One Piece of the Puzzle
“Fitted like pieces of puzzles, complicated.” -Eric B & Rakim, Microphone Fiend
I’ve been a bit obsessed with puzzles of late. It’s been years since I have really put a puzzle together but we received a new 1,000 piece puzzle for Christmas and my love for puzzles was instantly rekindled. I should start off by saying that I owe my wife an apology.
You see, on the morning of New Year’s Eve, my five-year-old daughter came to me holding the puzzle box with her big eyes and cute smile and said so kindly, “Daddy, can we please do this puzzle today?” My heart instantly melted and I said yes. It was, after all, only 1,000 pieces. How long could it take?
We emptied the box onto the kitchen table and starting working on the puzzle. Everyone chipped in working on the puzzle and we made fast progress. Then it all slowed down as the easy parts were completed. Seven hours later it was done. I expected it would take three hours. The puzzle put us behind on a lot of preparing for the evening in which we had company coming over to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
For the record my amazing wife was very nice about the whole derailing of the day with the puzzle. But still, I apologized and I am doing so again now, publicly.
After completing our Christmas gift puzzle I went out and bought three more 1,000 piece puzzles and started one of them within a couple days. This time, I would take my time and enjoy working on the puzzle without any rush. The kids and my wife all helped too. It took a few days. It was both relaxing and infuriating.
That’s interesting thing about puzzles. They have this uncanny ability to be both fun and peaceful while also making you want to swear and flip the table. In my puzzling experience, they usually start out easy and fun. You make quick progress, especially if you follow the “connect all the edges first” rule of puzzles. Once the edges are complete and the whole thing is framed in you start to get this false sense of hope that you’ll be done in no time flat.
You press on, putting together the “easy” stuff. You know, the readily identifiable patterns and areas of the puzzle. It feels like such an accomplishment. But then it happens. The time has come to focus on the minutiae and suddenly it all comes grinding to a halt. You spend what feels like two hours searching for that one piece that should be easy to find with no avail.
You start to convince yourself that somehow despite the puzzle being brand new and coming in a sealed bag, that the manufacturer has left that piece out of the box. You are stuck. There seems to be no way to move forward. Back to that in a minute.
Did I just describe putting together a puzzle? Or did I just describe working on any project? Spoiler alert: It was both!
When anything you are working on has 1,000 pieces, it is going to be complicated. There’s no way around it. You’re going to get stuck. You are going to get frustrated, and if you decide to flip the table, you will never complete the work. Frustration comes with every project. Any large task or project will never come without some amount of setbacks and challenges.
So what do we do about that?
Back to the puzzle. You’ve been searching forever for that one piece that you are certain isn’t there and you’re ready to give up. For myself, I usually stop looking and search for something else. I try my best to just keep making progress. Just keep moving forward.
When my kids started helping with the puzzles, they would lament about only finding one or two pieces that fit together in the time that I would connect ten or twenty. I reminded them every time they fretted, “Even one piece is helpful because every piece you put together is one less piece you have to worry about later.” And it stuck with them. They started repeating it back to me whenever I was frustrated.
By the way, eventually, I always find the missing piece that I was so sure wasn’t in the box. And that just renews my hope in completing the whole thing, because all of the pieces are there. We may not find them in the order we like, but we will find them if we keep working at it.
It’s the same with any project you are trying to accomplish. Keep working at it and you will get there. You may need to pivot and refocus several times, but you can absolutely get there. Focus on that this year with every task you take on and I believe you’ll accomplish more than you think you are capable of doing.
-Jason