In Defense of Getting Lost

In my office there’s a drawer full of dead ends.

Half-finished plays. Scenes that seemed brilliant at midnight and embarrassing at breakfast. Openings for columns that never found their second paragraph. A few big civic ideas that got as far as a legal pad and no further. For years I thought of that drawer as a graveyard — evidence of all the times I set out for somewhere and didn’t arrive.

I’ve come to believe I had it exactly backwards.

Here’s the thought by author Seth Godin I want to put in front of you, and I’d suggest reading it twice: Don’t curse the dead ends and the failures. They’re the key element of the work you’re doing. We find our way by getting lost. Anything other than that is called reading a map.

Kindly sit with that last line. It’s doing some heavy lifting. Because a map, when you think about it, is just a record of where somebody else already went. Maps are wonderful things — I don’t want to romanticize being lost on a highway late at night — but a map can only take you to places that exist. If the thing you’re after doesn’t exist yet — a play nobody has written, a story nobody has told, a version of a town nobody has built — then there is no map. There can’t be. The territory hasn’t been surveyed because you’re the one being sent to survey it.

Which means the wrong turns aren’t the interruption of the work. They are the work.

I learned this first as a writer. Every playwright knows the experience of following a scene confidently for ten pages before realizing it’s a cul-de-sac — the characters have nowhere to go, the energy has drained out, you took the wrong exit three pages back. The temptation is to treat those pages as waste. But they’re not waste. They’re reconnaissance. You now know something about your play that you could not have known any other way: you know where it doesn’tgo. And nine times out of ten, somewhere in that dead-end scene is a single line, a gesture, an image — the thing you were actually digging for, buried in ground you’d never have turned over if you’d stayed on the path. The failed scene isn’t the opposite of the finished play. It’s the tuition.

I learned it again in public life. Cities are the ultimate argument against map-reading. Every town has a shelf of master plans, and every honest person who has served in local government will tell you the same thing: the plans that worked were the ones that left room to get lost. You try a pilot program and it flops — but the flop teaches you what the neighborhood actually wants, which is never quite what the consultants’ map said it wanted. You back a project that dies in a 3–2 vote, and two years later the fight it started produces something better than the original idea. The failures weren’t detours from the town’s progress. They were how the town found out who it was.

The trouble is, we live in an age that has declared war on being lost. GPS reroutes us before we even feel the wrongness of a turn. Algorithms serve us more of what we already liked. Career advice comes bulleted and optimized: five steps, proven path, guaranteed arrival. We have built a civilization of maps, and we wonder why so much of what it produces feels like a place we’ve already been.

Meanwhile, everything genuinely new — every original book , every real reinvention, every town that became more than a strip of chain stores — came from somebody willing to wander off the surveyed grid and burn some daylight in the weeds.

I want to be careful here, because there’s a cheap version of this idea and I’m not selling it. “Fail fast” makes failure sound painless, and it isn’t. The dead ends cost real things: months, money, confidence, sometimes relationships. Getting lost is frightening precisely because it’s real — because for a stretch you genuinely do not know where you are, and no one can tell you. I’ve had those stretches. I’ve hated them. Every one of them, without exception, is where the work changed.

So here’s the question I keep coming back to, and I’ll leave it with you rather than answer it: when was the last time you let yourself get lost — genuinely lost, no map, no reroute — in anything that mattered to you?

If the answer is “a while,” the drawer full of dead ends is waiting. Mine is right here. I used to think it was a graveyard.

Turns out it’s a trailhead.