There’s a story about a traveler who comes to a river. It’s too wide to cross, too deep to wade, too fast to swim. So he spends days felling trees, lashing them together, building a raft. It takes everything he has. But he builds it, and he makes it across.
Now he’s on the other side. The mountain ahead is steep. He doesn’t know what’s coming. And he has to decide: does he carry the raft with him?
He built it. He needed it. It saved him. But it’s not going to help him climb.
Most people carry their rafts up the mountain.
What got you here won’t always get you there. The skills you spent years building might be the wrong skills next year. The beliefs that worked become the beliefs that hold you back. The hardest thing isn’t learning something new. It’s setting down something old that cost you a lot to build.
The people who stay useful are the ones who travel light. They hold what they know loosely enough to let go of it. They don’t confuse the cost of building something with the value of keeping it. They stay with problems long enough to understand them. And they only ask one question: did something actually get better?
I want to be that kind of person. I want to keep my identity separate from my expertise, so that changing my mind feels like progress, not loss. I want to make it safe for others to be wrong, because that’s how anyone learns anything.
This is my commitment: I will travel light. I will leave the raft at the riverbank. I will not carry it up the mountain.
I’m writing this down so I can come back in six months and be honest about whether I did it.