Puzzles are life!
Over Labor Day, I started a jigsaw puzzle. I just love them. I love to sit and connect the pieces, to see a picture come together. This particular puzzle was unique in that the ultimate picture of the puzzle was different from what was shown on the box, making it a true surprise as it unfolded.
I noticed something during the process this time that I hadn’t overtly noticed before. There’s a point in the puzzling where the delight of finding like pieces and putting together swaths of the picture slow to a grinding halt and you’re left with lots of singular pieces that feel hard to place. Suddenly, puzzling feels less fun and more like a chore.
It also feels like a metaphor for what Seth Godin refers to as “the dip” – the “long slow slog between starting and mastery”. The point when most people flounder and many people quit.
We all know those stories of successful people who seem like they just woke up one day and did something amazing and are suddenly rich and famous. And frankly, aside from maybe one or two crazy anomalies, these are indeed just stories. People who have success, who achieve something, who create something – they all faced this slump and kept going. It’s not that they didn’t run into trouble – any great creation has this hard moment (or many). And it may not even be that they were all that extraordinary. The determiner of that success is whether one persisted through the tough part(s) or ended the journey there.
Even something as simple as puzzling has this moment. The thing we forget is that we need to find the thing we’re so excited by that we’re willing to stick it out instead of abandoning ship when things get hard. If you’re connected and engaged with what you’re doing, you can find the energy, maybe even the excitement, to make it through that slog.
**For more puzzle-love, see my blog post a few years ago about we do life the way we puzzle**
One day into the puzzle, the point when “the dip” started…
The finished result on day 2!
