🧼 Mindset & Essays

Clean Slate Tradition

Every year I wipe the board clean — literally — and rewrite what matters from zero. Not because the past doesn’t count, but because I don’t want it quietly deciding who I’m allowed to become next.

Updated Feb 2025 ~8–10 minute read ← Back to Mindset & Essays

TL;DR

This essay is about my personal “clean slate” ritual — a yearly reset where I erase the goals, regrets, to-do lists, and unfinished versions of myself that have been living on the whiteboard and start from zero. It’s part productivity system, part therapy, and part rebellion against the idea that we are permanently defined by last year’s version of us.

The whiteboard that knew too much

At some point in my twenties, I realized my whiteboard had quietly turned into a courtroom. Every half-finished goal, abandoned habit, or delayed project was just there — hanging over me in dry-erase marker.

It started as a tool to keep me organized: tasks, deadlines, ambitious lists of “this is the year I finally…”. But over time, the board became a museum of unfinished versions of me. Every time I walked past it, I didn’t see opportunity. I saw evidence.

The board stopped asking, “What do you want to build next?” It started asking, “Why haven’t you done all of this yet?”

That’s when the clean slate tradition began — not as a productivity hack, but as a way to renegotiate how I relate to my own history.

A ritual of erasing (on purpose)

Once a year — usually at the turn of the year or after a big life pivot — I take a picture of the board, sit with it for a minute, and then erase everything.

Capture the evidence. I snap photos of the old board: projects, quotes, random arrows connecting ideas that made sense at 2 a.m. It’s a way of saying: “This version of me existed. He tried.”
Let myself feel weird about it. There’s always a flicker of guilt when you erase goals that never happened. I let that feeling show up, notice it, and then keep erasing anyway.
Rewrite from zero. I don’t copy the old list over. I ask: “Knowing what I know now, what actually matters?” Some things make it back. Most don’t.

On the other side of that ten-minute ritual, I’m not magically a new person. But the weight of old expectations is lighter, and the next moves feel like choices again, not obligations.

What survives the wipe

The surprising part is how many “important” goals quietly die during this process. When I’m honest, a lot of them were performative to begin with — goals I thought I should have because people with my background or ambitions usually do.

The things that survive the wipe are different. They tend to be:

Commitments tied to people I actually care about.
Skills that make me more useful and more free, not just more impressive.
Projects that scare me a little but feel aligned, even if they don’t fit the script.

Those stay. Everything else gets the dry-erase treatment.

Clean slate vs. escapism

There’s a version of “fresh start energy” that’s just running away with better branding. Ignore the debt, ignore the habits, ignore the consequences — just manifest a different life.

That’s not what this is.

My clean slate tradition doesn’t pretend the past didn’t happen. The point is not to erase reality; it’s to erase the script that says I’m permanently stuck inside my last attempt. The debt is still real. The responsibilities are still real. The lessons are definitely real. What changes is the story I tell myself about what’s possible next.

Why I keep coming back to this ritual

Life keeps changing faster than my plans. Career pivots, health stuff, family, newborn schedules, business experiments — the version of me who wrote last year’s goals didn’t know half of what I know now.

If I let old plans run the show, I’m basically letting past-me — who had less information and fewer scars — boss around present-me. That doesn’t make sense.

The clean slate is my way of saying: “Thank you for getting me this far. I’ll take it from here.”

How this shows up in the rest of my work

You can see echoes of this ritual across the rest of the site:

In Degrees Sin Barreras, where we help students treat college not as a one-shot “right path” but as a system you can re-route.
In the SRQ Food Bank map, which started as an imperfect v1 and keeps getting rebuilt as we learn more about how people actually use it.
In my tech projects and real estate deals, where I’d rather retire a strategy that no longer fits than pretend it’s still the dream.

The clean slate tradition doesn’t guarantee anything. But it keeps me from living inside expired versions of my own plans. It gives me permission to ask, again and again: “Given who I am now, what’s worth building next?”