Ep 545 | Live With It — Until You Can Solve It

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. There is a phrase that I personally live by, and that phrase is, when you can't fix a problem, you must live with it at least for a while. When you can't fix a problem, you've got to live with it, at least for a while. It doesn't mean you surrender to the problem. It doesn't mean that you accept it as your new normal. What it means is that sometimes a solution just takes some time, or a solution might take some resources, or it takes some creativity, or the right moment. But until that moment, you have to keep moving. You have to manage it, and you can't obsess over it. I think you need to compartmentalize it just long enough to stay focused and stay functional and come back to it when you can give it your full attention. I'm sharing this because just, uh, this past weekend I participated in a longer endurance race that I'm sure we'll talk about in future episodes. And somewhere deep in that race, I found myself in a predicament. I was stuck in some really cold rain, and I still had quite a ways to go before I'd finish and I'd ultimately be dry. I couldn't stop and I couldn't fix it. So I had to live with it. It was a problem I couldn't fix. I had to live with it, and I had to get creative. And for me, because it was cold and I was cold and it was raining and all of that, I had to think of ways to generate warmth. And that meant moving faster, specifically on uphill components of, of this race. It meant drinking broth, like hot, hot chicken broth at aid stations. It meant taking the hood that I was wearing and pulling it even tighter. It meant pulling my hands inside my jacket and doing all of these things that were rather temporary fixes that I knew wouldn't last indefinitely, but they allowed me to live with it at least for a while. And eventually, I had gotten through it. What I realized is this mindset doesn't just belong on the trails in Northern California. I think it also belongs in business and it belongs in life. I think when a business problem shows up that you can't fix immediately, the instinct sometimes is to obsess or to panic or to drop everything. And what I found in my experience, and maybe you found this as well, is that when you do those things, you panic, obsess, drop everything, it's rarely helpful. I think the better approach is to acknowledge the problem and then build some temporary workarounds. Push it from your mind for now, for the moment, so you can keep executing, and then return to it later with the energy and the perspective necessary to solve it in, in the right way. Some examples, just random examples that come to mind. Let's say, uh, you make a key hire and that key hire backs out on you last minute. You're scaling your business, you've interviewed people for a couple months, you found the perfect, let's say, ops director, they accept the role and then they back out. If you've been in business long enough, you've probably had people back out on you and it's deflating. You planned around them, you got everybody rallied and excited around them, and, and you feel like even though they hadn't started with you, they backed out and they turned your world upside down. Well, here's the deal. That scenario, you can't fix that today. You can rally your existing team, you could redistribute the workload, you could use, say, a project management tool to track all the gaps, and then Once your head's clear and the dust settles, you can restart the hiring process with renewed urgency and with sharper criteria. That's a really good example of a scenario where you can't fix a problem. You've got to live with it at least for a while. How about, let's say you have a conflict with your partner. Let's say you have a co-founder conflict. There's tension between partners. Emotions are high. Decision-making as a result becomes frozen. Well, you can't solve that in one conversation, but you can keep communication respectful and focused on the business. And you can revisit the bigger conversation once heads are cooler and energy's right. What if you have a market that turns on you mid-launch? You launch, you know, a product or a service or even a company and a competitor drops something better or cheaper. Well, you can't pivot everything today. You can double down on what your product does best though, and then over time adjust with intention and not panic. Now, this isn't just a business principle. I think it's a life principle. Let's think about maybe being a parent with a teenager and that teenager's struggling academically, emotionally, maybe behaviorally. You can't fix them this week, but you can stay connected. You can keep the home calm. You can offer support, and then you patiently build towards a solution. How about grief? When someone you care about or someone you love passes away, you can't fix grief. You live with it. You keep showing up. You eat, you work, you talk to someone. You let time and honesty do their work slowly, slowly. Or in marriage, let's say you and your significant other hit a difficult season. Communication's off, tensions are high. Well, not every issue gets solved in a weekend. As a matter of fact, most issues don't get solved in a weekend. But you can choose patience. You can choose peace. You can choose to talk gently or show up fully, and then you can revisit the deeper issues when the timing is actually better. See, in life, just like in business, problems don't always get solved in real time, but you can live with them with grace, with some presence, with some strength. And I think that's the difference between surviving and spiraling sometimes. So, in talking about this subject today, I have a call to action. I think I have a challenge for you. I want you to think of one problem you've been mentally chewing on, whatever it may be. It could be in life, it could be in business, but one problem you've been mentally chewing on and some— it's something you can't fix right now. I want you to write down two creative workarounds. Just 2 creative workarounds to that problem you've been mentally chewing on and that can't be fixed right now. Then I want you to give yourself permission to stop it, stop obsessing for 48 hours, just 48 hours. You'll be amazed what opens up when you stop squeezing that problem so tight. You live with it first until you can solve it. So whether it's cold rain miles or messy meetings or tense relationships, life's hard edges don't always smooth out on demand. But if you learn to hold pressure lightly, to keep moving with a clear head, you won't just survive tough seasons. I think you'll move through them even stronger. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.