Good Life Project - When to Hold, Fold or Change. Walking Into the Fire.

Episode Date: November 25, 2015

Ever wonder how to know when it’s time to hold, fold or change? At some point, we all end up walking into the fire. We feel the fierce heat of intense pressure, anxiety, uncertainty, challenge and frustration. Often, it’s self-generated, sparked by a project, company, quest or venture we’ve launched ourselves into. It’s not fun. But, […]The post When to Hold, Fold or Change. Walking Into the Fire. appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

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At some point in every career, every relationship, venture, or quest, you're going to find yourself walking into the fire. It's this place of deep discomfort and uncertainty, Joseph Campbell's famed abyss. So you'll be working like crazy, putting everything you have into making it succeed and looking for signs. Please tell me, is this for real or is it fantasy? Is this the fire that steals or is it the fire that burns? Is it worth the brutal, brutal time that I'm going through

or is that perpetual feeling in the pit of my stomach telling me to fold? Inevitably, answers come. Bits of data, some hard, some verifiable, but more often it's the soft data, those intuitive hits, visceral responses to people, to actions, circumstances, and scenarios. Sometimes they're clear as day. Most times they're not. So what are they telling me? Are they telling

me to hold or fold? And I've asked some of the smartest, most accomplished people in the world how to discern the difference. I've never left with a really satisfactory answer. The closest I've gotten is you just know, which sometimes is true, but oftentimes it's not. So no doubt my mindfulness practice has made it a lot easier to see through the haze of the inevitable fire that every creator must embrace. To tune into that world, my intuition and data are telling me, but the smoke doesn't always clear enough to see what's on the other side. So maybe there is no simple test because anything resembling the truth isn't so pat. It's not simple. Those moments and quests that give rise to them, they're laced with a dynamism and a complexity.

And the answer's got to be laced with that too, to a certain extent. I actually explored this question in a bit of detail in my last book, Uncertainty, and recently revisited my own thoughts on the issue. I know, I'm kind of weird like that. As I wade deeper into new fires of my own creation. I actually thought I'd share a little bit of an excerpt from the conversation in Uncertainty around this. So moments like this happen all the time in every creative process when we ask some variation of the following. Is this project, idea, or quest still worth pursuing? Do I need to either shut it down or go about it in a radically different

way? Is what I'm feeling, is it just resistance, that classic lizard brain anxiety and fear that needs to be leaned into? Or is it the accumulation of enough experience and data to tell me the smart move is now to move on? So we start by asking, what was your inciting motivation? What made you undertake this endeavor to begin with? Was it in some form the expression of a calling? Was it something to keep you busy? Was it about serving a group of people or solving a problem or serving up a delight? Was it about money or doing anything you could do to get your

parents off your back and avoid grad school? Begin by going back to the time surrounding your decision to create whatever it is that you're creating and answer this question. Then move on to the next question. In light of the information and the experiences that you've had along the journey to date, does that original motive still hold true? Are you still equally or even more determined to make it happen? And given what you now know, do you believe you can make it happen? In his book, Getting to Plan B, Randy Kamazar, who's a venture capitalist, suggests setting up what he calls a dashboard. You create a grid that identifies all your major data points and assumptions and leaps of faith on day one,

then revisit it at regular intervals to assess what remains valid. And his system helps identify at a sooner point when your initial plan may be starting to go off the rails. And it gives you an objective or relatively objective set of data to help decide what your next move should be. So for entrepreneurs, especially in startup phases, it's a great tool to help answer the big questions and decide whether, as more and more data comes in, you should hold, change your hand, or fold. But I've also found that these decisions can't be made entirely based on, quote, hard data. It's also important, especially for solo creators and bootstrap entrepreneurs, to add a more subjective exploration to the process, one that dives deeper

into whether data aside, there are other reasons to consider soldiering on, adapting, or jumping ship. So consider these other questions that may help you go one level deeper and potentially prompt you to explore what's really happening in these critical moments. They'll help you understand on a level that adds clarity to the decision whether you're reacting to an inability to handle fear and uncertainty or to real data and constructive intuition that's telling you to stop. So question number one, is this something you can't not do, regardless of whether you ever earn enough to live well in the world doing it? Question two, are you more connected to the medium and your solution or your desire to serve a market? Question three, if you believe in your heart that what you set out to accomplish is highly

likely to happen in the full glory you first imagined, would you still want that result? And then finally, would the data or feedback that you've gathered to date require you to change the endeavor in such a substantial way that while it may make it more likely to succeed, the final creation or process or career will no longer satisfy the very needs and desires that drew you into the quest to start with. So that last question is big, especially for entrepreneurs and makers. It's not unusual to begin an endeavor with a strong sense of what you'd like to offer and who you'd like to serve, only to have your market eventually tell you that you've missed the mark. So for many entrepreneurs and creators, that's not a death knell. It's just a signpost that it's time to, quote, pivot the model or the solution or even the culture and the vision. Behance founder,

Scott Bielski, a really interesting example, he created something called the Action Method products that are designed to, at the time, to help make creative professionals more productive. And they worked really well. Any given product that they bring to market bombs, it would hurt the company potentially, but it wouldn't be game over. And here's the reason why. The entrepreneur just needs to figure out how to better serve the market with the next round of solution. Belsky's vision was never to create the current line of products, but rather it was to create tools and processes that made creatives or creative professionals more productive.

What those looked like would change over time, and that allegiance to a market and a mission rather than a specific product gave him a lot of leeway to continue to test, build, potentially bomb, and then evolve. So all too often, that's not how startups or even established product development teams operate. They're more wedded to their particular solution than to the notion of serving a market. And when they start to have problems with that product, ones that aren't fixable with easy tweaks, they have a very difficult time moving through these moments. Without a willingness to pivot your solution and model, the endeavor is

likely to come to an end. One of the big lessons for entrepreneurs and solution development teams is to think very seriously about that inciting motivation for the endeavor. Is the vision connected to a single product or the desire to serve a bigger mission or market? The latter, well, it's far more likely to set in motion a quest that's sustainable, especially if the mission and market evolves over time, which sends us squarely back to that final question, even if you could adapt and move forward, should you? It's one thing to evolve your quest in response to new data in an effort to create something that's better aligned with what your market needs and wants. But it's also really important at that moment to ask whether that pivot will so substantially change the nature of the endeavor that it makes you no longer as intimately connected with it. I call this product maker fit. We tend to be really

obsessed with product market fit. Does what we're creating fit the market need? But we really rarely ever focus on does what we're creating fit our needs as the makers, the founders, creators. So if evolving to meet your market means stripping away the things that drew you to the quest in the first place, You'll end up on track to potentially create something everyone else loves except you. And that will eventually cannibalize your soul. You'll end up hating what you do every day and looking for ways to get out even if what you've created appears to be outwardly successful. This happens all the time in business and art. People follow product market fit, and they never think about product maker fit, and that ends up destroying them. So many actors are drawn to the craft because of the opportunity to tell stories, to illuminate

the human condition and stir souls. But somewhere along the line, compelling stories and gravitas give way to a stable yet incrementally less fulfilling reputation as the perfect actor or consumer goods commercials. The market is telling you that's where we want you to go. So because you have to pay bills, that's what you do. You found a way to make the business work. But the way you're doing it is gutting you. You're outwardly successful in your chosen field, but inwardly empty. And that's when you have a choice to make. You can either keep doing what you're called to do, but in a way that no longer honors the call and fills you up. You can work like crazy to redefine the box you've built

and potentially try all manner of unconventional approaches to making what you want to do work. Or you can surrender to the notion that to act in the roles that honor your calling, you'll have to spend the better part of your life earning the bulk of your living some other way and be okay with that. These are really tough decisions. They're not something where, you know, the old you just know when you're thinking about do I hold, do I fold, or do I change? And by the way,

those tend to be the real questions. Most people think do I hold or do I fold? But the real exploration is do I hold, do I fold, or do I change? These questions, I hopefully can be helpful in sussing out whether what you're feeling is just fear and uncertainty, or whether it's a failure of your initial assumptions that will require you to either change how you're pursuing your quest or end it. So I'm kind of curious about you at this point. How do you figure out whether the fires that you're walking through are the fires that forge or the fires that burn? What tools do you rely on? And I'm curious too, if you're listening to this now, are you wading through the fire as you listen? And if so, what's going on?

Share your thoughts on social media. Share this around if you're interested and start a conversation around this because one of the things that I found is when you walk through the fire and you realize you're not alone and you have a conversation that helps you through it, it can be incredibly helpful along the way.

I hope you found this valuable. As always, if you feel like sharing it around and even just jump on over to iTunes or if you're listening in your podcast app, give us a quick rating or review. It helps get the word out and it helps make a difference in more people's lives. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk.