Lessons From A Trash Can
I moved my trash can last month. That’s it. Moved it from the left side of my desk to the right.
It drove me nuts for a week.
I kept reaching left. Every single time. Tossing things into thin air. The pile got pretty hot and my bad words increased right with it.
There I was. Annoyed at a trash can. A trash can.
So naturally, I decided to make it worse. I flipped my entire desk around — everything on the opposite side. Monitor, keyboard, books, coffee, all of it.
That one bothered me for weeks. I’d sit down and my hands would go to the wrong place, my eyes would look for things that weren’t where they were supposed to be. I didn’t feel like I could think.
My brain was staging a quiet little revolt over office furniture.
Then I went after my closet. Reorganized the whole thing. My mind absolutely lost it. I stood there one morning staring at my own clothes like I’d never seen them before.
Why am I sharing my personal organizational issues?
These are tiny changes. Meaningless. Nobody’s business depends on where their trash can sits.
My brain treated every one of them as a threat.
The best demonstration of hanging onto the way we’ve always done it, right in my life.
We change the things we think we need to change.
We update our products, modernize our systems, rebrand and reposition. That last one is a doozy. I can’t count the times I’ve walked into a new client with revenue issues and their big plan was to update their website and get that new shiny logo.
Slap me now.
We do a lot of visible things to make ourselves feel like we’re keeping up.
Underneath it all? We’re still hanging onto to thinking and doing the way we’ve always done it.
That’s why the status quo thrives. We let it run the main show while we’re busy rearranging the furniture.
Case in point.
I had a turnaround client with a product that was genuinely brilliant. The kind of technology that makes engineers’ eyes go wide and competitors go quiet.
It was also five years old. The market it served was shrinking. Customers were finding cheaper, simpler alternatives. But my client kept pouring money into it — more than half their entire development budget — because they loved this thing. It was the product that put them on the map. Their baby.
Meanwhile, another team inside the company had something new. Something hot. Game-changing potential in one of the fastest-growing markets in their industry.
That new product? Underfunded. Understaffed. Constantly losing the resource fight to the legacy beast.
The future was being strangled so the past could stay on life support.
When I asked the executive team why they were still investing so heavily in a declining product, the answer was immediate: “It’s our core. It’s what we’re known for. Our customers depend on it.”
All true. Once. Not anymore. Not in a market that had already moved on without them. When I spoke with their customers, I learned many of them were seeking a better idea, better solution. They just didn’t tell my client.
Our minds view change as a threat. Hanging on fiercely to the status quo.
That’s not a discipline problem. It’s a human wiring problem.
Every success you’ve had reinforces the patterns that got you there. Your mind codes those patterns as safe. True. Proven. So when the market shifts, your mind doesn’t raise a flag to warn you. It doubles down on what worked before to supposedly keep you safe.
You literally can’t see the change until it’s too big to ignore.
That’s what happened to my client. That’s what happened to me and my trash can, for that matter. The brain fights change at every level — from where you keep your coffee mug to where you invest your next million.
I’ve seen this in every single turnaround I’ve done. Not some. All.
The status quo never came from outside. Not from the economy, not from the competition, not from a lack of talent.
It came from within. From internal knowns that had outlived their market truth.
And the consequence is always the same. Growth stalls. Viability gets threatened. Not because taking risks failed them. Because getting stuck in the past, treating yesterday’s known like it’s still a hard and fast reality, is not a path to growth.
Corporate legends live long. We don’t always prosper.
You know the ones. “They’re our best customer.” “The competition has it, so we need it too.” “We can’t grow in a down economy.” “Our customers want us to stay the course.”
And the granddaddy of them all: “But that’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Half the time we can’t even remember where these legends came from. They got handed down from mentors, from business school, from that VP who retired six years ago. Most of them made sense once. Today’s world moves too fast to assume what was true last month still holds now.
Hanging on to the way we’ve always done it is often the exact reason we begin slip slidin’ away.
That known is often sabotaging your future.
I couldn’t handle a trash can being on the wrong side of my desk. My mind fought me over a closet.
Now multiply that by every belief, every strategy, every “known” running your business.
That’s your status quo. Most of the time, you don’t even know it’s there.
Releasing your status quo is the first step toward sustainable growth.
The question is: what do you still believe that’s no longer reality?
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Learn to Use Your Attention
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