bag, wave goodbye, and push the eject button for a while. But the return, the re-entry phase, can be absolutely brutal.

The harder road, trickier, and more sustainable, is to make shifts every day within our existing reality. To integrate, not obliterate. For Sheryl Sandberg,Lean In was a tiny yet growing piece of her heart for years until it exploded into the world — all the while she was still running one of the world’s biggest companies and raising two children. Weaving our Must into our existing reality is about co-designing small opportunities with our teams. It’s about setting aside quiet time to be alone with our thoughts, and then actually following through. It’s about doing one small thing, anything, to honor our personal truth — today.

But while money and schedules are the reasons cited most often for not making the leap, I believe the real reason is something deeper and far scarier.

03

While Must comes from somewhere deep inside of us, a beautiful truth that calls to us from within, Should comes from somewhere external, a place that’s equally important and powerful. Should comes from the place we call home, the people we love, the world we’ve created—the people, places, and things that define us.

It is here, standing at the cliff’s edge, peering down below, hearing the siren’s call, that we feel the terrifying prospect of abandonment, failure, and humiliation. And this is the exact moment when people decide against taking the leap — to avoid that great unknown, that transformative place where nothing is written, nothing is guaranteed, and everything is possible.

Grab a piece of paper and write the numbers one through ten on the left side of the page. At the top, title it “What am I so afraid of?” This is your Worst Case Scenario list. This is your list of things that make you think “They’re all going to laugh at me.” These are your largest fears, and you’ve got ten minutes to write them down.

Go.

Line by line, walk yourself through each one. Would they really laugh at you? They would? How do you feel about that? Line by line, have a conversation about all of your fears. Would you really be homeless? Would you really be alone? Do you really need that much money? This is a list of your tradeoffs. And they are the biggest things standing in your way.

Dusk was falling as I arrived at the white room from my dreams. It was stark, absolute, white, and a symbol of something new, of beginnings. As I looked around, I thought, “What on earth have I done? Why am I here?” And as clear as day, I heard a voice say, “It’s time to paint.”

As time passed, I found myself choosing Must more often than Should. And over time, continuing to choose Must opened doors into worlds I never could have imagined. Here are three qualities I’ve integrated into my daily practice that have helped me achieve a sustainable Must.

Solitude

Often times, reconnecting with the road to Must is not about doing a lot of running around.

This solo inward journey has been called many things throughout time — the myths call it the labyrinth, the abyss, the forest, and the night journey. Culturally, it’s called the “walkabout,” the vision quest, and the pilgrimage. In tech, it’s recently been called “the Struggle” by Ben Horowitz.

Searching for solitude is how I eventually found myself in an Airbnb in Bali alone for six weeks, in the middle of the rice paddies, with no phone, no email, and no walls on three sides of the house.

I called my new home “the house without walls.” It was wrapped in palm trees, smelled of jasmine, and over the coming weeks, the geckos and frogs and people would come and go as they pleased, because there were no rules and no walls to stop them. I had long dreamed of being in a place where the inside and the outside were one and the same.

For six weeks, in “the house without walls,” I slowed down, silenced the voices, and relaxed into a quiet place deep within myself. I dreamed under the palm trees, night sky, and various phases of the moon.

Focus.

It was in “the house without walls” that I fell in love with the moon. And, one day, a Balinese friend of mine decided to turn two of my paintings into textiles — for the fun of it.

Fast-forward a few months: I was back in San Francisco trying to figure out what to do with these exquisite textiles. The batik process of hand-painting each cloth was so beautiful, and so close to my own painting practice, that I wanted to find a way to combine these techniques on a larger scale. So I decided to go to New York, hunker down in an Airbnb, and figure it out in two weeks.

A friend of mine once compared focus to the beam of a mag light — if you keep the light unfocused, light shines everywhere. It’s bright, but it’s blinding.

If you focus the light and tighten it, the light becomes a laser beam. Focused and strong.

Bring others in.

As a former IDEO-er who believes in the power of human-centered design, I began to wonder, even worry, how this inward journey would connect with the outside world. And this is what I found:

During my two weeks in New York, I emailed a dozen of the most talented, brilliant women I knew, inviting them to collectively review my work and give me feedback at the end of my sprint. Of course I needed to bring others in, I suddenly realized, but not until after I knew what I was working on and why.

The women gave invaluable feedback, leading to significant insights. And this is why, the very next week, I found myself Bali-bound again. Except this time, with 200 yards of raw fabric. Working with master batik artists, we hand-painted 100 limited edition pieces of art, inspired by the phases of the moon. We launched the textiles as the inaugural collection of Bulan Project, and sold out in two weeks.