Don’t Burn the House Down

The first day of the year. A breath of fresh air. Or so it seems. For most of us, the first feels like we’re set free from whatever held us back before. Our dreams, hopes and ambitions suddenly feel worth pursuing again. For a while we tell ourselves a calendar has the power to reset us and bring us power we never had before.

The first week of January is seductive, with this feeling of a ‘clean slate’. Even without explicitly saying the old “new year, new me,” we fall for the concept, the burning of bridges, reconstruction of foundations and rebuilding of character. All the work and rubble from the previous year is just collateral.

We are seduced by the thought that maybe if we shame our past selves enough, if we push the ‘DELETE’ button hard enough, we will wake up and become different people. We treat ourselves like some buggy application which needs to be uninstalled and installed again from a new package to function well.

This ‘clean slate’ is not a fresh start. It’s the erasure of history. It’s consequently the erasure of lessons. Instead of starting afresh, we start empty.

Perceiving our pasts as just baggage is a dangerous assumption. The future isn’t built on bulldozing the foundations that are our history, our mistakes, lessons and intelligence.

Besides deleting the data, we erase our why’s.

Without reference points, we are useless, we start empty. And in a world that needs us to be logically complex, emotionally intelligent and well ready to conquer, ’empty’, is a dangerous place to be.

Consider the products around us and all the technology in them. My personal favorite is the Porsche 911. Over years, this masterpiece looks like it barely changes. Its design philosophy remains the same. Yet, over the course of decades it has stayed a lead sports car and a favorite for car enthusiasts all round. This is because Porsche do not reinvent the car every time they release a 911. They iterate on the current model, keep what works, discard what doesn’t and reengineer where it’s needed most, opening up room for innovation and invention.

This is how stable systems evolve: through iteration and evolution, not annihilation.

We are no different. Yet each year, we choose to ignore the simple logic. We are disruptors of our own existence. We take the velocity we accumulated in previous years, our most valuable asset, and treat it as a sunk cost. We treat our foundations as failed experiments to be discarded. On the contrary, they are the cornerstones we are meant to build on.

Triumph is rarely the result of a single, explosive overhaul. It is the result of compound interest.

If the first day of every year counts as zero, we voluntarily bankrupt ourselves and bring ourselves back to being nothing but potential. We would need significantly more energy to move ourselves from a stationary position, than we would were we to keep ourselves moving or realign ourselves had we discovered that we were slightly off our optimal paths.

The past, because of its failures, is not itself a failure. It is data collection, a crucial stage of learning and optimal development.

You skipped the gym. You procrastinated. You broke promises to yourself. Those aren’t moral failings which validate you burning your house down to build a new one which isn’t guaranteed to come with similar vices. They are error logs. The full experiences are precise indicators of where your current system has bugs.

You delete the logs, and you lose the ability to correct your system. The risk of new you coming with the same, if not more severe errors, is high. You never took time to read the crash report. You never used the antivision as a guide towards a clearer path to your goals.

“Who do I want to be?,” becomes too broad, too vague and undeniably easy to fantasize about.

“Which specific habits, traits and attitudes are causing me to fuck up my life? And which ones are making me the most progress?,” are the boring, specific, but much more effective starting point markers.

“Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.” — Proverbs 22:28

A good house is one that is well maintained. A successful steward is he who has the discretion to know which load-bearing walls to protect, rot to remove and rooms to expand. The fool, no matter how resourceful, will destroy a beautiful home when all it needed was simple panel fixing. Never gut the building before learning to steward it well.

At the end of each year, we are probably in better places than we were. The fancy new things a new beginning promises are far less worthy of our investment than the simple things keeping us consistent, afloat and steady. The silent workouts, daily acts of kindness, reading time, may become so automatic that when you kill them off to block out time for a 30-minute face mask routine, your roof collapses. The crazy new routine might not even be worth it if it doesn’t integrate well with our progress. Keep the foundation.

Drinking a glass of water every morning makes much more sense than a 10-step juice protocol you will quit in a week.

Texting your long-distance friends relatable memes every time you find something relatable makes so much more sense than trying to download a new app to communicate which you’ll forget about in a month.

Improving your skill on a childhood sport and keeping that spirit alive in you makes so much more sense than trying a new, inaccessible, and costly sport just so you can post about it to strangers online who don’t care.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Continuity with consistency kills off toxic scripts, not the person. These scripts are not “failed attempts at something good,” they are active drains. They are the energy leaks that drain off your battery in the background.

Apply a ‘Zero-Return’ rule. If an activity leaves you tired and creates no value, bin it.

I had a zero-return ‘friendship’ some months back. I genuinely struggled with keeping this person close, but called myself a ‘good person,’ so I stayed. What I ended up with were arguments about nothing, the inconvenience of having to make time to hang around someone I principally had nothing in common with, and a constant hole in my chest from being around a person who never respected my time. I sat down with myself and decided to kill the monster before I allowed myself to hear any more of its story. The decision seemed and felt hard, but it was freeing. By killing the script of saying yes to the ‘pick your brain’ hangouts which left me questioning myself, I became more alive and valuable in the spaces I chose to be in.

Kill the political doomscroll before bed. it ruins your sleep and changes nothing.

Kill the porn consumption. It harms your brain and ruins your relationships.

Kill the fake smiling and conflict avoidance. It makes you weak and a liar to yourself.

“He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.” — Raymond Hill

Kill the inability to say no to people who don’t respect your time. It breeds resentment.

Evolve

“Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still.” — Chinese proverb.

Right goal, wrong vehicle happens to most of us. For all the things that failed but had the right intention, there is a chance for evolution.

Evolution is sometimes stalled by the Goldilocks Zone. You either tried too hard and burnt out, or too little and became ineffective. To evolve from this is to be able to split the what from the how.

Your goal to get fit is valid, but maybe 4am crossfit was the wrong vehicle to get you there. You might just need to park your car further from the office and allow yourself 5 extra minutes of walking every morning to get those steps in.

Your goal of reading 50 books in a year is valid, but sacrificing family dinners is not worth it. Consider listening to audiobooks on the commute to work.

Losing 10kg in a year is a valid, achievable goal. Running 5k a day at high risk of injury is not the vehicle. Try walking 30 minutes daily with a weighted vest, and build your fitness up to the performance you want to crunch in.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” — Heraclitus

Our focus on the same goal, but use of sustainable methods is what makes us innovate, invent and grow. The small iterations, just like the 911, of keep, kill, evolve, make us transcend into greater versions of our same personas. We don’t fire the entire cast of the movie and attempt filming again with a bad script. We rewrite our own stories with evolving perspectives and craft masterpieces one line at a time.

This new year, do not fire yourself from your movie set, let your character’s script evolve.

You are not a tear-down project. You are a heritage building. You have a foundation. Keep it. You have debris to clear. Kill it. You have renovations to make. Evolve. Get the best version of you patched, updated and ready to evolve, you don’t have to give up on what you already have.