draft #6: one small adjustment
What if the thing you're about to quit is just one small shift from everything you'd hoped it'd be?
“We’re all just one small adjustment away from making our lives work.”
You want to know what’s surprising about that sentence…
It was said by Paul Rudd.
He said it about the invention of Play-Doh
Let me explain.
I was watching the movie How Do You Know with Reece Witherspoon and Paul Rudd. In it, there’s a scene where he explains how Play Doh was originally invented.
Before it ever lived in classrooms and craft drawers, Play-Doh was nothing more than a white paste meant to clean soot from wallpaper.
For a moment in time, it was perfect. It solved a gap that so many people needed.
That is, until the world changed. People started heating their homes with gas and electricity, the soot disappeared, and so did this product’s purpose.
A once-brilliant invention became obsolete.
Until it ended up in a daycare by the founder’s sister-in-law. She saw how the kids loved playing with it. It was soft, easy to mold, and more fun to play with than clay.
She told him to add color.
Give it a name.
Try again.
And that’s how Play-Doh was born.
The exact same formula, just seen through a different lens.
So why do I tell you this story?
Well, it made me think about how often we walk away from something right before something turns into what it’s mean to be.
We start with excitement. With a clear vision of how things are supposed to unfold. We plan how it is going to look, how long it should take, what effort it will require.
And then somewhere in the middle, when it does not look the way we expected, we decide it’s not working.
So we quit.
We convince ourselves we need to start over. We scrap the dream, the plan, the vision, not because we were on the wrong path, but because it wasn’t happening how we imagined.
But this story reminds us: it’s not always about starting over.
Sometimes it’s about seeing what’s already there in a new way.
You see, some of the greatest successes in life did not begin as the “right” thing. They began as the “wrong” thing reimagined.
Slack started in the ashes of a failed video game.
YouTube was originally a dating site for uploading introduction videos.
Play-Doh cleaned wallpaper.
Each of these ideas were created for one purpose and found its success in another. All the same ingredients, just seen through a new lens.
And I think that’s true for us too.
We spend so much of our lives trying to make things fit the perfect version we have in our heads. And when life naturally doesn’t, we assume we’ve failed. That we’re missing what it takes.
But what if we haven’t failed at all?
What if life is just asking us to adjust…to loosen our grip long enough to see our circumstances from a new angle?
Because sometimes the thing that feels stuck isn’t broken.
It’s simply waiting to be seen differently.
You see, I think there’s so much power in realizing that what we’re searching for might already be within reach.
That our lives aren’t puzzles with missing pieces.
Instead they’re more like word banks, filled with every letter we already need. It’s not about finding something new, but rather rearranging what’s already there.
Because the truth is, we’re rarely as far away as we think we are.
We don’t always need a new formula.
We just need to remember what it’s made of, and have the willingness to look again.
Because maybe, just like Paul Rudd said, we’re all one small adjustment away from making our lives work.