Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 19 of our Wisdom-Trek and thank you for joining me. 

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom.

Today we look at the 1° Difference.

We are recording our podcast from our studio at Home2 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and it has been a hot week outside with temperatures hovering around 100° each day. And, it looks like it will extend into next week also. We are continuing to learn how to balance our daily client work load with the addition of creating our daily journal and podcast for Wisdom-Trek. At times life can be stressful, but we are gaining momentum and efficiency each day.   I would like to thank each of you who takes the time to either listen to our daily podcast, read the daily journal, or both. It is appreciated.

As we continue our Trek today, we come upon a grass airstrip nestled among the mountain peaks, and it brings to mind how precise our flying would need to be in order to locate and land on this strip. From the air, it would be nearly unnoticeable. This got me thinking about how crucial it is that we stay on course when flying. A mere 1° off course could have a significant impact on whether we reach our destination safely.

You might think out of the 360° in a circle being off by only 1° is not a big difference and for a very short distance, that may be true. Let’s look at what that means if we are hiking or more significantly flying.

Consider this. If you're going somewhere and you're off course by just one degree, after one foot, you'll miss your target by 0.2 inches. Trivial, right? But what about as you get farther out?

After 100 yards, (one football field) you'll be off by 5.2 feet. Not huge, but noticeable.

After a mile, you'll be off by 92.2 feet. One degree is starting to make a difference.

After flying from San Francisco to L.A., you'll be off by 6 miles.

If you were flying from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., you'd end up on the other side of Baltimore, 42.6 miles away.

Traveling around the globe from Washington, DC, you'd miss by 435 miles and end up in Boston.

In a rocket going to the moon, you'd be 4,169 miles off (nearly twice the diameter of the moon).

Going to the sun, you'd miss by over 1.6 million miles (nearly twice the diameter of the sun).

Traveling to the nearest star, you'd be off course by over 441 billion miles (120 times the distance from the earth to Pluto, or 4,745 times the distance from Earth to the sun).

Over time, a mere one-degree error in course makes a huge difference!

It is much the same with our trek of life. We allow small, seemingly insignificant obstacles to divert us from our intended path. It may not seem like a big deal, but over days, weeks, months and years it will have a large impact.

What are you accepting in your life? What is your tolerance for being off course?

Neither a marriage nor a business fails overnight. Cataclysmic failure generally comes from a series of small, correctable failures. I like to call these failures “one-degree failures.”

Just as it is hard to recognize being one degree off while flying at 30,000 feet, it is hard to realize these “one-degree failures” in our own daily lives. That’s why we need a crystal clear flight plan for our life and business, an easy way to measure success or failure, and someone who cares enough about us to hold us accountable.

Straying off course doesn’t have to result in cataclysmic failure in life or business. In fact, when flying, a plane is rarely on true course, but the pilot is continually making small adjustments to its course to ensure that overtime that the true course is followed to its intended destination.

While you may have never piloted a plane before,