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.