The real reason I never made the move I had wanted to make for years. And no, it was not the plan.

I hired an executive coach, built the spreadsheet, and still did not move. What I changed the last time round was not an app, a spreadsheet, or willpower. It was where I put the promise, and who could see it. Here is exactly how it works, and why psychologists say it makes sense.

Jack Ellison · Second-Time Founder & Contributor
Updated July 2026 · 8 min read

This is me at my desk, route maps glowing on the screens behind.

I need to tell you about the note in my phone titled “exit.” I started it 3 years ago. By the morning I am about to describe I had edited it 61 times and acted on it zero times. I know the number because I am the kind of person who counts things.

I make coffee in a galley kitchen outside Columbus at 5:40, because 5:40 is the only hour nobody needs anything from me. On the fridge there are 2 things: my daughter’s drawing of a truck, and a magnet from a customer visit in Laredo. I would read the same sentence I had typed a hundred times, pocket the phone, and go run a company I had stopped believing in.

I had no idea that 209 days later I would fill in the second eye of a small red doll and sign the papers on the company I spent 7 years building and 4 years wanting rid of. What changed was not discipline. It was something stupidly small about how I made the promise.

It does not arrive like laziness. It takes one thing at a time.

I was not lazy. Nobody who feels that bad about it is lazy — lazy people sleep fine, and I did not. It happens like a thief who takes one small thing every night, so you never catch him. First he took my mornings: 61 edits to a note I never sent to anyone.

It is smaller than people expect. That turns out to matter.

Then the thing I had built. Freight-routing software for mid-size carriers, 31 employees, real revenue, a product I could describe in one sentence and could not make myself care about. My first company failed in 19 months and taught me everything. The second one worked, and I sat inside the win like it was a waiting room.

Then the deals. 2 acquisition talks died, one at the term sheet, one at day 41 of diligence. There were 11 weeks in there where I told nobody. Not my co-founder, who had been in the room since Laredo. Not my daughter, who is 7 and asks better questions than my board. That is the part that breaks you — not the wanting out, but the knowing you could and watching yourself not.

I did not fail for lack of tools. I had bought all of them.

An executive coach, 11 sessions, canceled. A leather goal journal, 3 pages used, my handwriting getting less sincere down the third page. 2 productivity apps, one of which billed me for 19 months after I stopped opening it. A personal-OKR spreadsheet, 11 tabs, color coded, abandoned by week 5. The formatting is still beautiful. That somehow makes it worse.

The tradition it comes from is about four hundred years old.

I did not have a discipline problem. I had a system, and I failed with the system. It took me 3 years to name the flaw they shared: every one of them lived somewhere I could close. The app closes. The tab closes. The journal shuts.

A founder named Marco told the doll before he told his wife

Twice a year I go to a small founder retreat, 14 people in a rented lodge. On the second night comes the oldest exercise there is: say the one thing you actually want, out loud, to the room. Everyone gave the safe answer. I did too. Then a guy named Marco went last. He said he wanted to move his family back to Portugal, and that he had told a red ceramic doll with one eye filled in before he told his wife.

I painted one eye, brush steady, and set one goal that mattered.

At the fire pit he explained it in 90 seconds. I said, “So it is a sticky note with a face.” He said, “Yeah. And you have never once done what the sticky note said.” That was the truest thing anyone had said to me in a year, from a man I had known 2 days. So I looked it up.

The mind will not let go of an unfinished task

In 1927, a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik found something that has held up for a century: the mind holds unfinished tasks far more tightly than finished ones. An open loop creates a low, constant tension that keeps dragging attention back to it. A finished task the mind drops.

My goal lived only in my head, where it had nothing to answer to. Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University found that people who wrote their goals down by hand were about 42% more likely to reach them. Not because writing is magic. Because the moment a promise takes physical form, it stops being optional.

It sits on my desk by the laptop, notebook and morning coffee.

The one method a tired founder at 5:40 in the morning can actually do

The doll is called a Daruma, from a ritual rooted in Japan about 400 years ago, and the rule has not changed since. It gives that tension a form you have to look at. I call what I did the One-Eye Vow. There are 3 parts, and only the 3 together work.

One. You choose one goal, out loud. Not “fix the business.” One. 5 words if you can. A spreadsheet dissolves into 11 tabs in a month. This cannot, because there is one doll and one blank face. Two. You paint the first eye. That is your promise made physical — a signature, not a wish.

Three. You put it where you cannot not see it, and the second eye stays blank until you have earned it. You paint it the day the goal is done, not one day before. A written goal gets filed. A reminder gets swiped away in 6 seconds. An unfinished face in your eyeline cannot be filed or swiped.

Goal done, I'm holding the finished doll with a real grin.

The set has 5 colors, each with a meaning, so you match the doll to the promise. White for wealth. Red for fortune. Black for strength. Yellow for safety. Blue for peace. I chose red, because red was the loudest one on the shelf.

209 days, told straight, including the part I put in a drawer

I took it out of the box and stood it next to the coffee tin, face out. Then I chose the goal, 5 words, so there was no room to hide inside a paragraph: Sell it. Clean. This year. Day 6, after 6 mornings of half a face asking the same question, I sat down and wrote the one-page memo I had avoided for 2 years. 90 minutes. I had been treating it like a mountain.

Day 23. I told my co-founder. Worst conversation of my professional life. She was quiet a full minute, then said, “I have known since Laredo.” I had spent 11 weeks protecting her from a thing she had seen before I did.

The day the second eye went in.

Day 68. This is the part I put in a drawer. The third buyer walked — no reason, just a shorter and shorter email chain until it stopped. I took the doll off the counter, put it face-down in the junk drawer, and left it 11 days. I told myself I was a realist. I was sulking.

Day 79. My daughter, 7, opened that drawer looking for tape and asked why the man with one eye was in there. I had no answer I could say out loud to a 7-year-old. It went back on the counter that night. A child is the reason, not some strength of mine.

Day 116. A letter of intent with a strategic buyer already serving the same carriers. Not the highest number I had been quoted. The cleanest one. Day 154. Diligence, 14-hour days, and I started touching the doll on the way past it each morning.

Day 187. The buyer’s lawyers reopened a point everyone had settled. I picked the doll up, opened the junk drawer, and stood there. I could not do it a second time. I put it back facing the room and answered the email. Day 209. Closed.

The full ceramic set, 5 colors, each with its own meaning.

Here is the honest version, because you deserve the mechanism and not a fairy tale. 9 months of work did the carrying. The memo. The co-founder conversation. The diligence. The lower number I took because it was cleaner. All of it mine, done in rooms with no doll anywhere near me. What the object did was sit there, unfinished, and ask the same question every morning at 5:40. Is it done yet.

When it closed I sat on my kitchen floor and felt no fireworks. I felt grief, thick and embarrassing, for a thing I had wanted rid of for 4 years. 7 years of my life. A logo I drew badly in a hotel in Cleveland.

Isn’t it just a sticky note with a face?

Close enough. It is not magic and it will not do the work. It is one object with an unfinished face, sitting where it cannot be avoided, tied to one promise said out loud.

So why had I never heard of this?

It is not a conspiracy, it is math. There is no subscription inside a ceramic doll. The productivity industry makes its money when people start over every January, renew the coach, buy the new app, and quit again by February. A thing bought once cannot be upsold.

Five colors, five intentions. You pick the one that matches the promise.

What it costs, next to what not moving already cost me

Most versions online are thin novelty keychains, nothing you would trust with a real promise. The one I point people to is the 5-piece ceramic set from Daruma Ritual. Before I looked at the price, I added up what not moving had already charged me.

The coach and the 11 sessions. The journal with 3 pages used. The 2 apps I forgot to cancel for over a year. All of it for things I quit, and not one of them was ever in the room at 5:40. The set is bought once, and it holds 5 promises over a lifetime.

The gift box it arrives in, with the ritual legend inside the lid.

2 versions of the next 12 months

In one version, nothing moves. The note stays in the phone and gets edited a 62nd time. Next quarter arrives, and it is always the same quarter, and 12 months from now the year looks exactly like the last one.

In the other, one small thing sits in the eyeline with an unfinished face. Every time you look up, it asks the same quiet question. Some mornings the answer is a bad one. One morning, after enough of them, the second eye gets painted.

There is a 30-day guarantee, so the only real risk is the first version: another 12 months that look exactly like the last 12. Pick your goal. Paint the first eye. Then earn the second one.

Common questions

The honest guarantee

It is a small brand, and it asks for real money on a ceramic object nobody gets to hold first. That is a fair thing to hesitate over. So here is how we take the risk off.

Order the set. Choose your one goal. Paint the first eye. If within 30 days the ritual is not for you, email us for a full refund. No hoops.

Exactly what you get

5 glazed ceramic Daruma in white, red, black, yellow and blue, each color with its own meaning. A premium gift box. A legend card that explains the 400-year-old Japanese ritual it comes from. It ships worldwide with tracking, and checkout is secure. That is the whole thing. No subscription, no app, no upsell, nothing to cancel.

If there is one move you keep circling, one sentence you keep editing and never say out loud, this is the most honest tool I have found for it. It will not make the calls. It just makes it harder to stop showing up to the one thing.

P.S. I already knew which one it was. I had just never made it look back at me. Mine was 5 words next to the coffee tin. Sell it. Clean. This year. Yours is probably shorter than you think.