Creative Wayfinding For Ambitious Optimists.

Pick a Gear

May, 9, 2020

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

Think about growing your business like driving a car.

The road to your end destination is winding, hilly, and varied, and it requires you to shift gears every now and then in order to most effectively navigate the terrain.

Sure, you can try to crawl up hills in fifth gear, and you just might have enough momentum to do it. But you might not. To avoid stalling out before you reach the summit, it might make more sense to downshift, simplify, and take on the hill in a gear better suited for the climb.

Likewise, when you hit an open, level straightaway, you can certainly drive in any gear you want, but you’ll make more progress, faster by shifting up to take advantage of the favorable conditions.

The mistake is not so much in choosing the wrong gear entirely, however. Most of us probably rarely feel that we are in precisely the right gear for our current conditions.

The mistake is to get caught between gears, to refuse to commit to a single gear in which to drive.

When we fail to commit, we can rev our engines all we want without moving ourselves forward, or worse, end up grinding the gears down to nothing as we frenetically try to jump between all of them without committing to any.

Any gear will get you where you’re looking to go, some faster, some slower, some more or less suited to your present conditions.

But when the time comes to shift down or shift up, make the decision fully and commit to the gear you want to drive in. Things stop moving when you get stuck between.


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Hi, I'm Jeremy, I'm glad you're here.

No matter what you create, I'm guessing you spend a good amount of time feeling lost, hopeless, and unsure about how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

So do I. And so does everyone doing creative work.

This is the Creative Wilderness.

Every week, I publish a new article in my Creative Wayfinding newsletter about how we as creators and marketers can navigate it with more clarity and confidence.

If you're building something that matters, but aren't quite sure how to take the next step forward, I'd be honoured to have you join us.