Tom Petty Was Right
“The waiting is the hardest part…” -Tom Petty, The Waiting
I feel like I spend most of my life waiting for things to happen. I don’t mean that I am sitting around just waiting for work to come my way or just sitting alone at home hoping someone calls. No, what I mean is that in my line of work, I can be as proactive as I like, but I still find that basically every single day, I am waiting for something.
Part of it is because of my chosen professions. As a coach, I spend a lot of time between clients, waiting to hear back on proposals and scheduling. As a game designer, it’s even more of waiting game. I am currently working on around two dozen game projects and a good portion of those are in a holding pattern.
When a publisher is reviewing a game to determine whether or not they will they are going to buy it from a designer, the minimum time is usually a few months. Sometimes it can be much longer than that. Sometimes upwards of a year, though that is not as common. In any event, it feels like the main game I am playing is the waiting game.
And it’s not like the publishers are just lollygagging around while not getting back to me. The fact is most publishers are fairly small operations who don’t have a ton of staff and even if they do have larger organizations, those companies still only have a few people looking into acquiring new games.
I’m confident that whatever your profession is, you probably find yourself in a position of waiting. I’m also pretty confident that you aren’t super fond of waiting on things all the time. No one is, right? We live in an on demand world and a culture that wants everything done yesterday. That can mean that waiting for things feels excruciating.
We feel this just the same outside of work… whether it’s waiting for the weekend, a vacation, or for our Amazon packages to arrive. I remember when it used to take a week or two to get packages from Amazon and now, I get them in two days. Sometimes they show up on the third day and when that happens, I always feel ridiculously inconvenienced, even when I didn’t need the item right away.
The fact is, waiting is something that we are going to spend a lot of our lives doing. That doesn’t mean we have to love it, or even like it, but we do have to find a way to deal with it. I’ve been trying to think of strategies to teach myself and my readers how to be better at waiting and it’s a struggle.
Obviously, we need to have more patience when waiting but I know from experience, learning to extend our patience just by saying, “be more patient” is really tough. So I started considering how I feel when I am waiting and really every time I have thought about it, my feelings all come down to one word.
Stuck.
It’s a helpless feeling having to wait and not being able to move forward. Re-framing that helplessness as simply being stuck gives us something to work on. Helpless implies that we can’t do anything to fix our situation. Saying you are stuck, at least to me, implies that maybe there’s something we can do to get unstuck.
A lot of the work I do, even with coaching, feels like creative work to me. It’s easy to feel stuck when working on something creative. So let’s apply the same tactics for working around being stuck creatively to dealing with waiting. I know it’s not a one to one comparison but I think it’s a start.
There’s two tactics that I believe will work for both being creatively stuck and also being stuck while waiting.
First, just try working on something else. From the creative side, it can get your brain working again by focusing on something else for a bit. If you find yourself dwelling too much on waiting, it’s helpful to try and push our focus to something else and work on that. Doing so should serve two purposes— distract us from the annoyance or concern of waiting, and second it allows us to still move forward on other work. This helps ensure that we don’t fall behind and create more problems for ourselves.
Second, and this one doesn’t work in every situation, but reach out to others and check in. When working creatively, this can take the shape of checking in with a creative partner and talking through where you are stuck. When dealing with waiting, it can be simply checking in on the status of what you are waiting for. For example, usually about once per month when a publisher is reviewing one of my games, I will email them just to check in and see if I can clarify anything or help out in any way.
When they reply, it gives me confidence that they are still working through the process and also helps me to know that they aren’t stuck themselves on the review. When I worked in the corporate world and was waiting for others to finish their portion of a project, that check in would take the shape of offering myself or my team’s assistance in completing their portion. Even when they couldn’t use our help, the offer was generally met with gratitude.
Waiting sucks. That will pretty much always be true. But I believe that with these tactics, you can take a fresh approach and make it a bit better.
-Jason