"What Stands in the Way IS the Way"

- Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher

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Has the fear of failure held you back from trying something new or trying to make something better?

Afraid someone might think less of you?

Afraid you might think less of yourself??

Unfortunately, THAT is often enough to keep us in our comfort zone where things don’t really change.

Daniel Kahneman famously defined our built-in loss aversion bias as a 2 to 1 ratio. ?Translating that into monetary terms, we need an opportunity to win $200 in order to risk losing $100.? It’s a built-in bias we have that we’re much more afraid of losing than we are eager to win.?

This bias can be a big obstacle, ?

Or,

It can be a path forward.

Instead of asking, “What bad thing can happen if I try?”??

Ask yourself, “What am I missing out on if I don’t try?

Now our loss aversion can be a kick in the pants to get out of our comfort zones and “risk” exploring uncharted territory.

There’s got to be a better way than this!

If you’re involved in some process and you keep telling yourself, “there’s got to be a better way than this”, THAT is a call to level up your skills and be part of the solution.? Be curious and figure out what tools are at your disposal and look to make things a little better than they are today.

• Perhaps you work with Excel files all day and you need to learn some formulas to calculate fields instead of dealing with manual data entry errors.
• Perhaps you email files around for people to make updates, and you need to make a simple power app for everyone to enter data in one place.
• Perhaps approvals get lost in email, and you need to build a Power Automate flow to simplify the approval process.
• Perhaps you spend all day Monday cutting and pasting data from multiple sources to create custom reports, and you need to learn Power Bi to automate all those details in the background so you can focus on the actionable insights that come from it.
• Perhaps you’re a seasoned developer, but you struggle to understand your own code when you return 6 months later to work on improvements, and you need to do better with naming conventions and documenting your code.
• Etc

What personal development and career opportunities are you missing out on because you’re not slowing down to “clean up the bread crumbs” and make things better than how you found them?