Burning the Boats to Live More Urgently

Never have I been miserable in my work.

Not when I cleaned river-dust from under semi-trucks for the family janitorial business. Not when I speed-keyed pages full of 16-digit numbers for 14 hours daily for an entire summer. Not when I danced in heels on a concrete rehearsal floor to perform outdoors in KC summer heat and humidity.?

Not until this last year.

I still loved the 1 on 1 sessions with my clients as much as always. It was the tedious lead generation required to focus in a new market that was unbearable.

I winnowed that new market, consulting with other consultants, intending it to be a low-friction way to underwrite a new venture I’d paused during the pandemic. Instead, I worked on daily sandpaper with so little from the endeavor, I could barely tolerate the abrasion. I also felt confined by the conversations about a portion of my career instead of the breadth of my experience. I worked in a straightjacket without a rip cord.

It’s what Pulitzer Prize winning poet?Tracey K. Smith ?spoke about at the Sun Valley Writer’s Conference as?endemic island dwarfism . Beings grow in proportion to the size of their environment. For a full year, I was like a goldfish that could grow only so much in my current pond. I was stuck in my outgrown past.

"You don’t move on because you’re ready to move on. You move on because you’ve outgrown who you used to be.”? - Carrie Bradshaw, Season 2, ep 6 Bomb Cyclone, And Just Like That

I was sick of it, and stating that aloud for the first time reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from the movie I’ve watched more times than all others.

"I realize now that I have been wrong. All this time, I have been waiting. Waiting for what? For someone to find me? For Indians to take my horse? To see a buffalo? Since I arrived at this post I have been walking on eggs. It has become a bad habit, and I am sick of it. Tomorrow I will ride out to the Indians. I don't know the outcome, or the wisdom of this thinking, but I have become a target. And a target makes a poor impression. I am through waiting." -?John Dunbar, Dances with Wolves

Worn from working too long in ruts instead of grooves, I knew I would need to rekindle energy for the coming changes. I reached out for reinforcements on LinkedIn and offline to colleagues with whom I’d created boldly in the past. I sought quotes and books and stories to mine for next steps and encouragement, including some of my own writing from other chapters in my entrepreneurial life.

Bozoma Saint John is one of the most energizing people I’ve met, so I bumped her book to the top of my pile. “The Urgent Life” reminded me that I can’t know my life’s expiration date. If what I want really matters, I need to move forward promptly – not manically, but urgently aware of my mortality. And I recall her words about intuition.

“We try to rationalize, and sometimes intuition is what's going to drive you. Look, we all have it…We tend to ignore that because it's not based in fact, or what we respect as fact. But I have tested my intuition on enough times that now, I will turn around just because the vibes weren't right…It's not always the paper that tells you that it's the right idea.” -??Bozoma Saint John

I was starting to understand that I wasn’t impatient, I had the wrong strategy. My intuition was rearing at the hurdles when I read this from a fellow equestrian:

"There is no greater mistake than to try to leap into an abyss in two jumps" - David LLoyd George, former British Prime Minister

And saw this book title by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy , "10x Is Easier than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less.” I was decidedly trying to 2x a 10x leap, to take two jumps over an abyss, and I’d landed at the bottom of the canyon in a Dodie -shaped hole from the fall, flat splat like Wile E. Coyote.

I wasn’t sure exactly what new Plan B would replace the one I’d intended to bridge “safely” to my Plan A when I read:

"Whilst we're contemplating, putting off, making perfect, getting all the ducks in a beautifully straight row, procrastinating and generally faffing about, we could simply take the leap. There's nothing to lose. You've done the homework, you're ready! Go!" – Dr Tracey Cole

Tracey was right, I had done the homework. Years of homework. Seeing now that Plan B was taking more resources than Plan A, I had neither an intuitive nor factual reason to hesitate further. Compared to that generally faffing about Plan B, Plan A was actually less expensive in every way.

I started sketching ideas for a 10x, single leap when I got the direct message from Matt Higgins suggesting I check out his new book, “Burn the Boats!” Burning the boats is a strategy credited to Hernán Cortés when he landed in Mexico in 1519. Knowing his crew was exhausted, he ordered the ships’ burning to give his crew only one way to advance on land.

Reading story after story in Matt’s book, I was reminded of how many other times in my own entrepreneurial career I’d leapt forward in one hop without looking back. I remember a couple times when I burned the boats without realizing I'd assured my success, not sabotaged it.

I could see now that for the first time one thing continued to keep me on a smouldering ship. At this point in my life, a life that is rewarding because of many intentional choices, the stakes felt too high to leap, even if my feet were blistered and my sails bedraggled. I didn’t want to lose what matters to me while transitioning to the next chapter I’d sought for years.

I needed a new set of constraints for how I could 10x my work without risking unnecessarily what matters most about the other parts of my life. Once I’d committed to swim ashore and burn the boats, after I’d redefined the edges of how I would work next, a detailed plan emerged easily.

Three weeks later, I'd made the 10x leap.

“Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.” - David Bowie

Wondering about my Plan A?

I’m back where I started, in showbiz, baby. Arguably, it’s where I should have been all along. Yet I’m better prepared by the lessons and bolstered by the stories of my career so far, the ones I’ll continue to collect and share in this newsletter and when my capacity allows with other entrepreneurs and those in the #entrepreneurship ecosystem who serve them. Until my next sequel.

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