A few years ago I was trying to correct my daughter about something. One of those recurring clashes parents and kids fall into. She was sitting at her desk doing homework, and without even looking up she said, “Dad, I cannot get into that right now, I am doing my homework.” I told her she was right, that it was more important. She turned back to her work and said, quietly, “Don’t get it twisted.”
That landed.
She was not being dismissive. She was being clear. She knew what mattered in that moment, and she was not going to let anything pull her off it. I walked away thinking about that phrase more than I expected to.
There is an old practice among sailors navigating open ocean with nothing more than crude instruments. They stayed oriented by fixing their attention on specific points in the sky, constellations, and in the Northern Hemisphere, the North Star. The star itself did not move. That was the point. Everything else shifted with the wind and the current and the darkness, but that single point held steady. The navigator’s job was simple and demanding at once: do not lose sight of it.
“Don’t get it twisted.”
I have been thinking about how that applies to my own work. Not just the professional side, though it shows up there clearly enough. In my personal life too, and in the parts of life that go deeper than either of those. There is always something pulling at attention. A conflict worth having later. A correction that feels urgent. A distraction dressed up as a priority.
The mistake is not ignoring everything else. The mistake is losing your fixed point while you are dealing with everything else. That is getting it twisted.
My daughter already knew this. She was not avoiding the conversation. She was protecting her focus. She had something in front of her that required her full attention, and she was not willing to surrender it, even to me, even for a moment. That is not stubbornness. That is clarity.
The sailors did not stop noticing the waves. They just refused to let the waves redefine their heading. Every time the ship moved off course, they came back to the star. Not dramatically. Not with a speech. They just looked up, found it, and corrected.
That is the practice. In work, in the daily routine, in the longer arc of a life, the question is the same. What is the fixed point? What is the thing that does not move, the thing worth orienting toward when everything else is pulling in different directions? Find it. Keep finding it. Don’t get it twisted.
My next step is simple. At the start of each day, before anything else crowds in, I name the one thing I am orienting toward. Not a list. One thing. Then I let that be the star.
