How to Get Unstuck: Study

Learn something new, just because.

Sara Benincasa
Creators Hub
Published in
6 min readNov 1, 2021

--

Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash

This story is behind Medium’s membership paywall, which means the writer earns through our Partner Program. To become a Medium member, click here.

When is the last time you approached a task with the unclouded, pure and open mind of an eager child? If you’re like me, you probably can’t recall. In fact, you may have actually been a child the last time you really let yourself jump into something new. And if you were an anxious, shy kid — as I was — this joyful leap may have taken place in the years before your memories began to settle.

You may, in short, have no memory of a time before you were afraid to not be good enough. As adults, getting stuck on a project is certainly not in line with the generally accepted definition of “good enough.” But sometimes it’s quite necessary, and rather than persevere, we must temporarily set it aside in order to do something else.

We get stuck in our work for many reasons, but it’s not usually because we suck at it. In fact, when stuckness arrives, we are generally engaged in an activity at which we are quite adept. The stuckness, then, comes not from lack of talent or skill, but from something else — fatigue, or fear, or fixation on some imagined idea of perfection. We’ve done this before, so we must do it better this time around.

--

--

Sara Benincasa
Creators Hub

Author, REAL ARTISTS HAVE DAY JOBS & other books. Writer of scripts. Host of WELL, THIS ISN’T NORMAL podcast. Patreon.com/SaraBenincasa