Swinging your compass

Or- The powers and province of man

Today’s subtitle comes from a quote by Marcus Aurelius who said, “If anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.”

Think.

As a young Recon Marine, when preparing to conduct a small boat clandestine landing, we used a compass mounted on the gunwale of our rubber raiding craft to navigate.

Nautical navigation in the days before ubiquitous GPS coverage required a plotting board, slide rule, dividers, parallel ruler, hand bearing compass, a stopwatch, and a fair amount of luck.

Some of the tools of the trade.

One of the lessons that I learned early on was that once the rubber boat was loaded with all of the weapons and equipment needed for the operation, the metal in the boat would cause a compass deviation. Usually, this deviation was minor, but significant enough to cause us to miss our beach landing site (BLS).

An error of one degree in a 15-mile over-the-horizon navigation run meant that we would arrive 1/4 mile off of our intended BLS. That could lead to mission failure.

In order to account for this, we would ‘swing’ the compass by placing the loaded boat onto a painted compass rose and turning it 360 degrees while annotating the compass discrepancy caused by the boat’s load.

I was thinking about this recently during a coaching session with a high performer who was looking to move to the next level of achievement. I asked about his personal values, and he rattled off a well-memorized list.

Then I asked when he had developed that list and when he had last re-evaluated it.

As I suspected, the answer was that he had arrived at the list many years ago and had never reconsidered it.

All of the items on the list were admirable traits and had served him well in the past, but he—and all of us—owe it to ourselves to periodically swing our compass to check for drift and ensure that the azimuth we are following is taking us to our desired destination.          

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Bulletin From The Borderlands

Write.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be talking about values/virtues. If you haven’t given consideration to your own personal list of values, I recommend it. The attachment below will help you get started. It is not all-inclusive, so feel free to add to it, but work to select 3-5 values that you want to embody.

Core Values

6.47MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Let me know how it goes.

Repeat.

Words of wisdom from those who said it best.

“You don’t throw a compass overboard because the ocean is calm.”                            - Matshona Dhliwayo.

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See you next Thursday!

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