Announcing Change Can Become a Substitute for Change
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There is a strange pleasure in announcing a new beginning.
A new project. A new routine. A new identity. We tell people what we are going to do, and for a moment the announcement itself feels like movement.
That feeling can be useful. Public commitment sometimes creates accountability.
But it can also become a substitute for the harder part.
Once a goal has been announced, we begin to manage two things instead of one: the work itself and the image of the person doing the work.
The second task is often more attractive.
It produces immediate feedback. People encourage us. We explain the plan. We choose the language of the new identity before the habits behind it exist.
Then stopping becomes embarrassing.
Changing direction looks inconsistent. Discovering that the goal was wrong feels like a public failure rather than useful information.
This is why I have become interested in private change.
Learn before calling yourself a learner. Build before calling yourself a builder. Practice before turning the practice into a personal brand.
Silence creates room for revision.
You can fail without an audience. You can abandon a bad idea without defending it. You can discover that the version of yourself you imagined is not the one you actually want to become.
Kierkegaard wrote about the danger of losing the individual inside the crowd. Modern public life adds a new version of that problem: sometimes we begin performing our future self before we have lived into it.
The answer is not secrecy for its own sake. Some work benefits from community, feedback, and accountability.
The distinction I care about is simpler.
Does talking about the change support the change, or reward me enough that I no longer feel the same need to make it?
Real reinvention is usually less dramatic than its announcement.
It is repetition without applause. A different decision made enough times that one day the old description no longer fits.
By then, there may be very little left to announce.