While in Europe, we took the Metro in Paris, the Tube in London, the Subway — whatever you want to call it — everywhere we went. I'm a huge fan of the railway systems in cities that perfected it a long time ago. Unfortunately, we screwed this up in most of the United States outside of New York and a few other East Coast cities.
With today's tools, it's pretty easy to navigate the subway systems in new cities, but of course, you're still sort of figuring it out each time you walk down the stairs of a train station. Early in our trip to Paris, my son asked me, "Well, what happens if we get on the wrong train?" I replied, "Then you get off it." He sort of looked at me, irritated that my answer was so simple.
The reality is that the trains go in two directions. One goes one way, the other goes another way. East and West, North and South, and it doesn't get much more complicated than that. If you somehow end up on the wrong train, then you get to the next station, you exit, you go up the stairs and down the stairs on the other side, and you try again.
It's really no different than in life and our careers. If you're going the wrong way, you just go a different way. But for some reason, we overcomplicate the existing piece of this whole thing, often riding the train in the wrong direction much longer than we need to and wasting so much time in the process.
What I have noticed over the years is that we treat a wrong direction in our careers like a personal indictment instead of what it actually is, which is feedback. You choose a role, a company, a partnership, a path that looks right on paper, and then months later you feel the friction, the subtle resistance that tells you something is off, yet instead of adjusting, you sit with it as if changing course would somehow invalidate the effort you already invested.
We convince ourselves that because we have already spent a year, or three, or ten heading this way, we have to see it through. We call it loyalty. We call it grit. We call it patience. But sometimes it is just fear dressed up in professional language — fear of explaining a pivot, fear of what other people will think, fear of admitting that the direction we chose is no longer aligned with who we are becoming.
The reality is that progress is directional, not permanent. You are allowed to reassess. You are allowed to recognize that the environment you stepped into no longer stretches you, excites you, or supports the version of yourself you are trying to build. Staying on a path simply because you started it is not discipline; it is drift, and drift is what quietly steals years from people who are too uncomfortable to make a correction.
If you feel stuck, exhausted, or strangely disconnected from your own ambition, maybe the solution is not to work harder in the same direction. Maybe it is to pause long enough to ask whether you are even headed where you want to go. Changing direction does not mean you failed. It means you are paying attention, and in both life and career, that awareness is what ultimately keeps you moving toward something that actually fits.
Or perhaps, you just need to find a new method of transportation. We rode Uber Boats in London, so there's that.