Ever heard someone call a mess “a dog’s breakfast”? Muddled, chaotic, thrown together without much care. What’s odd is its cousin, “a dog’s dinner,” means the opposite—all dressed up, done up to the nines.
I keep coming back to that.
Dee Hock, the man who built Visa, spent a good part of his life on a word he had to invent: chaordic. Chaos and order, jammed together, because he couldn’t find an existing word for the place where the two meet—and he was convinced that place was where everything good actually happens.
Stephen Pressfield calls his half of it Resistance. The force that shows up the moment you try to make something worth making. The messier and more meaningful the work, the harder it pushes back.
Ryan Holiday puts it plainly: the obstacle is the way. The thing in your path isn’t blocking the road. It is the road.
Three people, three books, circling the same slightly uncomfortable idea from three directions.
So you look at your own dog’s breakfast—the half-finished, the tangled, the parts that clearly aren’t working yet—and it’s tempting to read it as a verdict. Proof you’re getting it wrong.
Or it’s just breakfast. And you know what tends to come after breakfast.
Cheers,
Jerry
P.S. If the numbers across your locations look like a dog’s breakfast right now—scattered, hard to read, no clear pattern—that’s usually the raw material, not the verdict. Trakwell is what turns the mess into something you can act on. Have a look: trakwell.ai
