Constraints Fuel You up

It doesn’t matter what is your job or vocation. It will happen to you, and me.

I received years of education and spent hundreds of thousands of hours to build my skills and expertise. I often question whether I want to keep doing the same thing year after year. As time passes, I feel the weight of increasing constraints—physical, mental, and technological. I can’t work as long hours as before. New technology and AI evolve at a speed faster than I can learn. And, as my role expands, I find gaps and loopholes within my skills.

I start wondering, Will I look back in ten years and regret not pursuing something I’m truly passionate about? Did I miss out on opportunities I should have taken earlier?

As I get older, these constraints seem growing bigger. Maybe one day, these constraints will become so overwhelming that I’ll be forced to quit or retire, not because I want to, but because I have no other choice.

So, I began to ask myself different questions: What if I don’t wait until I’m forced to stop? What if I actively design a new path now—one that I can continue to move on without being limited by my accumulating constraints?

When I start thinking about these questions, I feel, as Professor Herminia Ibarra said in her book Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, swinging. I swing between where I am and where I aspire to be.

I choose trapeze artists as the subject of my podcast episode, Become a Trapeze Artist: Swinging into Change for Reinventing Yourself. The reason is straightforward. They swing to shine.

Trapeze artists inspire us to keep swinging to gain momentum to leap to the next trapeze. Keeping momentum is hard. Letting go to leap is nearly impossible. Our hands sweat and grab tightly the bar, we fear to fall. The tighter we grab, the more difficult to leap.

Grabbing a new opportunity means letting go of our current opportunity. The new opportunity moves away from us if we do not grab it. The good news is that swinging means new opportunities will always come again if we keep swinging.

So, don’t focus on letting go. The focus is to keep swinging, keep showing up, keep taking action, make progress and gain momentum. You will always be pulled back to the original spot because you are swinging. But Design Thinker, in each pullback, you can gain more energy if you choose to connect your past instead of struggling away from your past.

Constraints will pull us back. You can’t change this reality. What you can change is how your mindset connects your past and uses constraints to fuel up a more powerful swing.