On bowling.

This may seem like a simple thing, but how do you get a high score in bowling?

Well, imagine someone came to you and said, “The way to become a good bowler is to avoid the right-hand gutter.” If you believed him, you’d line up way over to the left. But of course, you’d probably bowl a lot of gutter balls down the left side. Then imagine someone else told you, “No, no, no. The key to bowling is to avoid the left-hand gutter.” Well, perhaps you’d line up to the right, and of course you’d see very little improvement in score.

In life it’s often like this. We have experienced what it means to fail to one side or the other of some goal, and so we play the game of life as if the important thing is to avoid that error. But if our focus becomes avoiding one error, we almost always wind up falling into some other contrasting error.

So what’s the right way to score high in bowling? It’s simple. You aim at the pins. And of course, by aiming at the pins, you’ll naturally learn to avoid both gutters.