Imagine it’s the old days — before you had a map on your phone.
You go on a road trip.
You take a wrong exit.
It won’t lead you where you want to go.
So: don’t stay in the wrong place. And don’t force it to be the right place simply because you went there. (See Sunk-Cost Fallacy.)
Expect wrong exits. They happen. (Budget for them.)
Don’t get mad, don’t get discouraged, and definitely don’t give up. Don’t overthink it, and don’t form an identity around it.
Just say, “Wrong Exit.”*
Get back on the freeway (or interstate) and keep going.
Otherwise, you probably won’t get where you want to go.
This applies to dating, business, or composing a prog-metal album.
*I’ve actually been saying this lately. It seems to help. Tiny example: I ordered little wooden blocks to put into the floating tremolo of my Ibanez RG550 — so that it would be locked in place, disabling the whammy bar but avoiding all the tuning issues. I ended up not liking it that way. A critical voice in my head said, “It didn’t work. You wasted $20. You failed.” Instead, I caught myself. I reframed it as “Wrong Exit. I tried two options and settled on the better one.”