Against the grain #thursdaythoughts

Beyond Networking with Brian Miller

If you know where you’re going, and you’re sure, then by all means take the moving sidewalk. Swim with the current, go with the flow - pick your metaphor. If you have a clear destination you may as well take the fastest and most efficient route.

But you don’t have a clear destination nearly as often as you think. At best you have a vague idea of your intended outcome. It’s a feeling or gut instinct, but nothing like a map or blueprint.

In those cases, when the destination is loose and the journey unclear, the easy path offers no benefit over the hard path. It’s not more effective or efficient. If you don’t really know where you’re going, getting there quicker is of no use at all.

Walking against the sidewalk, swimming upstream, following the path of most (or at least more) resistance instead builds resilience. It slows us down just enough to notice new opportunities.

As Norton Juster wrote in The Phantom Tollbooth, one of the greatest books ever written for any age, “There are no wrong roads to anywhere.”

Next time you’re struggling to find the right path, try an obviously wrong one instead. It may not be so wrong, after all.

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