Stuck Is Not Failure
A Student's Companion Reader
Stuck Is Not Failure
Uncertainty, confidence, and what to do when the page goes blank
Joseph McFadden · The Holistic Analyst · McFaddenCAE.com
Written by Joseph McFadden · expanded and formatted in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic)
A Note Before You Begin
This is the written companion to the audiobook. The sections match the recording, so you can follow along, or you can read this on its own.
I’ve spent more than forty-five years as an engineer, an educator, and an investigator of failures. I teach fracture mechanics, which means I spend a good part of my life explaining to people why things break. This is about something more useful than that. It’s about what to do when you’re stuck.
I wrote it for students. But honestly, it’s for anyone who has ever sat in front of a problem with a clock running and no idea what to do next.
One
When the Page Goes Blank
You know the feeling. You’re in the exam. You read the problem. And nothing happens.
So you read it again. Still nothing. Your eyes go back to the top and the words are just words now. Your heart rate climbs. You hear the clock, and you hear pens moving all around you, and a voice in your head says the worst sentence in education: everybody else understands this except me.
Two things are true in that moment. The first is that the feeling is completely real. The second is that the story it’s telling you is false.
The pens you hear aren’t certainty. Half of those students are writing something they’re unsure of. A third are stuck on a different problem than you’re, and they’ll hit yours in ten minutes. The room isn’t full of people who know. The room is full of people managing not knowing, with varying amounts of grace.
And let me tell you something about the person at the front of the room. I get stuck. Forty-five years in, with a career built on solving problems nobody else could solve, I get stuck most weeks. The difference between me now and me at twenty isn’t that it happens less often. It’s that I know exactly what to do in the first sixty seconds.
That’s all I want to give you here. Those sixty seconds.
Two
The Reflex School Gave You
Let me explain why being stuck feels so much worse than it should.
From the first grade on, school has trained one reflex into you: produce the right answer, get the mark. Produce nothing, get nothing. Blank page equals failure. You’ve been rehearsing that lesson for twelve years or more, several times a week, and it has gone deep.
So when you don’t know, you freeze. Not because freezing helps, but because the blank page has been taught to you as shame, and shame makes people go still.
Here’s what nobody tells you until much later. Out here, in the working world, nobody hands you a complete problem. The data is missing. The customer doesn’t know what they want. The drawing is thirty years old and the revision notes are gone. The material certificate says one thing and the part says another. I’ve spent my whole career on problems where a third of the information simply didn’t exist.
Engineering isn’t the profession of knowing everything. It’s the profession of making defensible decisions with incomplete information, and being honest about which parts are which.
So the skill you actually need isn’t always know. It’s keep moving honestly when you don’t. And that skill can be taught, it can be practiced, and you can practice it on your next exam.
The First Move
Write, “I Am Stuck”
Here’s what I tell my students. When you hit that wall, don’t stop. Don’t stare at the page and wait for rescue. Pick up your pen and write three words.
I am stuck.
Then write why.
I know how that sounds. It sounds too simple to matter. Stay with me, because the reason it works is worth understanding.
While it stays inside your head, being stuck is one big undifferentiated cloud. It’s panic, and time pressure, and self-doubt, and the actual technical gap, all stirred together into a feeling. A feeling can’t be solved.
The moment you write it down, the cloud has to become a sentence. And a sentence has to have an ending. You can’t write the words I am stuck because and then just stop — your mind will finish it. And to finish it, you’ve to go find the exact place where what you know stops and what you don’t know begins.
That isn’t a small thing. That’s diagnosis. And diagnosis comes before treatment in every field I know of.
Now here’s the part that still delights me after all these years. Perhaps half the time, the path shows up in the act of writing the sentence. Students tell me this constantly. One wrote, “I am stuck because I can’t find the moment at the wall,” and stopped in the middle of it, because writing the word moment reminded her that she could sum moments about the other end and get there in one line.
That isn’t luck. Naming a gap precisely is most of the work of closing it. The vague version of a problem has no handles on it. The specific version does.
The Second Move
Name What You Are Uncertain Of
Suppose the sentence doesn’t rescue you. Fine. That happens. Go to the second move: state exactly what you’re uncertain of. And I do mean exactly.
Not “I don’t understand this problem.” That’s too big to act on — that’s the cloud again, wearing a different coat. Get specific:
• “I’m not sure whether this support is pinned or fixed.”
• “I can’t tell if this process is adiabatic or isothermal.”
• “I don’t know whether to use the yield strength or the ultimate strength.”
• “I’m unsure whether this load is applied slowly or as an impact.”
Look at what just happened. You walked in lost, and now you’re standing in front of a decision. Those are very different places to be. Lost is paralyzing, because there’s nothing to push against. A decision, you can make. You’ve been making decisions your whole life.
The Third Move
“I Will Assume”
Now write the most powerful sentence available to you on an exam: I will assume.
Then move forward. Do the problem. Carry that assumption all the way to a number, with your work showing. And if time allows, add one more sentence: what it would mean if the assumption is wrong.
Here’s what that looks like on a real page. A beam problem, and you can’t tell from the wording whether the right-hand connection carries moment:
I am stuck because the problem says the beam is “bolted to the wall” and I can’t tell whether to treat that support as pinned or fixed.
What I do know is the span, the load, the section, and that equilibrium has to hold either way.
I will assume the support is pinned, because a single line of bolts in a clip angle can’t develop full fixity.
Proceeding on that assumption: [the work, to a number].
If that assumption is wrong and the connection is actually rigid, my midspan moment is too high — and more importantly I’ve missed the moment at the wall, which is where the beam would crack first.
Do you see what happened there? You didn’t guess. You built a chain of reasoning, labeled the weak link, and told your reader where it would break.
That isn’t a student trick for salvaging partial credit. It’s the actual format of professional engineering work. Every analysis report I’ve signed in forty-five years has an assumptions section, and every one of them says, in effect: here’s what I couldn’t know, here’s what I decided to take as true, and here’s how much your answer depends on it.
When you write those lines on an exam, you’re not making an excuse. You’re practicing the real thing, early.
The Method
Six Lines to Carry With You
Here’s the whole thing in six lines. Memorize them. They fit on the inside cover of a notebook.
• I am stuck because…
• What I do know is…
• What I can’t determine is…
• I will assume…, because…
• Proceeding on that assumption…
• If that assumption is wrong, then…
Six lines. Ninety seconds. They’ll take you from frozen to moving on almost any problem you’ll ever meet, and not only in school.
From the Other Side of the Desk
Why I Don’t Take Points Off — I Add Them
Let me tell you what happens when that paper reaches my desk.
I see the student who left the problem blank. There’s nothing there to grade, and worse, nothing there to teach with. I’ve no idea where they stopped or why, so I can’t help them.
I see the student who wrote down a lone number with no work. Even when the number is right, I’ve learned almost nothing about them — and they’ve learned nothing about themselves.
And then I see the paper that says: I am stuck because the support condition is ambiguous. I will assume pinned, because a bolted clip can’t carry full moment. Proceeding on that basis… — and the final number comes out wrong.
That third student has my respect, and usually most of the credit.
Because I’m not grading arithmetic. Arithmetic is cheap, and machines do it better than either of us. I’m grading whether you can think when the ground underneath you is uncertain, which is the only condition under which real engineering is ever done.
A wrong number with sound reasoning and a stated assumption is an engineer having a normal day. A right number with no reasoning is a calculator.
So let me say this as plainly as I can. Writing “I am stuck, and here’s what I’m going to assume” isn’t a confession of weakness. It’s a demonstration of competence. I don’t penalize it. I praise it. I’ve written excellent next to a wrong answer more than once, and meant it.
Do ask your own instructors how they handle it — we aren’t all identical, and you deserve to know the rules you’re playing by. But even in the rare course where it earns you nothing on the page, do it anyway. It’s still the fastest route out of being stuck, and the habit is worth far more than the points.
Eight
About the Frustration Itself
Now the feeling, not just the technique — because the technique won’t help you if the feeling has already taken the room.
Frustration isn’t evidence that you’re failing. Frustration is the sensation of your model of the world meeting a piece of the world that doesn’t fit it. That’s precisely what learning is. It’s supposed to feel like that.
I want to be careful here, because this gets said too glibly. The comfortable feeling — reading a worked example where every step follows and you nod along — is usually the feeling of not learning very much. Recognition feels like understanding, and it isn’t. Understanding is what you’ve when you can generate the step yourself, on a blank page. Generating it’s uncomfortable. The discomfort is the work.
But frustration has a tipping point. Below it, frustration drives you and sharpens you. Above it, you flood, thinking shuts down, and no amount of staring brings it back. So you need practical ways to stay below the line:
• Take sixty seconds. Feet flat, slow breath out, longer than the breath in. You aren’t wasting time. You’re buying back the part of your brain that solves problems.
• Move to another problem and come back. This isn’t surrender. Something in the back of your mind keeps working while you’re away, and it’s often waiting for you when you return.
• Change the channel. If words aren’t working, draw it. If the drawing isn’t working, say the problem out loud under your breath. If nothing is working, write a list of everything you do know. That list is never as short as it feels.
And hear this part, because it’s the part students most need and least believe. You aren’t alone in that feeling, and you’re not the only one in the room having it. Every engineer in every building I’ve ever worked in has had the week where nothing worked. I’ve had the month. Some of the failure investigations I’m proudest of — the ones that ended up teaching an entire industry something — began with three solid weeks of me being completely, confidently wrong.
There’s no career on this earth that skips the stuck part. There’s only getting better at the stuck part.
Nine
Confidence That Is Actually Worth Something
Let me head off a misunderstanding. Being honest about uncertainty isn’t the same thing as lacking confidence. They aren’t even close.
The student who writes “I’m confident about the load path and the equilibrium; I’m unsure about the boundary condition, so here’s my assumption” is showing me more confidence, not less. That student knows where the edges of their knowledge are. Anyone can be vaguely sure of everything. Knowing precisely which parts you’ve and which parts you don’t is the harder, rarer thing.
There’s a way to practice this outside of any exam, and it costs nothing. Before you turn a paper in, write in the corner of your notes how well you think you did. Eighty percent. Seventy. Whatever your honest number is. Then compare it with the grade when it comes back.
Do that for one semester and you’ll learn something no course teaches: whether your own sense of certainty can be trusted. Most people badly overestimate. A few underestimate and talk themselves out of answers they had right. Either way, once you know your bias you can correct for it — and you become someone whose confidence means something. Including to yourself, at two in the morning, deciding whether you’ve studied enough.
Ten
The Exam Playbook
All of it, as a sequence you can use on your next exam:
• Read the entire exam before writing anything. You’re looking for the easy ones and the expensive ones.
• Start where you’re strong. Getting ink on paper changes your physiology. It gets you out of the freeze.
• Use the three-minute rule. No path after three minutes? Stop hunting and start writing: I am stuck because…
• Name the gap. State the assumption. Give the reason for it.
• Proceed to a number, showing every step — the steps are what you’re actually being paid for.
• Flag it and move on. Come back if the clock allows.
• Watch the expensive question. Don’t spend twenty minutes on six points while thirty points sit untouched on the next page.
• In the last five minutes, sweep for blanks. Every blank gets one honest sentence about where you got stuck and what you’d assume.
Never hand in a blank. A blank tells your instructor nothing and tells you nothing. One honest sentence tells both of you exactly where the next lesson should start.
Eleven
This Was Never Really About Exams
I should admit something before we finish. The exam is the least important thing in this essay.
The exam is simply the smallest and safest version of the rest of your life: a closed room, a fixed time, a known set of problems, and no real consequences beyond a number on a page. Then you graduate, and the problems arrive without time limits and without answer keys, and nobody tells you which chapter they came from.
You’ll be in an interview and be asked something you don’t know. The answer isn’t a bluff and it isn’t an apology. It’s: “I don’t know that — and here’s exactly how I’d find out.”
You’ll be six months into your first job, handed a part that failed in the field, with no test data and a customer on the phone. You’ll write down what you know, name what you can’t determine, state what you’re assuming, and proceed. And someone senior will notice.
You’ll sit in a doctor’s office, or in front of a mortgage, or across from someone you love, facing a decision you can’t make cleanly because the information doesn’t exist. Same six lines. Same discipline. What do I know. What can I not determine. What am I assuming, and what happens if I’m wrong about it.
You’re going to be stuck for the rest of your life, at gradually more interesting things. That isn’t a warning. It’s a description of a good career.
Closing
Keep Moving
When you hit the wall, don’t stop. Write “I am stuck,” and write why. Name what you’re uncertain of, as precisely as you can. State your assumption and the reason for it. Move forward. Say what would change if you’re wrong.
And be kind to yourself while you do it. That frustration isn’t a verdict on your intelligence or your future. It’s the feeling of standing at the edge of what you know — which is the only place learning has ever happened, and exactly where you should be standing.
Be confident about what you know. Be humble about what you don’t. Be clear about which is which.
And keep moving.
One Page to Keep
When You Get Stuck
Sixty seconds. Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Feet flat.
Then write, in this order:
• I am stuck because…
• What I do know is…
• What I can’t determine is…
• I will assume…, because…
• Proceeding on that assumption…
• If that assumption is wrong, then…
Then: flag it, move on, come back if the clock allows. Never hand in a blank.
And remember: everyone in that room is managing not knowing. So is everyone in every engineering office in the world. You’re not behind. You’re at the edge, which is where the learning is.
Appendix
A Short Note for Instructors
If you teach, consider saying this out loud on day one and printing it on the exam cover: a stated assumption, with the reasoning behind it, will never be penalized here.
Two things happen when you do. Students stop leaving blanks, which means you can finally see where their understanding actually ends — the most valuable diagnostic information a teacher can get, and one that blank pages destroy. And the anxious students, the ones who freeze hardest and are often the most conscientious, get a legitimate move to make instead of a spiral.
You’re not lowering the bar. You’re grading the thing you actually care about.
A Note on How This Was Made
Bring the Thinking, Keep the Judgment
An essay that asks you to be honest about what you know should be honest about how it was built.
The thinking in these pages is mine — the experience, the judgments, the examples, the positions I’ll defend in a hallway afterward. The expansion, the structuring, and the formatting were done in collaboration with Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. It drafted from my material and my direction. I read every line, cut what didn’t sound like me, and corrected what wasn’t right.
I mention it for a practical reason too. You’re going to use these tools. Use them the way I did: bring the thinking, keep the judgment, check the output, and say plainly what you used. That last part isn’t a formality — it’s the same habit as stating your assumptions.
Joseph McFadden has spent more than forty-five years as an engineer, educator, and investigator of failures. He writes and teaches under The Holistic Analyst — building intuition before equations.
Questions and disagreements are both welcome. Email: McFadden@snet.net · Blog: www.mcfaddencae.com
Companion reader to the audiobook “Stuck Is Not Failure.”
