The Bag

Why your abandoned initiatives might be your clearest evidence of growth

The clearest sign you're moving forward isn't always a new win. Sometimes it's the growing pile of things you were willing to let die.

There I was at my workbench again — a new idea for a Men's Alliance challenge coin sleeve, sharp in my head, solid on paper. I cut the leather, stitched it, slid the coin in.

Dead on arrival.

The disappointment lasted about a second. Then I made the call: any fix would push the design outside what still felt right. So I dropped it in the bag — the bag where all my failed leather designs go — and moved on.

Months later I'd dig through that bag looking for a scrap or clearing space. And I'd find them: the outright bad ideas, the mediocre ones, the ones that had been so close. A quiet mix of pride and nostalgia. Some of those failures had been direct stepping stones to my best-seller. Several lanyard designs went into that bag before the one that finally clicked and started selling steadily.

That's when it hit me: the bag had stopped feeling like a graveyard. It had become visible proof of progress.

Most principals have no bag.

No artifact of the trail. No record of what they tried, what they stopped, what it taught them. Just a vague sense that things aren't moving fast enough — with nothing to push back against that feeling.

Here's how to build one. And how to use it.

Keep a simple failure record. It doesn't need to be formal. A note, a folder, a running doc. When something dies — a program, a hire, an initiative — log it with one line: what it was, when you killed it, why.

Review it at two levels. Weekly, ask a simple question: what did I try this week that didn't get me the results I wanted, and is it worth adjusting or dropping? That's not a painful exercise. That's a skill. The faster you can make that call, the less time you waste nursing something that isn't working.

Quarterly, run a bigger scan. Look across the major initiatives, hires, and decisions of the last three to six months. What did you stop? What did you learn? Which dead ends turned out to be stepping stones you didn't recognize at the time?

Same questions, different altitude. Weekly keeps you nimble. Quarterly gives you perspective on the trail.

Name the fast kills separately. The things you abandoned quickly and cleanly deserve their own category. Those aren't failures. Those are evidence of judgment getting sharper. A principal who can kill something in month three — cleanly, without drama — is leading better than the one who nurses a dying initiative for two years because letting go feels like losing.

There's a reason some principals can kill an initiative cleanly and some can't. The ones who struggle usually sold the initiative — "we're launching an advisory program" — instead of the outcome they were after. When the program dies, it reads as a broken promise. The ones who kill things cleanly framed the work as a test from the start. Stakeholders can absorb a failed experiment. They struggle to absorb a failed promise. The bag only works if you never promised the thing in the bag.

The bag works for your team, too. When your staff feels like progress has stalled, don't just look forward. Stop and look back together. Walk through the last three to six months. Name what you tried, what you stopped, what you learned. What you'll do differently.

Something almost always happens in that conversation. One person is still carrying discouragement about a decision that someone else has already turned into a lesson. One person sees a dead end. Another sees the stepping stone. That gap doesn't close on its own — but naming it together closes it faster than any planning meeting will.

Real progress is only visible in hindsight.

As leaders we're wired to scan the horizon — the next hire, the next board meeting, the next objective. That forward pressure is real and it matters.

But there's something powerful about pausing, turning around, and looking at the trail behind you.

The clearest sign you're moving forward isn't always what's coming. Sometimes it's the growing collection of things you were willing to let die quickly and cleanly so you could keep going.

And sometimes you can't see it alone.