Turning Your Detours Into Triumphs

How do you handle life's detours? Do you get angry that plans have gone astray -- or can you turn today's unwanted meanderings into a new source of strength?

Let's start with the cold, nasty truth: Detours stink -- at least at the beginning. Even a two-hour airport delay can be maddening. Six weeks of working on a dead-end project is worse. A year of struggling to get along with the wrong boss can ruin anyone's peace of mind. Novelists such as Paulo Coelho and Mandy Hale may romanticize detours as necessary steps in our life journey. All the same, when something unexpected pushes us off course, there's nothing fun about it at first.

It's what we do next, however, that determines our destiny.

For insights about how to turn life's detours to your advantage, I'd recommend "Trailblazer: A Biography of Jerry Brown." Author Chuck McFadden focuses mostly on the public highlights of California's most enduring politician: four terms as governor ... three campaigns for the U.S. Presidency, and so on. But the book's best insights involve Brown's gritty comeback in his late 50s -- when he took a low-profile job running a city that most people ignore.

Political commentators mocked Brown in 1997, when he declared that he wanted to be mayor of Oakland, Calif. -- after having lost his previous three attempts at winning higher political offices.The Los Angeles Times wrote that Brown was taking his philosophy of "lowered expectations" -- and applying it to his own career. A Democratic Party activist declared that Brown would be better off if he retreated to the lofty safety of a university professor's job, instead of dealing with the grimy, everyday realities of trying to manage a blighted city.

Brown proved his critics wrong. After winning office in Oakland, he set out to improve local school options and revive the city's aging downtown. He got drawn into long battles between developers and community activists -- which forced him to become a better and more patient negotiator. As McFadden writes, Brown's time in Oakland "made him more pragmatic, less interested in pursuing intellectually stimulating projects with questionable immediate value, and more philosophical about the fact that other people had ideas and priorities that he would have earlier dismissed as idiotic."

The upshot: Brown has been able to revive his political career to a remarkable degree, going on to become California's governor once again in his seventies. He isn't winning all his legislative battles, but he has stabilized the state's finances and pressed ahead with favorite initiatives such as high-speed rail. Californians recently gave him a robust 61% approval rating. Political analysts credit him with a leadership style that's vastly more mature than the one he showed in his earlier stints as governor, back in the 1970s.

Metaphorically, there's a bit of Oakland in everyone's career. Taking a step sideways or backwards might seem infuriating at first. But there's usually some way to turn such detours into learning laboratories for persistence, humility and other big virtues. And as long as defeatism doesn't set in, opportunities to get back on the fast track will beckon again.