Blinded by the Light

It’s amazing how long a person can agonize about making a change — stumbling around in the dark, trying to find the path forward.  For me, it literally took months.  Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I tried polling my friends on  Twitter.  The question was simple:  Should I stay or should I go?  Within minutes, the answers came flying back and they were nearly unanimous — Go!

Go where?  To WordPress.  (And you thought I was agonizing over something truly earth shattering, right?  But think about it for a minute.  My question is just a proxy for a lot of tough decisions we face daily.  It’s the process of working through the question that I want to focus on here.)  The reality is that when you’ve made an investment in something, it’s hard to turn your back on your sunk costs and start over again.  In fact, the real question for me was:  Do I stay where I’m comfortable or do I take a risk and move?

As you can see, I’ve moved.  But the thing that tipped the balance for me was identifying the issues that were holding me back:  fear of the unknown and fear of failure.  Once I named them, I literally was blinded by the light.  I’ve been writing for some time about the importance of change and, especially, about the importance of feeling free to fail in order to learn and grow.  In fact, I’m on record for saying that failure is a critical prerequisite of innovation.  So now, having seen the light, I have to put on my sunglasses and walk the walk.

I’m up to my eyebrows in change and just a hair’s breadth away from disaster.  But as I work through this particular set of experiments and changes, I’ll be documenting my lessons as they become clear to me.  After all, as long as we’re learning,  we can’t call the experience a loss.  And, we certainly can’t call it failure.

(Photo Credit:  Little Ricky, Creative Commons License)