I mislaid my car keys today (turns out I put them in the left hand front zip rather than my usual right hand one…)
However, today’s meander isn’t about the key you swore you left in your coat pocket before turning the house upside down and accusing the dog of eating it. I mean the metaphorical key. The thing that unlocks understanding. The shift that suddenly makes the wheels turn smoothly. The revelation that makes you go, “Oh. That’s what I was doing wrong.”
Whether it’s business or relationships, we’ve all fumbled about trying to make things work with the wrong key. It’s a bit like trying to use a car key in a front door lock. Good intentions. Wrong tool.
Let me start with a guy I know. Let’s call him Neil. Neil had this little start-up idea. Nifty app, decent prototype, solid pitch. He read all the business books, listened to too many podcasts. Been on too many focus groups. The lot. But he couldn’t get it off the ground. Investors liked the idea but passed. Users signed up, then ghosted. It was like dating, but with analytics.
Then Neil did something revolutionary. He stopped trying to “scale”. He shut the laptop and walked into his local café. Sat down. Asked the staff how they managed their bookings. Within ten minutes, he had real feedback. In a week, he’d built a mini version of his app that actually solved their problem.
Turns out, the key wasn’t buried in a TED Talk or in that American bloke on YouTube shouting about hustle and getting everyone to jump and down. It was in asking normal people a normal question, and listening to the answer without thinking about his pitch deck.
Now, relationships. That murky place where logic goes to die. A friend of mine once dated a bloke who thought communication meant texting “wyd” at midnight. She tried everything. Talking. Not talking. Passive-aggressively posting quotes on Instagram. Nothing worked. She ended up convinced she was needy, too intense, maybe even the problem.
Then one day, she met someone new. Same girl, different bloke. This one actually replied with full sentences. Asked questions. Remembered what she’d said three days ago about her colleague at work. The key, she realised, wasn’t about fixing herself or learning some magic trick to keep someone interested. It was being with someone who wanted to communicate.
It’s easy to get stuck trying to force a lock that doesn’t fit you. Sometimes the key is as simple as not blaming yourself for someone else’s closed door.
Finding the key usually happens just after you’ve stopped trying so hard to impress everyone. It’s not about being louder or shinier or more perfect. It’s about being honest enough to say, “Right. This isn’t working. What am I missing?” And then shutting up long enough to actually hear the answer.
It might be a quiet comment from a friend you’d usually ignore.
It might be a customer telling you exactly what they hate about your website.
It might be your own gut, nudging you towards something you’ve dismissed because it isn’t what successful people do on LinkedIn.
The key could be in the way you’re framing the whole thing. Maybe you think success means seven figure bank accounts and an invite to do a TEDx talk, but actually, it’s just doing something useful that pays your rent and lets you sleep at night.
Maybe you think love means fireworks and grand gestures, but it’s really someone making you tea and rubbing your back when you’ve got period pains.
You might not find your key straight away and have to fumble around with a bunch of the wrong ones first. That’s normal. That’s how you learn what doesn’t work. But when you do find it, things tend to click. Not effortlessly, not magically, but cleanly. Like a good lock, or a moment of clarity at 2am when you realise you don’t actually miss him, you just miss having someone who replied.
So if you’re stuck, take a breath. Stop panicking. The key isn’t missing. You’ve just been looking in the wrong pocket. Probably the one you checked first, but didn’t dig deep enough…
Photo by Abbie Parks
