I have a friend I’ve known for years.  We will call him Mike Lowry (like from Bad Boys).  He has always been like Will Smith in that movie.  Smart, good looking, intelligent, and athletic.  Everyone likes him and for good reason.

We did everything together, except I wasn’t the big eared side-kick like Martin Lawrence (or was I?)

Mike was a star baseball player, ridiculously smart, and got all the girls.

And then he was kicked out of school during our sophmore year for using a fake ID.  Mind you he got caught after using one probably well over a 1000 times.  We bet against the odds and he lost.  I’ll tell you plenty of stories about that if you want to some time over a beer.

We were both devastated.  He lost his dream and I was losing my partner in crime (literally and figuratively).

We both struggled quite a bit moving forward from there.

Looking back over those 15 years its interesting to see the result of our bumpy journey.

Mike is now a freakishly successful ER doctor and I have a dream job where I get to work with all of you and travel the world teaching CrossFit.

Neither one of those things is what we set out to do……..not even close.  He wanted to retire in the navy and I wanted to be dentist (your eyebrows just went up because you didn’t know that about me)

Sometimes we see setbacks as the end of the road.  We see it as a scenario that we can never recover from.

What if we just looked at it as the only road there is.

In Ryan Holiday’s best best selling book “The Obstacle is the Way” he has lots or profound stuff to say.  This one sticks with me closely though:

“Failure shows us the way—by showing us what isn’t the way.”

Maybe your plan didn’t work out the way you thought it would.  Maybe someone wronged you.  Maybe something tragic happened.

Or maybe that’s just your road.  It’s not good our bad, it’s just the road you have to travel.

We can look forward to the future and learn from our experiences to better ourselves and navigate a little better,

or we can spend our lives driving while looking through the rear view mirror.

We all know how that ride ends……

Fern