If you stay attached to these things, you won’t move forward in life

Most people think moving forward in life requires accumulating more—more achievements, more relationships, more certainty about the future. We’re taught that progress means adding layers of success onto our already full lives, that momentum comes from gathering speed rather than shedding weight. But after years of chasing this myth myself, I’ve discovered something counterintuitive: the things we grip tightest are often the very anchors keeping us in place.

I learned this the hard way when my startup hit a crisis several years ago. Everything looked fine from the outside—we had secured investment, built a platform with global reach, accumulated all the markers of success. Yet beneath the surface, the business model was unsustainable, and I was drowning in the weight of what I’d built. Every achievement had become a chain, every identity I’d cultivated another mask I was afraid to remove.

The breaking point came during a trip to Southeast Asia to visit my brother. What was meant to be a brief escape turned into something else entirely when I realized the business was hemorrhaging cash and needed radical transformation. Instead of rushing back to fix things the old way, I made a decision that seemed insane: I stayed. I set up in Chiang Mai and began dismantling not just the business model, but every attachment that had been suffocating me.

As I explained in this video about life lessons I wish I’d learned sooner:

The challenges we face aren’t obstacles to overcome—they’re invitations to transform. But transformation requires something most of us resist with every fiber of our being: letting go of what we think defines us.

Living as a digital nomad with my back against the wall financially, I discovered something profound. The crisis that looked like disaster from the outside was actually liberation in disguise. Stripped of my usual props—the office, the meetings, the carefully curated professional image—I had to confront who I was without them.

The first attachment I had to release was to other people’s opinions. For years, I’d been unconsciously seeking permission from authority figures, from investors to mentors to peers in my industry. This need for approval had shaped every major decision, from pursuing graduate degrees to how I structured my business. But when you’re rebuilding a company from a co-working space in Thailand, the opinions of people living in a completely different reality start to lose their weight.

I began making decisions that would have horrified my former self. I restructured the entire business model, cutting prestigious partnerships that weren’t serving us. I stopped attending conferences where being seen mattered more than being present. Each choice that prioritized authenticity over approval felt like jumping off a cliff, but each time, I discovered I could fly.

The strange thing about releasing attachment to approval is that it doesn’t make you antisocial. It makes you more genuinely connected. When you stop performing for others, you start attracting people who resonate with who you actually are. The shallow network fell away, replaced by deeper connections with people who knew how to be real.

But letting go of external validation was just the beginning. The deeper work came in releasing attachment to my own story about who I was. I’d spent years identifying as “the startup founder,” “the entrepreneur,” “the guy who left academia to build something meaningful.” These weren’t just labels—they were the scaffolding holding up my entire sense of self.

There’s a concept I call fluid integrity—the ability to hold your values deeply while allowing your identity to remain flexible. Most of us do the opposite. We cling to rigid identities while letting our values shift with whatever wind is blowing. We say “I am an entrepreneur” instead of “I’m currently building a business.” We declare “I am this type of person” rather than recognizing we’re constantly evolving.

The difference might seem semantic, but it’s revolutionary. When you hold your identities lightly, you can evolve without existential crisis. You can be wrong without being worthless. You can change direction without losing yourself.

The attachment to perfectionism was perhaps the most insidious to release. I’d been carrying around an image of the perfect life, the perfect relationship, the perfect career trajectory. This mental blueprint was so detailed that no reality could ever match it. Every actual experience was measured against this impossible standard and found lacking.

I see this everywhere—people unable to commit to relationships because they’re comparing every person they meet to an imaginary ideal. Careers stalled because the next move doesn’t match the fantasy. Lives on hold, waiting for conditions that will never materialize because they exist only in our minds.

When I finally let go of my image of the perfect business, something unexpected happened. The actual business—messy, uncertain, constantly evolving—became more successful than my fantasy version ever could have been. Today, Brown Brothers Media reaches over 50 million readers monthly not because it follows some perfect blueprint, but because we built it to be adaptable, authentic, and responsive to what actually works.

There’s another attachment that keeps us frozen: the belief that we need to have everything figured out before we can move. We wait for clarity before taking action, for certainty before making commitments. But life doesn’t offer advance previews. It unfolds in the moving.

I spent years believing I needed a five-year plan, a clear vision of where I was heading. But when my carefully constructed plans collapsed, I discovered something liberating: uncertainty is where possibility lives. When you’re not attached to a specific outcome, you can respond to what’s actually happening rather than trying to force reality to match your blueprint.

The attachment to comfort zones is equally paralyzing. We create elaborate justifications for why we can’t make changes, why the timing isn’t right. But comfort zones aren’t actually comfortable—they’re familiar. There’s a difference. Familiar feels safe even when it’s slowly killing us.

Perhaps the most dangerous attachment is to being right. We grip our opinions, our worldviews, our versions of events like life preservers. But this attachment to being right keeps us from learning, from growing, from connecting with people who might expand our understanding.

The final attachment, and perhaps the most fundamental, is to the idea that we’re broken and need fixing. The entire self-help industry is built on this premise—that with enough work, enough healing, enough optimization, we can finally become worthy of our own lives.

But what if the constant seeking is the very thing keeping us stuck? What if the belief that we need to be different before we can move forward is the ultimate attachment holding us in place?

The truth I’ve discovered is that we can move forward from exactly where we are, with all our flaws and uncertainties intact. It’s often our imperfections that become our greatest strengths, our struggles that qualify us to serve others, our failures that teach us what success actually means.

As I write this from Singapore, having rebuilt not just a business but an entire way of being, I can see how every attachment I released made space for something more authentic to emerge. The company that almost died is now thriving and actually helps millions of people. The relationships I have are fewer but infinitely deeper. The life I’m living doesn’t look anything like the one I planned, and thank god for that.

The paradox is that letting go isn’t about losing—it’s about making space. When you release your grip on what you think you need, you create room for what you actually need to find you.

So if you’re feeling stuck, if forward movement seems impossible despite all your efforts, maybe the question isn’t what you need to add to your life. Maybe it’s what you need to release. What stories, identities, expectations, and fears are you carrying that have outlived their purpose?

The challenges you’re facing right now—the ones that feel like obstacles—might actually be invitations. Invitations to let go of what’s heavy, to discover who you are when you stop trying to be who you think you should be.

Moving forward isn’t about speed or accumulation. It’s about lightness. It’s about becoming so unencumbered by attachments that life can actually move through you, bringing possibilities you couldn’t have imagined when you were busy holding on. The choice is always there: grip tighter or let go. You already know which one to choose.