Have you heard of the one-in-sixty rule? It’s used in aviation and is based on the fact that for every one degree you travel off course for sixty miles, you will land one mile from where you had intended. If you are traveling across our country, one degree off course will land you about 50 miles from your destination. If you are traveling from the earth to the moon, one degree off course would make you miss your target by more than 4,000 miles! All that error would come from a seemingly minor, one-degree variation.
Think about this: What if you are ten degrees off course—or, heaven forbid, twenty or more degrees off—in your life? Where can you expect to land, and how far will it be from where you want to go?
The reality is that most of us are at least a few degrees off course. So how do we deal with this? Let’s take a cue from aviation. When you are flying from New York to Los Angeles, numerous course corrections are required. In fact, most of the time during the flight, you are slightly off course.
Regular course corrections help you to arrive at your intended destination. Isn’t life much like that? While we try our best, we drift off course frequently. It’s only when we slow down and make the time to check our bearings that we can make the necessary corrections to get back on course.
The best way to accomplish this is through regular checking and adjusting. Of course, all of this depends on whether or not you know where you’re going!
So, where are you going?
Once you know your destination, you can do what’s needed to gauge and amend your course. If you do not have a clear understanding of where you intend to eventually be, how in the world can you get there?
This is why it is so important to begin somewhere, anywhere, with a destination in mind. Until you see and acknowledge that you know what the destination is that you desire, you are completely at the mercy of others and circumstances.
Why take the risk? My question to you is this: Where are you going? What is your destination? If you don’t know, stop and think about it now. Otherwise, you might drift endlessly, winding up who-knows-where.
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©2019 Bill Abbate
Adapted from the book Uncommon Sense by Bill Abbate www.billabbate.com
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