As you approach the twilight of 2018, you have the opportunity to reflect on this past year, not only what you done or how you’ve improved, but also who you have become. Last week’s message brought this to your attention.

From the quote for this week, you can use the metaphor to assess your year from a different perspective—to determine whether you have been traveling or wandering. This metaphor is rich and elicits additional thoughts for you to consider.

Here are some distinctions.

Wandering can be misleading.
• In order to avoid feeling lost, you go along the path of everyone else. It’s well-worn, so it must be a good way for you too. Right?
• It provides the appearance of going somewhere, especially when you are busy with important work and relationships.
• It gives you an excuse for delaying the hard work of examining what your career journey should be.
• You may have goals, but they are less meaningful to you and you set them lower than what you would if they really mattered—to you.

Traveling truths
• You may not be clear on your destination, but you are moving in a direction that gets refined year by year.
• Your goals are focused and intentional with specific activities that may or may not be directly related to your job.
• You can expect that your journey will require discretionary effort beyond your job, like devotion to reading, learning, pursuing, reorganizing, rearranging—anything to create the space and focus you need to move ahead.

An important point to understand is that wandering and traveling has nothing to do with your activity or work ethic. Being productive in your job isn’t an indicator of either one. In fact, if you’re not careful, you can be a productivity machine with no career connection at all, other than to do it again tomorrow, next week and next year. But that’s hardly a career.

As you think forward to 2019, what do you need to do differently ensure that you are traveling, not wandering?