Something people don’t know about me: I’ve wrangled a 4.5-foot alligator by hand.
I learned I could do this as an undergraduate student when I had the opportunity to participate in a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission population study on Lake Orange. Yes, there were alligators. Yes, we caught them. And yes, there was a point when I discovered exactly how big an alligator I could reasonably handle on my own.
The answer was about 4.5 feet.
What I remember most in hindsight, though, isn’t the alligator. It’s everything that made it possible to do the job safely and successfully: another student, an experienced wildlife officer, an air boat, a spotlight, some electrical tape, and, most importantly, a plan.
That experience taught me something I’ve carried into my career: knowing your limits is only half the equation. The other half is knowing what to do about them.
When the alligator was bigger than I could safely wrangle, the answer wasn’t to try harder or prove I could handle it. We changed our approach. We used different tools. We leveraged people with different skills and experience. For larger alligators, that meant using a lasso or noose rather than relying on brute strength.
It’s a lesson that applies to far more than alligators.
Sometimes we think being capable means being able to do everything ourselves. But real capability includes recognizing when the situation has outgrown our current tools, skills, or capacity and having the judgment to ask, “What do I need to approach this differently?”
You don’t have to wrangle every alligator by hand.
You just need to know which ones you can… and when to reach for the noose.