Don’t shit in your own trail

When I started working as a teen, my father started sharing work-related wisdom. At the time, one of the lessons that stuck was:

Don’t shit in your own trail (loosely translated from French).

Through this crude piece of advice (sorry for the language), he meant:

1. Don’t rule yourself out of past opportunities you might have to get back to. There’s no point in ruining contacts and relationships.
2. There’s a reason why you took a certain path and chose certain options. Don’t lose track of the motivations behind your decisions because, at some point in time, it was exactly what you wanted.

We have a tendency to focus on our current position at the cost of forgetting the thinking process that brought us there. Right now might not be exactly where you want to be but, there are reasons why you chose that trail. At some point, it made sense to move away, get that job or get married. Well, hopefully…