The next time you’re walking down a well-trodden footpath through a wooded area, give a thought to the first person (or deer) who took that route.

Some determined being came through here when there was no path. They went straight into the woods. They didn’t circle around to try to find an easier way.

At any time you’re on a path, you can recreate the trailblazer’s ordeal by turning 90 degrees and walking straight into the messy, wet undergrowth that bounds the path now. If you do, you’ll immediately discover how much ease and comfort a path offers. From the first step, the dangers and costs of movement multiply.

For one thing, you aren’t sure where it’s safe to put your feet. You can easily roll an ankle or hook your foot on a low root, so you have to slow down and concentrate, feeling out each footfall.

Discomfort is unavoidable. Wet ferns soak your boots. Nettles scrape your legs. Dirt stains your clothes. It’s laborious and sweaty. And there are bugs. If there are snakes, you won’t have any warning. Moving through virgin terrain is mentally, emotionally, and physically taxing — everything a path is not.

The first person to go that way took on all those discomforts at once. By picking through the tricky terrain like that, they broke off branches and tamped down undergrowth, leaving a slightly less taxing route behind.

By the time you’re an adult, most of your life is spent traveling on paths of your own creation. In your youth, there’s frequent branch-breaking and ankle-rolling, because everything is new. This friction is unavoidable, although the adults in your life can guide you along.

You had your first nerve-wracking day at school, first swimming lesson, first wobbly bike ride, first awkward date, first time using the floor polisher at work. You had to step carefully, and you still endured scrapes and stumbles, went in circles, and got bitten by bugs. All of this carves paths you’ll use for life.

Years later, you mostly travel along the huge network of paths you’ve made. You have ways of talking to people, ways of conducting yourself at your job, ways of getting things done, ways of coping with uncertainty, ways of eating, sleeping, problem-solving, and learning — worn trails that allow for quick and easy movement.

Quick and easy movement is good, and the larger your path network, the more places you can go.

But there is a paradoxical problem with having all these paths. The more paths you’ve carved out, the less necessary it feels to head into the woods again.

The problem is that well-worn paths aren’t just a little easier to travel on than non-paths. They’re something like ten times easier – ten times less discomfort per mile. Walking a path is so much more attractive than traversing a non-path that we end up following paths even if they’re not going where we want to go.

Say you’re trying to learn a language. You’ve learned things before, so you follow the well-worn paths you’ve always used to learn: you read books, take lessons, and do exercises.

However, it doesn’t get you where you want to go. What you really need is to go out and have conversations in the new language – because the goal is to have conversations in that language. But you don’t have a well-trodden, comfortable path for that. How do you even find someone to converse with? Won’t you be embarrassed? You can already see the waiter’s impatience as you try your French on him. You know you will feel like a child.

So you look for a nearby path to take. You go back to the apps and flash cards, and ten years later you cannot speak the language.

It can only work this way, because even the enormous path network of a skilled and experienced adult doesn’t reach everywhere that person wants to go. In fact, none of your paths reach places you haven’t been, because they were all created only by your own feet.

It’s not effort that’s missing

Extra effort will not make a path go where it does not go. Going to a new place requires the specific act of choosing the untrodden, 10x-more-uncomfortable wilderness route over the clean, inviting path that’s right there waiting.

The path is so much easier to traverse than the woods that it doesn’t even seem like you’re at an intersection at all. And hey, maybe this path winds around to the place I want to go eventually. (It doesn’t.)

People try that all the time though – putting in a lot more effort or mileage on an established path, to avoid heading directly (through the woods) to the destination.

You get inspired to write your book, to hit it big. You’re prepared to do more, and go farther, than ever before. You know it’s an ambitious goal and you’ll have to put in unprecedented mileage to get there.

You will never get there though, because no matter how many miles you travel on those paths, they do not go to that destination. You cannot get to a new place if you do not subject yourself to the sticky and unyielding undergrowth between you and it.

Taking the long and fake detour can be such a trap. You can walk a thousand miles looping around the same paths to avoid a one-mile trudge through the woods.

This is because the human mind is guided by a million years of conditioning, screaming at you to STAY ON THE FREAKING PATH. Get away from the snakes and brambles! You have enough food, you have an insulated place to sleep, you aren’t currently gushing blood. SO WHY ARE YOU LEAVING THE PATH?! DO YOU WANT TO DIE?!

The mind will do anything but tell you to enter the woods

The mind will do anything to trick you into staying on the path. You might read this post and feel inspired to try harder, to go farther, to do the thing for real this time. That is also staying on the path. You’ve gone this way before, haven’t you?

The mind also steers you towards familiar — and therefore more “comfortable” — forms of discomfort. Entering new territory requires new forms of discomfort. You might already be accustomed to the discomfort of doing a lot of cardio, or working late nights. But saying no to needy clients is a deep, untrodden wood for you.

The kind of discomfort that takes you to a new place always has a quality of uncertainty. You can’t know the exact pains you’ll experience. You cannot get guarantees of how much discomfort will yield how much reward. This uncertainty around the new route will make the mind go “Ugh, no, let’s go any way but this way!”

That feeling is the signal to head into the trees. It’s subtle, but it’s happening all the time. Right when the mind goes “Ugh no not that!” you know you have an option to break some twigs.

It’s the feeling of knowing you should call but you send a sheepish email instead. When you know you should practice scales but then you just play Fur Elise again. When you know you should approach the guy but instead you raid the snack table and make an early exit.

Some part of you knows that the direct route to your goal is straight through the seething, sweaty, mosquito-ridden undergrowth. Meanwhile, the mind is shouting at you to avoid exactly that at all costs — even the cost of a taking years-long detour that never gets there.

The route we’re always searching for is straight through the woods.

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Waiter photo by pressfoto.