Steer into the Skid
A Whole New Perspective on the Art of Problem-Solving
Have you ever had something come up at you from a point-blank range?
You probably had to oversee evasion to improvise calculating damage-control.Then you’d have a lot of causes amount to it, and the most significant could be having taken the less-beaten track that not many people wandered into, but it didn’t matter. You were pretty much off the track — maybe it wasn’t going to hurt a lot, but nothing mattered at that instant:
Other than finding a way to get back on track.
If you are an independent creator who has to do all the nasty work right up to marketing, it’s going to be a long, hard path. You are going to think, now that you have gotten the worst part of getting your product done and gold-wrapped, more opportunities are going to unfurl your way to get your skill monetized. But it’s only being highly ambitious. The real battle does not begin until after.
Besides, if it takes the assurance of earning off of your skills much before you have put them to any use at all to even get started, you don’t marginally qualify.
So your startup is in shambles. As much as you’d managed all your expenses in every way comfortable to suit your financial paranoia, there’s one or some part that loses juice along the way and requires immediate backing-up.
Or you could hardly ever trust your own decisions again after what you’d done to make sure your work didn’t get lost in the noise ended up ensuring just that. Your nerves are shot-up. You are close to giving up.
You’d then be scrambling for a miracle.
It’s funny, though, it has supposedly got to be in a path that’s in every way assuring conflict (with the few people who dared take it) as it’s less-beaten. If you were ever going to take a fall, the least you would get is sympathy, that often outsources to secret glee.
So, what do you have to do to get back on track? What’s damage-control to you? How are you going to stand back up?
If you had driven around cars yourself for long enough, you probably know what uncontrollability is during a skid. You’d think you had always been so careful with your maneuvers like your car could capsize any moment, but somehow you understood how traction worked during a skid — or more likely didn’t.
And the best way to pull your wheels out of the skid is to steer right into it, and not against it. You might think you have to fight the skid giving all the gas to the other direction. But this further proliferates the uncontrollability.
Any problem that materializes in an otherwise uneventful career could flippantly dishearten us, like we were being bullied into inactivity and failure. If we had a choice, we would certainly want a completely frictionless surface to base all our startups and passions. But, starting from lacking a balance with external elements, and failing to elucidate and utilize all the power up to the brim of our potential sparks considerable amounts of it.
Besides, without friction, your career isn’t going anywhere.
Once in a while, it becomes inevitable to lose traction with your craft. It couldn’t be called disengagement, but you’d feel an overpowering confine after you’d had a graze with your errancy. On hindsight, it might tie up with Infallibility Syndrome, where you’d think you had to have everything figured out and hence you could never fail — but then when you do, you are largely disappointed.
On the whole, the reason you lose traction could be because of some internal factors like:
- Lack of curiosity
- Lack of confidence
- Lack of self-realization
Or other external factors like:
- Lack of resources
- Lack of funds
- Lack of a mentor
Consequently, now that you have lost traction and started skidding away from your path, you try to make up for it by directing all your fuel to steer away from the skid:
So, now’s the best time to ask money from a friend because you have used up all yours. Or you take sanctuary in wrong mentorship because you are desperately in need for help. At the worst, you may self-realize without self-actualizing, and end up using the wrong part of your fullest potential.
Whenever you have a problem, if you try and dive deep into it rather than make blunt evasive measures to detach yourself from it, you might end up learning more about its solution than when you take the easy way out.
On December 9, 1914 Thomas Alva Edison lost half the buildings in his West Orange Laboratory to a devastating fire. He did not shy away from it, although he was 67 years old then, and only two million would be covered by insurance when the damages amounted to seven million. He went right into the problem, and vowed he would start all over again the next day.
If he was steering away from this “skid”, he probably wouldn’t have invented a portable searchlight for the reconstruction party, whose three-million-candlepower beam would be visible for miles. He had finalized its design just two days after the fire, and made a demonstration six months after.
When you run out of money, find other ways to raise what you need rather than just borrow it from a friend. Instead of using what you think you have, put yourself through suitable stimuli to activate your inner talents, and hence self-actualize yourself. When you aren’t feeling particularly confident or curious about your craft, because you have lame reasons like how your muse ditched you, do it anyway instead of waiting for a lightening bolt of inspiration. Change your mentor when you reach the point you begin to feel he’s limiting you.
Embrace all your failures.
