What Are Your Escape Hatches?

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

So I once knew a talented designer who talked endlessly, all the time about launching her own studio, her own company. And she had the skills, she had the vision, she even had a few potential clients lined up. She definitely had what it takes to make it all work. But every time the opportunity actually came to make a leap or to even take a step, she'd find a reason to delay. Well, I just need to save a little bit more money, she would say. Or I should take one more course first because I don't really understand how all of the accounting and finances going to work for the business. Or maybe I'll just wait until the first of the year and get a fresh start. What she was really doing was building what I call escape hatches.

Todd Henry [00:00:41]:

These are backup plans that would allow her to avoid the vulnerability of truly committing to something, of truly jumping in, taking a creative risk. She wanted the identity of being an entrepreneur, right? Of having her own business without the risk of actually becoming one. As Austin Kleon has said, she wanted to be the noun without doing the verb. And we can't allow this mindset to creep in to our lives. And here's the thing. Those escape hatches often feel like wisdom. I was speaking to a group in Washington, D.C. about a week ago, and I told them, often fear comes disguised as wisdom.

Todd Henry [00:01:16]:

It sounds like, well, wouldn't it be better if. Or maybe you should wait until. And sometimes the reality is, sometimes those are good pieces of advice. I mean, the reality is that there are moments when we do need to wait until our vision is clearer or until we actually have the agency to execute our idea. But the reality is, often these escape hatches feel like wisdom, but they're actually just an excuse. They make us feel like we're making progress without actually making progress. They were preventing, in this case, her from ever discovering what she was truly capable of. This reminds me of a quote I once heard from AW Tozier, who was a theologian, but he wrote something that kind of captures this dynamic.

Todd Henry [00:02:02]:

He said, the man of pseudo faith will fight for his verbal creed, but refuse flatly to allow himself to get into a predicament where his future must depend upon that creed being true. He always provides himself with secondary ways of escape so that he will have a way out if the roof caves in. Now, Tozer was writing about spiritual faith, but this principle applies just as powerfully to our creative work, to our professional lives. We say we believe in our ideas. We say we want something better. We say we want to take a chance. We say we want to build Something we trust in our abilities. We want to lead our team to a certain place.

Todd Henry [00:02:38]:

We have a vision for where we're going to go. But do we really? Or are we always keeping one foot out the door? Are we building escape hatches in case the roof caves in? So today I want to talk about three common escape hatches that creative pros often build into their work. These are ways that we avoid true commitment and therefore avoid the possibility of both real life failure and, frankly, real success. These aren't obvious forms of self sabotage, but that's exactly what they are. They're subtle, they're socially acceptable, and that's what makes them so dangerous. So today we're going to talk about three escape hatches that we need to be mindful of as leaders and as creative pros if we want to produce meaningful work. This is daily creative. Since 2005, we've delivered weekly tips to help you be brave, focused and brilliant every day.

Todd Henry [00:03:35]:

My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show. All right, escape hatch number one, procrastination and last minute work. Not that any of us deal with this, I'm sure you never deal with procrastination, right. But this is the first one that often creeps in. And particularly it's the pattern of doing everything at the last minute. Here's why. This is an escape hatch.

Todd Henry [00:04:05]:

When you wait until the last possible minute to do your best work, you never have to find out how good you could actually be if you gave yourself the proper time and space to do the work. If the work turns out mediocre, you can say, well, I only had two hours to do it. Or if it turns out great, you can say, well, imagine what I could do with more time. Either way, you've protected yourself from the vulnerable question, what happens when I actually give this my absolute best effort? Last minute work is a hedge. It's a way to never fully commit to the outcome. So how do we counter this escape hatch, this very real temptation to procrastinate or to do everything at the last minute? The first thing we can do is to set step goals to measure progress along the way. I wrote about this in my book Die Empty. The importance of having step goals, not just stretch goals, because often that can be an escape hatch as well.

Todd Henry [00:04:57]:

We set these big goals that we know we can never possibly accomplish, so it just feels like they're so far off. But when we set step goals, what we're doing is we're establishing intermediate goals that we can actually use to measure our progress. So instead of Measuring success only at the final deadline. We break our project down into smaller milestones with their own mini deadlines to allow us to feel feel the rush of progress along the way. For example, if you're writing a report due in three weeks, your step goals might be research completed by day 5, outline by day 8, first draft by day 14, final edits by day 18. This gives you regular checkpoints to assess whether you're on track. And it prevents the kind of all or nothing pressure of a single deadline. I do this when I'm writing books, by the way.

Todd Henry [00:05:40]:

I don't sit down to write a book. I sit down to write 500 words each day. Every weekday. I take Saturday and Sunday off every weekday when I'm under deadline, I write 500 words. And frankly, I only write 500 words. So if I get to 500, even if I'm feeling inspired, I will stop writing because I know it will make it easier for me to pick up the next day if I'm right in the middle of writing about something. If I'm in the flow, I won't have to think about what I'm going to write the next day. And that just makes it easier to get started the following day.

Todd Henry [00:06:10]:

These are step goals. My manuscript target might be 60,000 words, but I know I can get there if I sequence enough 500 day writing sessions in a row. That's what step goals do for us. So at the end of the week, I just ask myself, did I hit my five step goals this week of writing 500 words five days in a row? And if the answer is yes, well, great, I'm on target to hit my overall goal. So that's the first thing we can do. How could you set a step goal so that you're not tempted to push everything until the last minute? The second thing is use time blocking. This is something that many others write about. Cal Newport is obviously really famous for writing about this.

Todd Henry [00:06:48]:

Dedicating specific periods of time to your most important work so that you know you have time allocated to do that work. This means literally scheduling blocks of time on your calendar for those specific projects or to solve those specific problems, rather than just saying, well, I'll get around to it when I have time. That makes it really easy for us just to push things off. So the key is to protect these time blocks fiercely. No emails, no meetings, no interruptions, and you only work on the designated task during that time. Time blocking also forces you to confront how you're actually spending your time. Right? So often we get to the end of the day and we can't even really remember what we did that day. It's so common for creative pros for leaders.

Todd Henry [00:07:30]:

So time blocking forces you to actually have some accountability for how you spend your time. When you break projects into smaller milestones and you allocate time to those milestones, you remove this escape hatch, you're forced to see what you're really capable of. So that's escape hatch number one, procrastination and last minute work. Set your step goals and use time blocking to counter it. Escape hatch number two, dilution and divided attention. So this means doing too many things so that you never fully have to commit to any one thing. Thing. This is my preferred escape hatch, if I'm being honest.

Todd Henry [00:08:11]:

I am someone who bounces from idea to idea, from project to project, and I love to have so many things going on in my world that it makes it really difficult for me to focus in and have accountability on any one project. And this is especially insidious because it often looks like ambition. You're working on multiple projects, you're exploring opportunities, you're maybe launching multiple companies at the same time. You're keeping your options open. But underneath, there's often fear. Fear of commitment. Because what happens if it doesn't work? If you spread yourself thin enough, you never have to find out what would happen if you put all of your energy into the thing that mattered most. You never have to risk discovering that even your best effort might not be good enough.

Todd Henry [00:08:51]:

So dilution protects you from commitment. Without commitment, you can't achieve excellence. So here's how we counter this. The first thing is to establish what I call the big three. And the big three is something I wrote about in the Accidental Creative. These are the three most important priorities that deserve your focused attention during a given period, whether that's a quarter, a month, or even a week. Now, the key is to be ruthlessly selective. These aren't just three important things.

Todd Henry [00:09:17]:

These are the things that if you accomplish them, would make everything else easier in your life. These are the big open loops that you need to resolve. And this framework forces you to make hard choices about where your energy goes and prevents you from spreading yourself too thin across dozens of competing demands. So what are your big three? What are the three problems? The three open loops right now that if you resolve them, would help you make significant progress on your work. The second thing is, we talked about this already, but using time blocking to protect space for your big three, right? So this helps you prevent dilution when you are Allocating time to just those big three problems. It prevents you from putting too many things in your life. And then another thing I wrote about in Die Empty is identifying your productive passion. So often we run away from the thing that we are most wired to do because we're afraid to commit fully.

Todd Henry [00:10:13]:

We're afraid of what might happen if we actually pursue it and we fail. Productive passion is at the intersection of what energizes you and creates value for the world around you. So it's things like, when do you feel most alive when you're working? What do you find yourself doing when you pour yourself fully into the work? When you find yourself lost in time while you're working? But we often avoid doing these things because they feel a little bit dangerous to us. When you narrow your focus, when you establish your big three, when you refuse to dilute your attention and your energy, you close this escape hatch. You give yourself a chance to see what happens when you truly commit. So avoid escape hatch number two, which is dilution and divided attention, and then escape hatch number three. And this is the one that I often talk to leaders about, because this is the one I find leaders jumping out of, leaping out of when things go awry in their organization. And it's this rationalization.

Todd Henry [00:11:13]:

Rationalization is the tendency to backward rationalize success instead of defining it in advance. So we finish a project and even though we didn't do the thing we said we were going to do, we rationalize backward and we say, well, we kind of succeeded. If you look at it in a strange way through a strange lens. Side ey on a Tuesday at 3:23pm when you don't have clear success metrics and you're not honestly measuring yourself against what you set out to do, it's really easy A to backward rationalize and B, to create dissonance within the organization. People know, people feel weird. They're like, wait a minute, we said we were going to do this thing, but now you say we succeeded even though we did something different. I don't understand. Yeah, it's because you're rationalizing.

Todd Henry [00:11:59]:

You're leaping out of the escape hatch. When you don't define success clearly at the beginning, you rob yourself of honest feedback. You don't get better. You never have to face whether your work truly succeeded or failed. Rationalization is an escape hatch that prevents learning and growth. So a couple of things we need to do. The first is establish clear measures of success before you begin. This means being specific and defining measurable outcomes before starting a project.

Todd Henry [00:12:25]:

Not after, instead of vague goals like grow the audience or grow our market share or launch successfully, you need concrete metrics, right? We're going to find 10,000 customers in Q1, right? Or we're going to secure five corporate clients by Q2. You have to be specific so that you can't backward rationalize. The key is to make these measures objective enough so there's no ambiguity and everybody knows what we're going after. Without this clarity, you're tempted to move the goalposts later and rationalize whatever happens as progress, which is the source of a lot of dissonance in organization. And then not only do you need to be specific and establish clear measures, but you need to create accountability for progress. Accountability means having someone or something outside of yourself that you regularly report progress to. This could be a trusted colleague who checks in weekly, a coach who reviews your metrics monthly, or a structured review process where you evaluate yourself against a predefined success measure, whatever that happens to be. The critical element is that you have someone in your life who you are accountable to, who is helping you, is basically keeping you from leaping out of the escape hatch, right? Their job is to keep that escape hatch closed and say, wait a minute, that's not what you said you were going to do.

Todd Henry [00:13:44]:

And also they will help you know when you need to course correct. Because sometimes we set metrics and those aren't the right metrics. And we do need to course correct, but we shouldn't be doing it as an escape path. We should be doing it strategically when called for. So this external accountability prevents you from quietly abandoning your original success criteria when things get difficult. It keeps you honest with yourself, which is always our aim. As creative pros, when you define success in advance and hold yourself accountable to those definitions, you close this escape hatch, you create the conditions for real growth. All right, so those are the three escape hatches, procrastination and last minute work.

Todd Henry [00:14:24]:

Where might you be doing that and what are you going to do to resolve it? Escape hatch number two is dilution and divided attention, which is when we do so many things, we dilute our focus, devote our attention to too many things, to the point where we can't focus on the things that matter. And then rationalization, which is when we're constantly backward rationalizing why failure was actually success, and we close the door for growth. Where might you be experiencing these escape hatches? Here's what I want you to hear today. Escape hatches often feel like safety, but they're actually barriers to the life that you want to build to the kind of leader that you want to be. Real safety doesn't come from having backup plans for every scenario. It comes from developing the confidence that you can handle whatever comes, including failure. As my father in law likes to say, adjust and adapt. The creative life requires commitment.

Todd Henry [00:15:16]:

It requires putting yourself in a position where your future depends on your work being true and good. And it requires closing those escape hatches. So here's my challenge for you. Identify one escape hatch in your work right now, just one. And this week, take one concrete step to close it. Maybe that means setting clear milestones for a project you've been procrastinating on. Maybe it means choosing your big three and saying no to something that's diluting your focus. Maybe it means defining what success actually looks like before you launch your new initiative going into the new year.

Todd Henry [00:15:47]:

Whatever it is, close one escape hatch this week and see what happens when you give yourself no choice but to move forward. That, friends, is where real creative life begins. And that is the definition of leading yourself and of leading others. Hey, I hope you found this helpful. As always, you can get our full interviews, bonus content and more absolutely free. If you go to DailyCreativePlus.com you'll get a private feed where you have access to all of our interviews, all the bonus content. We have more interviews coming up and especially in the new year, we have a ton of great interviews lined up. So make sure you go to DailyCreativePlus.com to get access to those.

Todd Henry [00:16:32]:

If you are a leader looking to connect with someone wanting to have conversations about your leadership and some of the pressures you're facing, visit creativeleader.net that's the site of Creative Leader Roundtable. We're launching a roundtable for leaders to be able to have real conversations about the dynamics they're experiencing and to help one another be better at what we do to close those escape hatches. So check it out@creativeleader.net and of course, if you want more information about my books, my speaking events, and more, you can do so@toddhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant. We'll see you then.