Chapter 3
COM-PASS YOU ARE
“Doing as others told me, I was blind.
Coming when others told me, I was lost.
Then I left everyone, myself as well.
Then I found everyone, myself as well.”
—RUMI
My senior year in college i was taking a leadership training course for my business minor. We were divided into teams for various tasks. Our instructor believed that the best way to understand the lessons of leadership was to engage in actual leadership scenarios. One activity in particular stands out in my mind. It was a team building exercise around the skill oforienteering. If you are unfamiliar with orienteering allow me to give you a quick explanation. Technically speaking and by definition, it requires navigational skills using a map and compass to navigate from point to point in a diverse and usually unfamiliar terrain whilst moving for time. Participants are given a topographical map, which is used to find specific control points. Defined from the perspective of a participant in this challenge, it’s a 2-hour survival course in how to see your friends as your greatest enemies, stab yourself repeatedly with low hanging branches, and suppress your unquenchable thirst for ringing a bell of surrender just to be freed from the nightmare. Basically they are the same definitions—right? Perhaps, I should elaborate a little further with my story and let you extract your own conclusion.
Handed a compass and a map, I was told that my team needed to find four controls on our orienteering map in a specific order as fast as we could. The goal was to “punch” all tags and be the first team to finish. It would be easy enough if everyone on the team had the same familiarity with orienteering, maps, and compass reading. But the truth is that everyone had a completelydifferent background and amount of experience with each of those things. For some, map reading had e
