Coddiwomple

I learned a new word this week:

Coddiwomple: To travel purposefully toward an as-yet-unknown destination.

I love this word.

In my book “Someday Is Today,” I discuss the importance of horizon goals. Too often, people establish exceedingly specific goals, absent any flexibility or opportunity for insight, adjustment, revision, or a change of mind.

Adherence to a specific goal, absent the willingness to adjust or pivot, often leads to failure.

I believe that the most successful, creative, and happiest people maintain a certain degree of flexibility in their goal-setting. While it’s perfectly fine to drive towards a lifelong dream, we must also understand that the horizon is vast, so that dream may ultimately take a new form. And if you remain open to that possibility, your chances of doing something great expand exponentially.

This means that my screenplay idea might someday become a novel, a musical, or even an epic poem. Maybe one of the characters in the screenplay becomes the antagonist in a future novel. A joke in that same screenplay may instead become a seed for a humor column.

Everything can be anything of you keep an open mind.

If you coddiwomple.

I’ve transformed autobiographical poems written in college into stories I tell onstage.

I’ve turned amusing lists in a notebook into an entire novel based on those lists.

I’ve taken a single sentence, spoken oftenhandedly in a workshop, and made it the basis of an entire TEDx Talk.

I’ve turned a tiny bit of advice – offered to a client amid other advice – into an entire online course.

I’ve transformed a career of telling stories and performing comedy onstage into a business consulting with Fortune 500 companies, hospitals, nonprofits, attorneys, inspirational speakers, advertising agencies, the FBI, and many, many more.

Coddiwomple tells us to keep moving forward, relentlessly and purposefully, toward a flexible, uncertain horizon that will likely land somewhere on the continent of our dreams but perhaps not in the exact city we once envisioned.

Coddiwomple your way to greatness, even if it looks slightly different than you once envisioned.