Keep Moving Forward

Keep Moving Forward

I finally signed up for Disney+ last week. I know, I know, probably the last one in the country to do so. But I finally took the plunge, and I’m enjoying it immensely. As I was catching up on some of their lesser-known classics yesterday, I happened to push play on “Meet the Robinson’s”. I recall seeing it in the theater and enjoying it, and yesterday I remember why. It tells the story of a young boy, an orphan, who wants nothing more in life than to have a family and invent cool stuff. Unfortunately, most of the time he fails pretty miserably on both counts. No matter how hard he tries, he just can’t seem to find the success he’s looking for. He becomes discouraged, and is about to give up, when just in the nick of time, he finds encouragement from an unlikely source, and is reminded to “keep moving forward!”

Isn’t this like us a lot of the time? We work hard and no matter how much the effort, success, or our definition of it, slips through our fingers. I remember a time when I was deeply discouraged. I had left a secure low-paying job for a new one that paid a lot more, but I pretty shortly discovered that I was not a cultural or technical fit. No matter how hard I tried, and how many new ideas I would come up with, I would get negative feedback, and very little support. I tried looking for a new job, I enrolled in a Master’s program, and still my situation didn’t change. I was miserable and I was making those around me miserable. I wanted to just quit, get in my beloved Mitsubishi Montero, and just keep on driving. I’m sure you know the feeling.

However, being the responsible adult that I am, instead of driving off in my Monty, I kept after it. I kept studying, I kept believing, I kept trying to be kind. And eventually, things turned around for me. At my darkest moment, someone reached out on LinkedIn, and two weeks later, I had a new job, and a much brighter outlook on life.

As a friend and former colleague is fond of saying to me, whenever I have a small failure and think I’m not on the right path, “try again!” In other words, keep moving forward. Who knows, that could be the moment things work out. Maybe not in the way we hope, but likely even better than we had ever imagined.