How To Chart A New Course For Your Life With 3 Simple Diagrams

“By far the most significant learning experience in adulthood involves critical self-reflection — reassessing the way we have posed problems and reassessing our own orientation to perceiving, knowing, believing, feeling and acting.”

— Jack Mezirow

I was about to take over the navigational watch when the captain of our sailboat announced: The GPS is dead.

It wouldn’t have worried me so much — if the sea hadn’t be covered with the thickest fog I had ever seen in my life. With the visibility reduced to only a few meters and no GPS available, we were facing hours of blindfolded navigation, hoping to find an archipelago of islands so tiny that its name Ærtholmene comes from the Danish word ært, meaning “pea”.

Looking at the map didn’t bring me any comfort at all. I knew the coordinates of our destination, but without knowing the position of our yacht, I was unable to calculate a course which would bring us to land.

This made me realize a very simple, but crucial principle: if I don’t know where I am, then I can never reach the place where I want to be.

Even then, knowing where I am is not enough.

That foggy morning at sea helped me understand that in order to avoid disorientation in my life, I needed to have absolute clarity over three fundamental facts:

1. My goals (the destination),
2. My current situation (my coordinates), and
3. The path that connects both of them (the route).

If you’ve ever experienced that feeling of being stuck, of going in circles without a clear sense of direction, or feeling that you had so many possible options to follow that you ended up not doing…