Right turns and blue specs

[powerpress]

Every now and then you need right turns. If what you're doing seems a matter of life and death, you need a right turn. If you're content that all is going according to plan, you need a right turn. If you're aggravated at the progress you're making, you need a right turn right now. This is a right turn. This isn't a how-to, do-this-and-get-that story. I promise you one next time. Want to get more out of those nuts-and-bolts stories? Take more right turns. If taking this one bugs the bejesus out you, then you probably need it worse than you know. Right turns aren't detours. They're self-selected alternate routes. They're interruptions to your daily pattern. Adding one to an otherwise routine drive brings a fresh perspective. Try it out: take a random right along your daily drive. You'll be surprised how the unexpected sights impact your day; one may even unlock a solution, or open a window to new ideas. I'm a big believer in right turns. After all, we're each of us a stew of routine and right turns: a spit-shined marine who excels at ballroom dancing, or a weekend heavy-metal head who spends her days as a buttoned-down office clerk. Jesus was love and light, but took a sharp right to crack a mean whip clearing moneychangers out of the temple. Where there are right turns, there's depth. There's authenticity. There's something fresh and unexpected.

It's a matter of perspective.

Our personalities, our lives, our businesses, benefit from our willingness to take an occasional right turn. Ride the same path long enough and it becomes a rut; dry, dusty and predictable. Worst yet, do it long enough and you'll start to believe it's not only important, but the only right way. There's a name for people like that: hard-asses. Any way but their way is a detour, a delay, a waste of time. They're the ones boiling over with rage because the guy in front of them is going too slow through the car wash. The sun doesn't rise and fall in accordance with your plans, successes or failure. It's easy to forget, as Carl Sagan says in the video above, that we're all riding on a little blue spec. From that perspective, your right turn is an indiscernible change of course. So, where's the risk? Banish "detour" thinking and take that next turn. Right turns--and even left ones--bring fresh air into your life and business. Your North Star will ultimately bring you back on course. But, you'll return with fresh juju for what is possible, or maybe even a better understanding of why you chose this path in the first place.

"You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you." --Heraclitus, Greek philosopher