When you are stuck not knowing what to do next, it is easy to stall. Not doing anything is the easiest option.

For instance, if you're writing something and you get stuck not knowing what to write, the easiest thing to do is to stop writing.

When you keep writing, you upgrade your problem. You've now gone from having a creativity problem to having an editing problem.

Now you might be worried that what you have written isn't good enough. That doesn't matter though, because moving forward always upgrades your problems. Even if you have to throw the whole thing out, you can start over, this time with much greater clarity in what you want to say and how to say it.

Yesterday I wrote the Sunday Morning Marketing Dispatch, the very issue that was supposed to go out that day. In previous weeks I had written that week's issue much earlier in the week, but for some reason the contents of this issue didn't make themselves known to me until the very same day. No time for editing or even thinking very much for what to put in or leave out. SMMD#5 is almost completely unedited.

So I had a choice: go over the whole thing, edit out the rough spots (stalling)... or ship it out the door, as-is.

Considering the opportunity cost of those two choices, the latter leaves me in a much better position.

If you want to improve your dating life, but you are afraid to go up to women... and you approach anyway... you have now upgraded your problem from an "approaching" problem to a "conversation" problem. That's way better, because now, at least you're interacting with a woman.

And even if she doesn't like you, instead of seeing it as rejection, you can see it as simply taking a survey of who has good taste and who doesn't.

Also, if you do get blown out, you are now in a much better place than you were. Having approached and been rejected is way better than not having approached at all. You now have a reference point for what it is like to approach a woman, and you have a starting point for improvement. You now have some idea of what to do differently next time.

We talk about problem solving a lot, but in most cases you just need to upgrade them.

I don't care what kind of problem you have. Chances are, you can upgrade it to a much better problem by simply moving forward. The trick to improving problems is to not stop just because there is a problem.

Every time you don't stop, you upgrade your problem.