Broken By Design

My name is Jon and I believe in burning bridges.

Not great professional advice, I realize, but this terrible advice doesn't only lend itself to professional environments.

The benefits of bridge burning are never discussed, only the issues you'll run into when those bridges are no longer available.

What if you need them?

How else will you get back to where you were?

If you share this sentiment I'd like you to create a fictional situation where your principles lead you to a place where you will have to make the decision to stay the course or to abandon ship.

It happens all the time in business: Two people come together with an idea, they execute the idea the way they had always planned it and for one reason or another passion get lost for the project, one party wants to take it in another direction, or wants to have complete creative control.

Other times it's a situation where one partner realizes they've made a terrible mistake with who they decided to go into business with but they've passed the point of no return.

Sometimes it's even relationships that we've had for most of our lives.

Friends we've had since childhood that constantly need lifted up and we eventually realize we can't be a cheerleader for them and ourselves. Trying to keep both of those tanks full is only exhausting us.

Or family members that want you to remember your place and how easy their expectations are for you to meet and how impossible it will be for you to break their cycle of mediocrity.

Your mother that tells you you share her blood and this means you do what she does. You have her temper so you fight what she fights. You act like she acts and think how she thinks.

You have to.

Whether it be personal or professional you'll find yourself in a situation where your honest feedback was requested and then seen as vitriol. Or a time when you asked for clarification and were told you are looking too much into it or are calling the integrity of a person or organization into question and it wasn't called for.

It should go without saying that step one should always be to gut-check yourself. You have to make sure you're not causing the problem you find yourself in. That ALWAYS needs to be step one.

Vet everything from your own thought process down to when the last time you drank water, walked in the sunshine or woke up without an alarm clock and move each item into one of two areas:

1) Things in your direct control, and 2) things you can only influence.

Compare these two areas side-by-side, line-by-line and determine where changes need to be made and make them.

If you end up with a relationship (And I don't care what relationship it happens to be) that takes you off track, detours you from your end game or otherwise doesn't carry you toward your goal here is my honest advice:

Burn that bridge.

Take a flamethrower to it until there's no hope of you ever thinking of it as a viable way to cross ever again.

Burn it quickly and with much prejudice.

-Before you see them as the only way from point A to point B.

-Before you get into your own head that there's only so many people who can do things.

-Before the echoes of family voices whisper that you should know your place or that you can't be anything but just like them.

-Before the people who built the bridge tell you what you need to do before they will allow you to cross.

Burn. That. Bridge. To. Ash.

Because here's what those people telling you not to burn bridges either don't know or aren't telling you:

The bridge was fucked up by design.

It was deliberately built over the most rocky areas of the sea and with missing or rotted slats so the fear of misstep was enough to keep you on your toes. It needed to shake when you got halfway across it.

The fear of falling was all the motivation you needed to keep moving forward and backward like a ninja in constant motion so you never have time to think about the bigger picture because you had to stay focused on your next step.

The bridge is quality control.

If you want to cross you must first prove they belong on the other side.

So, yeah. That bridge that links the mainland to the island of wonder and possibility? I want you to make sure you're not the problem standing in your own way and then I want you to burn it.

Because here's something the non-burning crowd never learned because they always did the dance:

There is more than one Island out there.

Tap-dancing across that rickety-ass bridge, maintaining focus with every step possibly leading to death made you stronger. It heightened your senses and drove you to seek nothing short of perfection because anything less meant failure.

You are stronger than they want you to know you are.

Sometimes it'll turn out that you're capable of more than they were when they were in your place and they can't let you know that.

In spending years taking two steps forward and one step back, getting half way across only to have to return to the mainland to regroup and plan the next attempt you have honed your skills into Mehrune's Razor.

In staying one step ahead of a catastrophic end you've become a goddamn ninja and now is the time to act like it.

The bird rests on the branch not because it is confident in the strength of the tree, but because it can fly.

The bridge is fucked up anyway and you're strong enough to swim.