2-3-4 Friday

‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’

1 thought

Yesterday, I was listening to a politician speak at an event on education. He shared about his recent visit to a school, where he asked the students why they weren’t playing on the newly constructed track.

They told him that it was only concrete, and that the rubber hadn’t been laid upon it.

He pointed out how people can play on any surface, and not just one that has a rubber surface.

It’s like your footballer complaining that the natural grass is not good enough for his passes.

Or closer to home, it might be you, and me, complaining that the condition is not quite right for us to excel.

When do you take the leap of faith, and when do you hold?

When I first incorporated a company in June 2020, at the height of the pandemic, things couldn’t have looked bleaker. I studied social work, and not business, and didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew I wanted a different way to make a difference.

I had my first two teams break up, right in front of me.

One painful moment came when a software engineer we had hired announced during our weekly meeting that he wasn’t planning to continue any longer and would move onto finding another job. I didn’t know how to react.

I had tried everything I could to win projects, but I still couldn’t keep him.

The most painful thing was feeling like I let him down, and that I hadn’t tried hard enough.

This happens alot in our lives. Where you are faced with a big decision, and you don’t quite know what you should do, and the least that we do, is hold. 

We end up sitting and waiting, and not really doing anything.

You might be in a job you hate. You want to move, but you stay in your job, whilst applying for jobs sporadically.

Or you’re in a relationship that’s not working out, but you stay in it, thinking that if you give it enough time, it will work out.

None of this is easy to hear, but if you’re never fully in, you’re never fully out.

We can dance around the edges and flirt with the idea of what it would be like if we really took bold action to get what we want, and went all the way out to get it.

The thing you shouldn’t do is to sit and wait, doing the same thing, hoping for something different to happen.

1 talk

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

• Dr Val Gonzales, psychotherapist

1 tip

The quote above is what my therapist often tells me.

And it’s what has inspired me to always, always take an action bias.

You can too.

You might be fearful of what happens if you take the big step forward. You start thinking that you’re uncertain, and you start asking ‘what if’ questions. 

There’s wisdom in making calculated decisions. But there’s also wisdom in trusting yourself, that come what may, you’re going to handle it.

Because you won’t have a 100% correct answer for what you should do.

You just need to make the decision, and adjust along the way.

John

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