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Week 11 Be a Brilliant Big-Picture Thinker

The summer before my senior year in high school, I attended a one-month program at the Minnesota Outward Bound School. I lived in New York City, and couldn't wait to get away from the sweltering heat—and my mother. Outward Bound offers wilderness programs that push you to your physical and mental limits. They are rewarding but very demanding experiences, perhaps even more so in that era.

For my “solo” experience I spent three days and three nights alone on the shore of a remote lake in the Boundary Waters wilderness area. I had no food. I was given just three matches, a fishing hook, a rain tarp, and a metal cup. At night, nearby wolves howled nonstop as I huddled around a small fire.

One especially grueling segment of the course involved orienteering. In groups of three, we were dropped off in the wilderness. We had two days to hike, over difficult terrain, back to our instructors. They were waiting at a designated spot 10 miles away. To make the trekking even more difficult, they loaded our already-uncomfortable canvas packs with unneeded pots and pans to weigh us down.

Cell phones and portable GPS devices were still years in the future. So, armed with nothing more than terrain maps and a compass, our mission was to navigate to the pickup zone by sunset on day two. We had to traverse miles of swamps, thick forests, and steep ravines. ...