What's the Right Way to Do This? Versus Finding Your Own Way to Do This

Trying to get it right is the reason I can't get started. Have you been there?

May I ask you a question? 

This is my first post.

So I thought it would be wise start with something small. Here’s what I came up with:

What’s the right way to do life?

I’ve wondered about that question for a long time.

I’ve worked hard to ‘get it right’.

I’d like to get this post right. So your answer would be very helpful.

Here’s what I’ve discovered.

There’s almost never a ‘right’ way to do things.

Some choices are more efficient than others. But what’s the “right” way to write, for example? Or to start a business? To be a friend? A partner? An executive or entrepreneur or scientist or nurse or inventor or realtor or….?

The internet has no shortage of people who want to tell me how to do things.

My trying to get it right often makes things go wrong. And copying somebody else’s life choices is like trying to wear my Aunt Mo’s favorite sweater.

Even though I am a “Summer”, and I can wear anything, that sweater doesn’t fit. It’s just not me.

Source: DailyMail.co.uk

I want to get things right, at the game of life. If the outcome is uncertain, I say to myself, I will not take the journey.

However, I’ve noticed something about outcomes.

No one can predict the future.

Despite my best efforts to coordinate my calendar, the unexpected always seems to show up.

The outcome is always uncertain. Because that’s how the future works.

If I have to know the future in order to take a step in the present, I’ll never move.

I’ll never try anything.

Paralyzed by uncertainty and afraid of making a mistake, I sit shivering with my fear. Frustrated. Immobile. Wondering. What am I gonna do?

I talked to my coach about making mistakes. I had concerns about getting things wrong.

He said that there are no mistakes.

My rebuttal is one you may be familiar with: “Then what about…?”

I had 3,746 examples that we needed to discuss.

I wanted to help him with a statistical analysis that proved I was an error that needed to be corrected. A short debate ensued. He refused to look at my powerpoint slides.

Here’s where I landed, after I spoke with my coach:

What you might call a “mistake” I now call a choice.

(It’s funny how life gets easier when I drop the self-judgment).

A choice that I made based on the thinking, experience and state of mind I had at the time I made the mista choice.

For example, I had a horrible break up with a girlfriend I loved deeply. The relationship’s disintegration was my fault, I was certain of it - somehow I had failed to get it right.

Yet from this disaster, a series of events unfolded. These events introduced me to my wife.

So, mistake … or divine intervention? Hold on, I need to ask my wife.

“What about people who break the rules, or break the law - aren’t they getting it wrong?” I asked my coach. “What about those 10 Commandments and stuff?

In baseball you get three strikes. In basketball you get five fouls. In hockey you get put in the penalty box. But then, in two minutes, you are back out on the ice. Do you think that a hockey player making a high stick move is making a mistake - or a choice?

The universe seem to have bigger plans for us. Plans that we can’t see. Relationships we can’t recognize. The Big Picture is hidden, and we become afraid.

When we are in the middle of difficulty, struggle and frustration, we can’t zoom out. Yet, when it feels like life is stabbing me in the back, it turns out that the universe has my back. In the uncertainty, there’s one thing that is reliable.

Mistakes take a different shape, when we see the Big Picture.

Once upon a painful time, I needed that breakup so that I could find the life that was waiting for me - the person that I really needed in my life.

I often think, if I had a time machine I would go back. I would play the game of life differently.

Except I wouldn’t.

Because it would still be me playing the game, with the skills, experience and thinking I had at the time.

Also time machines do not exist.

There's no way to "get it right" in life. There's no blueprint. No template. If you break the law, or break someone’s heart, you get something that’s called “consequences”.

You also get to choose whether you want to beat yourself up or give yourself some grace. Resilience gets easier when you see that you made a choice, nothing more.

What if, my coach said to me, you can’t make a mistake?

True, there are laws. Boundaries. Some ideas are better than others.

But these "rules" are guidelines, not commandments.

What’s your greatest mistake? What’s a mistake that forced you to be great?

What’s that thing that looked like an unflinching disaster and it turned out to be the thing that made you who you are?

“What if you dial down the judgements and the labels?” my coached asked me.

That helped. I discovered that reaching neutral was accelerating my results.

Did I become an anarchist?

Did I swerve on the freeway because the rules of the road don’t matter …and every little thing I do is magic?

No.

For me, I didn’t turn to a life of crime. I see my choices, and I recognize consequences. I’m guessing you do, too.

Ultimately, the player inside the game that is the deciding factor on any course of action. If you are beating yourself up over your last mistake, your last failed relationship, your missed deadline…you’re going to miss what really matters.

Moving forward.

If being hard on yourself were going to work, it would have worked by now.

What works for one person might not work for you. That's how life works. Doesn't mean somebody else is wrong. But living up to someone else’s standards or expectations is no way to live your life. Because that life is not yours.

I mean, if you looked at my desk, you might say, "Well, the way you have this desk set up just doesn't work."

And I would say:

"It works for me."

---

How have you found a way to move beyond trying to get it right and finding ways to move forward? What if there are no mistakes?