What now?
After reading about the new movie 127 Hours on a popular movie blog I started thinking about the future. More accurately I started to thing about the present. If you’re not familiar with the movie it is the story (based on the real deal) of a hiker who gets his arm trapped beneath a boulder in the bottom of a crevasse where nobody knows where to find him, or that he is even there. The hiker, Aron Ralston, spent 127 grueling hours trapped in what he thought would be his grave. He saved himself by cutting off his own arm with a dull pocket knife and walking out to freedom.
I watched Ralston talk about this on Jay Leno December 3rd and what I found was most interesting was his talk of how he felt when he realized he’d solved the ‘riddle’ of how to escape… by cutting off he own hand! When he realized he could use leverage and break his own bones to get free rather than cut through them with a knife he said it was a feeling of ‘ecstasy’. Do you feel that way when you solve a problem?
In some ways, not at all as literal as Ralston, we all deal with our own rocks and hard places every day. We get stuck in tough situations and have to find our own way out. This past week I escaped a couple of my own boulders and it is liberating. The challenge is that for the past 18 months these were a couple of big boulders I thought about every day. But, now I’m free. So now what?
For me it’s time to retreat in order to move forward. I’m going back over old notes and ideas and evaluating current projects from new angles. I’m excited about some of the projects I’m working on and I’m focusing on the steps that can be done today to make those projects more successful.
What rocks are you currently stuck under? How can you escape them? Now what?
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