Chosen Frozen: When Paralysis Looks Like Prudence

In 1978, I was five years old, and I was in love. Her name was Jenny, and every other boy in our class seemed to be angling for her attention. I had to up my game. So one day at recess I raced to the top of the tallest set of monkey bars, worked my way out to the middle, swung backward into an upside down position by both legs, and shouted, “Hey, Jenny, look at me.”

What I hadn’t noticed was that the recess bell had rung. While I was busy scrambling to my perch, everyone else had lined up to go back inside. First came a few giggles. Then laughs. Then the mocking. I managed to pull myself right side up, one hand on one rung and the other hand on another, and there I stayed. I couldn’t seem to let go. But I couldn’t hold on much longer either. There was nowhere to go but down, and my five year old frame wasn’t built for the fall.

A teacher eventually lifted me by the waist and set me on solid ground. Jenny moved on. My friends forgot the whole thing. I never did, and honestly, it still stings a little. I don’t regret going for it. Taking a chance was fine. What I regret is putting myself in a position I couldn’t get out of.

I have thought about that “most embarrassing moment” from time to time, because I see the same posture in the workplace all the time. Most people aren’t cowards. They have made a brave decision, or they were about to, and now they hang in the middle with a grip on two different rungs, unable to commit to either one. The name for it is paralysis, and I want to make the case that it is the most underestimated threat to good work. I don’t mean the blank page kind. That one is real, but it is just part of the gig. I mean the kind that is harder to spot, because it hides inside busyness, boredom, and conventional wisdom.

You might be stuck right now and not know it. So let’s look at where paralysis comes from, and what it takes to get one hand free.

The man who frozeParalysis wears a disguise.

The HBO series Band of Brothers has a scene that has stayed with me for years. It is the attack on a city named Foy. Before the assault, Captain Dick Winters, a respected strategist and the kind of leader you want to follow into battle, appoints Lieutenant Norman Dyke to lead a portion of it. Dyke is a very different kind of officer. He is nicknamed Foxhole Norman for his habit of disappearing into his foxhole rather than fighting on the front lines, and the story implies he got his position more from being the son of a New York state supreme court judge than from his qualifications.

On January 13, 1945, Dyke and his men charge the town. The plan is to move fast, before the Germans can bring their heavy artillery down on them. Midway through the charge, Dyke gets disoriented. He orders Easy Company to hold up, which is the absolute last thing you should do. They are exposed. They are sitting ducks. His men plead with him to take cover. Winters shouts from his command post at the rear, “Keep moving forward.” Members of Easy Company fall, one after another. Behind a straw hut, with soldiers demanding that he act, Dyke freezes. He is nonresponsive. Catatonic.

Winters, overcome with frustration, grabs his rifle and charges the battlefield, dead set on relieving Dyke himself. His superior, Colonel Sink, stops him: “Winters, you do not go out there now.” I often use that story when I teach leaders about the pull to revert to being the technician. We want to charge into the fray and do the work. But when you are leading work, that is not your job anymore.

That lesson stands. But what often gets overlooked is why Winters felt the need to rush the field in the first place. And what might we learn if we stand in the boots of frozen Foxhole Norman instead? I suspect that for all his faults, Dyke was a lot like you and me. He wanted to do the right thing. He wanted to be brave. In the moment that mattered, he didn’t run. He froze.

That distinction matters for creative work, because cowardice is easy to see and easy to name. We know when we are ducking. Paralysis is quieter. It looks like one more round of research. It looks like a full calendar. It looks like sensible advice from a person who has never made the thing you are trying to make. From the outside it can pass for diligence, and from the inside it can feel a lot like prudence.

The skill you skippedYou can’t swing without letting go.

There is a word for what I failed to do on those monkey bars, and I learned it years later.

Brachiation is a skill, like any skill, and it has to be developed. By now you have probably mastered the physical version. The psychological version is much harder. A brave decision can quickly turn into a moment of indecision, with both hands clenched on different rungs, and before you know it you are five years old again, unable to let go of what has been. If you want to move forward, you have to release something. That is the first step, and it is the one most of us want to skip.

Consider General Motors. In the mid twentieth century, the family car of choice was the station wagon. It went by many names: the grocery getter, the land yacht, the Vista Cruiser. Fake wood paneling on the outside, third row seating on the inside. It was an icon of the American dream and a mainstay of GM. But by the late 1970s, baby boomers wanted more style than the stale wagons of their forefathers, and in 1979 the Chevy Nomad II was born. It was too tall to be a wagon but too streamlined to be a van. The concept looked like a smash success.

Then nothing happened. GM never released it. They loved the concept, and they were convinced the American car buyer was craving that not quite a van, not quite a wagon mystique. But they still had one hand on the traditional station wagon, and they could not let go. Sales were softening, sure, but the wagons were still highly profitable. What if this new family van ate into their precious wagon market? Could they really afford that loss?

In 1984, Chrysler introduced families to the Dodge Caravan, which launched an entirely new category and then dominated it for nearly two decades. Chrysler has built well over 15 million minivans since, and it is considered the biggest engineering, design, and sales accomplishment in the company’s history. It should have been the Nomad II. GM killed the concept and left the opportunity wide open, a decision that drastically altered the futures of both companies.

Here is the real irony. When was the last time you rode in a traditional station wagon, or even saw one? Station wagons, at least as we knew them, are practically extinct. They evolved into SUVs and crossovers. GM passed on the biggest concept in recent history, all for the sake of something that doesn’t even exist anymore.

GM held the station wagon so tightly that it let go of the future.

If you are feeling paralyzed, this may be the nudge you need. What if the biggest barrier to a brave decision is how highly you think of what you are holding right now? Maybe the thing you are clinging to isn’t worth nearly as much as you believe, and you just don’t know it yet. Maybe you are white knuckling a station wagon when you could have had a caravan.

The dipSometimes the brave choice is to quit.

Not every freeze is about two rungs. Sometimes we lock up because we can’t decide whether to quit altogether. Once the initial excitement wears off, what is left is the hard work, and hard work has a knack for making us want to stop. Yet everybody knows that winners never quit and quitters never win, to quote Vince Lombardi. So you don’t quit, and you don’t quite commit either. I have seen creative pros stay in that state for months or even years, with no handbook for the tension.

Seth Godin wrote the handbook. I interviewed him in 2007, just before his book The Dip came out, and he told me, “No one had ever written a book about quitting. In fact, people aren’t even good at talking about quitting.” His definition has stuck with me: “A dip is that moment of pain or suffering or hard work that separates the masses from the best in the world.” His best example is organic chemistry on the way to becoming a doctor. If it weren’t for organic chemistry, lots of people would become doctors, and the title wouldn’t be worth much because there would be too many of them. Organic chemistry is the filter.

That is the good news and the bad news. Your work is going to be hard, and there is no way around it. But it also means most people can’t or won’t put in the work to become great. Difficulty creates opportunity. Thomas Edison put it this way: opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Then Godin made the move that frees people. Quitting, he said, contrary to what Lombardi would have you believe, is not a bad thing. It is a really good thing, if you know what you are facing. Either you are in a dip or you are in a cul de sac.

The decision comes down to a few honest questions. Can you still see the other side? Do you still have the drive to keep going? Will success be worth it? If so, you are in a dip. It is perfectly normal, and you should keep going. But if you have lost the vision, run out of drive, and aren’t willing to pay the price that success demands, you are probably in a cul de sac, and those go nowhere. Pushing through the dips that matter takes energy. Don’t waste yours on a dead end.

Lombardi was wrong. Winners quit all the time. It comes down to being decisive: letting go of one thing so you can take hold of another, pushing through the dip to reach the other side, quitting the cul de sacs that ultimately go nowhere. If you are feeling paralyzed, choice is the solution.

Too many rungsWhen choice is the problem.

But for some people, choice isn’t the solution. It is the problem.

Emily Wapnick says she has always had a lot of different interests. She was into the arts, she liked English, she played in a band, she built websites, and she went to law school. For a long time she wondered what was wrong with her. “Why can’t I just kind of pick one thing and stick with it?” she asked. “That seems like what we’re supposed to do.” She now calls herself a multipotentialite, a term she coined in her book How to Be Everything. It describes someone who is curious about a bunch of unrelated subjects. Some people say generalist, polymath, or Renaissance person. She tells people to use whichever word they like.

Serious people have historically frowned on this. The multipotentialite gets labeled flaky, aloof, or undisciplined, someone who can’t buckle down. And if that is you, you may experience a different kind of paralysis. You know you are supposed to choose, and you can’t, because you are excited by too many pursuits, and the thought of saying no to any of them crushes your soul.

So what if you had permission not to choose and could still build the life you want? To find out, Emily interviewed about 50 multipotentialites who described themselves as both happy and financially comfortable, and she asked how they made a living. She found four work models that people use to get the variety they need.

The group hug is when your interests come together in one big embrace: one role or business where you wear a lot of different hats. The slash is the programmer, teacher, and stand up comedian, who keeps three very different things going and moves between them over the week. The Einstein approach is named for the man who worked at the patent office for several years, holding a stable day job while he explored his theories on the side. Emily points to author Barbara Scherr’s phrase for it, a “good enough job,” one that pays the bills and leaves you the time and energy to explore. She told me about Charlie Harper, an IT director by day who spends his evenings at musical theater and a cappella practice, builds furniture on the weekends, and just built a boat. The model takes the pressure off monetizing every little thing you love. The phoenix dives deep into one career for a number of years, then starts something new in a totally different field, usually developing the next thing on the side first.

You might be one of these, or a hybrid, and that is totally normal. But isn’t this a recipe for mediocrity? Being okay at many things instead of great at one? I can’t help thinking of Steve Martin, perhaps the most famous multipotentialite, who was a stand up comedian, a novelist, a movie writer, an actor, and a Grammy winner for playing bluegrass. In his autobiography he wrote, “despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity naivete, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you’re about to do.”

Notice what Emily’s models actually ask of you. They ask you to let go of one rung: the belief that you must pick a single one. That is brachiation too.

This weekName what is in each hand.

Paralysis feeds on vagueness, so start by getting specific. Take a sheet of paper and write down what is in each of your hands. One hand holds what you have been doing, your station wagon. The other holds what you suspect you should reach for, your caravan. Be concrete enough that a stranger could picture both.

Then price the station wagon honestly. Ask what it is worth now, not what it was worth when you first grabbed it. GM’s wagons were still profitable on the day they killed the Nomad II, and that was exactly the trap.

If your stuck feeling is really about quitting, ask Godin’s questions out loud. Can I still see the other side? Do I still have the drive? Will success be worth the price? And if your trouble is too many rungs rather than two, stop asking which one to pick. Ask which of Emily’s four models would give your interests the room they need. Then make one small move toward it. Brachiation is a skill, and skills get built by doing them.

I still think about that bell. It rang while I was busy climbing, and I never heard it. Paralysis often begins that way. We are so absorbed in the brave move that we forget to plan the next one, and then we are suspended in the middle with everyone watching and nowhere to go.

A teacher lifted me down that day, and I am grateful. But no one is coming to lift your work down from the bars. I wasn’t short on courage up there. I had climbed higher than anyone else dared. What I was missing was the skill of letting go, and that is a skill you can learn.

The bell has already rung. Reach for the next rung.