When you notice things aren’t going the way you want sometimes you’ve got to stop pushing. Stop. Step back. And consider the bigger picture.
When you do this you’ll usually find you need to retrace your steps. Perhaps you took a wrong turn somewhere back down the trail. Or maybe you’ve been building on shaky foundations.
This realisation brings a huge opportunity: you’ve got the chance to go back and make things better. But this is hard.
The first obstacle is your ego.
It hurts to admit that you’ve been wrong. It hurts to go back and work on “simpler” stuff when you feel you should be diving further into the super advanced and complicated mess that makes you look like a genius who’s on top of everything and way out at the front.
But that’s merely table stakes. There’s something much more insidious. If you do swallow your ego and start again from the beginning then the battle is only just beginning. The hardest part is yet to come.
Identifying a fixable problem at the core of things reveals a tantalising prospect to you. You realise that you’re now on the path to achieving your desires. So you expect great results; and you expect them soon.
But it doesn’t work like that. In fact, it’s usually completely the opposite.
When you go backwards things often get worse before they get better.
You might find you grind to a halt for the moment — not even able to maintain your previous slow crawl forward. Or, just as likely, the things that were previously working fall apart and fail.
This is all good.
It’s a necessary stage on the route to that promised land up ahead where everything’s running the way you want. But you’ve got to be prepared for it. And you’ve got to be willing to push through it.
Here’s why it happens:
When you delve back into the fundamentals you usually find that you’ve built on shaky foundations. And the answer is not to try and shore them up with a temporary fix. You need to rip them out and start again — correctly this time. You need to deliberately break things at the most fundamental level in order to access new options in the future. That means everything’s going to come crashing down for a bit as you rebuild.
So you’ve got to be patient.
The reason things came off the rails in the first place is because you were rushing to get to the exciting, ‘advanced’ bits. That’s where the shaky foundations came from.
Going back to basics is inevitably going to be frustrating. If it was fun or sexy you’d have been doing it already! You’d have spent the time you needed on it in the beginning rather than rushing ahead.
And it’s going to be even worse the second time around.
You’ve gone from assuming that things are just fine to accepting that something’s fundamentally wrong so you’re actively on the lookout for problems. Previously, the situation flowed serenely past you with any potential problems obscured by your hazy glow of satisfaction with how things were going. Now, any potential issue is highlighted and magnified in painfully sharp focus.
So you need to strap in for the long haul and be prepared to push through the pain when you go backwards. It’s not fun. It’s not easy. But it’s worth it in the end.