CHAPTER 5 Leveraging Your Gifts and Addressing Your Gaps
When I was in college, my friend Tony and I spent our spring break on a backpacking trip in the Escalante River wilderness in southern Utah. It was a five-day adventure through one of the country’s most beautiful—and desolate—regions, characterized by striking red rock desert landscapes with scarce water and unrelenting sun inhabited by only the most resilient of plants and animals.
To survive our journey, we had to carry all the essentials—food, water, shelter—on our backs. We spent months preparing, making countless trips to the local outdoor gear store to make sure we had what we needed: tents, sleeping pads, cooking stove, pots and pans, water purifiers. We packed everything.
Everything, that is, but a map.
We had a guidebook with some written descriptions of the route, accompanied by some simple sketches of trail branches and landmarks; and in our youthful arrogance, we thought that was sufficient. The trip route followed a single, winding river at the bottom of a deep canyon most of the way. Why would we need a map for that?
The problem, as we discovered on day five of what, up until that point, had been an extraordinary trip, was determining just where we were supposed to climb our way out of the canyon in order to take the proper trail back to our car. The Escalante River is a winding maze of sharp, 180-degree ...
Get The Intelligent Leader now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
