The Path to Success

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
— the final stanza of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”

This Robert Frost poem is often used as a happy-go-lucky rally to follow your own path and forge ahead without heeding the consequences. But compared with the instant success stories we hear through the internet’s grapevine, Frost’s invitation to carpe diem willy-nilly can sometimes appear naive. The entrepreneurial lore that’s repeated in countless self-help books doesn’t often talk about the paths that sent us veering off-track or lead to nowhere, and the people we look up to may have