On not starting fresh
The winds and water will smooth out the sand each day, giving us a new canvas to etch our footprints upon. But everything else just stays messed up. (Image by Norbert Waldhausen)
Transformation is an experience both magical and unsettling.
Suddenly, the world you thought you knew is remapped. Like a bougie kitchen renovation, what was once familiar is made new, and even what has stayed the same is unrecognizable in its new context. We feel so different that everything around us feels different, too.
In such a situation, we might want to start over, with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective. However, this can be just as deceptive as the illusion we now believe we’ve left behind. We don’t need to abandon everything we’ve done heretofore because of our new insights. The next step is not to throw everything away. Instead, we can integrate our past ideas with our new ones.
When my clients look for support for their businesses, they are often fed up with whatever they’ve spent the last five or ten or twenty years doing. They have achieved some success, but they’re tired and frustrated and bored. The next thing looks shiny and exciting—the solution to all of their problems. And maybe it is—but there is so much value in the work that’s already been done and the goodwill that’s been created. It isn’t just something to salvage—it might, in fact, be something to celebrate.
Participants get to the end of The Marketing Seminar, a 150-day online course, and say, “I had no idea what I was doing, and now I have to overhaul everything.” But that is just another way of making a project so big that it will never get done. It’s another insidious manifestation of perfectionism. What we can do instead is start where we are, with the knowledge we have, building on what we have so far. It won’t be perfect, but doing the work this way will probably allow us to achieve results faster than starting over completely, even knowing what we know now.
Sometimes, we see that we’ve been doing something the hard way in the first place. We set out for a walk, and then we realize it’s going to rain, so we double back to the house and get in the car. Despite retracing our steps, we will get where we were going faster using our new strategy.
However, we might just replace the old hard way with the new hard way. We’ve raised our standards, but our standards were never the problem. The challenge was always execution and follow through. That never gets better if we start over.
Beginning when I was around nine years old, I tried to will myself to perfection. “Starting…right…now!” I would say, resetting my life, believing that this time I would be nice to my sister, do my chores without complaining, get my homework in on time, and write neat, legible letters. It didn’t work, though I tried for years. But little by little, I did get better at relationships, school, and life in general. Of course, that didn’t come from my resets; it came from messing up, living, and learning.
Whether we’re running a business, trying to finish staining a cabinet, or teaching a kid to empty the dishwasher, we owe it to ourselves to hang in there even when something isn’t turning out exactly the way we wanted it to. Even when giving up and trying something else is way more appealing, even when we think that there’s nothing here worth saving, it’s important to acknowledge what we’ve achieved and what we’ve learned. Maybe we have what it takes to do better than what came before, but it’s a mistake to dismiss it all as as naive and wrong and foolish.
To try to put distance between yourself and who you used to be is an adolescent move; it’s the fourteen-year-old who is horrified by the artwork from when she was eleven. In another ten years, she’ll look back at those drawings with appreciation, seeing in them the seeds of who she has become.
Therefore, as tempting as it may be to destroy all evidence of who you used to be and start fresh, dismissing your past attempts as embarrassing and immature, I invite you to treat your former self with respect and appreciation. That guy isn’t as hopeless and clueless as he might seem.
In “Amazing Grace,” we sing of how we were once lost, but now we’re found. Maybe it’s not so black and white, though. We’re always growing and figuring stuff out. It’s a continual process. There are moments of dramatic transformation, but our new insights become our old status quo soon enough. We don’t have to be in such a hurry to put it behind us. We don’t need a fresh start; we’re already rolling, and the beauty is that it will never be over.