#ATCF: Break the Knot's Back

Vance Crowe [00:00:10] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we're gonna do an as the crow flies episode. I wanna talk about a subject to I call breaking the back of a knot. When I was a deckhand and I was just learning how to do things like tie up a ship, you know, make knots, how to scrub decks, do all these things. There's a guy on a ship called a bosun. The bosun is the person that trains all the deckhands in how to do their work. And my bosun was a true sailor. In fact, everyone called him Sea Dog. He had sunburned skin so much, it looked like leather. He had this raspy voice from smoking cigarettes all the time, and he was rail skinny, just, you know, every ounce of calorie was burned off of him in the hot sun. And he was kind of a rough guy, but he knew so much about sailing that it, it was really deeply important to me. And one of the tasks that a deckhand has to do is they have to get knots out of line, out of rope. And you may think like, well, how bad could that be? But imagine you have a ship and it is tied up and somehow some kind of a knot gets into the line. Well, that ship is gonna pull and pull and pull, and maybe the line was wet, and so it could squeeze really far. And then as it dries out, it gets hard. So sometimes you encounter these knots in rope that are really difficult, and if you didn't know what you were doing, you would say it is actually impossible to get that knot out of there.

Vance Crowe [00:01:43] But Sea Dog taught me a really important lesson. You'd say, you know, when you get a knot, you need to look at it and you need to pull on it a little bit. You need to like put your fingers down in there and try and see what's going on because you're looking for the back of the knot. The back of the knot is that spot where once you can kind of get just a little bit of give, you can slide a little bit of slack outta there and the whole knot starts to come undone. And this was a really powerful thing. In fact, I've often said there is no knot you can give me maybe in some kind of little tiny thread or something that I can't get out. Because once you learn how to break the back of a knot, you can always figure a way to open it up. And I actually think this is a lesson for life. I think that there is something really important about finding the back of the knot, of the things that hold us back. You know, a few months ago I decided that I was really, really anxious. I was having a lot of stress, even though the business was going great, my team was doing amazing. We were getting all kinds of new business and, and just things were good. But I found myself at 11 o'clock feeling like I was going to have an ulcer. I'm super stressed, I'm really tired. And I started to get up and walk towards the coffee pot and I was like, wait a second. Maybe having another cup of coffee to wake me up isn't actually going to help my stress level. So I just didn't drink that cup of coffee.

Vance Crowe [00:03:17] And then the next morning when I woke up, I didn't make some giant decision. I just said, you know, I'm not gonna drink that next cup of coffee. And so I didn't, and this went on for a few hours until I had to make a conscious decision because I started getting that addicted feeling, you know, you really need that cup of coffee. And then once you get past the, you know, the, the need, which is more like want, then you start getting a headache and then you start getting that nausea feeling and now you're starting to feel like, no, I mean, really I need that cup of coffee. But I just held on for a while. I didn't really know what I was doing or why I was doing it. It just felt like the right thing to do. And over time, a couple days, the nausea started going away, the headaches were gone. And eventually I got to the other side and it was kind of nice. I didn't wake up in the morning being like, ah, I wish I could get a cup of coffee. Now, I thought that this was all it was gonna be was just lower my stress because I wasn't taking in all that caffeine. But as I started to look around in my life, I started realizing, hey, things are getting easier. Things are getting better. And not just having to do with my stress level. Like, I noticed that when I got home and I was trying to put my daughters to bed and I wanted them to take their baths and get into their pajamas and you know, put on your pull-up and, and you know, they're fighting me and I'm pushing back. And I could tell at those times it was calmer. I was calmer. I didn't feel the level of stress that I normally did at these times.

Vance Crowe [00:04:51] And so it felt really good. And then I noticed that because I was getting done and putting my daughters to bed and having a much calmer situation, I didn't feel this pull to eat a bunch of ice cream and stay up late just zoning out on something or trying to work really, really hard. And instead, I just had a peaceful evening. And I would go to sleep at night and then I'd wake up in the morning and I had the energy that I had been lacking before. So I started being more consistent with my exercise. In fact, I got so consistent I started inviting my wife to come along. And so we started, you know, lifting again and running like we used to before we had kids. And this in in turn created time for us to have great conversations. And then when we would get the kids ready for school, I'd get to work and I'd already be energized and ready to go. And so work gets better and things just start working easier. I didn't know when I quit coffee that that was the back of the knot on a whole bunch of other stress and problems I had going on. Now looking back on it, I might have been able to figure that out, but I wasn't really thinking of it that way. And so I bring up this subject because I, I don't care if you quit drinking coffee. I will say this, I think that coffee had a larger psychological impact on me than any other chemical I've ever used and abused, whether it's alcohol or nicotine or THC, any of these things that you ever like just dabble with.

Vance Crowe [00:06:23] I always thought caffeine is the, is the lowest commitment, you know, no big deal. It actually had a huge impact on, you know, the the cacophony of, of things I have going on in my voice. But I'm not advocating that you quit coffee. I have no idea whether it's right for you. I'm just saying that if you're looking around and life seems like it's on hard right now, maybe try and figure out where the back of the knot is and you don't have to take everything on and you don't have to make some giant decision. Just try not to drink the next cup of coffee. And by not drinking the next cup of coffee, you might find that there's a little bit of wiggle in that line and you may be able to find like, oh, I can actually pull this rope out right here and things can get easier. This results in a virtuous cycle. And these virtuous cycles are those few but sweet and beautiful times in our lives when things start to feel easier when you start to get that relief of having that click, like, ah, these things are working now. And you know, you just get the experience of having things get better and better. So coming up in the next few weeks, you probably noticed that we didn't do a podcast in the last couple weeks. I had that little voice in the back of my head saying, you know, you don't have a podcast ready, you don't have enough signal to be able to send out to all your listeners, so just wait, just wait a little bit, figure out what you gotta do. And one week turned into two and after two weeks I had to start saying, wait a second, is this the voice of resistance?

Vance Crowe [00:07:56] You know, this voice telling me just wait and don't put one out. Is that just the voice that's saying? No, it's okay to be lazy, you don't have to follow through with your podcast. It's okay. But no, I actually sat down, I got some really great input from people I trust and I'm gonna start doing some new and interesting things with the podcast. The podcast has been doing great, but I wanna find some way to continue to get better. You know, we've been around for almost a half a million downloads. We've been doing this for nearly four years, and it's time to really be deliberate about making this time as valuable as we can and continuing to get better. So what I'm gonna do in the month of August, I am going to do a series on, on tying the knots. And what I mean by this is I'm going to find specific issues that are really tight knots that people think, I'm not sure how we're gonna get out of this or what, what needs to be done to move to another

Vance Crowe [00:08:55] Level. But I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna have a couple of interesting people. We're gonna talk about complicated problems and how to untie that knot. Some of them will be about things going on in the world. Some of them will be about things like addiction, stuff like that. So I'm excited we're gonna start doing some, some more signal to noise in these podcasts. And I am just so, so grateful that you're here. So we'll be back next week with another episode and good luck out there trying to find the, the back of the knot and so you can break it and have life go a virtuous cycle for a while.