26 Weeks to Freedom: Creating an Internet Business

Bob Mann

                                                                                                                   After yesterday’s solemn pledge to become more serious about sticking to the day-to-day activities I need to do in order to achieve my online business goals, you may be wondering why on earth I’m starting today’s post with a picture of a jigsaw puzzle!   Actually, there is a connection—as I’ve just discovered, by accident, that the process of putting together a jigsaw puzzle can teach us a lot about the right way to approach the other “puzzles” we’re trying to solve in our lives!

When I noticed this puzzle (which somebody had given me a few months ago) sitting in its unopened box on a shelf  last night, I wasn’t doing anything else and thought it would be interesting just to see if I could dump the pieces in a pile and begin to make some sense of it.  I think it’s been about 20 years, at least, since the last time I tried to tackle a jigsaw puzzle.  Anyway, I intentionally did not take a close look at the box cover to see what the finished version is supposed to look like; I figured it would be more challenging just to proceed piece-by-piece.  All I knew was that it’s an artist’s whimsical view of the Seattle waterfront.

I began, of course, by looking for the “edge” pieces (which are easy to identify), and then tried to separate those pieces into more recognizable parts of the landscape, like water, boats, fish, buildings, and sky.  Gradually, piece-by-piece, the outer edges of the puzzle began to take shape.  This morning, after taking the photo, I made some more progress, putting little clusters of pieces together and gradually filling in the parts closest to the finished bottom edge.  The side and top edges are still mostly undone,  but I’ll keep working on it until I have the satisfaction of seeing the whole thing completed.

So, how does assembling a jigsaw puzzle relate to the more serious challenges of life?  Well, although we may be starting with just a pile of confusion—not even knowing what the end result is exactly supposed to look like—we do know what our first steps should be, which is to “find the edge pieces.” In other words, start with whatever simple steps we can do, knowing that after those steps are completed, it will then be possible to figure out what we should do next—and so on.  The subsequent “pieces of the puzzle” always build upon those already assembled.  And eventually, if we are patient and use our intelligence as we go along (including plenty of trial-and-error), we’ll start to fill in more and more of the big picture.  And as we all know from putting together jigsaw puzzles, the more pieces you fill in, the more momentum you gain in speed and excitement as the number of unassembled pieces shrinks and the big picture gets clearer and clearer. The same is true when we get closer to achieving any goal in real life.

Of course, you can gain an extra advantage with a jigsaw puzzle by referring to the picture on the box as you go along.  And, in a sense, the same is true of real-life goals: we should keep our “eyes on the prize” as we go along so we don’t get discouraged by the day-to-day, “piece-by-piece” details and obstacles that get in our way.  But I think it’s more satisfying not to refer to the exact picture on the box (i.e., not to be obsessed with a specific outcome), because it gives us a chance to be even more adaptable and imaginative in seeing what kinds of connections we can make and things we can create as we go along.  Which is an important skill to use in real life as well—since, as you may have noticed, that ideal  ”picture on the box” never looks exactly the same  by the time we get there anyway :-)

Copyright © 2010 by Bob Mann