What Robert Frost Taught Me about Making Hard Decisions
Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" might be one of the most misunderstood poems in American literature. For years, I thought it was about diving into the unknown, until I realized it's about something much more profound: the simple, powerful act of choosing.
“The Road Not Taken” might be the most famous poem in the American literary canon. It’s one that I studied multiple times throughout my schooling, and it made Robert Frost a household name for generations to come.
I’d bet that you’ve heard of the poem. I’d go even further and speculate that most people reading this have read it or are at least aware of its contents.
The general idea (or so I thought for many years) is that the narrator comes across a fork in the road. He makes the bold decision to choose the lesser trodden of the paths. “That has made all the difference,” so the poem beautifully concludes.
Rethinking a Classic Poem
I always thought this famous poem was about making the hard choice. I thought it stood in as a metaphor for the classical concept of the American Dream.
Recently, I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was an uncomfortable yet beautiful realization.
The full poem can be found here, but I’ll include the key quotes as I discuss them throughout the blog post. It’s a rather short poem, so give it a quick read before continuing if you’d like (it’s only 20 lines long).
Beyond Those Famous Lines
The narrator does indeed stand at an intersection of two paths feeling “sorry [he] could not travel both.” There is a choice to be made.
He stares down the first path until it’s out of sight then looks to the other. Initially, this second path looks easier to traverse, but the narrator admits that “the passing there / Had worn them about the same.” These paths look slightly different, but in reality, they’re equal.
The narrator has a decision to make. “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.” The poem adopts a more figurative tone here. Sure, there are paths we physically cross that we might never revisit (maybe some beautiful trail whilst on a European vacation), but this is where the paths begin to resemble the narrator’s future, his potential. He must pick one path without guarantee that he’ll ever get to try the other. There is an opportunity cost to his decision.
Before deciding, the narrator confesses that he “shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” This is a decision that he expects to be important one day, but how so? He cannot yet tell.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” We finally get those famous lines that I so grievously misinterpreted for so many years of my life.
If you were to just read the final stanza, then yes, the poem is about the American Dream. It is about choosing the risky decision over the sure bet.
But this poem doesn’t exist just as the final stanza.
The final stanza exists in the context of what comes before it (kind of like we do as humans, but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself there).
Choosing without Certainty
The narrator decides. That’s the important bit. It’s not necessarily critical whether he chooses one path or the other but rather that he picks at all. In retrospect, he will look back and say that the one he chose was the harder path and the correct one, but this comes with the admittance that it is impossible to know in the present.
A Real-Life Fork in the Road
I heard a story about Steve Jobs once. I’m not 100% sure if it’s true, but the point stands, nevertheless.
After he dropped out of college, Jobs audited a calligraphy class. This didn’t seem particularly relevant to the work he’d go on to do, but it was. That calligraphy class instilled the importance of type face and font to Jobs. He took that knowledge and incorporated it into Apple’s early software designs. Fonts ended up being an area where Apple stood out from Microsoft and other competitors.
Imagine Jobs was torn between auditing a calligraphy class or a pottery class. There’s a world where he chooses pottery. In that world, iPhones could look entirely different, and we could all be using the bland monospace font associated with coding terminals instead of Comic Sans.
Jobs didn’t know the importance of that decision when he made it. He only was able to understand the importance looking backward, just like the narrator in Frost’s poem.
You Can't Predict What Will Matter
Despite how much the news might act like certain outcomes are inevitable, nothing is fully a foregone conclusion. Something you consider a small action today could wind up being a major decision. The important thing is that you decide.
Decide to start writing the book you’ve been dreaming of. Decide to start running. Maybe you’ll fail, but that failure will only inform you on how to do better the next time. Just decide.
Now, if you’re making a big decision, spend an appropriate amount of time deciding, but don’t let the burden overwhelm and paralyze you. A lot of choices are somewhat reversible (even tattoos are removable with pain and lasers).
The next time you come face to face with a seemingly critical decision, think back to Frost’s poem. Maybe it’s not so important as to what you decide to do, but rather that you commit and own that decision. Who knows, maybe you’ll look back on it as the decision that made all the difference.
What choices have you been sitting on for too long? How can you move forward with a decision?