Do you Feel Stuck in a Rut?
The quickest way to get out of a rut is to have a deadline. The moment you don't have a deadline, you're in trouble. Soon, that blip becomes a blurb, which becomes a balabooza that you can't control.
How do you get out of a rut quickly—really quickly? Here is the second best way.
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Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
What's the second best way to get out of a rut?
Well, let's look at the first way, and that is to have a deadline. Most of our activities in life don't have a deadline. And if we wait, we wait just a little bit, we tend to get into a rut.
Take this podcast for instance. There was no rut two weeks ago. I had a whole bunch of articles that I wanted to write, a lot of scripts that I had in hand. And then suddenly, last week, for probably the third or fourth time in ten years, Yes, it's been ten years on the podcast.
I didn't record the podcast. And now, I mean, I wrote that. “Rot comes in so quickly. Don't expect it.” And then suddenly, you have nothing. You're trying to do something, but you have nothing.
And this is what I advise people when they're in the article writing course.
They start to write an article and then another one and a third one and the fourth one and maybe they're in the 17th one and then they hit that right and they can't think of what to write next.
Well what you have to do is talk about the trouble that you're having writing the article. When you do that the first thing that happens is that you're physically writing, see you're doing the act of whatever you're planning to do And that alone gets you moving.
If I'm struggling with the podcast, and I start talking, like I'm doing right now, that gets me out of that rut. So it's very important for me to just talk about how I am feeling.
And might sound bizarre because I might have to do this many times over a lifetime of a podcast or many times over the lifetime of an article. But no matter how many times I do that, as long as it's not super frequent, somebody's gonna get the benefit of it.
Somebody else is going to be in that rut.
They're gonna be listening to this podcast and going, that's right. I have to do a bit of what I'm supposed to do. If I'm supposed to write an article, well, let me write about why I'm struggling to write an article.
If I'm supposed to make a podcast, let me talk about why it's so hard for me to make a podcast right now. And so it gives them that little in-road, your frustration, your problem gives the other person in-road.
You're not even trying to solve their problem. You're just trying to solve your own problem by speaking, writing, drawing, doing whatever it is that you have to do. And then talking about it. And then that moves the needle from zero to one and you're slightly out of that rut.
But here's the second problem that all of us have, and that is we want to do a really good job. Right now as I stand before you, I don't have a script. I don't have a story. I don't have three parts to this podcast. I don't have all that polish that normally goes into any of this production. And it feels very naked.
I feel exposed.
Like maybe I should just go back to the computer and sit for a little while and put something together. And I know that won't work because I've tried it all of last week and on Monday and Tuesday and today's Wednesday.
So I know that whatever I'm doing right now has to be unpoliced, slightly unfinished. It has to be a role. Because somehow that Ronis will come across to you.
You will experience that frustration.
This podcast might even sound better than some of the other podcasts that are polished and finished and have the stories and have everything in there. Probably the third thing that you have to do to get out of rut is to make it as short as possible. And so this brings us to the end of this podcast.
So what did we cover?
The main thing that we covered was that deadlines they make you do stuff.But if you don't have deadlines, it's not uncommon to fall into a rot, especially when you have dozens of things that you're doing.
And still, you have to do this one thing. So the first thing is to talk about the rot. If you're writing about it, then write about how you start if you're drawing, you can draw if you're dusting the furniture.
I don't know what you can do.But essentially, talk about it to someone else, why you having this problem. And immediately you start to solve that problem.
The second thing is to overcome this concept of perfection, where everything needs to be in place. Right now, nothing is in place for me, as I stand at this microphone.
And so I know it's unpolished, but that's how it's gonna get me out of this rut.And finally, it needs to be short. You don't have much to say anyway, you don't have much to do anyway. So you might as well just keep it short and finish it off.
And the thing that you need to know is that someone somewhere is going to benefit from this.Way more than all of your polished, finessed stuff that you plan to do.
Doing something is usually better than nothing. But doing something like this where it comes from a place of raw emotion, or a raw frustration, it helps other people more than you'd expect. So if this helped you, let me know.
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