September 23, 2012

When it comes to change, there are three paths to take; waiting for life to happen TO you, making things happen, and turning around and wondering what happened. The first path lacks responsibility. The last path lacks intention. The middle path is the way to go. It is for sure the road less traveled, but it’s also the highway to your highest purpose.

The middle path is where the trail blazers head. When you don’t like the path laid out for you, and don’t like any of the other paths on offer, make your own.

In a sense, that’s what we all do, all the time, because no one knows the future. Management guru, Peter Drucker, said,

Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights looking out the back window.

Albert Einstein is said to have performed a thought experiment when he was contemplating relativity. He posed the question: If you were literally riding on the edge of a light beam and you held a mirror in front of you, could you see yourself? And the answer is no. If nothing travels faster than light, light can’t get to the mirror to reflect your reflection, so you would see nothing.

That’s a brilliant metaphor for change. There’s nothing in the future to see. It doesn’t exist yet except as potential. This is why change can be so scary and also why change is SO exciting. You look in the mirror of the future and see open space. No matter how much you wish for certainty, life doesn’t work that way. That’s the scary part. And yet, accepting that the future is unknown is also incredibly empowering. You get to help create what you want to see in the future. You get to help make change happen. That’s why we’re all trailblazer. The question is whether we choose to trail blaze with intention or not.

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