Life is a Choose Your Own Adventure Book

If you’re old like me, you remember those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. And if you’re like me, you cheated until you found the right ending that didn’t end with you getting crushed by a bolder or captured by pirates.

NOTE: If you searched for the path that ended in you being impaled on a punji stick, you’re sick and should seek professional help immediately.

Having read tons of these books, I feel fully qualified to establish a profound connection between a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book and life.

Along the path in the book you were given 2 or 3 choices at very critical junctions in the story. One choice put a you farther down the road of success, one choice sent you closer to your demise, capture or impalement, and the other instant death. Although life’s choices aren’t so cut and dry in their results, a very critical lesson can be learned. We need to stop and analyze our choices before turning the page. We don’t have the option of cheating by reading ahead and reversing our choice if we chose poorly. Once it’s made, it’s final.

My life has been a series of choices; some good some bad. If I’m honest probably more than “some” were bad. But fortunately the good choices I made put me back on the right path; narrowly avoiding a poison dart in the neck from an Incan tribesman. Good or bad, I made a lot of these choices without much thought for their consequences or outcomes.

However, at several stages in my story I let others choose the adventure for me. I froze when given a critical decision and let the pages just turn without me. All too often we see the fork in the road, that could lead us to greater success, but are paralyzed with fear of the risk of failure. So we choose to make no choice at all and continue on our “adventure”. But is it really an “adventure” any more?

Don’t let others make your choices for you, they won’t always be in your favor. It could be getting passed up for a promotion because you didn’t ask or a missed career opportunity because you were too afraid to apply for the position or not getting the parking spot you wanted because you let your wife convince you to go down the wrong aisle.

Whether you believe you have a divine purpose or just had a dream as kid, it’s never to late to wrest back control of your story and start making the choices for yourself. You can’t go back and join the caravan instead of the space circus, but you can make every choice deliberately with greater thought and meditation from here on out.

Now that you’ve decided to take back control of your story, you may be asking yourself how will I know the right choice to make or how to identify when there is an opportunity for a choice?

Good questions? I’m glad you asked. You’ll have to stay tuned next week for chapter 2 of the “ChooseYour Own Adventure” blog. It’s you’re choice to either follow my blog or make no choice at all and just let life pass you by.