Before You Scrap It, Try This

January makes us want a clean slate. New goals. New plans. New energy.

And sometimes… we scrap more than we should.

In this week’s Two-Minute Tip, I’m sharing a simple story from my Christmas baking that turned into a powerful reminder about learning from what didn’t work, the value of iteration, and why great leaders don't always need a brand-new plan — sometimes they just need a smart pivot.

Click play if you’re feeling tempted to wipe the slate clean.

• Read the video transcript

  Well, in our household, every Christmas morning must include a slow breakfast together with some sort of cinnamon swirl pastry. Typically that means cinnamon rolls or maybe monkey bread.

  But this year I decided I wanted to experiment with a new recipe. It was a sourdough Christmas cinnamon star, and it took days to prepare.

  If you know anything about sourdough, you have to plan in advance, and it looked beautiful. I was so excited.

  And we cut into it on Christmas morning and it was not very good at all. The taste, the texture did not live up to the beauty of this creation. And it was kind of a bummer, and I was tempted to just throw the whole thing away, but instead I decided to turn it into french toast. And so the next several days, we enjoyed the most delicious cinnamon swirl french toast as a result.

  Now the lesson from this can apply to the current state because in January what I find is we are often tempted to completely scratch some things from the prior year. And sometimes this is a benefit. Sometimes we do need to totally let go of something from the prior year, but I find that we often try to completely scratch something that still has some goodness in it.

  So I want you to think about what is something you are tempted to just completely erase, dump in the trash from last year, and instead, treat it as an experiment. Treat it as, okay, I experimented with this last year. Maybe it didn't go how I wanted, but what can I learn from it? What can I take from this and tweak? How can I pivot it moving forward? I can almost guarantee there's some goodness in there that you can learn from -- and now tweak, pivot, to take into the coming year.

  So before you throw it all out in the trash, think about what can I learn from this? How can I tweak it? How can I pivot to improve it and carry forward the goodness into this coming year?