Every individual has a place
to fill in the world and is important, in some respect,
whether he chooses to be so or not.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne}
Destiny
W
hen I was going through my mail one day, I came across a
stack of letters from students in middle school about The
Apprenticeand the business lessons they’ve learned from watching
it. There must have been forty letters, so I skimmed through them,
and a couple questions stood out because they were asked repeat-
edly. One was about how to achieve success, and the other one
was how to deal with obstacles on the way to success.
My first thought was how important planning ahead is to suc-
cess, and how equally important it is to remain flexible with those
plans. How do you tell students about the importance of plans and
sticking to them while still emphasizing the necessity for flexibil-
ity? It would seem to be a contradiction.
There’s a quote I like by an anonymous thinker: “The bend
in the road is not the end of the road unless you refuse to take the
turn.” That’s a valuable thought for business skills as well as life
skills. Very rarely does everything work out the way we hope or
think it will. In fact, sometimes it works out better when you’ve