Map or Compass? Chapter 1
We don’t have to relive our mistakes to learn from them.
Capital Thinking • Issue #311 • View online
“Wouldn’t it be great if we always had a map? A set of step-by-step instructions on how to get from here to there, wherever we were and wherever we wanted to go…
Steve Pressfield relates this magical story:
A Ghurka rifleman escaped from a Japanese prison in south Burma and walked six hundred miles alone through the jungles to freedom. The journey took him five months, but he never asked the way and he never lost the way.
For one thing he could not speak Burmese and for another he regarded all Burmese as traitors. He used a map and when he reached India he showed it to the Intelligence officers, who wanted to know all about his odyssey.
Marked in pencil were all the turns he had taken, all the roads and trail forks he has passed, all the rivers he had crossed. It had served him well, that map.
The Intelligence officers did not find it so useful. It was a street map of London.
I love this story.
Happy endings come from an understanding of the compass, not the presence of a useful map.
If you’ve got the wrong map, the right compass will get you home if you know how to use it.
Where are you headed?”
“The compass and the map” | Seth Godin (4/21/2019)
To Be Map People
I love the concept provided here by Mr. Godin; the underlying message.
It encourages us to stay the course, even if we take a wrong turn now and then.
It reminds us that failure is inevitable and isn’t really failure at all.
It only becomes failure, and it only becomes a determining factor when we allow it to change our course.We need to be compass people, not map people.
The stars can lead your direction, but they won’t tell you the specifics.
Map People Fall, But They Stay On Course.
These are the ones that rely on their determination. They stay focused on the destination.Instead of replaying in their minds the “mistakes” they’ve made, they concentrate on controlling their reactions.
They react intentionally. Their reactions are based on an overall plan.They don’t allow small detours and roadblocks to change the destination.
They’re not insane in the sense that they forget their mistakes altogether and just hope for a different outcome in the future. But they are cognizant of the fact that some of the consequences are out of their control.
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*Featured post photo by Daniil Silantev on Unsplash