The Dog Days

How to snatch the bone right out of their teeth.

The Dog Days.

When the snowball feels stuck. The writer’s block hits. The promising deal stalls. The hill’s too high. The wifi’s shaky. And the coffee’s lukewarm.

They say great golfers play poorly well, but I’ve never been a golfer. I was the caddy and every bag was too heavy. So what does that even mean?

It means that any given Dog Day is temporary, and everybody else who’s ever entered the arena experiences them too. So it’s the ones who engage them best that wind up the winners.

I believe there’s a craft to be practiced in navigating out of them, even snatching the bone right out of their teeth.

Two steps forward, one step backwards is still progress. The obvious first key to navigating a Dog Day is to prevent it from becoming three steps backwards. Then the next time the Dog Day hits, the game is to limit it to a half a step backwards until eventually your definition of a Dog Day is defined by still progressing a half a step forward. Yesterday’s ceiling becomes today’s floor.

In football they call that moving the chains.

In entrepreneurship, beyond moving the chains we have the opportunity to snatch the bone from a Dog Day. This is predictably achievable with a combination of organization, action, and reflection.

My playbook for snatching the bone out of a Dog Day looks like this:

1. Reset my fundamentals. For me that’s a habit stack of Exercise + Meditate + Journal (ideally on a foundation of a good night’s sleep)

2. Organize: get my inbox, project management portals, CRM, etc. in order. In the motion of doing that grunt work, my head starts regaining its order too.

3. Take one focused action: in the process of getting organized, it’s likely that one “Most Important Thing” (MIT) will emerge. Even (especially) if it’s uncomfortable, take that action. Now.

4. Zoom out: reflect on the big picture strategy and my system(s) of operating. Why did I land in this Dog Day? Get curious about architectural changes I might be able to optimize for my Next Draft of being.

If I haven’t yet reset my fundamentals, my mind will be operating like a computer experiencing high lag. I can’t yet get organized.

If I don’t get organized, I can’t clarify my MIT on which to take a focused action.

If I don’t take a focused action, it’s difficult to get into the type of motion I need in order to conduct a quality “big picture” reflection on my systems.

The brilliant thing about the Dog Days is that, if navigated well, they gift me with the catalyst for taking uncomfortable action and making necessary system adjustments. That’s a rich bone. And in that sense, perhaps there’s reason enough to view the Dog Days as a “feature, not a bug” in the entrepreneur’s perpetual journey of discovering their business (or a writer’s journey of discovering their story).

So embrace your Dog Day despite its stink. Snatch the bone right out of its teeth. And when you inevitably turn that corner to take your next step forward, well, just remember what Florence said…

The horses are coming.

You better run.