With 31 years of life officially under my belt, I have completed my first decade as a working professional adult. The lessons I have learned along the way are vast. While a deliberate sequence of choices has led me to exactly where I am today, I currently stand on the precipice of a decision that has forced me to deeply reflect. Reflect on where I’ve been, what I have enjoyed, where I am going, what I truly want out of life, and the most optimal way to get there.
Entering the Next Chapter
Stepping into this next chapter, I have found it is essential to possess a crystal-clear vision. I needed a distinct understanding of what I want to accomplish, what I want to prioritize, and what I want the day-to-day journey to look like. The possibilities before us are endless, and there are infinite paths available for whatever adventure we choose to embark upon next. But I realized there is only one optimal path to achieve what is most important to me.
Part of living with total intentionality is keeping the end goal entirely in mind, ensuring every action, decision, and choice aligns perfectly to lead you there. Having this clarity of vision is a superpower. It allows me to reject 99% of the distractions and options presented to me, resulting in extreme focus. Perhaps the world isn’t waiting for me to jump into my next journey, but my life, my future memories, and the new characters I am meant to meet certainly are.
This clarity allowed me to reverse-engineer a plan—a pathway built on a series of logical steps where the only mathematical conclusion is achieving what I am pursuing.
This is the process of getting to great.
It requires knowing exactly what you want and devising a realistic, practical framework to get there. For me, that meant leaving my steady paycheck as a high school teacher in order to build The Lowe Report.
Rejecting Good
This brings me to the concept of "rejecting good."
I loved my job. I loved teaching high school in underprivileged neighborhoods. The relationships you build with students are deeply impactful, and the work genuinely makes a permanent difference in their lives—especially serving as a Special Education teacher in low-income areas.
I guided my students through the college application process when, in many cases, their own parents had never attended university. Without someone in their corner, they wouldn't have known how to navigate early action deadlines, early decisions, scholarship applications, or the daunting realities of student loans and debt. Helping them discover the careers they wanted to pursue made getting up early every single day entirely worth it. This was good.
But the sacrifices required to sustain this work are exactly what kept it from being great.
The education system comes with low pay, capped salaries, and a lack of upward mobility without returning to school to take on even more debt. It requires navigating massive political landscapes and dealing with endlessly clashing personalities from bureaucracies, managers, and parents.
One day, I looked at teachers 30 years my senior and clearly saw what my life would look like if I continued down that same path, relying on a traditional teaching job as my lifelong career. That was the moment I knew I had to reject good to get to great.
I have dreams of owning a multi-story apartment in New York City—being a teacher would never get me there. I have dreams of traveling the globe, living in different countries for weeks or months at a time—being a teacher would never get me there. I have dreams of building a family where my future children are entirely free to pursue their passions because I provided for the next handful of generations, freeing them from financial pressure—being a teacher would never get me there.
Decisions like this are incredibly hard. Being blessed with a good thing—meaningful work, people you care about, and a career you feel genuinely privileged to do—is rare. People dream of having that security, and I do not take the gravity of what I had for granted. But my desire to reach my highest form of self, my highest expression, drives me to demand more out of life. I want to extract everything I can out of this short ride we get on Earth, to give more, to impact more, to build better infrastructure, and to do so to my absolute greatest capability.
I can do more. I can help more. I can create superior resources and platforms that impact far more people than the students inside a single school. That inner knowing that I am built for more draws me to reject the good so I can claim the great.
I suggest you consider doing the same.