How to Step Out of Stagnation

The following is adapted from The Elephant’s Dilemma.

Wake up. Go to work. Answer emails. Sit in another weekly meeting. Go home. Repeat. 

This is the reality for most of us. We do the same things over and over, again and again and again, until we work ourselves into a rut.

The problem with ruts is the longer you’ve been in one, the harder it is to escape. The rut is all you know, so even as your daily routine becomes more and more unbearable, you feel incapable of moving anywhere more meaningful. 

Stagnation is a common trap, but there’s a simple solution. To step out of stagnation, just do something different—something new.

Easier said than done, right? It’s difficult to leave what feels safe and familiar, but there are things you can do to make it easier. Let me share with you how I personally stepped out of stagnation, and then I’ll offer some advice for how to do the same in your life.

From GE to Big Ass Fans

I worked at GE for more than ten years. When I started, I thought the job would be a springboard into something really interesting and impactful, but instead, I fell into a very deep rut. I was just a battered old cog buried in the depths of an immense machine.

Big companies do a really good job of keeping you just busy enough, distracted enough, tired enough that you don’t look for more fulfilling work elsewhere. Their business life cycles keep pulling you back in, engaging you in challenging work that doesn’t really affect much change. They cycle you through various opportunities that make you feel good for a short while, so you can push down the urge to do more meaningful work.

After ten years of being a cog in the machine, I’d had enough. I wanted something different. But even if I could muster the courage to leave, what the hell would I do?

Deep down, I wanted to do something innovative—maybe start my own business—but the truth is I wasn’t ready to make a massive leap. At the time, it was too much to imagine taking the steps required to start my own business or do innovative things in a challenging industry.

Breaking free of a known existence, even one that’s kind of a downer, feels risky. I’d be leaving a great pension plan, some significant stock options, a network of contacts I’d built over a decade, and a reputation within an industry I knew inside-out. 

So I found middle ground. Instead of throwing away everything familiar and comfortable to start my own business, I moved to a different, smaller company: Big Ass Fans, which made large industrial and commercial ceiling fans. 

From Big Ass Fans to Truman’s

Though I was still working in a somewhat corporate environment at Big Ass Fans, it was a big change. GE was a multibillion-dollar company with 300,000 employees, while Big Ass Fans, which brought in a couple of hundred million dollars a year, had a staff of just 1,300. It wasn’t quite a ma-and-pa shop, but it felt that way to me.

Going to Big Ass Fans was a step out of stagnation and into movement. I took a risk, and guess what: I didn’t die! It gave me the inspiration and motivation that made my next, even bigger step possible: Truman’s, a non-toxic cleaning products company designed to reduce waste by shipping concentrates instead of products that are 98 percent water. 

In 2019, my business partner and I launched Truman’s as a direct-to-consumer cleaning subscription business. Just months after our launch, Fast Company honored Truman’s as a “World Changing Idea.” We’ve since won a bunch of awards, received $5 million in investment funding from a massive brand, and drawn worldwide attention to toxicity in the home. 

And to top it off, I’m actually having fun at work. I finally feel like I’m doing something really useful, and that’s helped me relax and sink into the work. It took many years, many steps, and many missteps, but I finally broke free from a good-on-paper yet boring-as-hell career. I discovered my strength and founded a fun, fulfilling business that’s creating a more sustainable future, both for my career and for the environment in which my kids will grow up.

Aim Big but Start Small

If you don’t feel you can take a big step forward into something different—as I felt when leaving GE—a smaller step is essential. Stepping out of stagnation and finding more fulfilling work starts with testing the water, just a little, before jumping all the way in.

That’s all you can reasonably expect to start with if you’ve spent your whole life being risk-averse, getting up at the same time every day, wearing the same color pants, putting on the right sock first, then the left, getting into your safety-rated sedan, and clocking in at a nice, secure company. 

If that’s you, then god forbid you wear your gray pants with blue socks instead of the standard black socks. My goodness, the world would end—because it’s not laundry day until Thursday, and you can’t wash your socks on the wrong day of the week.

If this sounds like you, then start with something that feels crazy: wear red socks with your gray pants. I dare you. And hell, if that’s your starting point, then great. Recognize that and build up from there. 

Start with the step that feels radical to you, even if it’s small by other people’s standards. Because screw other people. This is your life. Your achievements. Your sense of contribution to the world.

Once you’re comfortable switching up your socks, try a bigger risk. Speak up in that meeting. Take on a special project. Move to a different company within your industry.

This is the only path forward for anyone: understand where you are in terms of risk-taking and start making decisions that push you forward from there. There’s no inventory process to assess your current risk profile. There isn’t a neat little five-point plan to become more risk-tolerant. You just start moving. 

Just Start Moving

I can’t promise you that every risky move you take will pay off, but I do know that stagnation is the killer of dreams. 

If you want to step out of stagnation, you need to take some risks. Breaking free from the norm to do something different will always feel hazardous, to a degree. It inevitably involves swings and misses, but even if things don’t pan out, you will learn from those experiences. You will gain new knowledge, skills, and confidence. 

And when one of your risks does work out, when you swing and score big, you feel like you did something important. You moved in the direction you believe in, and you contributed in a noteworthy way to the world. And that gives you a kind of rush that trains you to be more risk-tolerant.

Newton’s first law of motion tells us that an object in motion stays in motion. If you start moving, however small, you can build to bigger, better things. 

For more advice on breaking free from stagnation, you can find The Elephant’s Dilemma on Amazon.