What compass guides your career and life?

One of Seth Godin’s daily blogs from this week has spurred me to craft this post. I’ve been chewing on it for a few weeks. This is Seth wrote:

"The map keeps getting redrawn, because it's cheaper than ever to go offroad, to develop and innovate and remake what we thought was going to be next. Technology keeps changing the routes we take to get our projects from here to there. It doesn't pay to memorize the route, because it's going to change soon.

The compass, on the other hand, is more important then ever. If you don't know which direction you're going, how will you know when you're off course?

And yet...

And yet we spend most of our time learning (or teaching) the map, yesterday's map, while we're anxious and afraid to spend any time at all calibrating our compass."
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/02/the-map-has-been-replaced-by-the-compass.htm

Words of wisdom right? Easier said than done? It must be hard or we’d all do a better job calibrating our compass, right? Here’s another though that extends what Seth was writing about. (BTW, I agree with everything Seth wrote above.) Part of the reason calibrating the compass is so hard for so many people might be that we fail to recognize the compass direction we set for our personal life can be hard to keep in balance with the compass direction we set for professional life. Do you agree? Hmm. It was sort of a trick question.  We only have one compass and that’s the fact we all too often lose sight of. Too often we claim that we’ve set long term goals for our professional and business lives that are mutually incompatible. Too often we try to set compass direction for our professional lives while ignoring the fact that our personal lives may be impacting the direction as well. I can’t reconcile this disconnect for you. Heck, I struggle with this in my own life. At most, I can simply help you become self-aware that your life really only has one compass for our life. Professional, personal, social, spiritual and all other aspects of our life are all impacted by how we calibrate and set that single compass. Don’t trick your-self into thinking otherwise. I’ve begun to realize that this is the first step towards recalibrating my compass on a regular basis to make sure I’m heading in the right direction.