Why You Can Never Replicate The Formula

This post does not aim to say anything negative about “Gurus,” self-help leaders, motivation speakers, or anyone claiming to have mapped out how you can make it like them. This post, instead, is to give you a visual metaphor to view your life through, so when you follow someone else’s “perfect plan,” and it doesn’t work out, it’s not your or their fault.

As I said before, words are not the primary way I interact. My head typically experiences the world in pictures and feelings, so that is how I will explain this point. Let’s start with the end goal. You are following this plan to end up at a uniquely made home for you. Only your fingerprint will work on the door handle.

Think of the “plan” as a map designed to help you get home. Can you already see the trick? The map they give you leads to their home. Their home is not your home. They cannot give you a map of your home because that requires roads that have never been traveled. Now, that doesn’t mean their map is useless. As they created the road to their home, they created paths you and others can utilize. This is okay and is, in fact, part of the process, yet at some point, you are going to have to head off into the wilderness.

“There will be times when standing alone feels too hard, too scary, and we’ll doubt our ability to make our way through the uncertainty. Someone, somewhere, will say, ‘Don’t do it. You don’t have what it takes to survive the wilderness.’ This is when you reach deep into your wild heart and remind yourself, ‘I am the wilderness.”

-Brené Brown

This takes an enormous amount of courage and trust. It’s likely you’ll fall and scrape yourself up. Sometimes, you’ll head in the wrong direction. All the while, you are forging a path that others will use on their journey. You may find that you meet up with another path someone else has made. You won’t always be alone. You’ll go through times when you get to walk alongside others. You have trek into the wilderness to get to that home made singularly for you.

That place will be home to you for some unknown amount of time, and then a new home will call you further up the mountain. Back into the wilderness, you will be sent. And make no mistake, you will be sent. If you don’t voluntarily walk out those doors, the wilderness will find a way to reclaim your home.

You start to learn when it’s time to share and utilize someone else’s path and when you must head into the wilderness.