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I started this year in a heavy season of burning things to the ground. As I watched my subscribers, my money, and a bit of my sanity burn away, I asked myself a question that I will now pose to you:
“How would you feel if someone handed you the keys to your business right now, exactly as it exists today?"
You get all your:
- Current projects
- Offers
- Systems
- Processes,
- Habits
- Sales pipeline (or lack thereof)
Everything stays the same, you’re just buying it fresh. Would you be happy with what you’re getting? Would you be frustrated with the burden of it? How would you start again with your new self at the helm?
I ask because in a very real way, we are a new self, every single day. Every seven years, every cell in our body regenerates, which means every seven years you are a whole new self. Everything you do today is in service to a future human that doesn't exist yet...
...because you're literally creating them with every breath you take.
If you've been doing this work for more than 7 years, then congratulations, a completely different human built all this for you, and now you're suffering (or thriving) through it.
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When we’ve been building our businesses day by day, decision by decision, we rarely stop to evaluate the whole picture. We inherit our own choices without questioning them.
- That product line you keep trying to salvage.
- That marketing channel you hate but feel obligated to maintain.
- The service offering you’re not passionate about anymore but have “invested too much time in to quit now.
We put up with them because a past version of ourselves thought it was a good idea...
...but if you were acquiring this business today, looking at it with fresh, objective eyes, you’d see things differently.
There’s a cognitive principle at play here called the endowment effect, which describes our tendency to overvalue things simply because we own them.
Behavioral economists have repeatedly proven that we demand more money to give up something we already have than we’d pay to acquire that same thing fresh. This bias doesn’t just apply to objects, either. It applies to business decisions, strategies, and commitments.
You’re anchored to your sunk costs, but you're not trapped by them. At any point you can cut the anchor and chart a different course.
When you imagine yourself as the new owner who just paid for this business, you bypass the sunk cost fallacy. You eliminate the “but I’ve already invested so much” reasoning, and can see your business the way an outside buyer would, as a collection of assets and liabilities, opportunities and drains, with no emotional backstory attached.
We also realize that we did a lot already. Even if we haven’t had a lot of success, we’ve done so much testing about what doesn’t work.
No, we wouldn’t do everything the same a second time around, but we don’t have to, either. If we’re beginning again from this moment, then we get to begin again without starting again.
When I shut down The Author Stack and started Hapitalist, I did it with a mailing list of 46,000 people, a membership with 64 people paying $300/yr, almost 1,000 people in my basic membership, and an ARR of $35,000...
...and after the transition over 80% of them retained, which is awesome.
You might think “Russell, I don’t have nearly that much to carry with me”, but you might also say “Are you nuts? Why would you blow up your business when you had that much working for you?”
Both are valid emotions to have, but the point is that no matter where you are, you can always begin again without starting from scratch. You’ll never start from “scratch” after you start that first time, no matter how many times you begin again.
I didn't just do this once, either. I am a perpetual quitter.
- I closed down The Complete Creative while it was pulling in $40-$50k/yr in business because it wasn’t getting me where I wanted to go.
- We shut down a conference with over $150k in ARR because it was weighing us down. Then, we shut down the whole company.
- I stopped two series after 12 books because I had nothing left to say, and I stopped podcasts with 100+ episodes because I stopped having fun with it.
I will never not be the person who did that, but I don’t want to be that person right now.
We can always begin again…from exactly where we are right now.
We have a saying in Hapitalist: If it was working, it would be working.
If something’s not working, then you either need to fix what’s broken or discard what doesn’t work. If you keep riding something that's broken, it's only going to break more until it falls apart...
...or you do.
The past decisions that shaped your current business? They don’t have to dictate your future ones. You’re not locked into the old way of things, and everything before this moment is the old way of things.
Your business isn’t a ship that’s already been built and launched. It’s something you’re constructing every single day.
If it’s any ship, it’s The Ship of Theseus, the classic philosophical thought experiment that asks whether something remains the same thing after all its parts have been replaced, one at a time, over years.
That means you can change the blueprint whenever you want.
This isn’t about burning it all down. Most businesses don’t need destruction. Instead, they need decisive pruning and strategic redirection.
So let’s make this practical. Imagine you just acquired your business for a dollar.
Now answer these questions honestly:
