Procrastinatory urges will creep in like a thick fog

Are you a passive subject of a reality, or a conscious creator within it?

Hopefully the latter.

Because there is no skill more valuable in the modern workplace than initiative. People who take agency and exert real motivational force on their environment will always have a job.

And if they don’t, they’ll create one for themselves.

I learned this after a few weeks of beginning my first job at a global tech startup. We had offices in fifteen countries around the world, but our ten person marketing team was fortunate to work alongside the company founder on a daily basis.

My team member was nice enough to give me a little speech over lunch one afternoon, in terms of working effectively with the boss:

Don’t wait for your him to ask you how things are going. Report on your own progress. Keep the founder informed and on board with your efforts. Remember, running a startup is a stressful, labor intensive, time consuming job, and most managers simply won’t have enough time to keep the full scope of your work on their radar. Know that it’s not personal, it’s just math. The volume of tasks on a given leader’s plate makes it difficult for them to see past their immediate workload.

She was right. Our founder cancelled meetings left and right. Scheduling changes were frustrating as hell. Made me wonder if anything was ever going to get done.

But I quickly learned that you can’t expect to leave the ball in the boss’s already very busy court, and then get frustrated that something never happens. You have to figure out a way to proceed without their immediate oversight and trust your own judgment on crucial decisions.

One question that was helpful for me to ask when my leaders weren’t unavailable was this:

How can you proceed here without this person’s direct involvement?

It forces you to take extreme ownership. Instead of being passive about creating opportunities for things to happen, you just start leading from the middle.

Over the course of my career, I’ve spearheaded many book publishing projects for company executives, and this question was a lifesaver.

Because authoring long form content on behalf of founders isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. You really have to pace yourself. You’re investing eight to twelve months of time and energy into this work, and along the way, there will be infinite opportunities for delay.

Procrastinatory urges will creep in like a thick fog, and if you’re not vigilant about overcoming them, projects may never see the light of day.

You have to think of yourself like a stream of water flowing around a rock. Don’t bemoan the obstacle in your way, simply flow around it. Find another path. Get to your destination however you can, even if you stumble along the way.

I remember at one company, I was all set to do the critical in person review of the first draft of our book. Naturally, our founder had to go out of town last minute to meet a prospective client. He totally threw a wrench in my process, and kicked the can down the road for yet another two weeks.

I had no choice but to proceed without his direct involvement.

I ended up making the book edits myself, emailing him a summary, and when he ultimately got too busy to comment, I trusted that my changes would suffice and moved on to the next phase.

The hard part was not expecting praise for each and every impressive thing I did. It simply wasn’t going to come, so I had to pat myself on the back, feel proud of my accomplishments, and let that be enough to motivate myself forward.

That’s the difference between being a passive subject of a reality, and conscious creator within it.

Now, taking this kind of initiative isn’t easy. There’s the fear of upsetting your team members with your agency. There’s the possibility of failure and humiliation with your projects. And there’s also the chance that people will be too busy to even notice in the first place.

Either way, it’s still work worth doing. Because the feeling of fulfillment you receive from conscious creation is like no other.

Making things out of whole cloth, even when you don’t have permission and reassurance, is at the heart of what it means to be human.

How can you proceed here without this person’s direct involvement?