Your Path Isn’t Crooked. It’s Yours.

If your path doesn't look like a straight line, you're not behind.

For years I told parts of my story with an apology built in. The temporary job that became a career. The career that had nothing to do with archaeology. The states I never expected to live in.

Then I noticed how many things get a vote in how a life turns out:

1. Economics gets a vote.

2. Opportunity gets a vote.

3. Loss gets a vote.

4. Sometimes pure chance gets a vote.

5. And you get the last one: what you do with what happens next.

If you've ever felt you had to explain your résumé, take this as validation. Four of those five votes were never yours to cast. That isn't failure. That's life.

Two things that helped me stop apologizing for my own path:

• Drop the "instead of." Pick a job, a place or a season you still describe as a consolation prize for something else. Describe it again without the comparison. It deserves to exist in your story on its own.

• Ask what it carried forward. Write down one skill, one person, or one piece of yourself that turn gave you, which the planned road never would have.

A detour implies there was one correct road. But what if there was never only one road?

What's a turn you used to apologize for that you wouldn't trade now?

I wrote more about this in Book 4 of Musings of a Recovering Executive, That's Not a Detour. That's the Point. Links in the first comment.