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It’s Memorial Day. And before I get into today’s episode, I want to say something about that, briefly, because it connects to where we are going.
Memorial Day is a day about cost. About people who paid the highest possible price, and about the rest of us being asked, once a year, to actually remember it. To not let the cost become invisible just because time passed and the grass grew back.
I am not going to pretend my story sits anywhere near that kind of sacrifice. It does not. But the principle underneath the day, that some things cost something real and you dishonor them by forgetting, has been on my mind. Last week I talked about breaking patterns. This week I want to talk about what it costs to keep them broken. And about not forgetting that cost the moment things start feeling normal again.
Two kinds of change
Here is the thing I did not understand for most of my life. I thought change was one thing. You decide, you do, you are different. One category.
It is two categories. And confusing them is why I spent years thinking I had changed when I had not.
The first kind is the change you perform. Real effort, do not get me wrong. But underneath it, you are still the old you doing a convincing impression of a new you. A costume. A good costume, one you can wear for weeks. But costumes come off, usually at the worst possible moment, usually when you are tired.
The second kind is the change that sticks. The new behavior is not a costume anymore. It is just how you operate. You are not performing it. It is load bearing now, in the good way. It holds weight without you having to think about holding it.
The change you perform is a costume you are wearing. The change that sticks is a wall you are standing behind. They look identical from the outside. They are nothing alike when the wind picks up.
The white-knuckle months
After that first broken pattern, I did keep choosing differently. Telling the truth on the calls. Not disappearing into the basement. But the highlight-reel version would be a lie. It was exhausting.
Every truthful conversation, I had to choose it. Deliberately. The Isolator pattern did not retire just because I stopped obeying it. It was right there every time, offering the old comfortable move, and every time I had to consciously decline. Like a coworker who kept showing up at my desk with a bad idea, and I had to keep saying no thank you, ten times a day, for months.
And here is what nobody tells you. The white-knuckle phase looks, from the outside, exactly like real change. If you had watched me, you would have said that guy has changed. But I knew it was a costume. A costume I was committed to, but a costume, because it still cost me something every time. And I kept waiting for the cost to go away. I thought that was the goal.
When it stopped costing
I cannot give you the exact day it changed. It is not a day. It is more like a season you only notice you are in once you are already a few weeks deep.
But I can tell you the moment I noticed. Another client call. By then Pinnacle Masters had a name and a couple of real engagements. Something was off in the work, not my fault this time, but it required the kind of conversation where you tell a client something they do not want to hear.
And I had the conversation. Directly. And only afterward, hanging up, did I realize I had not braced for it. No talking myself into it. No coworker at my desk. I had just told the truth, without effort, because that was the move now. The pattern had not even shown up to fight. It had gotten quiet. Not gone. But quiet in a way it never was during the white-knuckle months.
I kept waiting for the cost of the new behavior to disappear. It does not disappear. It just slowly stops being something you pay on purpose and becomes something the new structure pays for you.
What actually made it stick
I have spent a lot of time trying to understand what turned the costume into a wall. The most honest answer I have is this. It was reps. It was just reps.
No insight did it. No breakthrough. I did the new behavior, effortfully, as a costume, hundreds of times. And somewhere in those hundreds of reps, the behavior wore a groove. It became the path of least resistance instead of the path I had to force. The reps did not feel like they were building anything. They felt like maintenance. But they were building the wall the whole time. You just cannot see a wall from the inside while you are still laying the bricks.
And here is where Memorial Day comes back. The danger, once the change sticks and stops costing you, is that you forget it ever cost you anything. You forget the white-knuckle months. You start to think you were always this guy. And the second you forget what it cost to build the wall, you stop maintaining it. And a wall nobody maintains comes down. Slowly. Quietly. The same way the collapse happened in the first place.
So I try not to forget. I try to remember the exhausting months the way the day asks us to remember cost. Not to wallow in how hard it was. But because the remembering is part of what keeps the thing standing.
THIS WEEK I’M THINKING ABOUT
Remembering the Cost Is Not Living in the Past
For a long time I thought health meant putting the hard years behind me and not looking back. Move forward. Do not dwell. And there is something to that, you cannot build anything while staring backward.
But there is a difference between dwelling and remembering. Dwelling is replaying the pain on a loop and letting it run you. Remembering is keeping an honest accounting of what something cost so you do not casually let it come undone. On a day built around remembrance, that distinction feels worth holding. The wall you stopped paying attention to is the wall that comes down.
ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
Write down what your current best change actually cost you to build. Pick one thing about yourself that has genuinely changed and stuck. Then, in a few sentences, write down what the white-knuckle phase of it was actually like. How long it took. How exhausting it was. What you had to decline, over and over, to get here. You are not doing this to feel bad. You are doing it so the cost stays visible, because the change you remember paying for is the change you keep maintaining.
READER QUESTION
What change in your life has crossed over from costume to wall, and do you still remember what it took to build it? Or have you started quietly assuming you were always this person? Because the moment we forget the construction is the moment we stop the maintenance.
If this one landed, the Sunday Reset pulls this week’s three episodes together with the underlying question and one thing to try. It hits your inbox Sunday morning. You are already on the list if you are reading this.
Dan
Orlando, Florida
What happens when you throw out the GTM playbook
That investor was wrong. Gamma is now worth $2B, with 50M users and more than half their growth driven by word of mouth.
They're one of 6 AI-native startups in HubSpot for Startups' free Bold Bets Playbook. Replit grew revenue 50x after half the team pushed back on the strategy. Ramp generated 100M+ views from a single stunt. Clay's co-founder wouldn't hang up a sales call until the prospect DMed him in Slack.
Each one took a GTM risk most founders would never greenlight. Each one paid off.