Can We Embrace the Winding Road?

There has been a bit of a theme in my recent work with clients. It’s actually a theme that extends beyond my work, and into my conversations and interactions with friends, family, colleagues – people in general. The theme centers around a myth pertaining to the topic of career, or work. I myself would have subscribed to this myth prior in the early years of my career. The myth is this: 

A successful career path follows a straight and upward trajectory. Anything else deems you a failure. 

Ugh. 

How the heck did this idea gain any traction in our world? I would argue that very few people – if any – have followed a straight path to the pinnacle of their success (whatever that is for them). Most people I know – myself included – have followed a path that has had as much uncertainty as not, as many curves and bends and detours as direct routes (if not more), and as many moments of absolute confusion as there were moments of clarity. And yet, somehow, the myth persists.

The danger in perpetuating this myth is that too many folks fail to recognize their actual success when they hold their experience against this unreasonable bar. In holding themselves as failures, they play so much smaller in their worlds. They’re actually blinded to their success – they can’t see it, because their journey hasn’t been linear. But that’s the thing; the path to success is rarely linear. 

It’s not a super-highway of perfectly paved asphalt. 

It’s more like a winding, tree-root infested, hiking trail deep in the woods. 

Sometimes, the sun breaks through the tree branches and provides some clarity. 

And a lot of the time, it’s more like an experience of walking through dim, dark shadow. 

If I were to create a line drawing of human success, it wouldn’t be a line that starts in the lower left corner of a page and goes straight up to the upper right corner. It would be one with ups and downs, one that turns in on itself and goes backward at times, one that has sections of going around in circles, as well as sections of moving ahead, until – eventually – the “line” ends at that top right corner. And, in my experience, anyone who’s being 100% honest would have a similar depiction of their success. 

The thing is, when we look at those around us, it can be easy to think that they are just moving forward and upward, rarely losing momentum and only gaining traction. Especially in our current world of social media images, photoshop and other editing tools, we rarely see folks in their “slumps”. Trust me; those slumps are there. And your non-linear experience is no less successful than anybody else. 

You are absolutely doing things right. 

You don’t need to have your whole life mapped out at the age of 18 (or 25, or 40, or 60).

If you feel like you’ve lost your way, you get to pause and re-evaluate. 

Bottom-line: your path to your success need not – and likely will not – be a linear one. Don’t beat yourself up about that. Let yourself enjoy the twists and turns. And at least make note – if not throw an all-out celebration – of the milestones along the way.