You know, there are times, and I mean plenty of times, when you just hit a wall. You’re working on something, trying to figure something out, or maybe just trying to figure yourself out, and boom, everything grinds to a halt. It’s like your brain just decides to go on strike. You stare at the screen, at the empty page, at the ceiling, and nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’ve been there more times than I can count, and honestly, sometimes it feels like it’s going to last forever.
I remember this one project, a while back. It was for a client, a fairly big deal, and I was supposed to come up with a whole new angle for their marketing campaign. I’d done plenty of these before, right? No biggie. Or so I thought. I sat down, opened my laptop, typed a few words, deleted them. Stared into space. Went to get coffee. Came back, typed a few more words, deleted them again. This went on for, I kid you not, two solid days. Two days of just… nothing. Zip. Zero. My mind felt like a dusty attic, empty and full of cobwebs. I was so freaking stuck, like a car buried in thick mud, just spinning its wheels.
I kept looking at all my old successful campaigns. Scrolled through old ideas, tried to rehash what worked before. It was all so familiar, so comfortable. But none of it felt right for this new project. Every attempt to force an old idea into a new box just made the ‘stuck’ feeling worse. It was pure frustration, boiling up. I was getting nowhere, and the deadline was, well, it was always there, breathing down my neck.
Now, I’m a pretty practical guy, but I also dabble a bit in, let’s just say, unconventional wisdom. And during one of these “stuck” moments, not even related to work initially, just a general feeling of being in a rut, I happened to be looking at this one image. You know, the Four of Cups. It’s this picture of a person sitting under a tree, arms crossed, kinda looking down at three cups right in front of them. And there’s this other cup, seemingly offered from a cloud, but the person isn’t even looking at it. They’re just… absorbed in their own little world, or maybe just thoroughly unimpressed by the cups they already have.
And that image, it just hit me. Like a ton of bricks. That was me. In that moment, and honestly, in so many other moments when I felt stuck. I was so busy staring at my three old cups – my old ideas, my past successes, my familiar ways of doing things – that I was completely missing the fourth cup. The new one. The one being offered right there, a fresh perspective, a new opportunity, something completely different from what I was fixated on.
So, back to the client project. After those two utterly unproductive days, staring at those damn old campaigns, beating my head against the wall, that Four of Cups image popped into my head. I literally thought, “Dude, stop looking at your three old cups.”
What did I do? Well, it sounds simple, but it was a huge shift for me. First, I closed my laptop. Completely. Not just minimized, but shut it down. Then I did something I hadn’t done in those two days: I went outside. Just walked. No phone, no music, just me and the pavement. I walked for about an hour, letting my mind wander, trying not to think about the project, which is harder than it sounds when you’re stressed.
As I walked, I started noticing things. A funny sign on a building, a kid drawing with chalk on the sidewalk, the way the light hit the leaves of a tree. Little, unconnected things. And then, I kid you not, out of nowhere, a completely random thought hit me. It wasn’t about the client, not directly. It was about something a friend had said a few weeks ago about their struggles with cooking, trying to reinvent old recipes. And suddenly, bang, a connection formed. Not just an idea, but a whole framework for the client’s campaign. It was completely outside the box I’d been trying to force myself into.
I rushed back home, practically ran. Flipped open my laptop, and the words just flowed. It wasn’t a struggle anymore. It was like the dam broke. I wasn’t rehashing old stuff; I was building something new, exciting, and genuinely fresh. The “fourth cup” had been offered, and because I finally lifted my gaze from the familiar, I saw it and took it.
It’s become my go-to move now when I feel that familiar sense of ‘stuckness’ creeping in. That image, that old piece of wisdom, it’s not about magic. It’s about perspective. It’s about realizing that sometimes, the solution isn’t in the three things you’re obsessing over, the three familiar paths you keep trying to walk down. It’s usually right there, a new option, a different way, waiting for you to just look up and acknowledge it. It’s about breaking that cycle of staring down at what you think you want or what you already have, and daring to cast your eyes wider, to see what else the universe might be trying to hand you. And trust me, it’s usually something way better than what you were stuck on in the first place.
