I lifted my gaze for only a second, but that was all it took.

My foot slipped on the rain-slick rock and the next thing I knew I was going down.

I landed hard on my hip. For a long moment, I lay motionless on the ground. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. I’d anticipated a sharp shooting of pain up my leg. Luckily, I was greeted only by a dull ache.

As I picked myself up, I realized my luck was due to the fact that I’d landed in a shallow puddle of thick mud. I’d seriously stained my pants, but had managed to avoid breaking my hip on the jagged rocks surrounding the puddle. Slowing my pace, I kept my eyes on my feet as I picked my way down the hill to the main road.

As it happens, the fall wasn’t the first time my misplaced gaze had lead me astray this morning.

An hour before my fall, I was out for a short hike up one of the hills behind my apartment. Sarandë, was ringed by a half dozen or so hills and I was determined to climb them all over the course of my 6-week stay. This hill was my second.

I call it a hike, but it was more like a scramble. The landscape was all jagged boulders and brambles, making the existence of any kind of path all but impossible. And so, rather than walking, I was trying to hop from boulder to boulder in the straightest line up the hill. This was a difficult task.

The boulders were razor-sharp. I’d already found many of them to be more than capable of slicing through skin. But they were also loose, liable to shift under the slightest misplaced step.

The hill they covered wasn’t huge, maybe a 30-minute hike up. But navigating the rocks and the spiky brambles that exploded between them required the utmost attention. As such, I kept my eyes firmly on my feet, letting them stray only far enough to find the safest, easiest next step.

Spot. Step. Plant. Balance. Repeat.

After 10 minutes of this slow, careful upward progress I stopped on a large, flat boulder to survey the remainder of the climb.

As I turned my gaze upward I immediately realized that while I had been making progress up the hill, I had been taking what was clearly a very diagonal route. As a result, I had gone further laterally than I needed and would now need to angle up and back the way I came. I reoriented myself, put my head back down, and continued upward.

Five minutes later, I stopped on another boulder. I looked up, and once again, realized that I’d gone too far–this time in the opposite direction. I was making my way up the hill, but I was letting the landscape dictate my path, always opting for the easiest way forward. The result was a drunken zig-zag of a route up to the summit.

I took a breath, reoriented myself once again, and started up once again directly toward the summit, this time stopping every few steps to check my direction in relation to the hilltop.

It was slower, harder going, with more than a few bramble snags cutting up my calves along the way. But 15 minutes later I’d reached the top, having cut a nearly direct line up the rocky hillside.

5 Ways To Climb A Hill

To me, this hillside represents the work each of us does in navigating our creative careers.

The journey is littered with obstacles, some outright dangerous, some simply inconvenient. It’s up to each of us to decide how we’ll choose how to navigate them.

In my experience, we take one of five routes up the hill.

1. We make slow, meandering progress up and down the hill but never truly commit to making it to the top. Eventually, we run out of daylight or the weather shifts and we turn back and head for home.
   
2. We keep our eyes fixed upward on our destination, paying little attention to the obstacles at our feet. We might bulldoze our way through the first few hazards, but before long we find ourselves lying in the mud with an aching hip. If we’re lucky we can pick ourselves up and continue upward with more care. If we’re not, the repeated stumbles and falls that accompany this style of travel break us, causing us to limp home, defeated.
   
3. We start climbing but don’t have a clear idea of our destination. As a result, we settle for heading in a vague, upwards direction. It’s possible that we eventually orient ourselves or even stumble on the summit by accident. But either way, it’s a slow, inefficient journey.
   
4. We’re clear on our destination but keep our gaze directed downwards, immediately in front of us instead of the hilltop on the horizon. Each step we take feels like the obvious, easiest choice in the moment. We fail to realize, however, that over time they lead us diagonally away from our goal. At some point we look up, see we’re off-course, and must head back in a new direction.
   
5. We’re clear on the summit we’re aiming for and balance our gaze between our feet and our destination. Each step moves us in as direct a line as possible toward it while also taking care to maintain our footing.
   
   We have to move slower and stop regularly to re-orient ourselves. We might take detours around particularly dangerous obstacles when necessary, but push straight through the brambles and minor inconveniences. We get scraped up in the process, but we maintain the most direct course to our destination.
   
   This mode of travel is the most uncomfortable and feels in the moment like the slowest option. The truth, however, is it’s the fastest, most predictable path up the hill.

We can’t always see the summit from the base of the hill. More often than not it’s hidden in cloud.

In these cases, we have little choice but to start up the hill, hoping that the cloud thins as we move upward. Climb far enough and it almost always does.

Once we have a clear view of the summit, however, it’s best to balance our gaze, navigating the obstacles, keeping our footing, and fighting through the inevitable brambles while maintaining as direct a line to our destination as possible.

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Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters

This article originally appeared in my weekly Listen Up Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.

A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.

Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilderness of creating work that matters?”

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