#12 Letting Go, Evolving, or Continuing: Rethinking Projects as a Multipotential
How to know when it’s time to stop — or transform what you’re building
When you’re a multipotential, you rarely have just one thing going on.
Projects, roles, ideas — they grow, overlap, evolve.
And for a long time, I believed that having many directions meant I should hold on to all of them.
Because stopping felt like failure.
Closing something felt like losing.
But over time, I started noticing a different signal.
Energy.
The real indicator
Not every difficult phase means something is wrong.
Every project has cycles — effort, uncertainty, growth.
But there’s a difference between:
something that is temporarily demanding
and something that is consistently draining
If a direction, project, or role over time takes more energy than it gives —
it’s usually not a phase.
It’s a signal.
And ignoring that signal is what actually creates stagnation.
Reframing the decision
I used to think the choice was binary: continue or quit.
Now I see three possible paths:
• stop
• continue
• transform
The most interesting one — and often the hardest — is transform.
Not abandoning the direction,
but redesigning it.
Changing the format.
The scope.
The role you play in it.
This way of thinking is very close to principles from TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) — where instead of accepting constraints, you look for ways to reconfigure the system.
But transformation requires space.
If I can’t see how to transform something, I consciously choose between the other two: continue or let go.
What makes this difficult
The hardest part is not the decision itself.
It’s noticing the moment when a project needs to be re-evaluated.
Multipotentials are good at pushing through.
At holding complexity.
At continuing.
But that strength can also delay necessary change.
That’s why reflection is not optional.
It’s structural.
Try this
From time to time, review your active projects and ask:
Which ones give me energy — even if they are hard?
Which ones consistently drain me?
For each, consider:
Do I want to continue?
Do I need to transform something?
Or is it time to let go?
Not everything needs to be closed.
But everything needs to be seen clearly.
A quiet reflection
Letting go is not failure.
Continuing is not always strength.
Transformation is often the most demanding path —
but also the most generative.
For a multipotential, the goal is not to keep everything alive.
It’s to keep the system alive.