There is a phrase I love in the Star Trek movie franchise, about Captain Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru. It goes like this: It’s a test designed to draw inferences about someone’s character by giving them a no-win scenario and about how you, as a starship captain, face a situation when there are no good options. It doesn’t matter what you do, the simulation will throw the worst possible result at you. There is no cheat code. You can’t win, because the point of the test is to find out how you react to losing.
I imagine life to be a Kobayashi Maru. Your dreams, ambitions, relationships—everything really—you can’t use someone’s template. You wonder, what if I had picked the other road? So you wing it—leadership, fatherhood, manhood—there’s no formula.
