There are some times in life where we cannot help but face difficulties. It’s really just a matter of when and how, but no matter what, life is not one smooth transition after another, from one pleasantry to another with no fuss. In between the good times, there are dark ones. Between the moments that feel like answers to prayers, there are other times to pray. To ask questions. To dive into the unknown to potentially fix and heal issues that are unknown to you, with tools you may not have yet, and knowledge you do not yet know.

I grew up in a Black neighborhood in California in the 90s. I am from a place called Richmond and if you ask me what you may know about it I will tell you The Luniez or the movie Coach Carter.

The Luniez, known for the song “I Got 5 on It,” it turned out were from Oakland. I am not sure how we in the mid-90s in Richmond got it in our heads that they hailed from us. Either way, it was an instant classic, and we felt connected to them. It was a Bay anthem for a while. 

In Richmond, we loved our double dutch. I learned to double dutch in elementary school in the 90s. My whole class went through a phrase with double dutch and, fast learners as kids are, we had all mastered it and were obsessed with it. I played double dutch on weekends on 13th street in Richmond outside of my best friend’s dad’s sign shop in my undershirt. A dog roamed the open lot of the building next to their sign shop/home. The back of their apartment had a built-in barroom in it, present when they rented it out. It was about 1993 and life was good. By middle school, girls were more likely to sit down and gossip instead of playing at lunch time, but we did double dutch on occasion. 

After many years of not playing double dutch, I once tried to join in with the few Black girls who were for one time only playing in high school, years later, once my family had moved to a new city. I remembered you had to jump in when the mouth was open. That’s what people say. And yet, despite knowing this, I hesitated too long, strategized, hesitated again, and then jumped in at the wrong time. The ropes stopped turning as they hit my feet. The girls snickered. 

Double dutch is a problem best dealt with full on, right away—no hesitation. It’s funny because we can forget that double dutch is just a game when we are standing in front of those two ropes. We can forget the ropes can’t actually hurt us. That the mouth won’t bite. When the ropes are opening and closing in front of you, the only way to do it, and best thing to do, is to just jump right in. You cannot double dutch without jumping right in.

I like this method of attacking a problem, really. I think there are a variety of ways to solve a problem, and I am the first to tell you to develop a strategy and plan, if there is a way to do so. But ultimately, you just have to jump into the mouth of the beast.

They say it takes a rocket at least 80 percent of its energy to launch. That means that for the rest of the journey, the rocket is operating on 20 percent of its energy. For most problems to solve, the initial part is actually the most difficult, and the reason for that is the amount of momentum that’s needed to reach lift off is a lot. 

But I think I prefer double dutch to the rocket. It’s true. At least 80 percent of a rocket’s energy goes to the initial lift off, and you could say 80 percent of the game of double dutch comes from the decision to jump in.

To jump into two ropes opening and closing within a second, you need precision. Listen to the sound of the ropes hitting the ground to know when it is right to jump in. Watch when the ropes open. Spring into your step. And have the confidence to not hesitate when the time is right.

“What happened?”

“I flinched.”

“You flinched. The gunshot holds no fear. Say it.”

“The gunshot holds no fear.”

“The gunshot holds no fear. Say it!”

“The gunshot holds no fear.”

“Louder!”

“The gunshot holds no fear!”

“Louder!!”

“The gunshot holds no fear!!”

Whispering: “That’s good. You welcome the sound. In fact, it’s the sound that sets you free. You are a prisoner to this block until that sound sets you free. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Are you set?”

“Yes.”

Sound of gunshot¹

It is sometimes the thing we flinch at, the perfect moment to jump in the ropes’ open mouth, the gunshot while we stand on the proverbial cinder block, waiting to compete—it the the very first part that is the hardest for us, the part where we stand the lose the most. The first point of the process, of jumping in, is the hardest. For everyone.

It is no wonder so many people get stuck wondering when it’s the right time to jump in. So many people will plan and strategize the point to jump in for years. They think they need to buy a fancy camera before trying their hand at photography. Or if they want to be a cook, they must first invest in top of the line cookware. They put off jumping in supposedly because the first step to competing are ironically all sorts of things that aren’t in the here and now. It’s very easy to see how a great idea can go on the shelves for years in this way, right next to the rest of someone’s “maybes,” “one days,” “when I have time’s,” and “when I have money.”

I am prisoner to this block until the sound sets me free.

I find it fascinating how a reframe of perspective can reframe an actual reality. In my many, many years of business, I learned not to hesitate. Sales are down and we need to make month end goals? Caroline, our Meryl Streep in the Devil Wears Prada, asks us what we plan to do. Go, now.

In reality, we’d hold a brainstorm session and tell her we’d come up with some ideas and get back to her by the afternoon. This was a rapid pace for any business. In our brainstorm, any and all ideas work. We’d rank them by level of impact and level of effort. We highlight our best ideas, by what is higher impact but lower effort. We will meet with her later. Caroline asks what our plans are. Approval. Now, go.

Hesitation is what some people think is weakness. It is not, but some people think it is. Some people can smell the meekness of the weak. Its scent smells like hesitation, like lavender, nervousness, the color gray, and a lack of confidence. Some people don’t respect that. And unfortunately, this is something you have to deal with.

But confidence is something that can be built. This I am sure of. We aren’t all born with it, and that is okay. The trick to developing confidence is knowing that when the gunshot fires, you jump. When the mouth opens, you jump in.

What I have learned is that if you hit the ropes, it truly isn’t that big of a deal. There is always a second chance, even for the big things in life. The only time there is no second chance, is if you didn’t take the first chance. I have an Amazon business. For a long while, it netted me a nice side income each month that I greatly enjoyed getting with so little work. But the lift off was rough. I actually completely failed at my first Amazon item and to add insult to injury, I had to pay Amazon to destroy it. But the learnings made Amazon item two—and by extension, me—a success. But it wouldn’t be remembered as a success if I didn’t take my learnings and try again. And it wouldn’t be remembered as a success if I hadn’t tried in the first place.

I love a good plan or strategy. Do not get me wrong. I love to start strategizing how we may solve a problem more intelligently than just immediately attacking its parts. In many cases, if we want to solve a problem, we need to ask some good questions. We need to understand what kind of problem we are dealing with. This can solve for a lot of upcoming agony, wasted time, wasted emotions, and wasted resources. I am a big believer in optimizing yourself to deal with issues in the most optimized way, so you can go back to enjoying your life. But even then, the best plan or strategy means nothing if execution never comes.

I wasn’t always a decisive person, but I learned to become that over time. People will generally listen to or follow a decisive person who might not exactly know what they are doing more than a learned indecisive person. The reason for this is when solving problems, decisiveness is seen as a leadership skill. And honestly, sometimes, there isn’t a particular right answer, but rather we have to choose something, anything, to go forward. Being decisive and putting your stake in the ground takes guts. People respect that.

But beyond what people think, being decisive saves time when solving problems. And often, for many problems, the urgency in solving it is more critical than solving it perfectly.

I was at my orientation at Facebook when I learned that one of the things they believed in was “Move fast and break things.” This is something I truly believe in. There are many times in which the time-based advantage in solving something outweighs the risk of breaking something. They eventually changed it to “move fast and take calculated risks.” I agree with this too—but we still have to be able to bookend how long we’ll be assessing our risks, or we’ll get lost in analysis paralysis.

I felt a lot more comfortable at the next Big Tech company I went to. At 3,000 people, my manager had described it as the Goldilocks of tech companies. My team worked at an incredibly fast pace that I was only able to manage without working constant overtime by being an autistic individual. We had to bookend the amount of time we spent on research and problem solving, and sometimes threw it out altogether. This wasn’t my favorite, but I understood it. Sometimes, reducing the time to try to understand the problem was part of taking the calculated risk. 

This is all great to say, but the truth is, these are all parts of what that initial jump could look like. Sometimes we’d talk about a new product and my designer and I would get to work immediately. Or, sometimes, we calculated the risk and decided not to tackle the problem at this time. One of my favorite phrases is “I have bigger fish to fry,” a casual way to say that time is better used elsewhere. But you still need to calculate your risk to know to ignore a problem.

At the end of the day, the thing you have to do—the thing you can’t avoid doing if you want to get anywhere, solve a problem, answer a pressing question—is jump.

I am prisoner to this block until the sound sets me free.

I have not always taken the “right” decisions off the back but something I admire about myself is no matter what, I took them. Decisions that is. I took them. All over my life, from wearing two clashing prints together during fashion week to filing a medical accommodation for autism, I made decisions. I jumped. And no matter where I landed, I always did land.

It’s in this way I have been told I’ve lived seven different lives. It’s funny because I have been told this in a variety of settings, personal to professional, and in different places. It is hard to avoid this fact, even for me. Looking at my life, almost 40 years old and living in Mexico City, I do not struggle to say that I have no regrets about this life I have lived. In fact, if I were to do it over, I wouldn’t change a single thing.

There isn’t a time in my life I’d do over or that I have regrets about, even the ones that you could all objectively call bad. Because I took risks, and no matter where I landed, if I kept doing it, I would eventually find myself in the exact places I wanted to be. People sometimes find me impressive for the variety of lives I have lived. I don’t—mostly because I know the essence of my life is the result of saying yes to opportunities by jumping into the open mouth when presented with them.

There are moments that are easy in life, and others that are not. Almost as a human fallacy, we resist the times that are not as positive as we don’t like them, treating them like unwelcome guests, often forgetting that the unpleasant moments are a fact of life. Life was designed to have unpleasant moments. Why should we resist them?

I know. I know it’s like looking at the ropes bouncing up and down. Avoiding, resisting, ignoring the problem just seems much better than jumping into the open mouth of the problem. The mouth can be so daunting. But, we have to deal with it eventually, and often, the sooner, the more likely success. You can’t hesitate. Go, now.

I am prisoner to this block until the sound sets me free.

I don’t think I am much braver than anyone else. It’s more that the alternative scares me more. I have learned to come to life with the sound of the gunshot. In that way I am a coward. The alternative of not solving the problem, of not knowing what’s on the other side of the jump scares me into action. I have always been that way. I just can’t not take action.

Watching a short clip on YouTube called The Story of Double Dutch, I learned that double dutch is dying out even in Black communities, even though it is an activity that the people in the clip called quintessentially Black. The issue, they said, is phones. “They’re playing games,” one woman said.² It’s easy to be on your phone all day, easier than double playing dutch, which is pretty easy and just requires three people and two ropes. People don’t like to choose things that are hard, now more so than ever. 

In a sad twist of fate, when “I Got 5 On It,” blew up for the Luniez, Michael Marshall, who was one of the song’s writers and in a way its soul, had an issue with the paperwork for the song, in which he was not listed initially as a publisher. This all mattered a lot when the song was used in the opening credits and trailer of the film, “Us.” Marshall did not start getting royalties until about 2005 and he had struggled with drug addiction and homelessness in the meantime. Marshall would go on to explain how he felt during this time as “a constant circle of fuckery in what seems like a conspiracy to not let me shine.”³ 

Life is truly not always pretty. If we want to use words to describe the sour moments, it can downright suck. It is hard to understand why we sometimes have to go through such wretched, pathetic moments in our lives, sometimes a hop and a skip away from something that felt really good. All I can say as a product designer is, it was designed this way. In a board game or a book, conflict is built into it. Life is no different. The sooner we accept this, the less it hurts.

I don’t always know the answers. Heck, I often have none. What I have learned over the years is, no matter what the problem, question, or hurt you are trying to solve—you win little by not just jumping into its open mouth. In fact, it might hurt more upfront, but less in the long run. 

But I also learned that if more and more people are hesitating, and people more and more don’t want things that aren’t easy, that means that by just taking the jump, any jump, you will likely get more in this life than most people, and eventually, you will land on your feet.

I am prisoner to this block until the sound sets me free.

Go, now. Jump for the love of God.

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1. Scott, T. (2004). Man on Fire. Twentieth Century Fox
2. Brut Media. (2021, September 14). The Story of Double Dutch [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I06pOBN4_wI&t=2s
3. Harvilla, Rob. (2021, April 7). I got 5 on it: The history of the song and its impact. The Ringer. https://www.theringer.com/2021/4/7/22370963/i-got-5-on-it-history-michael-marshall