When a dream gets too heavy
How creators and founders drop dead weight and regain real momentum
I went six weeks without hitting publish. Here’s the one-hour audit that got me moving again, and how you can run it today.
it’s been a while
Six weeks away from publishing felt like a year. I kept telling myself I was “busy building” my LinkedIn presence. Truth: I lost momentum.
It felt like I was writing for two crowds: operators who want clean playbooks and founders who want the story behind the scars.
Today I’m choosing to drop that split. You’re the same people. You care about outcomes, and you care about the person who has to carry them.
It was this issue of Justin Welsh’s The Saturday Solopreneur that triggered me to write today’s post.
Reading about reviving a dream hit a nerve. Some of my dreams didn’t die. They just gained weight.
A dream gets heavy when it stops returning energy. It creeps into your mornings. It crowds your calendar. You can still carry it, but the cost climbs every week.
Leonardo da Vinci knew that feeling. Brilliant, curious, wildly productive—and famous for unfinished work.
He left “The Adoration of the Magi” incomplete, chased flying machines that never took flight, and filled notebooks with designs that never went into production. Yet his output changed the world.
The lesson: great builders don’t carry every dream to the finish line. They carry the right ones long enough to reveal compounding value, and they set the others down without drama.
I’m rebuilding with that in mind.
the quick audit: carry, compost, or cache
Take ten minutes and list your current dreams, projects, and identity-level goals. Not tasks, but dreams. Things with emotional weight and a real cost.
Now apply three buckets:
Carry: The dream still gives energy. You’d do it without applause. Clear use case, clear upside, and momentum you can feel.
Compost: The dream served you, taught you, and now it’s raw material. You extract the lesson and feed it into something alive. No ceremony, no guilt.
Cache: The dream might be right, but the timing is wrong. Park it in a holding file with a recheck date. This frees attention without erasing intent.
Signals a dream belongs in the Compost: you’re negotiating with it every day; progress requires force; the team keeps asking, “Why this, why now?”Customers aren’t pulling; your body tightens when you open the doc.
Signals a dream belongs in Carry: you do reps without calendar pressure; people ask for it by name; you can describe the next three steps in one breath.
Most leaders overestimate willpower and underestimate drag. The cost isn’t only time. It’s trust.
When you hold onto stale dreams, your team stops believing your yes. Your audience senses hesitation. You burn optionality that could compound elsewhere.
the bridge between my two audiences
On LinkedIn, you see the strategic business advisor in me: plays that reduce noise, tighten culture, and grow revenue.
In Mindset Rebuild, you meet the guy under the armour: the father, partner, creator, sorting out meaning and mastery.
Same person, same mission: give founders a clean path to clarity and execution without burning their humanity.
That bridge matters because energy allocation is both a mindset and an operational issue.
The inner decision (drop a heavy dream) must become an outer design (calendar, crew, cadence). If the inner and outer don’t match, drag returns. Fast.
the CEO life OS routine I’m adopting this quarter
Weekly Dream Review (15 minutes, Friday):
Open three lists: Carry, Compost, Cache. Move items without ceremony.
A dream that moved to Compost last week doesn’t get resurrected without new data. A dream in Carry must show a concrete proof-of-progress snapshot: shipped pages, shipped conversations, shipped commits.
Dream Scorecard (simple, not fancy):
For each Carry item, track:
energy returned this week (low/medium/high),
market pull (mentions, asks, pre-sales),
learning gained (one sentence),
next visible proof (one step you’ll show publicly).
Public proof, private reflection:
Share the proof where your people are (LinkedIn) and bring the reflection here (Mindset Rebuild). Public proof builds trust. Private reflection builds wisdom. Together, they compound.
Quarterly Cache Check:
Open the Cache and ask, “Did the world change? Did I?” If neither did, keep it cached. If something moved, run a seven-day micro-experiment before promoting it to Carry.
what I’m carrying now
CEO Morning OS. Helping leaders win the first 90 minutes of the day is still a core lever. It returns energy, creates visible wins, and supports my strategic retainers.
Substack as trust engine. You’re reading it. This is where I show the work behind the work. Essays that move first, frameworks that follow.
Founder conversations. Private rooms with real operators. Listening > talking. The market continues to shape my offers here.
what went to compost (with gratitude)
“Be everywhere” content schedules. Reach without resonance erodes signal. I’m choosing depth with a higher standard for usefulness.
Shiny tooling experiments that don’t shorten time-to-proof. If it doesn’t help a founder ship faster, it’s fertilizer.
what’s in cache (revisit December 15)
A small accelerator cohort for operators becoming CEOs. It’s promising. Timing and partner alignment are still baking in the oven.
a simple test you can run this week
Block one hour. List your heavy dreams.
Rate each on a 1–5 scale for energy returned, market pull, and time to proof. Anything scoring under an 8 is likely to belong in Compost or Cache. Move it.
Then choose one Carry dream and publish a proof by Friday: a page, a call, a prototype, a pre-sell. Ship the smallest unit that counts.
consequence of doing nothing
Heavy dreams don’t just slow you down. They reshape your identity.
You become the person who “almost launched,” who “used to write,” who “plans to focus after this sprint.” That story multiplies. It shows up in your team’s risk profile, your product’s pace, and your customer’s confidence.
I’m done carrying that weight. I’m writing here every week again. You’ll get the story and the system: the heart and the handle.
If you felt the drag too, try the audit. Send a note with your Carry list. If it helps, I’ll share anonymized patterns and build next week’s piece around them.
The dream isn’t gone. It just needed to weigh less.
Onward—with lighter packs.
~Warren