Adjust Your Course Continually
When you drive a car, you’re constantly making tiny adjustments, correcting
the direction you’re heading every moment. Once you’ve learned to drive,
that constant adjustment of the steering wheel becomes so familiar that it’s
second nature, and you probably never think about it. But if you decided to
hold the wheel in one place, you’d be off the road in less than a minute.
Perhaps you think being off course is something to avoid at all costs. After
all, if you’re off course, you’re failing, right? Not according to the slight edge.
Remember Thomas Watson Sr.’s philosophy:
Would you like me to give you the formula for success? It’s quite simple,
really. Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy
of success. But it isn’t at all. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you
can. Because that’s where you’ll find success: on the other side of failure.
The Apollo spacecraft didn’t reach the moon safely because it was always
on target—it achieved its destination by constantly correcting its course.
Planes do the same thing. So do babies, when they’re learning how to walk.
And so do successful teens.
Desiree had to adjust course when she arrived at college, as almost all
students have to do. She felt out of place among students who had gone to
private schools, because she had always gone to public schools:
I had this whole image of what college was like in my head. I was
really excited, but at the same time a little bit nervous, a little bit scared.
There were lots of kids with a private school education and I’m from a
public school.
It’s all about realizing they’re not too different from you. Of course there
are going to be people who were exposed to more things than you were, but
there are other people who weren’t. Sometimes you’ll be more knowledgeable
about an aspect of life than someone else. At the beginning people
were showing off because we all had the same fear. Now we’re comfortable
around each other because we’ve all found where we belong. And we all
realize that we each have something special to offer.