When you can't get anything done
Perhaps you're finding yourself unable to push even a tiny bit further on a project. No amount of brute force or additional time will unblock your desire to check that item off a list.
In almost all cases the answer is to take a break. Get some water, stretch, go on a walk, or a run. If you have the opportunity sleep on it and come back fresh the next morning. Or try taking a nap.
Forcing creativity to pay attention doesn’t work when the mind and body are exhausted.
Maybe you have lack of clarity.
Maybe you’re working with stakeholders that don’t know what they want. Maybe you don’t know what you want. If this happens sharing what you believe to be true will always get pushback from others. That’s a good thing. It moves the project forward.
Early on in my career I learned that sharing a sketch or design or early draft of a project, even when I knew much was broken, unlocked the project by getting much needed feedback from others.
I still value that feedback, and use it often, but sometimes more to state out loud what I’m blocked on. Recording a video of your progress and sharing it is a form of rubber ducking that can bring clarity to the fog in your mind.
Maybe you lack experience.
Sometimes you’re placed on projects or with teams where your lack of experience stands out. You haven’t quite done this thing before. If half of the words spoken don’t make any sense, there’s a chance that you’ll fail through no fault of your own.
In these situations you have a few choices. You can double down with energy, throwing every bit of will and time you have at the problem. It may work, or you may get burnt out. Sometimes I’ve been fortunate enough to win with persistence when experience wasn’t enough.
But other times you might just fail. And that’s not the worst thing. Failure could mean needing to change projects, teams, or get a chance to restart the work alltogether. It’s not ideal, but the fact you got in the room to try is often a win in itself.
You can learn from those failures and improve and have some real world experience to help separate the theoretical from the actual. When I’ve been in the right frame of mind I’ve been able to use failures to push my career forward.
On a recent team meeting we touched on the idea of calling these learnings instead of losses. I like that.
The most critical thing to remember, whether you’re exhausted, projects are going poorly, or even if projects are going well, is your own value. Maybe you haven’t yet realized marketplace value yet, maybe someone else hasn’t recognized that you’re worth the salary you believe you deserve.
That has absolutely zero bearing on what you bring to this world. You’re a miracle, an amazing bundle of a human, sitting atop this spinning planet and part of the beauty of life we see all around us. You deserve to be here, you deserve to be seen, and I hope you receive chances in this world where your value as a being is appreciated as much as the value you can bring to the market.