Andy Lykens

Innovating and operating through growth

Feeling Stuck?

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When there’s no momentum, when the conversations happen when you’re not there, when you try something new and it doesn’t take off, that’s when you feel stuck.

Stuck is annoying. Stuck isn’t the same as failure, stuck is stuck. Not moving ahead, but also not falling behind. If failure is a pool of sharks, stuck is the treadmill in front of it. To be stuck, you have to be trying.

I wish I had the answer for getting unstuck, but I don’t. All I can think about are the jars I haven’t been able to open. They were stuck. And they were stuck. And they were stuck. And suddenly…they weren’t.

Checklist

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Tasks you can complete do you the smallest amount of good. Don’t let them distract you from spending time on the work that never ends.

A decision made

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Decision-making can be quick, pragmatic, slow, careless. You can hear all the arguments or not. You can do the analysis or rely on intuition. You can mix these approaches.

In any case, if you’re the one deciding in the first place you’re likely to benefit. It’s difficult to undo a decision made. That’s a positive and a negative depending on where you stand.

If you’re going to burn the boats, it’s a risky bet with upside if you’re right. If you achieve first-mover advantage, it’s hard to beat, at least for a while. And in both cases, being wrong will quickly be forgotten and being right (or lucky) is sure to bring reward.

So the lesson is to look for opportunities to decide – rather than to simply react to a decision someone else has made.

Boring people

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Seek out the boring people. The ones who slug it out, doing the work. The people who bring big impact even in small spaces, who aren’t vying for credit, and who show up every day to do it over again even as they go unnoticed.

Boring people know how the sausage is made because they make it. They know what it feels like to do something well. It is their point of pride. They could take it apart and put it back together again.

Boring people are different than the people phoning it in. A boring person is doing a job most people ignore. The phoners are doing a job that everyone ignores.

The conditions for a boring person to excel are: the identification of a problem, the permission to fix it, and constrained resources.

When you stop and marvel at how something works, chances are a boring person figured it out. Not because they’re especially smart, talented, or wealthy, but because they had to even though it was hard. And because everyone else knew someone boring would do it if they just waited.

Trying, Failure, and Winning

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They’re all the same, because in each case you’re doing something and you get a benefit. Respectively: empowerment, knowledge, your goal.

Most of the parameters that determine your outcome you can’t control. Plus there’s the element of fortune, good or bad.

It doesn’t really matter how you start or where you end up – you always get some benefit and you’re never in control of the outcome.

In which case the only thing that doesn’t make sense, is never starting in the first place.

Checking

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It is so great to have something to check. Something to check means progress is being made. The package is on the way, the project is moving forward, the numbers are ticking ever higher. Checking can be encouraging, exciting, and instructive.

But checking is a trap. Things don’t happen because you check, things happen because you take action, make a move, share something. The checks are the ripples from the first drop.

Checking is tricky because it can be nuanced. You can create new ways check; new ways to filter the spreadsheet, or create a new ratio. But this nuanced checking is still checking at its heart.

The more time you spend checking, the more likely it is you’re being distracted; doing things that are important but secondary.

By all means, check. But don’t lose site of the fact that you must keep doing things, over and over, to make the checking informative and useful.