Work on your own puzzle.

An analogy I've been thinking about.

Life is like a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

We start with a bunch of weirdly-shaped pieces scattered on the hardwood floor.

Our intuition is that these weird shapes might fit together to create something beautiful.

So you start trying to put your puzzle together because you want to create something beautiful!

But it gets hard and so you start looking around for help.

Luckily there are a lot of other people around also solving puzzles!

Hooray!

And so naturally you start to watch them solve their puzzles.

Some people have completed more of their puzzles than you have.

Some people have barely even started.

Some people are eating their puzzle pieces and don’t seem to care about the game at all.

And some people are already done! Impressive.

You decide to watch the people who are ahead of you and then try to start emulating their work.

You start trying to build the puzzle they built.

The only problem is that they have a different puzzle than you do, made up of different pieces than you have.

So when you start trying to build the same puzzle they built, you run into trouble.

You are trying to find a blue corner piece because you them building a sky in their puzzle.

But your picture doesn’t have a sky. It’s all green.

And so you will look forever for that blue puzzle piece.

As you realize that you don’t have the same pieces the people around you have, you naturally turn your focus back to your own puzzle.

You start to realize that you’ve got some really nice pieces that they didn’t have.

And it clicks.

You start to spend all of your time working on finding good homes for the pieces that you do have in your own puzzle. You no longer look at other people’s puzzles.

You sometimes borrow strategies of puzzle building from your neighbors, but rarely look at the actual pieces they are using.

You notice one gal started by doing the edges and then filled in the middle.

That’s a good strategy.

You can use that.

You are now certain that your pieces fit together quite nicely, you just need to focus on them.

This is a more productive use of your time.

Stop wasting time trying to build other people’s puzzles.

Work on your own puzzle.

Until next time,

Flickman

P.S I’m writing this as much to myself as I am to all of you. This is something I like to be reminded of frequently. Hope you all are having an awesome week!