We don’t want to throw away the baby with the bathwater. Get rid of the soiled, unwanted; keep the precious.

This is why most entrepreneurs talk about “the pivot” and not a leap.

A leap means lunging into the void, leaving everything behind, with all your energy; and then not knowing for sure where and how we’ll land.

A pivot is cautious, and is economic. It keeps most of the things in place, hopefully the ones that are valuable, that have taken us a lot of effort to build, and that continue to function. And then, it changes one thing.

Honda pivoted from inexpensive road motorcycles to dirt bikes, IBM has since pivoted from mainframes to PCs, to services, Netflix pivoted from DVDs to online streaming, and now producing content.

The pivot allows us to change, keeping the baby.

(Don’t ask me what the watermelons in the photo are, your guess is as good as mine).

There are some habits, especially of the bad type, that just keep coming back.

No matter how much we commit, or how much of our willpower we throw against them, we just return to the “default mode”. For these stubborn ones I have found that the best thing is to replace them, to distract myself with a new habit. In this case, the fact that we cannot be in two places at the same time, actually helps us.

It is also useful to think it through the other way around. In the process of forming new habits, what older, bad habits could we oust in the process as well?

Churches were built on top of pagan temples, and it was quite effective, I haven’t ever been able to visit one of the latter.

The best way to get rid of old habits is to create new ones.