Move One Stone, Not the Whole Trail

What's on my mind?

I found a note I wrote to myself five years ago.

Not in a notebook.
Not in a folder called “Personal Growth” like a responsible adult.

It was sitting in my outbox as an unsent email draft.

And it showed up in a week where I’ve been asking, quietly but constantly: who am I becoming?

It felt less like discovering an old thought… and more like being interrupted by a past version of me who still had something to say.

A phrase I wasn’t ready to live yet

The note circled an idea I’ve heard a hundred times but am only now learning how to carry:

A leader needs a strong back and an open heart.

The strong back is discipline. Clarity. Boundaries.
It’s knowing what matters and having the spine to protect it. It’s making the call, holding people accountable, and not mistaking avoidance for kindness.

The open heart is what makes leadership human.
It’s giving a shit about people. Purpose. Meaning.
It’s leading from something deeper than ego management—drawing on what shaped you, and letting yourself be seen as a full person instead of a polished version of one.

It also pointed toward the kind of inner work that doesn’t look like work at all: slowing down long enough to ask the questions most of us spend our lives trying to outrun.

Who am I?
What do I believe about the world?
What does success mean to me—not everyone else’s definition?
And maybe the hardest one: how have I helped create the conditions in my life that I say I don’t want?

I’m not fully sure what in that note was mine and what I was echoing from Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up or an interview on The Tim Ferriss Show.

But I know this: reading it now felt like a mirror.

The stone I keep tripping over

I keep coming back to a recent conversation with my nephew.

Nothing dramatic happened. No big speech.
It was one of those normal, quiet conversations that rearranges something inside you.

It made me think about the way humans get stuck in patterns.

We do something a certain way for years, and then we keep doing it mostly because we’ve always done it that way. Even when we can see the places we’re falling short. Even when we’re smart enough to know better.

Change is hard.

Which is why I want this phrase tattooed on the inside of my eyelids:

Think like a scientist. Question everything. Especially the things you think you know.

Because the moment I feel certain I’ve got it figured out… that’s usually the moment I stop paying attention.

And when I stop paying attention, I start stepping over the same stone in the path again and again—until I think the path is the problem.

What if I go the wrong way?

Here’s the fear under all the curiosity:

What if I pick the wrong direction and it takes me backward?

The answer I’m trying to practice is simple:

Did you learn?

Even if you only learned, “That wasn’t it,” you learned.
Take the lesson. Try again.

I have a quote from Thomas Edison that I see every day:

“When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you haven’t.”

There was a time when that kind of quote felt exhausting—like a demand to grind harder.

Now it feels different.

Goals still matter to me, but they aren’t the whole point anymore. When I miss the mark, I come back to a better set of questions:

Did I learn?
Did I pay attention?
Did I share what happened and invite feedback?

If the answer is yes, starting over doesn’t feel like defeat. It feels like staying in the game.

Restraint is my real discipline

I’m a risk taker. I like changing everything at once.

All chips. One color.

The hard part for me is restraint—testing one small change instead of rewriting the entire system in a single weekend.

The farm has been my best teacher here.

When I was developing my worm farm process, I tracked what went into every bucket. I kept notes. Every harvest.

And I tried—sometimes painfully—to keep most things the same.

Then, if I was going to change something, I changed one thing in one bucket.

That sounds simple, but it isn’t simple for me.

My impulse is: a handful of this and a handful of that… and definitely some of that because it will be good.

But the restraint—one change at a time—is what allowed me to improve outcomes without guessing.

Because here’s what I’m moderately terrified of:

Making a change… getting a tremendous result… and having no idea how I did it.

That’s not a result. That’s a lucky accident.

And I don’t want a life built on accidents I can’t explain.

Move one stone, not the whole trail

I keep coming back to this question:

What’s the small stone I can move off the path that improves the experience for everyone who walks behind me?

Trying something new doesn’t have to mean changing everything.

It can be smaller than that.

One potted plant.
One corner of the garden.
One bucket.
Ten acres of one field.

Pick one thing.
Apply it.
Then watch.

And if you find yourself anxious about failure, try this before you start:

Write down the worst outcomes you can imagine.
Then write the early warning signs you’d see if they were becoming real.
Then write what you’d do if you saw them.

It turns vague fear into something workable.

The leader I’m trying to become

Finding that old outbox draft didn’t feel like nostalgia.

It felt like a reminder.

Strong back. Open heart.
Curiosity. Restraint.
Small experiments. Honest learning.

And maybe most of all: a willingness to go inward before I try to fix everything outward.

If you’re in a season of starting over too—maybe for the first time, maybe for the hundredth—my hope is simple:

Start small. Track something real. Move one stone.
And keep your heart open while you do it.