This book sits at the intersection of several conversations that have been happening separately and deserve to be brought together.
One is the psychology of motivation and behavior change. Research by scientist Gabriele Oettingen on mental contrasting has shown that purely positive visualization of future goals actively undermines the motivation to pursue them. Peter Gollwitzer's work on implementation intentions shows that specificity of planning matters far more than strength of intention. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer's progress principle research reveals that what actually motivates humans is the experience of visible progress. The honest accounting of what has already worked is not a nostalgic exercise but a practical motivational tool.
Another is the anthropological one. Almost every culture that has ever taken new beginnings seriously has built honest backward examination into the threshold. The ten days of teshuvah in the Jewish tradition is often translated as repentance but more precisely meaning return and requires accounting honestly for the year before committing to the one ahead. The Japanese Oosoji, the great cleaning, clears the old year from the home before the new one is welcomed. Enkutatash, the Ethiopian new year, marks a literal clearing of the rainy season before renewal begins. These traditions are not coincidentally similar. They encode a wisdom that the secular Western January 1 has largely abandoned.
A third conversation is the one about burnout. I came as someone who burned out at the peak of a Fortune 500 career. On Saturday, September 6, 1997, I found myself sequestered in a Hong Kong hotel room, unable to get out of bed, watching wall-to-wall BBC coverage of Princess Diana's funeral while having what I can now call a nervous breakdown. I was running glamorous expat assignments launching Clairol Nice'n Easy and Herbal Essences across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. From the outside, I was on top of the world. Inside, I had gained fourteen pounds in five months, stopped exercising, worked well into my weekends, and was lonely and homesick. I was officially burned out. What I discovered in the years that followed is that my burnout was not just an energy problem. It was a sequencing problem. I had been charging forward, year after year, without ever honestly looking back at what the year was revealing about my own life.
That experience sent me searching. Through psychology, philosophy, ancient mythology, and the practices of cultures that have always taken their thresholds seriously. What I found became this book.
The life path matters here too. I grew up between the Philippines, Nepal, Thailand, and Japan, the son of a university professor whose academic work took our family across countries. I have crossed more thresholds (geographic, cultural, linguistic, personal) than most people do in a lifetime. I understand from the inside what it means to stand at a beginning and not know who you will be on the other side. That understanding is baked into every page of this book.
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