Appreciate Small Breakthroughs

Last week, I was taking care of some errands, driving around with way too much stuff in my car. Even the passenger seat was filled to the brim, so that the empty cooler that I had balanced on top of the Jenga pile kept slamming into my shoulder every time I turned right. It was annoying and slightly painful. My self-talk was, “You can handle 45 more minutes of this silliness…”

As I often do when I’ve got time to kill in the car, 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 just a minute, voilá, problem solved. It took all of 1 minute to solve the problem I was resigned to spend 45 minutes 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.

It’s often the case that breakthroughs 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 don’t tend to think of asking for help.

After I got off the phone with my bro, 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.

Appreciating the small breakthroughs — memorializing them through pictures, notes, or blog posts — is an important step in rewiring some of our default ways of working.

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

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