I rented a car a few months back, and they asked me if I wanted a GPS device for an upcharge. I gave them a funny look because, first of all, I was shocked to think they still offer those, and who isn't using their phones for GPS these days?
I remember a time before a "Garmin GPS" device was readily available, even before we had a computer in our pocket that could give us directions to anywhere in the world. It's wild to think we would stop and ask for directions at random places if we were lost and just rely on some stranger to say, "Go down this street, turn left, and the destination is on your right."
When I was a young sales guy right out of college, I would get to the office early in the morning to print out my MapQuest guides for getting to and from all my appointments to see new clients. If your client called and rescheduled, your entire day was screwed because you had a plan geared toward printed documents to tell you where you're going.
If you do make a wrong turn today or happen to get lost, your GPS will simply say something like, "recalculating route." What's fascinating about that is you can make a mistake while driving, and the GPS doesn't call it out. It won't say, "hey idiot, why did you make that turn?" It won't say, "Only a moron would have missed the turn," or "What are you stupid?"
Nope. The GPS simply says something as simple as "recalculating" after you make a wrong turn.
So why is it that when you make a mistake in your career, you start saying negative things about yourself, or you lose confidence, or you begin to start thinking it's all over?
What if next time you made a mistake, you simply said to yourself, "I'm going to recalculate the route."
What I love about that concept is how calm and matter-of-fact it is. The GPS does not panic, it does not spiral, and it certainly does not sit there questioning your intelligence or your future as a driver. It simply recognizes that you are now in a slightly different place than you expected to be and quietly begins calculating a new way to reach the destination you were heading toward in the first place.
The end goal never changed, the road simply shifted a little bit, and the device immediately adapts to that new reality without judgment or drama.
Yet when we make a wrong turn in our careers, we tend to treat it like the entire journey has fallen apart instead of recognizing that we simply took a different street for a few minutes. We tell ourselves that we should have known better, that we wasted time, that we ruined an opportunity, and before long, we are convincing ourselves that the destination we wanted is no longer possible.
In reality, most careers are just a long series of recalculations where you adjust direction after a missed turn, a bad manager, a failed project, or a job that did not work out the way you expected it to.
So the next time something goes sideways in your career or your life, try borrowing a little bit of that GPS energy and take the judgment out of the moment entirely. Instead of beating yourself up over the turn you should not have taken, pause for a second, look around at where you actually are, and calmly decide what the next move should be from this new position on the map. Because the truth is that nobody reaches the destination without making a few wrong turns along the way, and the people who eventually get where they want to go are usually the ones who simply take a breath, adjust the route, and keep driving.