Welcome to One Thing Better. Each week, the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine (that’s me) shares one way to be happier and more effective at work — and build a career or company you love.
Today’s edition is sponsored by UKG’s HR & Payroll eSymposium — where you can watch ME for FREE! Details at the end of the newsletter.
What did you start this year? A new job? New project? New relationship? Congratulations!
Now, ask yourself: What did you end this year? And did you congratulate yourself for that too?
We often don’t celebrate endings. We think of them as failures or mistakes — as if the end invalidated everything else.
But endings can be many things: They’re how we preserve time and energy, how we reach a healthy conclusion, and how we prepare for something new.
Today, I want to help you embrace endings. I’ll give you three questions to ask yourself — and after you do, you may find yourself feeling lighter and freer.
And I’ll start with something I just ended. I loved it, truly. But saying goodbye was liberating — just as it could be for you.
What I just ended
A few weeks ago, I got an exciting email. A new project of mine got approved, and it’ll require a lot of my time in 2025.
I felt excited… and then terrified. I’m already too busy. How will I possibly do this new thing too?
Then I remembered a conversation I had this summer with Mary Beth Westmoreland, a VP of technology at Amazon. She told me that, when her team starts a new project, they often eliminate an old project at the same time.
“We ask our teams: What’s the most important thing that we need to spend time on, to make the biggest impact?” she said. “Sometimes that means we’re going to stop doing things that are not making the most difference.”
I realized: To add something to my life, I also needed to subtract. But… what?
Then I asked myself three questions — starting with Mary Beth’s:
1. What is not making the most difference?
Pause to consider the language here. What is not making the most difference?
I love that word, because we’re free to define difference ourselves. What is accelerating our goals? Improving our lives the most? Once we know what makes a difference, we can optimize for it.
These days, my goal is to build a portfolio of projects that bring me joy, stretch me in the right ways, create financial stability for my family, and leave me time to enjoy non-work life.
With that in mind, I asked Mary Beth’s question: What isn’t making a difference towards that goal? My answer came quickly: It was a community that I’d built on top of this newsletter.
Longtime readers might remember this community. My initial launch was an embarrassing flop, but it eventually grew to 160 members and was so fun. Members became friends, and some even started working together.
But it was also a lot of work. I never figured out how to meaningfully scale or monetize it. It brought me joy, but not enough to outweigh its downsides.
So then I asked a second question:
2. What would happen if I shut it down?
My first reaction was: I can’t, because I’ll disappoint too many people.
We often react to endings that way, by thinking about the negative. Who will we impact or disappoint? How will it feel to say farewell?
That’s not helpful. We must consider what happens a week, month, or year afterward — because an ending isn’t just about one moment. It’s about all the moments afterward.
So I sat with it for a few days. I kept asking myself things like: If the community didn’t exist right now, how would I feel? In truth, it felt good. I imagined all my newfound free time and energy, and how I would spend it.
So finally, I asked one more question:
3. What purpose did it serve?
Everything we do serves some function in our lives. It taught us, trained us, or expanded us. Maybe it added joy or escape when we needed it most, or pushed us in directions we needed to go.
So if you’re thinking about ending something, it’s worth asking: What purpose did this serve for me? Because your next question can be: Has that purpose already been served?
For me, the community served many purposes. I learned a lot about community functions and how to moderate calls. I met great new people and had fun. All of this remains true, even if the community ends. A purpose has been fulfilled.
After all this, I knew what makes a difference in my life. I also knew what would happen if I ended the community. And I recognized what I already got from it.
This all clicked into place for me while having lunch one day. I felt instant relief. The next day, I wrote my community a message to announce its ending.
So, what are you ready to end?
Things will end for you, whether you want them to or not.
When you add new things to your life, something will be subtracted. Your time and energy will be redistributed, diminishing other projects or relationships. This is life. This is natural! The only choice we really have is: Do we want to consciously and proactively subtract things, or just let them wilt on their own?
I speak from experience: When you end something proactively, good things happen.
After closing my community, members wrote me the nicest emails. One said: “As a business owner and entrepreneur, you’ve shown me that it’s okay to try something new and that it doesn’t have to be forever — it’s okay, and even normal, for that thing to evolve or not, and ending one thing doesn’t mean the end of all things.”
That’s right!
When we start something, that doesn’t mean we have to do it forever. The only project you really need to keep going is yourself.
That’s how to do one thing better.
Watch my free keynote in January!
Work is changing. Are you ready to thrive?
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I’m part of an amazing lineup of speakers — aimed at HR and payroll specialists, but useful to everyone!
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