Forks.

My Mother often sites her decision to emigrate as the reason for any success I may have achieved, believing that success, would not have been duplicated in the country she left. I cannot conclusively argue the point because that decision had been made for me as child and all I could do was manage my way to the future without reference to what might have been. Decisions and life directions are often made for you, caused by external circumstances, accidental occurrences and people deciding for you. Without a chance to influence those directions and standing at those forks in the road, you have to become more adept in your ability to manage change and have the capacity to see the opportunities, regardless of whether they were your decision.

Decisions are often seen as the accumulation of our intentions but nothing could be further from the truth when your life, your work or your family is affected by external happenstance. When a fork is presented, your choices are limited to taking the new road or not seeing it and finding out later, there was a better way. So where, as Seth Godin, describes the difficulty in the fork in the road being, seeing it and taking it, the greater difficulty for most is the management of change that comes along with the new direction they are travelling.

Stories abound of successful people raising themselves from poverty and adversity, achieving against the grain of a life chosen for them. Malcolm Gladwell, in his seminal book on success, Outliers, sites the month you were born as a precursor of success for many professional athletes, the cultures and times that influence what you become when he described the top lawyers in New York but countered those arguments with his thinking on the 10,000 hours of work, sweat, determination and not giving up, that can counter everything else and bring success.

My favourite examples sites the Beatles, hailed as overnight successes in 1962, when their records hit the airwaves. Not achieving any success outside of their local cavern and only offered some gigs in the bars of Hamburg, the mop tops took it upon themselves to hone their skills to unimaginable heights via 10,000 plus performances before they put the grooves on their first record, to become overnight successes. Hard to imagine an act nowadays even performing that many gigs let alone doing it before their first success.

If a government changes, if you are made redundant, if relationships breakdown, if your Mother takes you to another country, standing at those forks in the road and all you can see is desolation, take an extra moment to look down the other path, for opportunity is not always about a path chosen for you but how you walk the one you take. So where a fork in the road is presented to you, there is still a decision to be made and success to be had but where as you thought it had nothing to do with you, it has everything to do with you.