My friend Byron has taught me a number of things, but my favorite is the idea of cracking chickens. (Don’t worry – they’re not real chickens, just theoretical ones.)
Have you ever found yourself stuck in one of those situations where nothing can be done until something else is done first, and even that first thing has a thing before it?
Suppose you’re paying bills, but you’re out of stamps. (Yes, I still use stamps.) The closest place to get stamps is the grocery store, so you could just go there, buy stamps, and come home. But you also need groceries. In fact, you’ve had a busy week and you need to clean out the fridge (and probably the freezer), organize what’s left, make a big new shopping list, and then go to the grocery. What’s more, the refrigerator could probably use a good scrubbing, so you have to go to the hardware store to get the right cleaner to use.
So you’re stuck: You can’t pay bills without stamps. You can’t buy stamps because making two trips to the grocery is inefficient. And besides you have to go to the hardware store first anyway, but by the time you do all of those things, the mail carrier has already come and gone, and the bill won’t go out until Monday.
There it is: gridlock. Each item on your To-Do list has a prerequisite. Even the prerequisites have prerequisites. You’ve locked yourself out of your own day. And just like the age old riddle of the chicken or egg, it seems that nothing can come first.
That’s when you have to start cracking chickens. It’s the perfect name: cracking implies taking an action, cracking chickens is a non-sequitur. (We crack eggs, not chickens.) In other words, Cracking Chickens means choosing an action that doesn’t make sense in order to free up other actions that do.
What held you back was your principles – I should go to the store now for stamps when I know I’m going again in a few hours. But we forget that action itself is a principle. And sometimes action is the most important principle, as long as nobody gets hurt – except for theoretical chickens.