Coffee ready?

Hey everybody. I've been thinking about course corrections this week. I've been doing some course correcting myself in fact. Remember all the shows where some guy didn't want to ask for directions, and ended up lost? I'm good with a little pride, but I also don't like wasting a bunch of time and gas.

Sometimes you really don't know how lost you are, and sometimes you just don't want to look and find out. Usually that is me and my bank account after a trip to the casino. Ross yelling "PIVOT" on the staircase with the couch will always live rent free in my brain. I like to use it to remind myself that pivots are just plain necessary sometimes.

Everybody's got something they want to avoid. The app you don't open. The voicemail you haven't played. The doctor's portal with the little red dot. The balance, the scale, the text you read in the preview and never actually opened. Even checking your blood sugar after a sugar binge.

The bad news that you just know you can't handle.

You know roughly what's in there. That's exactly why you don't look.

I've heard it called the ostrich syndrome. Picture an ostrich burying its head in the sand when danger shows up (which, for the record, real ostriches don't actually do). The message: If you can't see it, it isn't there. It's a cognitive bias where you avoid negative information to spare yourself emotional discomfort.

Here's the trick it plays on you: not looking feels like keeping things okay. As long as you don't check, it's still "probably fine." The second you look, it's real, and real means you might have to do something about it.

But it was already real. Not looking doesn't change the number. It just changes how long you get to pretend.

And the looking is almost never as hard as we expect. It's ten seconds. What makes it heavy is all the time we spent building it up in our heads first.

This week's check-in: pick the one thing you've been not-checking. Open it. Look at the number. That's it.

You don't have to fix it this week. You don't have to tell anybody. Just know where you actually stand.

You can't pivot if you won't look at where you are.

Keep the coffee hot.

Mike

P.S. — Last call. Advance reader signups for The Blueprint close tomorrow, Monday, Oct 12. You get the whole book free before it launches; all I ask back is your honest take on what works and what doesn't: https://mike-kerklin.kit.com/7d5057810f​