I drive a 75-minute commute every morning and evening. It presents a lot of time to think.
Recently I was driving to work, and it was pretty foggy out. I got to thinking about life and how it relates to the fog.
As you are driving in the fog, you can see what’s in front of you, but it's obscure. You can see taillights, you can see the road, but you don’t see the details. You can’t see what is until you are right up on it and then, once you’ve passed it, it slips back into obscurity where you can look at it in hindsight and think about it, but the details change because you’ve passed it.
It’s a memory, and the vantage point is different.
You know where you are trying to go, you know the general path to get there, but there’s fog ahead. There could be detours, accidents, changes that alter the path, but you’ll keep that destination in mind as you go.
This is life; this is your career.
We all have goals. I know I do.
I want to be a good father and raise my boys to be better than I am. I want to be a good husband and always lift my wife up because she lifts me up. I want to do exceptional things for my health system because if I’m getting it done, they’re treating patients and making their lives better than they were before.
I know what I want to do, but there’s fog in front of me, and I don’t always know how I’ll get there.
The goal is to keep going and not allow the fog to force you to pull over or turn back.
Challenge is the nature of business and life. There is always something that will take you off the path of where you want to go. The delineator is whether you find a way back to your goal or if you change your goal and hit Starbucks instead.
I was once frustrated with a project and how it was going. I was frustrated because I had to go back to my COO and tell him we weren’t there yet and what I was doing about it.
He put a dot on a white board and then another dot on the other side of the board.
He connected the dots with a straight line.
“This will never be your path unless you’ve done it many times before,” he said. “Even then, it will still very often not be a straight line."
He went on to tell me every journey will look a little like a spaghetti mess between the two dots. The important thing is you learn as you draw your line so that the next time you do it, the line is a little straighter. That’s called incremental improvement, and it’s done by learning as you go and grow.
Since his example, I’ve had to tell teams that perfect won’t be found at the beginning of a project; it’s where you try to get to by learning your way through the project. Otherwise you’ll see the fog and won’t even start driving until you have the best plan to deal with the fog.
That will never work either, no one knows what’s in the mist.
So be brave, be bold, and start driving.