How To Stop Spinning Your Wheels And Start Making Real Progress
Are you spinning your wheels?
If you’re not careful, you’ll trick yourself into believing you’re well on your way to your goals when actually you’re just spinning your wheels. You can be at risk even if you’re doing All The Right Things. You can seek out advice, you can read every career blog, and you reach can out to ambitious and like-minded people. Meanwhile, you can make your way through your daily checklists and, though I hope you’re not running yourself ragged, put in A TON of hard work. So if you’re doing All The Right Things and consistently working hard, how are you still spinning your wheels?
You’ll hear me say this a lot: Hard work is not enough. No matter what you were taught, hard work by itself is not a career strategy. Without a strategy, you are absolutely wasting your time and efforts — and quite frankly, you’re wasting your allies. Let’s arbitrarily say that I want to build a house. I have the tools and materials needed to get to work. Let’s say I even have a crew ready to go. Can I successfully build that house? No! My entire crew and I can spend day after day digging, drilling, pouring cement, and throwing in wiring. We can be persistent, and dedicated, and show up, and work hard! But give it time, and the only result is going to be a sprawling, disconnected, and ugly mess.
That’s what you get when you deploy tactics without strategy. You get a mess! On top of that you get the confusion, the self-doubt, and the resentment that comes from working hard, following rules, and not seeing results. Needless to say construction is not my area of expertise. But I can’t imagine throwing some tools and materials at a crew, no matter how skilled, and expecting the home of my dreams (or any home for that matter) to just appear. I’m missing the most foundational components! No design, and no plan of execution. Translate that into your career journey and you’d be missing the indispensable: a definitive, individualized goal; and a solid, personalized strategy.
I hear a lot of folks using “tactics” and strategy interchangeably. This is one of the biggest and most common confusions afflicting aspiring managers, leaders, and innovators. I want to clear this up right away because that confusion is costing you big time. “Tactics” are merely the individual tools you deploy in order to implement your strategy. “Strategy” is the plan that organizes and gives direction to your tactics, so that you can move towards your goal. Your goal is the foundation for your strategy. So to succeed in a way that’s authentic to you, in a way that meets your needs and provides you with a sense of fulfillment, your goal must dictate your strategy and your strategy must determine your tactics.
Most career advice is going to land you squarely in the realm of tactics only. Focusing on tactics is easy because they feel concrete, straightforward, and “tried and true.” You can pick up any tactic and run with it, and feel like you’re on your way to success. But that’s the trick. You’re running and running (deploying tactics) with a vague destination (stereotypical “success”) without any real direction (a specific and personalized strategy). That’s a sure way to get random, chaotic, and fleeting results.
The greater the distance between your goal, strategy, and tactics the greater your risk of utterly wasting your time. I don’t want that for you, and you don’t want that for yourself. So, as jarring as it may seem, it is 100% worth it to put on the brakes. Stop running long enough to figure out if your tactics, strategy, and goal are actually connected. When they are, you can finally start getting somewhere.
