Andy Lykens

Innovating and operating through growth

Progress

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.

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.

How hard is it really?

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That thing you’re avoiding, how hard is it really? What is the actual activity that you need to undertake?

Sending an email? Having a conversation? Raising your hand? Doing a little math?

Certainly these things aren’t hard. No one is asking you to push a boulder up a hill.

And even if they did, could you find a way to start? A lever and fulcrum. A group of allies and a meeting time.

It’s easier to predict an outcome of failure so that we have an excuse not to act than it is to actually act. And slowly, over time, the action we’re not taking slips away. And we wonder how we wound up like this.

It’s unlikely that what you’re avoiding is actually that difficult. And it’s equally unlikely that whatever outcome you’re imagining will be accurate.

If you do nothing but make excuses, you can be sure of an outcome that won’t be your idea (unless you’re very lucky).

So what are you waiting for?

Traction

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Skis are slippery on the bottom, which is great when you want to ski down a hill. But how do you get up a hill if you don’t have a ski-lift?

This is where skinning comes in.

Skinning is an old indigenous practice of affixing seal skins to the bottom of skis. If the sealskin is attached so that the grain of seal hair faces in the right direction on the bottom of the ski, it creates traction and you can slide your skis up a hill.

If you’re just starting out, you may feel like you’re not getting anywhere, and that can be frustrating. Just remember the beauty of traction is that once you have it, your entire journey becomes possible.