Categories
Social Commentary

Signs are everywhere. We just need to look up.

You wouldn’t think there’d be a business (and life) lesson hidden in Bajan civic planning.

Generally, the folks who man the desk at rental car agencies go to great lengths to either furnish old fashioned paper maps or upsell you on a navigation system.  The friendly man who provided me a rental car in Barbados this past week did neither.  He instead assured me that it was impossible to get lost on Barbados.   “Just follow the signs.  Wherever you want to go, there’ll be a sign for it.”

In an age when we’ve outsourced most of our environmental perception to technology, this seemed quaint and outdated and flat out impossible.  How could there be a sign for everything?  And what was the point of paying enough to AT&T for local data to chart a course to any point on the island ten times a day if all I had to do was look up rather than down at my smartphone?

Turns out using GPS technology on Barbados just makes traveling more complex.  They tend not to like straight lines: it may take 30 turns to go less than a mile, which makes following a little blue dot on a tiny screen challenging.

Like the little blue squares of paint that mark blazed trails in the woods, frequent uniform civic signs inform drivers that they’re driving either towards or away from whatever major town to which they’re proximate, and customized private signs with colorful logos point – literally – to nearly every commercial destination in the region.

Image

It took me three days to finally look up for these signs rather than down at my phone.  It took getting lost because I lost signal.  It took asking a passerby where an establishment was only to have her smile and point up to a sign for the establishment not 30 feet ahead of me.  It took making room in my intuition for a few well-placed, hand-painted signs on defunct telephone poles to finally get where I wanted to go without endlessly clicking the next arrow on my map app.

I once read that finding your true path in life is a combination of internal direction and external perception.  You must have a strong sense for what you want, but you also must listen to the directions that the world around you provides.  Call it motivation coupled with cosmic jujitsu.

I’ve been hearing a lot about “failing fast” lately.  It needs little explanation: realize you’re wrong as quickly as possible so that you can change course and succeed more quickly and efficiently.  That to me now sounds like “get lost fast.”  Why, in the age when signs both real and virtual surround us entirely, must we fail at all?  Why can’t we just look up a bit more often and take in data in “realtime” so that we never fail or get lost at all?  To me, modern failures hailed as “fast failures” seem totally avoidable.  The folks doing the acrobatic pivots should have just paid closer, “iterative” attention to the signs all around them.

Too many people get lost these days – in business, in relationships, and on rustic roads on holiday in countries with an aversion to straight lines – because they don’t listen to the world around them.  All it takes is looking up from time to time and adding what you see to your own well of motivation.

By adamjdevine

I'm a compass with an opinion.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *