You may have read, “Do Things While You Can.” One of the things I talked about is deciding to say yes.

Here’s the other side of that coin. To say yes, you also have to say no.

Over the years, I have written hundreds of posts to help small business owners start and grow profitable businesses. More than 100 are still sitting on my business blog.

I reread a few recently, and I was happy to see they still had value. I helped people. I explained things. I gave beginners a place to start.

But I’ve closed my business now. I’m focusing on fiction writing.

So as I update my website, I have to decide what to do with all those old business posts.

Could I leave them up? Sure. I could tuck them into a quiet corner of the site and point people there.

But should I?

There’s a good argument for letting them go. Clear the decks. Clean out the corners. Focus on what matters now.

But it is very hard to delete thousands of hours of work.

As an artist and writer, I’ve faced this before. The beginner work you once loved can start to look awkward later. The misshapen pots. The short stories that never quite gelled. The paintings that you stuff in the closet.

They mattered then. But they may not represent who you are now.

My business posts feel a little like that.

Letting go is not just practical. It is personal. For more than 30 years, my business helped define me.

At a party, the second question after your name is almost always, “So, what do you do?”

My answer was easy. I helped people build businesses. That sounded useful. Solid. Clear.

Now my answer is: “I’m retired, writing fiction, painting, and taking photos”

“Oh,” they say, looking around the room to find someone who is actually “interesting”.

That stings a little.

It also says something uncomfortable about how much our value and self-worth gets tangled up in work. Those blog posts were part of my proof.

Proof that I knew things.
Proof that I helped people.
Proof that I spent years building something with care
Proof that I knew my sh$t

And who wants to throw proof into the trash? Not me. Apparently, I would rather stand in the digital basement, holding a box labeled “blog posts from 2017,” than set the whole thing on fire.

There is another problem too.

If I keep the posts, I know myself. I’ll reread one. Then another. Then I’ll think, “Hmm. This is outdated. I should fix it.” And down the rabbit hole I go, pretending this is useful.

It is not.

It is me avoiding the scarier thing. Writing new work. Being new at something. Letting the old proof stop doing its job.

Maybe the real question is not whether the posts still have value. They do.

The question is whether they still belong in the front room of my life. Stop making them front and center.

So…do I leap? Delete, delete, delete?

That is the choice I am fighting hardest against.

That might be the very reason to do it.