Get a little bit lost.

(It is part of finding your way)

We were running through the winding path of Theodore Roosevelt Island. This circular island is a short 1 mile run from my house. I have lived in this area now for over 20 years. Yet I was lost. My 11-year-old daughter stops and looks at me, all worried, "daddy, are we lost?". Yes, indeed, we were a bit lost. Fortunately for me, all I needed to do was to snap out my phone and use Google Maps to redirect us. A few quick course corrections, and we were on our way. On the run back home, I couldn't help but reflect on the course corrections I've had in my life.

One of the biggest course corrections of my life was two years after saying goodbye to my job at a top-tier consulting firm. I had left the firm with this amorphous idea that I was going to "productize" areas of my consulting practice. After a year of building and a year of marketing, we had concluded that we had failed. My partner left, and I fired our small team.  I found myself the last guy standing at our fledgling company. While our product had failed to get traction, the consulting work I was doing to keep "food on the table" was thriving. Still, I felt officially lost. In the haze of uncertainty, I quietly approached my old boss to see if I could return to my old job, and she kindly accepted.

It was a good job with some of the smartest people in the industry. So I went back. But six weeks later, sitting at my red oak wood desk on my fourth inane conference call of the day, I had this sinking feeling. If I was lost before, I was now on the slow train to the wrong planet. It didn't take much reflection on my part to realize I was on the wrong path. I went into my old boss's office and embarrassedly told her the job didn't feel right. I offered to stay on for a month or two, knowing she had expended some political capital to get me back. She could see the pain on my face, and she was kind to say I could wrap up by the end of the week.

Now ten years after that fateful detour, I can say with a high degree of confidence that I made the right call. Not only that, I believe getting lost was actually key to helping me find my way. Going back to that old job and feeling the chains of big firm life that second time clarified my thinking. The first time I left was in pursuit of a vague dream. The second time I understood with visceral certainty that I was not cut out for big firm life. There is nothing like the visceral certainty of earned wisdom. 

So, I have made peace with getting a little bit lost. It's part of my process, and I suspect many others feel the same way. When we finally got back home from our run, I looked at my daughter and said, "life is simply a sequence of getting a bit lost and finding your way back again".