The Puzzle

My sister Stephanie smiled as I unwrapped the long, thin gift from her. When I finished removing the festive wrapping paper, I looked at the gift with curiosity.  It was just a simple puzzle. In the age of video games, it seemed too simple, almost crude. It was a gray piece of metal with knobs inside a slot.  On one side of the knob was a circle. And on the other was an indention of a circle.  To solve it, you had to turn all the knobs in the correct direction to allow the tray holding the knobs to slide out of the gray piece of metal.  I nodded and thanked my sister.

Later that evening, I picked up the puzzle to solve it. “This should be easy,” I thought as I began to twist the knobs.  I failed.  Not one to be easily discouraged, I tried again. And I failed again.  I tried one more time.  And once again, I couldn’t solve the puzzle. I looked at the knobs and thought “What the heck?”  My linear method of problem solving was taking me nowhere.

And then it hit me.  I started over, twisted the puzzle’s knobs and moved forward. And then, I untwisted a knob and moved BACK two steps. And then I moved forward again. And then I moved BACK a couple of steps again. I kept repeating this until I was holding the tray in my victorious hands. I had solved the puzzle.  I couldn’t move forward until I learned to take a step back.

I thought about that puzzle this morning while I ran. I used to believe the path to success was a straight line. That you had to travel quickly from A to Z with no stops in between.  But my recent career upheaval and that old puzzle have taught me otherwise. Sometimes you have to have a setback to be able to move forward.

It also happens in exercise, fitness and dieting. It can be an injury. Or a couple of pounds gained. You can hit a wall or plateau and feel like you are falling backwards.  Just remember, no setback is a failure if you learn from it.

That puzzle is somewhere in my house.  I need to find it because in hindsight, it is the most valuable gift I’ve ever received. It’s truly a metaphor for my life and success so far: That setbacks are sometimes as important to success as moving forward. And that I can’t quit when they happen.