There is a true story about a troup of young Hungarian soliders lost in the Alps during training. In abysmal weather, with no food or supplies, they were cut off from their colleagues. After two days of snow and sleet, they were frozen and weak from hunger. They had no idea how to get back to base. They lost the will to live.

Then a miracle happened. Searching for a cigarette in the lining of his tunic, one of the soldiers suddenly found an old map. The soldiers confidently used the map to march through the mountains back to safety.

It was only when they were warm and fed at base camp that they discovered it was a map of the Pyrenees, some 2,000 kilometers away.

This story has two valuable lessons:

• It is better to act constructively than to have the right answer and not act.
• Each of us has to find our own answer, or adapt someone else’s answer to our own circumstances. The soliders got home safely because they made sense of the map for themselves and related it to their immediate surroundings.
  

(From, "Living the 80/20 Way," by Richard Koch.)