I often notice that there are recurring themes that happen in my life. Much like the quote in Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist,

“Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.”

I find it to be my experience that certain challenges, skills and hurdles will reoccur over and over again in time. If you’re smart, you’ll learn from the first pass of the hurdles. If you’re smarter, you’ll ask for help the second time around; but, even that is not enough.

To truly gain wisdom from life’s hurdle in front of you, you have to not only learn from the past and ask for help… you have to be able to see the hurdle from the new perspective of where you are standing. You will never approach a hurdle, however identical its appearance to the previous, from the same place. To assume you have the same perspective as previously would be to deny and ignore the fact that you are a different person today than you were yesterday.

Consider car racing on an oval track. I’m a big IndyCar fan, particularly of the Indy 500. The Indy 500 takes place on a historic 2.5 mile oval on the same Saturday in May each year. This year it will celebrate its 100th running. Drivers at this endurance race have 200 laps of turning left, each seemingly the same as the last. But, they’re not. The turns, however repetitive, are different each lap, each corner. As the driver approaches, the surrounding forces change; the wind speeds, the other cars, the mental state of the driver. The perspective from which you approach the turn must be re-evaluated every single time.

I will always remember the 2011 Indy 500. Of course for the reason that it was the last time I ever saw Dan Wheldon race, and win the Indy 500… but also for the reason he won the race. JR Hildebrand was a rookie that year. He was 23 and he was about to win the Indy 500. He was one turn away from it. Seemingly, all he had to do was turn left one more time, hold off the others on the straightaway and cross those historic bricks.

But, he went high on the last turn. He approached the turn with a maneuver that worked earlier in the race, and hit the wall. He came in second, as Wheldon passed him to take home his second Borg Warner.

In a 2011 New York Times article by Dave Caldwell, Hildebrand is quoted as saying, “Is it a move I would do again? No, I think the only reason I did it in the first place is that it had worked at different stages earlier in the race. But in hindsight, I think with the tires being as used as they were at that stage, that last run after the caution being so long, it’s obviously a learning experience for me.”

That lack of assuming a different perspective for the same problem often ends up with hitting the wall… albeit most of us don’t have the physical representation seen by hundreds of thousands live that day.

Last month I found myself on a panel of professional women, preparing to speak to a group of high school girls.

The panel was varied, as would be the questions. The girls had free rein to ask anything about jobs, career paths and life. The panelists were in fashion, business, education, medicine, sports and technology.

Knowing that we needed to be prepared for any question, I tried to think back and put myself in their shoes. They were about to enter their last semester of high school. Some would be starting their careers, other would continue their education. At that that time in their life, suddenly the question,”What do you want to be when you grow up?” became more and more real.

I can clearly remember being in their shoes. Fiercely independent, determined to tackle the next step… and a little bit afraid to let on I didn’t know exactly what I was doing; I was just guessing. I remember thinking everyone else had it all figured out, especially the adults and kids already in college.

I would learn, of course, that no one ever has it all figured out. I would learn with experience to trust my gut, but balance that with research and reason. And, over the years, my gut would get more reliable with experience. But learning those things, that’s something that you can’t really be told. It doesn’t always make sense until it happens slowly, over time.

On my run that morning, I started to think about the best piece of advice I’d ever been given. If I could pass that same piece of advice along that day, maybe it could had the same impact for the girls who were listening.

I thought through conversations with mentors and conversations with friends. Conversations with family and conversations that came during some of the toughest moments that I’d been through over the years. Through all of that, I realized one of the best pieces of advice I could remember is one that I heard from my high school band teacher.

“If you see a piece of trash on the floor in the hallway, it’s your job to pick it up.”

At the time, I couldn’t understand that it was about a lot more than picking up the piece of paper. It was also about a lot more than making the walk down the hall for the janitor easier that day.

That simple piece of advice stuck with me because it represents that you are part of a community. It’s your job to make where you’re standing a better place than when you got there. It’s your job to contribute, to make your community a better place.

We all see “it’s not my job” syndrome happen in the world. Trash in parks and where it shouldn’t be, communal coffee pots where someone took the last cup and didn’t make a fresh one, even someone with their hands too full and struggling to carry all their bags. It may not be “your job” to pick up the trash, and there may even be someone whose job it is to clean that up or fix that, but if you’re there and able – make the place you’re standing better. Because that absolutely is your job.

That’s the best advice I think I’ve ever been given, and I passed that along to the girls that day last month. I don’t know if it will stay with any of them, but I know it has made a difference in my life and how I make decisions each day, wherever I’m standing.