The lie of the clean slate

If you're carrying baggage into 2026, it's not too late to put it down

Author

Jen Phillips
January 06, 2026

Hi it's Jen,

A new year has a way of making everything feel possible again.

It also has a way of making leaders secretly believe unresolved problems were wiped away overnight.
They weren’t.

CEOs and founders lost millions in 2025.
Not to competition or market conditions, but to indecision.

The clean-slate story is tempting.
But at its core, it’s just indecision with better branding.

So let’s do something about it.

In today's issue:

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When you treat January 1st like a reset button, you carry forward what didn't get resolved. Like overweight baggage you’re lugging into the new year.

The hard conversations you avoided in December? Still hard. Still need to happen.
The strategy drift you ignored? Compounding daily.

Our unresolved decisions aren't neutral. They're a hidden line item devouring our runways.

I call it decision debt. The backlog of important decisions that show up in planning cycle after planning cycle.

Y Combinator partners are more blunt. Their take? Indecision kills startups. YC founders describe "pivot hell": direction changes, delayed calls, and lack of commitment, as a reliable way to burn runway without learning anything.

Decision debt steals momentum instead of building on it.

McKinsey's research shows companies that make decisions quickly achieve about 2x the revenue growth and 1.5x better operating margins than slower peers. Messy progress beats clean restarts.

It’s avoidance masquerading as strategy.

January’s magical thinking is an expensive delay of (better) game. By February, you’ve lost six weeks of traction to a plan built on hope instead of definitiveness.

PwC found that 57% of executives admit they're missing business opportunities because they can't decide fast enough.

…And gives permission to avoid the real question.

"What should we have stopped doing six months ago that we’re still doing?"

You pay the toll of indecision.
So does your business.
And every single member of your team.

Ambition

Leaders with traction don't "start fresh." We start honest.

So you carried old shiznak into this year. Big deal. I promise you, you're not the only one.

Behavioral researchers call this moment the fresh start effect. Temporal landmarks like New Year's create a real motivational bump. The brain loves a phase change.

It's easier to believe "the slate is now clean" on January 1 than on some random Tuesday in March.

A temporal landmark can accelerate change.

If we use it wisely.
Not to hope for a magical change.
To finally make the calls we’ve been deferring.

In other words, we can let it be our afterburner, not our excuse.

What if instead of hoping for magical resets, we:

  • Protected what's actually working (even if it's messy)

  • Made the calls we've been avoiding (even though they're hard)

  • Built momentum on evidence instead of January energy

We’re not going to kill the decision debt overnight. But we can start building a system that doesn’t accrue it.

When decision debt drops, culture shifts. Teams spend less time second-guessing and more time executing. Employees experience less whiplash from constant strategy pivots. Leaders stop white-knuckling their way through every quarter.

Decision clarity isn't just good for the business. It's good for the people inside it.

And that's the new ambition: accountable leadership that's healthier for humans and better for business.

Be a change-maker: forward this email to a founder or leader who could use the reminder to put the baggage down and reduce their decision debt.

GO | DO

Estimated time: 30 - 45 minutes | Estimated energy: minimal

This week, pay down your decision debt.

Your Open Loops List (15 minutes)

Avoid the Zeiganik Effect (where unresolved issues create cognitive load). Make an inventory of every open strategic question, org decision, or directional call that’s been “under discussion” for more than three meetings running or a quarter.

Pro-tip: running EOS? These are the issues that stay open, week after week.

Prioritized Loop Closure (15 minutes)

Choose the open loop that’s creating the most significant decision debt this week. Set deadlines to close the rest of your open loops, prioritized by decision debt. Even if the decisions are imperfect.

Fast decisions with room for course-correction outperform slow “aiming for perfection” ones.

Confirm your “NO” List (15 minutes)

Write down what you're explicitly not doing this quarter. This isn't negativity. It's protecting focus by taking work that’s not imperative off the backlog.

Cascade to the organization. Clarity delivers focus.

What’s In It For All Of Us

When leaders make decisions clearly and quickly, the benefits ripple through our entire organization.

Decision debt isn't just a CEO problem; it's a systemic one.

And the freedom removing that debt delivers creates a culture of action, accountability, and clarity.

🗓️ And that’s a pretty fantastic way to start the year.

Get In There

📊 Subscribe to The New Ambition for instant access to the complete subscriber vault: healthy leadership tools, templates, and frameworks updated weekly with resources shaped by subscriber feedback.

🔰 ”Make Time”: how to do more of the “rightest” work from the builders of Gmail and YouTube. Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s solid bestseller shares a practical, humane system for reclaiming focus from endless to‑dos and distractions.

What's YOUR decision debt?

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Well, well, well, you decided to make it all the way down here. I appreciate you! I’m excited for 2026 because I killed a LOT of my decision debt in 2025. I can attest to how good it feels to step into the new year (relatively) debt-free.

Work with me

If you’re carrying decision debt into the new year, that's not a motivation problem. That's a decision architecture problem. Let's talk.