I was headed home for the weekend to visit my parents. Driving west on I-40, I took Exit 126, an exit I had taken many times before. At the top of the ramp was a stop sign at Highway 641.
Turn left and I would go home. Turn right and I would go to a job interview in Bruceton, Tennessee.
It didn’t seem like a particularly historic moment. It turned out to be one of the most consequential decisions of my life.
An interview I almost skipped
At the time I was already looking for another job after only about a year with my employer. It wasn’t because I was restless. The company had been sold, and my boss had warned me that the future was uncertain. He suggested I might want to start looking. So I did.
I had already interviewed with another company in Nashville and felt very positive that an offer was coming. That made the interview in Bruceton seem almost unnecessary. The company was Henry I. Siegel Company — H.I.S., a clothing manufacturer — and I had seriously considered canceling. Why spend the time when I believed I already knew where I was going?
But I hadn’t canceled it. And now I was sitting at that stop sign. Left or right. Go home or go to Bruceton.
I turned right.
There was no dramatic revelation. No carefully constructed analysis. No prayer asking God for a sign. No call to a trusted friend for advice. I simply turned right and went to the interview.
And that ordinary decision changed my life.
What was waiting down that road
I couldn’t possibly have known what was connected to that decision.
I met the woman who would become my wife. Although the marriage eventually ended, it gave me two children who have been among the greatest blessings of my life. I also met a man named Wes, who would later become my boss and introduce me to the world of management consulting, changing the direction of my professional life.
One decision connected me to people and opportunities that would shape the decades that followed. None of that was visible from the stop sign. All I could see was Highway 641.
Most turning points don’t look like turning points
Looking backward, we tend to give the important moments of our lives a sense of inevitability. Of course I took that job. Of course I met that person. Of course one thing led to another.
But that isn’t how life feels while we’re living it. We make decisions with incomplete information. We choose one opportunity over another. We accept an invitation, make a phone call, take an assignment, walk into a room. Turn right instead of left.
Most of the time we have no idea which of those decisions will matter twenty or thirty years later. That’s one of the things experience teaches us. Some decisions that seemed enormously important at the time eventually become little more than footnotes. And some that seemed almost inconsequential turn out to have changed everything.
The road we didn’t take
I’ve occasionally wondered what would have happened if I had turned left that day. I would have gone home. I probably would have accepted a different job, met different people, and followed an entirely different career. More importantly, my family’s story would be different.
There is no useful way to reconstruct that alternate life, and I’m not sure there is much value in trying. We live the life on the road we took. That road included opportunity and success. It also included disappointment, heartache, mistakes, and lessons I would never have chosen in advance.
That’s life. A consequential decision isn’t necessarily one that makes everything easier. Sometimes it simply determines which set of experiences will become ours.
An ordinary stop sign
I can still picture that exit. Exit 126, westbound I-40, a ramp leading up to a stop sign at Highway 641. There was nothing remarkable about it. Thousands of people have probably stopped at that same sign without remembering it five minutes later.
For me it became a dividing line between the life I had lived up to that moment and much of the life that followed. I didn’t know that when I was sitting there.
That’s the part that stays with me.
Sometimes the biggest moments of our lives don’t announce themselves with fanfare. They quietly wait at stop signs, disguised as ordinary decisions on ordinary days.
And sometimes we don’t recognize the turning point until years after we’ve made the turn.