Episode 27: The "How" Is Killing You

Do you have a dream or goal that feels too big because you can’t figure out how it will ever happen? You’re not alone. Many of us get stuck waiting for a step-by-step manual before we even start. The thing is: most great things in life don't arrive with a completed blueprint of how you'll get from Point A to Point B.

Whether you’re writing a book, starting a business, or picturing the fulfillment of a personal vision, this episode will help you reconsider “how paralysis” and take the next step with confidence.

#DecodingtheUnicorn #goals #dreams #DagHammarskjöld #trust #TypeA #TypeB

Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will release globally on July 29, 2026. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

In Episode 27 of the Decoding the Unicorn podcast, host Sara Causey discusses the paralyzing effect of the "how" question on achieving goals. She uses examples like wanting to write a book or start a business to illustrate how the "how" can stifle ambition. Causey references Dag Hammarskjöld's journey to becoming UN Secretary-General and the concept of hindsight. She emphasizes the importance of committing to a goal before questioning "how," breaking tasks into manageable steps, and trusting that solutions will emerge as progress is made. Causey also critiques overly optimistic financial advice from Ken Atchity’s book.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Decoding the Unicorn, Episode 27, goals, dreams, how question, Dag Hammarskjöld, UN Secretary General, hindsight, cynicism, Type A personality, Type B personality, Type C personality, trust.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 27 of Decoding the Unicorn the podcast, I appreciate you joining me today. In this episode, I want to talk about the how is killing you. Bear with me for a moment. We have goals. We have dreams. We have ideas, maybe big, maybe small. I want to lose weight. I want to find another job. I want to start my own business. I'd love to freelance. I want to find a profitable side hustle. I want to write a book. I want to find the love of my life. I want to change my image and start dressing differently or find a sassy new haircut. The very next question, after we have a spark of desire, the very next question, how well, how are you going to do that? You've never written a book before. How are you going to find a good stylist? It's really difficult, and the good ones are all expensive. How am I going to find somebody great? My area is small. I feel like I've had horrible dates. How's this going to work out? I want to find a new job in this economy. Yeah. How's that going to happen so often, before we ever even make an attempt of any kind of action, we're hamstrung by the simple question, how, if you found yourself in this dilemma, stay tuned.

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Early in DAGs journal, he wrote that he felt he was being pulled into the unknown. He knew that something significant was going to happen in life, but he didn't really know what or when or how. He just had an overall sense that something big was on the horizon. He suspected that at some point he would probably follow in Hjalmar’s footsteps and become Prime Minister of Sweden. Even though he had never aligned with a political party, he thought, maybe an exception can be made. Maybe somehow this will work out. His career continued to go outward, but not necessarily upward, within the Swedish government, and then, just like rocket fuel in his career, he was suddenly catapulted to being the UN Secretary General, but trying to figure out how that was going to happen would have only been possible. In hindsight, I've heard the podcaster David bear talk about this exact phenomenon when we're in the thick of something, and maybe it feels like we're muddling our way down a dark hallway, or down a pitch black hallway. You can't see what's going on. You're trying your best to feel your way through it. It's basically impossible to know exactly, step by step, what's going on. It's only possible when you look back in hindsight and you say the amount of things that had to add up for me to have been at the right place at the right time for that event to go in my favor is phenomenal. People, I think, nowadays, have the tendency to be cynical about the universe, and they think that almost any kind of optimism is woo, woo. And I don't necessarily blame them for that, but I do think they're selling themselves awfully short. It's like the quote you have to decide if you believe in a fundamentally hostile universe or in a fundamentally friendly universe. I think a lot of people have given themselves over to the idea that the universe is fundamentally hostile, and what's the use in trying nevertheless, oh, isn't it human nature to have sparks of desire? I don't think we can resist it. I did quite a bit of academic work with the Faust legend, and I'm thinking back to early on in Goethe's Faust Mephistopheles is talking about humanity. They just hop from one rubbish pile to another like a grasshopper that can't stay content. It has to leap here and then leap there and stick its nose and other people's business, humanity is not typically satisfying to stay in one place. So we have these sparks of desire, and then, unfortunately, before they can gain any real momentum, we go into the how room. Well, how is this going to happen? So let's say that someone has decided they want to take a six month sabbatical from work, or maybe they want to. Semi retire for six months, rent the proverbial cabin in the woods, write the great American novel, and be undisturbed for that period of time. The very next question, how am I going to do this? And my question to you is, what if you didn't have to worry about the how? What if the How was never going to be revealed to you, except in hindsight, anyway. But we want quick, fast, in a hurry. Well, how would I find another job? What if I got there and it didn't work out? How would I pay my bills? How am I going to write a book anyway? I have no experience doing that. How would I find an affordable cabin in the woods. How would all of this work out? How, how and how, except for its sister or its brother? What if that's a whole other anxiety topic? How am I going to find this amazing person? How am I going to find another job? How am I going to deal with a down economy? How could I possibly start a business after a layoff? Everybody's doing that, everybody's freelancing now, the pond is crowded with fish. How would I stand out? How can I do this? How can I build a personal brand? On and on and on it goes. And I think sometimes, even when we have that same sense like dag did, that, we know we were meant for something more than what we're doing. We know that there's a higher potential that we haven't experienced yet. We begin to talk ourselves out of it with that one little word, how we can't see how it's going to happen, therefore it must not be capable of happening. And the good news there is that's just a limiting belief that's patently false. Ken actually has a book titled How to quit your day job and live out your dreams. Then, yeah, it's a bit funny that it's called how, in an episode dedicated to how, how, the question how, hamstrings us. It's called How to quit your day job and live out your dreams. I don't agree with everything that's in the book. To be clear, I was having this discussion the other night with a friend of mine because he was asking me what I had been reading recently. And I said, Well, the last book that I've read, cover to cover was this book by Ken achey. And you know, in my opinion, he's got some risky stuff in that book. And my friend was like, what does that mean? I was like, well, he is awfully frivolous about finances, for example. Again, that's just my opinion, but he's sort of like, hey, in America, they're not going to put you on the treadmill, they're not going to enforce poverty laws. They're not going to throw you in jail. So run up your credit cards and go into debt and declare bankruptcy if you have to, it's whatever. And I'm sitting here like, No, I don't think it's whatever, having been in that position before. You know, I really haven't on this podcast talked about certain elements of my backstory, but years ago, I tried self employment for the first time, and I failed. I started a business where I was going to have my very own staffing agency, and it went splat at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It did not work at all. I was constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul. Worried about where my next dollar was coming from. It just felt like I was scraping the bottom of the barrel all the time. I didn't have my heart conditions at that point, so I was living off of sugar, caffeine and fumes. It was extremely common for me to go to bed around midnight, and by that, I mean fall asleep with my laptop still going in my lap, just collapsing out of exhaustion at about midnight, and then get up at about five to just start hustle. Just start hustle. Just start hustle. Like over and over again, and I was getting nowhere. I was getting nowhere fast. I can laugh about it now, but God, it was depressing at the time, and I teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. So for me, whenever I hear somebody like, Oh, hey, just run up your credit cards, not going to throw you in debtors prison, you can always negotiate a settlement, and and you've got to declare bankruptcy. I mean, it's whatever I'm like, Um, no, I don't know about that. I don't think that's a direction that I would want to go in. And I certainly wouldn't recommend that for anybody else. As always, I'm no expert on this. You'd want to talk to a financial planner, a bankruptcy attorney, etc. But, you know, just for me personally, in my opinion, that's not a road that I would want to travel down. I'm more interested in having a life that's comfortable, where I can make ends meet, and I feel like I have a little bit of breathing room. I'm not out here trying to become the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. I just want to be able to live my life and work my projects and do the things that I find deeply meaningful, and I don't feel that I can do those things in a deeply meaningful way. If I'm robbing Peter to pay Paul and creditors are blowing my phone up and I'm on the edge of bankruptcy having been there and done that before. It's not something that I would recommend, but without being. Said, here's another dag trait. You can learn from people you disagree with. You can learn from people that maybe some of what they're saying is off base, but some of it isn't. And in that spirit, Ken actually has some really good information. I think about type A versus type B, and what he describes in his terms as the accountant versus the visionary, and he uses his own parents as his kind of metaphors for these ideas. I describe myself as recovering type A and I think that if you have ever worked in a hard driving, hard nosed kind of office, or certainly if you've ever been in sales or marketing, you can relate to this. Everything is about the bottom line. It's about the bottom dollar. Did that deal close? How much have you build? There were so many times more than I can count where I would close a deal, and it would be lots of golf claps. And then what are you going to do next? That was last quarter. That was last month. The slate is clean. Now. What are you going to do? What have you done for me lately? What's next? In fact, I do remember one particular deal that was pretty robust, and it just closed, and I got my little round of golf claps and wanted to go crawl under a rock, because I don't particularly like that kind of attention. And one of the partners in the company looked at me, dead in the eye, eyeball to eyeball, in what I would call a menacing way. And he was like, what's next? The ink wasn't even hardly dry. What's next?

We have the tendency to internalize that. And sometimes we take stuff that's come with us from other people, from other jobs, and we begin to internalize that, and we start doing it to ourselves. That's really what the corporate machine wants. They want people who will integrate that kind of panopticon, that kind of surveillance, that kind of hard driving, hustle and grind mentality upon themselves. They don't have to supervise you if you're riding herd on yourself. So that's how that works. So we have Type A the accountant, as Ken actually would call it, someone that's always thinking about the money, and believe me, the accountant is always in the how room. It's really the accountant that asks that question. So you have the type B on the other side of the equation that's the visionary, the one that comes up with awesome ideas, that sets off a question or a statement of desire. Then you immediately have the type a that's like, well, how are you going to do that? What if it all goes wrong? So the visionary might say, I would love to start my own business, or I would love to start my own shop on Etsy and do homemade, handcrafted, homespun, whatever. And then your type A account. It says, Well, how are you going to do that? Look at how crowded that market is. Look at how many people try and fail. What if you only sell one widget a month and you make $20 that's not going to pay your bills? Who do you think you are? So you have these, these, like it's like in the in the old the old cartoons almost said commercials, but that's the wrong word. In the old cartoons, the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. It's a bit like that. You have the visionary on one shoulder going, Hey, I'd really love to do and then on the other shoulder you have this sour dower accountant who's like, well, how are you gonna do that? Yes, that ever gonna work? What Ken actually calls the Type C personality is someone who can integrate both of those things so that you're not completely going way off a cliff. You're able to harness your ideas and turn them into something real and tangible, but you're not giving yourself over to that cynicism and that just negative, pessimistic, bad attitude. Nothing is ever right, nothing ever works out. For me, other people get to succeed, and I don't. When people get too far into that kind of framework mentally, they turn into Eeyore or droopy dog. Everything's unfair, and my life is bad, and nothing ever works out for me. It always works out for other people, and that's not a good space to play in, either being hard nosed and hard driving and being unwilling to even take a day off to do something enjoyable, or just to rest, to catch up on sleep, because you feel like I can't afford to fall behind. All of these competitors are coming to get me and Chicken Little The sky is falling. That's not a fun sandbox to play in, but droopy dog Eeyore isn't either. It's important not to allow. That question of how to get in your way. Now I know, I know your next question is going to be, well, how do I do that? How do I keep how from hamstringing me? You're bringing up a great point, but you're not giving me any ideas on what to do instead. Well, never fear, I will offer you three ways that you can keep from getting derailed by the question, how? Because that's part of the battle. And in fact, that's going to be point number one, decide what it is that you want before you ever even ask the question, how? Make some kind of a commitment to the goal or the dream first, because if you start asking how, before you've even decided what you're going to do and why you want to do it, you're in the danger zone. You you'll just give up. You'll throw up your hands and say, it's going to be too difficult. I don't see a path forward, so I guess I won't. Once you're all in on something, then how can actually be utilized as a tool instead of a stumbling block? So here's an example. How am I going to write this book? I don't have any experience. I don't know what I'm doing. How could I sit down and become a novelist? You could make the decision this book will exist. I will do this. I want to do this. I'm certain that I would enjoy doing it. So what's the next step? Instead of saying, How am I going to do it and thinking about, I have to know every step. I have to know every rung of the ladder that I'm going to climb before I'll even take the first step. No, what's your first step? Which segues nicely into point number two. Instead of worrying about every rung on the ladder, think about what you need to do in the short run, the big stuff, heck, sometimes even the small stuff can feel impossible. If you ask for the entire blueprint upfront, I will use myself as an example on this I had no idea, no idea that I would ever write a biography about DAG. If you had told me a year ago, I would have known it then, because we were actively engaged in the writing process. If you had told me two years ago, if you had sat with me on September 1 of 2023 and said, Hey, so in the summer of 2024 you're going to start writing a biography about Dag hammerschol, and it's going to be a co creation with his essence, I would have thought you were completely and totally mad. There's no way that anybody could have given me the entire blueprint up front. I would have just assumed it was nuts. So what you want to do instead is narrow it down to bite sized portions. And whenever I was working on the book, it was like, Well, what do what do we need to do today? Sometimes not even that. Sometimes it was, what do we need to do this afternoon? What do we need to do this evening? And then on a Saturday, when I would have the whole day, it's like, okay, what? What do we want to do? What's our focus? Is it going through speeches? Is it going through previous writing? How do we want to structure this today, but not How do we want to structure the entire book, ad infinitum. It's just, what do we need to do today? And you can think of it like this, I don't need to see the entire staircase. I just need to see the next step. And that can sometimes quiet down that type a sense of overwhelm. Point number three, you have to have a sense of trust. I know some people, especially with religious or spiritual trauma, they bristle at the F word faith. So you can just say trust. Instead, life rarely gives you the whole ball of wax in advance, and sometimes that's because plans will change as you grow, as you develop, as you launch new questions of desire, the plan will change something that you wanted when you were 20 years old might not be something you want at 40 and something you want at 40 might not be something that you want at 60, you change plans change. And here's a question. Now I understand, believe me, but leave me when I was firmly entrenched in my type a days, this question would have made me break out into hives. But just bear with me. What if you asked yourself the question? What if the how only becomes visible after I'm already in motion?

I know that's scary. I do. I know some of you will push back and say, but what if I go in the wrong direction, go in motion how? I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. What if the how only becomes visible after you're in motion, that will build that sense of faith or trust, if you prefer, in your own creativity, in your own problem solving skills. You may not see it from the starting line, but as you get further down the track, you'll realize I'm actually doing this.

So again, I'll use myself as an example.

I certainly had that question of like, how are we going to do this? I don't have any experience doing this. I was still, at that time, engaged in some staffing and recruiting work. I knew that I would have to do it in my off hours. And I'm like, I don't know how we're going to do this. I I want to do it. I knew that dad can ask me to do anything that's that's not the issue. It's just my own shortcomings. I was like, how am I going to do this? Well, don't forget that we live in the information age. How does one write a book? You'll have tons of information at your fingertips, information that people 50 years ago probably would have killed for. So it's handy to look at other people's experiences. Now you may have to forge your own trail. Don't get me wrong on that. You may still have to forge your own trail, but you can look at references of other people, and in some cases, writing an outline up front or a chronology of some kind, particularly when you're talking about a biography, that can be extremely helpful. Okay, writing an outline. I have no experience doing that, so I worked with an editor who helped me understand how to put together an outline. And after that, honestly, we were off to the races. It was easier for me to start looking at important events in DAGs life and putting them in chronological order and putting together a skeleton, and once the skeleton was assembled, the flesh and the sinew and the tendons and all of that went on so quickly, it just still feels to me like a fever dream. I can't believe that we did that and we did it so fast, just insane. But again, if somebody had telegraphed all of that to me in advance, I would have thought they were crazy. I had to get into some kind of motion, and just doing a simple Google search on how to get started writing a book helped me. There is a scripture that says there's nothing new under the sun. Whatever it is you're imagining doing, the odds are quite high that somebody somewhere in human history has already done that or something like it, probably enough that you can at least say, okay, what can I take from this person's life lessons? Is there something that I can use? Whether it's something to say, Okay, here's what not to do. Sometimes, knowing what not to do is valuable information too. So let's think about how to get out of how paralysis into some kind of momentum, commit to the dream, decide what it is that you want and why you want it, and make your commitment to it, act on whatever it is that you can do. Now, get some forward motion going, and then trust that the How will emerge when you're supposed to know something in order to meet the goal, to meet the dream appropriately, you will I wish you all the best, all the best in all of your endeavors. Take good care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode.

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