At the end of every school year we built a fire and fed it the paper.
All of it. Quizzes, worksheets, book reports, the folded thing that had been hiding in the back of a folder since October. Nobody sorted first. The A went in touching the D. Paper burns fast and a little dishonestly, a whole year of getting things wrong gone in about the time it takes to tie a shoe, and we stood there with our faces too hot, watching.
It worked because the pile was complete. Curate it first, pull the good ones, arrange them, and what you have built is a trophy case. Nobody has ever felt anything standing in front of a trophy case.
The grown version happens in December at my current company. A year of tracked chaos gets pooled into one document and read back. The reorg. The outage. The launch that slipped twice. The thing that broke in July that everyone has quietly agreed never to discuss again. And the room goes quiet in the good way, because holy hell, look at what we walked through.
The ugly entries survive, too, which surprised me until I understood why. Nobody’s hands are on the pile anymore. A machine scrapes the year and stacks it, and a machine has no instinct to protect anybody’s quarter.
Notice what that document still doesn’t hold.
It records what happened. Not what it felt like going in. That part your memory deletes on your behalf, quietly, without asking… and by December you cannot get back to March. You remember how it turned out, and how it turned out paints over the version of you who didn’t know yet. Everything that ended fine gets refiled as obviously fine.
So the nerve never accumulates. Wins leave receipts. Fear doesn’t leave a receipt.
I wrote one down before the bar ever opened, in the middle of the build out, back when the place was mostly plywood and paperwork. I’m going to ruin my relationships.
It didn’t happen. And I would never have thought to be proud of that, because by now it reads like it was never a real possibility. It was. I just have no way left to feel it.
I wrote another one. People won’t come back to us.
That one came true. It’s true most weeks. We are not made for everyone, and I have to swallow that more often than I’d like, and most of it is on purpose. The taps say no to a lot of people. That was the plan before I had a nicer word for the plan.
(Not the loud fears, either. The quiet ones you write down and then feel a little embarrassed about.)
Positioning shows up dressed as fear first. Long before anybody builds a deck, somebody on the team is lying awake about the customers you’re going to lose, and that list is usually accurate, and usually the whole point. The fear arrives early, without vocabulary, describing the edge you already chose.
So the piles worth keeping are the private ones and it pays to remember nobody is scraping your year for you.
A year from now I want to read back a page of things that were going to end me. Most of them won’t have happened. A couple will have.
Those are the ones I’ll want to keep. Or… at least smirk as I toss them into the ceremonial fire.
Stay Positive & Burn Burn Burn
- Fear Doesn’t Leave A Receipt - September 12, 2026
- You Weren’t In The Room - September 11, 2026
- Grades Roll Downhill - September 10, 2026
