The boat that got you across the river is now holding you back

Sahil Bloom was working through a reader's dilemma about reinvention when he came to his final step. The reader, a 32-year-old lawyer, felt stuck on a path chosen years earlier and feared it was too late to change. Bloom had offered ways to reframe that fear and to take small daily actions. Then he told an old story about a traveler and a river.

A traveler reaches a river with no bridge, Bloom said. He chops down a tree, strips the bark, shapes the wood, and after days of work builds a boat. He crosses safely. Then, worried he might meet more rivers ahead, he fastens the craft to his waist with a cord and keeps walking while dragging it behind him.

After a mile, every step feels far harder than it should. The river is long out of sight. As Bloom put it, "When you hold on too long, something that helped you can begin to harm you."

Bloom argues that reinvention fails for the same reason. People drag old boats that once carried them forward. He names three he sees most often, in others and in himself.

The first is fair-weather supporters. They backed you while your old life suited their interests, but as you change, Bloom says, "They tell you to be realistic. They laugh at your ambitions. They subtly belittle your aspirations."

The second is self-limiting stories about what you can do. Those stories may once have kept you focused, even fueled your success through fear of losing it all. Now they sound like, "You aren't an entrepreneur," or, as Bloom put it, "You aren't good with technology or sales."

The third is the conviction that results are shaped by forces beyond your control. Bloom calls it the ultimate self-protection mechanism, because failures need no explanation and other people's leaps can be written off as luck. But, he argues, "that self-protection quickly becomes self-rejection."

His prescription is blunt: "To reinvent yourself, you have to cut the line on the boats you're dragging."