Maps

Last weekend, all the members of my family except me, performed on a stage.

The sang, they danced.

They were magnificent.

My wife performed in four shows and our kids performed in two shows.

All of these shows were in the same building.

Over the course of the weekend, we drove to the same parking lot three times.

On the third time, my wife and I noticed something.

This post is about what we noticed.

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A mental model that I enjoy, involves the idea of maps and asks a simple question.

Do you need to follow a map or do you need to make the map?

The reason I like this mental model is because of how well it scales.

You can ask this question of yourself when thinking about what you want to do this weekend.

You can ask this question of your team when deciding what type of person you need to hire.

You can ask this question of your community when thinking about your strategic direction for the next 10 years.

Map making and map following are both necessary skills.

They're just needed at different times.

***

So my wife and I pulled up to the same parking lot for the third time over the show weekend, and we noticed something.

First, let me tell you about this parking lot.

It's a massive outdoor rectangle.

If you imagine rectangle laying flat on its longer side, the way out to the theatre where the shows are is located at the top-right-corner of the rectangle. Naturally, this is where most of the cars are parked.

When we pulled in that third time, we noticed a few cars were parked on the top-left-corner.

By a few, I mean probably 10, compared to well over 100 that were parked on the other side.

This made us pause for a moment.

What did these 10 cars know? They can't possibly a group of FitBitters who just want extra steps.

Then we looked a little further, beyond the cars, and noticed a fence.

The fence had an opening.

Beyond the opening, we saw this:

***

Someone decided to make their own map.

We decided to follow it.