You may have heard me talk about a concept in the past that I call linchpins. This refers to people or events that set us on a different path in our lives and our career. Every story of success and failure always has several linchpins. These critical junctures often appear small in the moment but show their true importance later on.
I’ve been thinking more about this recently. I had to do a presentation about my life and career to a group of trusted advisers a few weeks back. If you’ve never sat down and mapped out your life and career in detail, I will tell you it’s a different kind of experience. It pushes you to look at yourself in ways that can be uncomfortable but really eye-opening.
It was much harder than I thought it would be, and it made me remember some pivotal moments from my past. Some of those moments I had all but forgotten. Our memories have a curious way of burying certain defining experiences, perhaps as a means of self-protection or simply due to the constant forward momentum of life.
They fall into two basic categories, people and events.
When I started to write down some of the right people I had met at the right time, the list was longer than I had imagined. Not all the people were great mentors to me. Some were just people that changed how I thought about a situation or how I thought about myself. Even brief encounters — a single conversation or an offhand comment — have sometimes altered my trajectory in ways I couldn’t have predicted.
Some were even bad experiences, people that didn’t see value in me or treated me poorly. But the few that stood out were the people that took time with me when they didn’t have to. They believed in me even when I didn’t fully believe in myself at that moment. Their faith served as a mirror reflecting back potential I couldn’t yet see, creating a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.
Then I thought about the events, and what was interesting is that almost all the big linchpin events that had shaped me were mistakes, failures, tragedy, and loss. Although the people that were linchpins for me were mostly positive relationships, almost none of the events were my successes. This pattern suggests that comfort rarely breeds growth; it’s the friction and resistance of difficult circumstances that forge our character and capabilities.
I found this super interesting.
I think there’s more here. I’ve even thought about starting a podcast series on the topic of linchpins to interview people and pull on this thread. When I look back to these pivotal people and events, it gives me a different view of who I am. We’re all the sum of our decisions.
Each linchpin has the ability to change in some way the path we are on over time, and it means we reach different destinations far from where we’ve set off. I wonder how many of us recognize our linchpins as they’re happening, and how different our lives might be if we cultivated greater awareness of these critical moments as they unfold before us. Perhaps by sharing our linchpin stories with each other, we can better appreciate how these pivotal moments shape not just our individual journeys, but our collective human experience.