Taking the wrong path.

Yeah, I’ve done that a few times.

The thing is, wrong turns sometimes get you exactly where you didn’t know you needed to be.

Back in college, I took one of those turns. Me and my buddy went back to Guatemala for the summer. He’d never been. He was from Venezuela, curious, hungry for something new. So we hit the road. Antigua. Panajachel. Places I loved, places I wanted him to see.

Then we thought, why not the coast? So we headed for Puerto San Jose in my beat up 1989 white Hyundai Excel, bald tires, a passenger door that wouldn’t open, and at least a decade past its prime. Took the wrong road and ended up on some deserted strip of beach. We were starving, hungover, ready to eat anything.

There was one shack. A small, beatup spot with one option on the menu: sopa de pescado. I wish I could find the picture, but I doubt we even took any.

They brought out this steaming bowl. Half a chopped-up fish sticking out of the broth, shrimp everywhere, whole thing looking like it was dragged straight from the ocean five minutes before. It was exactly what we needed. The broth rich and briny, the beers ice cold.

That’s the thing about wrong turns. You get lost and sometimes you find something magical.

My career’s been like that. Early on, I had a choice. Take a job at the agency I wanted or stay where I’d been interning. The internship offered real money, and when you’ve got none, that sounds like salvation. I took it.

It was a mistake, what I thought at the time. All I wanted was to create. Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to fix it and refocus on what I wanted.

I got good. Real good. Efficient. Took seven hours of work and crushed it in two. I’m not proud of it, but I spent the rest of my day plotting my escape. That escape landed me in Houston, surrounded by people who changed my life.

I don’t love the mistakes I made, but I wouldn’t trade them now. Some great things came from those wrong turns.