What's Your Strategy When Things Aren’t Working?

Getting unstuck, favorite books, and quiet as a natural resource

For the remainder of 2022, I’ll alternate each week — a fresh dispatch followed by something from the archives. Today’s dispatch features a post I wrote back in 2017.

Ten things that aren’t a strategy:

• anger

• anxiety

• cynicism

• self-doubt

• hope

• passion

• good intentions

• expectations

• wishful thinking

• magic

These can all be fuel, but they aren’t strategies. Some are better fuel than others. But they are all fuel for your strategy, not the strategy itself.

The problem with the list above is, without any other tactics or actual strategies, these “false strategies” all end up in the same place: hopelessness.

The feeling that nothing you try will work, things are always going to be this way, and there is nothing you can do about it. That’s what inevitably happens when you are using a false strategy, like hope.

“I hope this works out” is a perfectly fine thing to think or believe, but a poor way to actually nudge an outcome in your favor. Hope, believing that positive future outcomes are possible, can be a critical ingredient in helping you grow and persevere. But hope has to be paired with some other action or movement. The same goes for anger, good intentions, and having expectations. Left alone, they are mighty powerless.

On the other hand, strategies can actually move the ball down the field. Here is the start of a list of strategies you can use to nudge the outcome in your favor:

• listen

• empathize

• take a risk

• set and work toward short-term goals that add up to a bigger one

• resist the comfortable choice

• assume the best in others

• limit your options and commit

• get direct, honest feedback

• rest and recover

• practice

• learn

• meet another person’s needs

• exceed another person’s expectations

• cut your losses and move on

• double down

• experiment

• practice gratitude

• be accountable

• be transparent

• decide

• ship early and often

• practice humility

What else would you add to this list?

Personally and professionally, in your relationships and in your community: do you have a strategy to get where you want to be, to see what you want to see? If you don’t have an actual strategy, get one. If you do, is it working? Or is time to add to it or try something new?

Strategies don’t guarantee success, but they create space to take action, to learn, and to keep moving forward.

When you are stuck, or when you aren’t seeing the outcome you want to see, what is your strategy?

Maybe you need to be more resilient. Maybe you need to change your strategy. Most importantly, make sure you have a strategy.

It’s too easy to fool ourselves and settle for something less.

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Links to Check Out

(these are current, not from 2017)

• All There is With Anderson Cooper: Stephen Colbert: Grateful for Grief. This podcast episode is a beautiful, vulnerable, inspiring conversation that expands on the powerful interview I’ve shared before.

• NASA’s new images of “The Pillars of Creation.” Unbelievably beautiful, astonishing, and the kind of thing that simultaneously makes you feel infinitely small and wildly grateful

• The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel. “Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”

• I refreshed my personal “Library” on my website. My favorite books across several categories.

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For the Road

“Quiet is a natural resource. But along with dark night skies, it's not one we often think about until we experience its wonder for ourselves.” — Andrea Debbink

A Sunday morning walk at Fort Harrison State Park.

A Sunday morning walk at Forst Harrison State Park.

See more of my fall photos on Unsplash.