Happy Birthday, We're Lost
On my wife’s 30th birthday I took her hiking in the desert… in the summer… and I got us lost.
We were on vacation having recently hiked from the north to south rim of the Grand Canyon. Feeling great we wanted more. I found an amazing and unique hike in a nearby national park. We could drive out, park on the side of a highway, and hike to a butte in the desert. The draw was the ancient, well preserved petroglyphs.
It was about 110 degrees Fahrenheit but the hike itself was less than 3 km out and then back. No problem! We'd just finished the Grand Canyon! Bravado and confidence fuelled my idea.
Standing at the side of the road the butte was easy to see in the distance. I was an obvious landmark, and easy to keep in sight. We set off across the hard packed sand chatting away.
The desert was incredible. The glyphs themselves were beautiful. They spoke to the resilience of the people who lived there centuries before. It was a wonderful trek, and a fitting birthday activity. It’s the type of unique moment that's impossible to recreate.
The problems began when we turned around.
I knew the direction we had come from. At least, I sort of knew the direction we had come from. I hadn’t been looking in that direction much as we walked out. From where we stood the road was no longer visible, neither was our car. The “path” we’d taken was hard and rocky. There isn’t a marked trail and for the most part our foot prints didn’t show on the ground.
In short, we were a little lost.
In any endeavour we may find ourselves eager to begin. So eager that we skip important moments of planning. The reality is that a bad plan is better than no plan at all. A bad plan can be adjusted along the way. No plan leads only the to gut punch when you turn around and realize that you don’t know where your car is.
This is of course an amateur mistake, but to be clear, I’m not an amateur hiker. I’ve planned 8 day excursions, solo canoe trips, and we just hiked the freaking Grand Canyon. I knew how to plan a hike and I knew the pitfalls. I plunged into action anyway. I failed to stop and look ahead to the ways that things could go wrong.
I see this mistake so often with the business owners I work with. They have an idea and they immediately execute. They're stunned when they encounter a surprise problem that should have been obvious. They repeat the same mistakes over and over, failing to notice the pattern in their repetition. They get lost in motion, never pausing to take stock of their situation or destination.
When you begin without a plan you can be successful. It happens. It isn’t common though. When you don't have a clear plan it's hard to honestly examine the causes of your failures. It's easy to rationalize what went wrong. You chalk it up to a learning experience. When you are successful you're equally unprepared to understand your achievement.
Failure sneaks up on these people like it snuck up on me at the butte. They reach a goal only to find themselves lost in the desert. Without a plan their success is inadvertent and failures are customary.
We made it out of the desert but it was an annoying process. Unlike our carefree and pleasant hike out our return was focussed and tense. We were meticulous in ensuring that none of our actions caused us any more problems. We didn't have attention to spare on the beautiful scenery and unique location.
Our lovely little hike was marred by the tedium of cleaning up my mess.
The lesson isn’t to avoid the desert. The lesson is that the desert isn’t forgiving. The journey looks different once you’re in it. The lesson is that a little bit of planning goes a long way. Having a goal is great, but planning how to get to the goal and how to proceed in the event of a challenge is even better.