Restart – Grandpa Bob Encouraging Leadership

The blinking cursor on a blank document. The empty stretch of land where you’ll soon be building a shop. The new web application your company wants to develop that will revolutionize your industry. These are just a few examples of standing on the edge of something new, something important, yet feeling completely unsure of where to begin.

You might have a vision of the final result—the finished document, the completed shop, the fully functioning app. But that doesn’t mean you know how to get there.

It’s easy to get lost in the variables and the endless possibilities. What if I make the wrong decision? Are there more resources out there? What do other people think? Should I read more articles? Watch more videos? Seek more advice? What if I mess it all up?

In every case, the hardest part is starting.

It’s taking that first step. Writing the first sentence. Sketching out the first screen of an app. Nailing the first stakes into the ground—the ones you’ll attach a string to, so you can visualize where your new shop will go.

It’s a commitment to action over hesitation. A moment of bravery that marks the beginning of making something real.

An amazing thing happens when you start. Your mind shifts from a place of endless “what-ifs” to a place of positive motion. You begin to focus on the next steps and real solutions. All the challenges you imagined before starting—that, in many cases, won’t even come to pass—are forgotten. The path ahead becomes clearer, and each small step forward makes your next decision easier.

Does this mean everything goes perfectly after you start? Of course not. You’ll make mistakes, adjust, learn, and pivot along the way.

But here’s where starting becomes crucial: it provides a tangible foundation. It gives you something to measure against, something to refine, something to edit. You might completely change your initial idea, but you wouldn’t have discovered the need to change if you hadn’t started.

Starting is hard, but it’s also the most important part.

Take the first step, even if it feels uncomfortable. You’ll learn more from those first few steps than you will from standing still…wondering what might happen.

Once you start, momentum kicks in. And from there, the possibilities are endless.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I learned a truism about computers back in the late-80’s:

More than 50% of the time, a computer problem can be overcome by merely rebooting the machine

Sometimes this means pressing a specific keystroke combination. Other times it means simply unplugging the machine from the wall, and then plugging it in again.

Fast-forward nearly forty years, and the old “reboot method” is still effective at least 50% of the time.

Reboots aren’t only applicable to technology problems.

Unplugging from a problem or challenge, even for a short period of time, can shed light on a new set of perspectives. And, guess what…about 50% of the time, one of those new perspectives will hold the key to overcoming your “unsolvable” problem.

Rebooting doesn’t only mean disconnecting. It can also mean purposely switching up your approach, assigning new team members, changing up the words you use to describe the problem, or putting the issue into a “timeout,” so you can work on something else for a while.

Rebooting may mean taking that vacation you’ve been promising yourself and your family. You tell yourself there’s no time for a vacation. No time to disconnect.

Wrongo!

Denying yourself the opportunity to temporarily disconnect is denying yourself access to your most creative idea flow. The flow that comes from freeing your mind, even briefly, from your day-to-day tasks.

There’s a ton of power in the reboot, the restart, and the disconnect.

The answers to your most unsolvable problems lie on the other side of that reboot you’ve been avoiding (at least 50% of the time, of course).

Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash