Reposted from Daryl Gibson
I do a lot of driving. I’ve driven over a million miles in my life, and so I tend to see many things through a driving metaphor. In driving a car, one of the most prominent rules for any driver is this: “Know where you want to go.” Choosing a destination determines your path, your travel time, and on longer trips, where you’ll take breaks or stay overnight.
It’s obvious, isn’t it? When you get on a freeway, you need to know your exit; when you drive down a highway, you want to know where you’re going to turn. It’s the premise behind great mapping systems such as Google Maps, or the ubiquitous GPS mapping systems, which use transmissions coming from a constellation of satellites in order to tell you the best road to take to Aunt Mary’s house.
But for some reason in our individual lives, this simple rule gets lost by the wayside. Most of us don’t know where we are on the path we’ve chosen, because we haven’t a clue where we are going. We don’t know where our destination lies, and that means that all roads are the wrong one (or conversely, all roads are the right one). We’re like the person who “got up and went off in all directions,” as Earl Nightingale once wrote. It doesn’t make sense to us to think of a concept like that, because it just doesn’t make sense at all.
Far better for us to sit down and dedicate a few minutes to deciding where we want to wind up in the near future. Most of us should have a life goal, but it would be progress if we just had a goal for the next few months — we need to determine where we want to go, and then how we’re going to get there.
Roads stretch on for miles and miles. The freeway I habitually drive would take me to Mexico if I didn’t get off the road (or Canada if I went the other way). But when we get onto the freeway, we have a determined plan for our trip. Too bad that some people make a decision, and never get off that bad decision’s path, unless they’re pushed off by some outside source.
In life, we sometimes do stupid things; we make bad decisions and stay with them, or we refuse to make decisions at all, and go with the flow. Occasionally, our lives are populated with good decisions and excellent follow-through, but more often than not, many people are driving without a destination in mind, happy to just drive along until they finally run out of gas.
Let’s choose our destinations in life, and set a course that will help us achieve those destinations with a minimal delay. It would be great if we could use Google Maps to plan a course to “success,” but until Google implements that feature, we’re just going to have to plan our own lives, ourselves.
Copyright, 2012, by Daryl R. Gibson. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the non-commercial redistribution of this document as long as it remains intact with this copyright and all other lines. This license does not extend to the use of this material in a compilation, whether for profit or non-profit use. Join us at http://www.weekdaywisdom.com.
