I love the magicians Penn & Teller. In their first book, Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends, Teller describes their rule of "No Permanent Damage": P&T are willing to try things, even crazy things, so long as there is ZERO risk of them causing permanent harm to themselves.

As I wrote near the end of the year, I felt highly motivated to leave Substack. This is my first post since then, and my first post of 2024, and I literally don't know what it will look like, whether it will send properly, whether it's more or less likely to trip email filters, and whether it's more or less likely to trigger unsubscriptions. I don't know much of anything about how this Buttondown system works.

But I know that if it totally fails, the Substack I need to move away from still exists, and I can backtrack if I have to. Of course, I also know that I've already lost subscribers who told me explicitly that they were leaving because I was on Substack and that they looked forward to resubscribing if I ever left. (Welcome back!)

Moving platforms isn't a tiny change for me; it was complicated, made more complicated by battling COVID while I dealt with some of the technology nonsense behind the scenes, and involves many steps and lots of exports and imports and QA and on and on. Even if it all goes wrong, though, it's survivable: A potential mea culpa email to my subscribers, a revert to my old system, a move to a new system. Annoying, painful, difficult... but survivable. No permanent damage.

I think of each new year as a time of some mental conflict: We want to start fresh, we want to reset and be our best selves. But we also are buried after a holiday break and have so much work and life to attend to. It's a lot.

I'm a full-time consultant. I have some clients looking to decrease their hours with me as they handle 2024 budgeting; I have some new clients looking to ramp up as quickly as possible. I want to build better habits, but I also want to not, you know, lose my mind.

The biggest mistake people make when they start working out (obviously a very common New Year's resolution) is going too hard too fast. There are overflowing parking lots at the gym for the first two weeks of the year, and then a whole lot more spaces are available after that. You don't need to hit the gym for an hour a day in January. Committing to 20 minute walks a few times a week (like my pal Marko advises) is a much smarter way to ease in.

Big business decisions and strategic moves are similar. You don't have to change everything all at once. You can take thoughtful, patient steps to evolve your business and your approach to customers. You can take risks, too. I love the "no permanent damage" rule and apply it a lot — in life, in friendships, in business, in improv, in stage acting, and on and on.

Don't be afraid to try things. Could I offer more clichéd advice? Probably. But my point is simply that you can be thoughtful and even cautious without being afraid. If you're not at risk of causing permanent damage, you're pretty safe.