Burning it down and starting over? Read this first

I can't tell you how often people come to me and tell me they're ready to burn it all down and start over.

Usually these are people that have been in business for a while, growing their audiences and networks, selling a particular set of products or services. They've almost always come to "be known" for something, reaching a degree of success offering cooking tips or coaching sessions or parenting advice to people who trust them.

Then they get the nudge.

If you've felt the nudge, you'll know what I'm talking about. It's an inkling—an idea that just won't go away.

Sometimes the nudge is a name. Other times it's a stack of seemingly unrelated books that feel totally "off topic" but irresistible all the same.

For me, it was the phrase "Big Paper Planning Day." I just couldn't get it out of my head. I walked around (literally) for two years, wondering what it wanted to be, this cute little turn of phrase that felt so accurate to the way I organize my life.

Nudges, like any creative idea, are a recognition of opportunity. Those "Aha!" moments we love, the ideas we come up with in the shower or on a walk, they often arrive out of our being steeped in a particular context. We observe a problem or question or desire, whether in our environment or within ourselves, and then we consciously and subconsciously begin to look for solutions.

The solutions and nudges we get are often inherently pretty interdisciplinary, if only because we as humans are made up of our own unique set of experiences and perspectives. This is why me and the person next to me can both be designing offers for "creative people who want to make a living working for themselves," and have totally different solutions to the same problem.

As it turns out, this "dot connecting" between seemingly unrelated factors is a form of pattern recognition, and it's theorized to be a large part of how entrepreneurs notice opportunities in the marketplace. (Shoutout to all of the ADHD/ASD cuties who just found another reason to be proud of the way their brain works.)

So what does this have to do with wanting to burn it all down and start over? I did promise I'd try my best to weave it together for you in the end.

The connection I see, due to my unique set of experiences and perspectives and books on my nightstand, is that the inkling to burn it all down and start over is often a sign of a brilliant new iteration asking to expressed.

Sure, sometimes that new "Era" is incongruent with what we were doing and who we were being before, and kicking down the lego tower might be a necessary first step to building something new.

And also, often times what we have now is exactly what we need to make something new. After all, even when we're making something "from scratch," we're still working with ingredients. We still have a recipe, somewhere, we can look to as a reference. 

In other words, even when it's necessary to completely start fresh, we're never really starting from the beginning. Each time we arrive at the drawing board, we bring with us all of the insights, experiences, "Aha!" moments, nudges, ideas and "Oh I actually really hated that" realizations that we gained the last time we tried.

So here's to starting again, whether from a blank page or by using the pieces already on the table.