Last week I said the two words only the most challenging problems force out of me:
“What now?”
Five previous attempts at part-swapping on the valve in front of me ended in failure. I couldn’t consistently get a metal rod in the valve to shift, and none of the usual suspects were causing the issue. Add in the pressure of an anxious customer who needed working valves days before, and you can see why I was a tad more stressed than normal.
I’m an engineer who troubleshoots quality issues non-stop, so you’d think I’d be immune to the hopelessness I began to accept. After all, it wasn’t the first time I was bombarded with emails, handed an “unfixable” part, and told to figure it out after exhausting the potential solutions I was once so confident in.
But this time was different.
No, it wasn’t that the problem in front of me was too complex—like I said, I’ve been stumped plenty of times before. It was more so that this time, I was different.
I wasn’t the rookie just learning how this stuff worked anymore. This wasn’t a major project I needed to prove myself either. It was a high-pressure scenario—which again, I was used to—at a place where I routinely used skills I developed over multiple years. Yet I still failed.
All the experiments I’ve completed, the thousands of parts I’ve dissected, and the experience I’ve gained over half a decade didn’t matter in that moment—all because one metal rod wouldn’t shift.
And now as I think back on my life, it’s always been these kind of problems that frustrate me most. It’s never that first roadblock, or the first rejection, or the inevitable skill check that exposes a weakness you were blind to. No, it’s the hump you’re supposed to overcome, and still can’t.
Failing those challenges brings us all to a “what now?” moment.
Sure, it’s great thinking of how far we’ve come, but seeing another stop sign at this point is just…exhausting.
“Was all this really worth it?”, “Am I not the person I thought I was?”, “Was I fooling myself this whole time?”.
Those questions are the human responses that rise at this point. And while their implied answers may not be encouraging, they do point to the root of what these challenges are all about: identity.
While previous challenges were tests of skill or experience, these roadblocks make you question your purpose, your career, and who you are.
Yeah, you might say I’m exaggerating, but you know what I mean. We’ve all faced moments that made us feel like everything we achieved up to that point was a waste. And the scary thing about these moments is that they can actually make our feelings become true. They can make our knowledge useless, our relationships sour, and our skills defunct…if that’s what we allow.
If we forfeit our identity, it’s over. If we submit to this vile, abstract thing, we lose.
But life doesn’t have to be this way.
All you have to do is one thing new. One variable is all you have to change, and if that doesn’t work, you change one more. Then you keep doing one thing new after one thing new and another thing new. Or in other words, you keep experimenting.
People think the end result of mastery is constantly succeeding at what you do—as if an easy life is proof of how skilled you are, but I disagree. True mastery isn’t living a life free of challenge; it’s living a life free of questioning.
Instead of questioning yourself, you experiment. Instead of doubting your skills, you experiment. Instead of longing for an easy path, you experiment.
You do at least one thing new until results change.
That’s what an engineer is supposed to do, and it’s what any other professional does too. So if you and I are going to claim those labels, it’s about time for us to try something new.
-Drew
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.
Leave a Reply