Recognize When You’re Stuck

Last week, I found myself in need of my own expertise. Except — as is often the case — I didn’t have the wherewithal to recognize it in my moment of need.

I was taking care of some household chores, driving around with way too much stuff in my car. Even the passenger seat was filled to the brim, so much so that whenever I turned to the right, that the empty cooler that I had balanced on top of the Jenga pile kept slamming into my shoulder.

It was annoying and slightly painful. My self-talk was, “You can only handle another 45 more minutes of this before you’re going to incur rotator cuff injury…”

As I often do when I’ve got time to kill running errands, I called my brother to catch up. After talking about life for a few minutes, he said, “Hey dude… why do you keep grunting?” I told him about the cooler situation. “Have you tried buckling it in with the seatbelt? That’s what I do whenever I’ve got too much gear in my truck.”

After wrestling with the seatbelt for about 30 seconds, voilá, problem solved. It took less than 1 minute to solve the problem I was resigned to enduring.

The sad thing is, I didn’t even think to ask for help, despite the fact that my brother is in construction. His expertise was perfectly suited to advise me in that moment. The breakthrough solution he suggested was the most obvious thing in the world to him. So much so that he hesitated to mention it at all, for fear of “stating the obvious.” But it was the most genius contribution anyone could have possibly made to the situation I was in.

Breakthroughs often come from outside one’s field, and we should be as eager to embrace an outsider’s perspective as we are to preserve our own. But when push comes to shove — the moment we forecast the cooler slamming into our shoulder for the next 45 minutes — we tend to forget to ask for help. The problem is we don’t realize we’re dealing with a problem. According to one of my favorite studies on creative thinking, "people fail to recognize when rigid thinking creeps in."

After I got off the phone with my brother, I took a picture of the seatbelted-secured cooler. I wanted to remember the power of an outside perspective, and also my own tendency to forget to ask for help.

Recognizing when we get unstuck — memorializing breakthroughs through pictures, notes, or blog posts — is an important step in illuminating some of our default modes of working.

Related: Be Obvious
Related: Preserve Your Perspective
Related: Diagram Your Last Breakthrough

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