How to Get Out of That Damned Rut

“How do you get out of a rut?” a good friend asked me. “Regain passion for your work? Get yourself up for each day?”

“Have you thought about this?” he continued. “It happens to me often. It makes me miserable. I feel useless, because I tend to piss away the day. The only way I can get back into it is to get on a good roll with a new project. But sometimes it takes too long for that to happen.”

What can you say to that? It sucks!

You wake up tired and unmotivated. You dread work. Everything seems more interesting than what you have to do.

The feeling can pass in a few hours or it can last for days — even weeks. For some it lasts months… years… a lifetime. It is unproductive — and completely unnecessary.

Dr. Srikumar Rao, a marketing executive I met several weeks ago, told me about his experience with the dilemma my friend described. Dr. Rao tried various popular motivational techniques, but none of them worked.

Because of his formal education in philosophy and religion, he turned to ancient spiritual texts for an answer.

“I found some peace almost immediately when I started reading,” he said. “But the thoughts were vague in my head. I wasn’t sure how to apply them to the real-life problems I was facing.”

So he set about adapting those teachings, converting them into practical techniques.

As he made progress, he began sharing his techniques with others. He’s taught his course at Columbia and Berkeley, for example, and to companies like Google. “It’s been very gratifying to see my solutions work for people in so many different fields of work,” he told me.

I’m happy to say that Dr. Rao is now on the ETR board of advisors. And he will be sharing his techniques with ETR readers. You’ll read his first essay in tomorrow’s issue.