Andy Lykens

Innovating and operating through growth

Posts

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.