FULLY CORNERED

Everything is spinning so fast, and an answer wants to be found.

THE PATTERN

It's Saturday night, Cannes Film Festival for me, something for each one of us.

Everything is in motion, everything feels urgent, and somewhere underneath all of it, there is an answer trying to surface. We try pretty hard to catch it, but the spinning won't slow down long enough to let it through.

So we keep moving because moving feels better than stillness (safer also).

We want to avoid stillness because that looks like giving up, and we are not someone who gives up.

And then it's not an answer that comes through but a distraction.

More marketing (I hate that one).

A revamp (disgusting).

A new angle that someone mentioned in a thread that seemed relevant (the guy with 57k followers who has everything figured out).

A tactic that worked for someone else in a slightly different situation (sure, never works).

The worst part is that for a moment, it feels like progress. Hooray, it stopped the spinning because forward motion in any direction feels better than standing still in the middle of a room that has answers you can't find yet.

But three weeks later, you are spinning again, and the center is still missing.

ACT ONE: THE CITY

Sofia Coppola understood something about this state and created an entire story around it.

In Lost in Translation, she puts two people in Tokyo, one of the most electric, overwhelming, alive cities on earth, and she watches them become completely still inside all that motion.

A lot of things are happening, though, but everything is happening and none of it is connecting to the thing they actually need.

That's the four corners feeling.

When you are surrounded by possibility, by tactics, by people telling you what worked for them, by content about what is working right now, by frameworks and funnels and strategies and refinements, and you are completely, quietly, privately unable to move toward the thing that actually matters.

And you are not lost, even though it feels like it. The problem is that the noise has become indistinguishable from the signal, and you stopped trusting yourself to know the difference.

ACT TWO: THE DISTRACTION

Here is the thing about distraction that makes it so effective and so dangerous at the same time.

It is almost always reasonable. None of it is fundamentally wrong, it just isn't the answer. You probably already worked on it, you have that answer already, but framed differently, it becomes the thing that looks enough like the answer to make the spinning stop for a while.

I’m bringing Kahneman again, he spent his career studying this: The mind under pressure doesn't look for the right answer, which would help us tremendously, but it looks for a plausible answer.

Something that can attach to the feeling of uncertainty and call for resolution.

Resolution requires sitting in the stillness long enough to let the actual answer surface, and the actual answer is almost always more uncomfortable than the distraction. Nothing fun there.

The actual answer usually requires changing something you haven't been willing to change yet, and probably saying something you haven't been willing to say.

Stop everything that feels productive but isn't moving you toward the center.

The distraction lets you avoid all of that while still feeling like you are doing the work.

And the part I dislike the most, the one that keeps you in the loop, is that sometimes the distraction does work. Just long enough to make you trust it again next time the spinning starts.

ACT THREE: THE SPINNING'S WHISPER

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson find each other in that film because they stop trying to solve Tokyo and start paying attention to what is directly in front of them. Around them, the city continues to move full speed.

In their case and in ours too, the spinning is information.

It is telling a big fat clue that the center hasn't been found yet. That underneath all the tactics and refinements and marketing angles and blah blah blah more more more, there is a question you haven't answered honestly about what you are actually building, who you are genuinely building it for, and what you believe about your market that nobody else in your space has been willing to say out loud.

Socrates said it long before any of us were in this mess: "Beware the barrenness of a busy life."

When you are fully cornered, no one is coming to save you.

Not the new strategy or that guy with 57k followers who has everything figured out. Not the refinement, the rebrand, the tactic that worked for someone else in a slightly different situation.

Just do the damn thing.

The one you already know, that was working before the noise convinced you it wasn't enough. The one sitting quietly underneath all the spinning, waiting for you to come back to it.

The one that carries your story.

— Théo

A note before I sign off.

The Repository keeps growing: distilled wisdom from the people who figured things out before us. Members get it inside The Narrative Equity Council. Link here.

The Narrative Equity Council is where we look at your business from the outside in, borrowing the lens of film, psychology, architecture, whatever industry sees what yours can't and circle back with something you couldn't have found alone. The Repository is part of it.

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