Remove the Rubble: The First Step to Building Something New

Before you can create the life you want, you have to clear away what no longer serves you. It's time to let go of the debris and make space for what truly matters...to you.

Author

Paige Mitts
October 25, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

Two years ago, I had a plan.

I was going to start a newsletter about hummingbirds. The goal? To monetize my real life and create an income stream that would let me stay home for the summers. After years of grinding and living out of suitcases for our hotel photography business, we had finally reached a point where we only had to travel about 25% of the time.

It wasn’t that we have lost our wanderlust—we still want to travel—but on our own terms.

I had a plan…Then the phone call came. 

If you are of a certain age, you have gotten the call or know someone who has. Daddy had fallen. He had a stroke. He was in the hospital 14 hours away. And just like that, the first domino fell, taking down the entire vision I’d so carefully crafted in my mind.

But this part of my story didn’t really start with that phone call.

Yep, that’s my house with 44 inches of water inside…three years before “the call”.

It started five years ago when two different floods destroyed our house in a matter of weeks. We were left with the challenge of demolishing a home surrounded by water. Before we could rebuild, we had to tear the house down to the studs and subfloor, removing boatloads of soaked drywall, carpet, and debris. Yes, boatloads - because the flood that destroyed our 700-square-foot home didn’t recede for weeks.

We had to remove the rubble and live with cardboard boxes stapled to the studs as our only source of privacy.

But once we got the rubble out and lived without the walls, we were able to reimagine what the house could be. We rebuilt something far beyond our expectations, so ridiculously amazing that trying to describe it beforehand would’ve sounded impossible.

The thing is - I already knew what the house would look like when it was done. 

For years, I’d been building Pinterest boards because when you live on the Mississippi River, you know that a flood will one day destroy your house. It’s the cost of living in paradise. The cabinets in my house now cost more than the house did when we bought it. My contractors didn’t see the vision. My husband didn’t see the vision. But I saw every single piece just as it is now, even while staring at bare walls without drywall.

My story isn’t new. It’s been told for millennia. It was the same story I had read years before in the biblical story of Nehemiah — a story about rebuilding while living in the rubble. Different place, different space, different time, but the story is the same.

People who returned after years of exile, walking into what used to be home, only to find it in ruins. The walls meant to protect them were reduced to rubble, leaving them exposed, vulnerable, with no defenses. So, naturally, they set to work—brick by brick, building up the walls around their homes.

Like our Old Testament predecessors, we believed that if we could just rebuild what once was, we’d be fine. But soon, we realized we had a problem. The more we focused on rebuilding, the more the rubble from the ruins piled up inside and the walls we built made it difficult to remove the rubble. The very structures and permits we needed to build required us to remove the debris first and raise our house above the flood zone.

And that debris? It was heavy, overwhelming, making it impossible to move forward until it was gone. The giant trees on either side of the house? Now weakened from extended floods threatened to topple over and destroy what was left.

We had a plan.

Our business was thriving, and we were going to use our insurance windfall to hire the best contractors to build our home the way I had always seen it in my mind’s eye and on my Pinterest boards.

Then COVID hit, and our hotel photography skills were suddenly irrelevant. So we learned how to do drywall, electric, plumbing. We moved our bed into the living room, finished the bedroom, and worked on the rest of the house one step at a time.

We had to rethink everything we thought we knew. Our individual efforts, which had served us for decades, were wasted in this new reality. We rallied together because there was no other option. Even when we wanted to push each other off ladders and into the bay, we joined forces and did what had to be done.

We understood that no matter how high we raised our house or how well we built our walls, if we didn’t remove the rubble first, we’d never be free of the mess inside.

The lessons I learned rebuilding our home after the flood are the same ones I use now as we rebuild our lives after that phone call and everything that followed.

Me learning that my least favorite job is insulation and drywall.

Get to No University is not something I preach—it’s something I live.

This newsletter is for those of us who had a plan, who could see our dreams so clearly that when they crashed and burned, it only fueled the fire that burned inside of us. My dream of writing a newsletter about hummingbirds morphed into something much bigger than I could have ever imagined. It never died. It never dimmed but the desire was not as important as the things that had to happen first.

The principles of Failing Fabulously are unconventional. They require abandoning the standard wisdom of planning, balance, consensus, positivity, and patience. The key rule is simple: The Chooser gets to Choose. Over time those words will help you find your Neurosparkle and define what success means on your own terms.

Build from the inside out, fueled by your own fire and see what happens.

This isn’t about barreling ahead blindly. It’s for those of us who live in the real, grown-up world, where the steps are simple if not easy:

Step One: Remove the Rubble.

You can’t build something new if your foundation is buried under the debris of what no longer serves you. Clear it, or anything you build will be unstable.

And here’s a secret: The goal of the Rabbit Hole Roadmap isn’t to prove you can do everything. It’s not to show all those people who didn’t believe in you. It’s to Get to No and rule out what doesn’t serve you so you can focus on what does.

The Four Steps of Get to No University:

  1. Tackle the Topic – Identify What Is.

    What’s the rubble you need to clear out before moving forward? What real-life circumstances are more pressing than your desire, no matter how deep that desire is?

  2. Research the Role – Imagine What If?

    Uncensor your mind. What would success look like if everything went perfectly? And what would make you say “Hell No,” no matter what the upside potential might be?

  3. Interrogate Your Inklings – Examine What Now?


    What would need to happen for you to move forward. This is where the Rabbit Hole Roadmap is built—it’s about deciding if you should move forward, not just if you can.

  4. Practice Pragmatic Positivity – Decide What Next?


    Neurosparklers can do a lot, but the question is, knowing what you know, should you take this TRIP? If yes, what’s the first action step whether or not it’s the most important priority overall? (hint…it probably involves removing the rubble)

Here’s what to expect…

Over the next several days, I’ll roll out a welcome series of much shorter emails to explain the core principles of Get to No University.

I’ll introduce new terms like Rabbit Hole Roadmap, Failing Fabulously, Pragmatic Positivity, STIQS, Neurosparkle, and Bird Brain Archetypes. I’ll show you how to use these to create your own Empire of Empathy and build the life of your dreams out of the life you’re already living.

After these introductory emails, the Neurosparkle Newsletter will be delivered once a week - on Tuesday afternoon at 2 pm. Let’s be real, I am a Neurosparkler and Neurosparklers aren’t typically Monday morning people.

I’m speaking to a specific subset of grown-ups. Unconventional high achievers - those of us who have always known we were different but were born before there were diagnostic terms for our neurodivergence.

If at any point this doesn’t resonate with you, by all means, please unsubscribe. I’m not for everybody. I am not here to explain myself to a broad audience. I’m here to share what has worked for me over 50 years as a neurodivergent woman diagnosed much later in life. I am here to share my story as I live it. You’re welcome to peek over my shoulder and see if any of it works for you, too.

Those of us born before 1980 didn’t have the luxury of labels to explain why we were different much less a spectrum against which to measure our differences. We had to figure it out ourselves - without the algorithms of AuDHD TikTok to make us feel nearly normal. We didn’t know there were others like us. We just knew that we were right about what worked for us, even if no one else understood.

Now, we have a choice. We have the tools, the language, and the insight to understand that the brilliance the world asked us to dim is still inside us.

It is my hope that Get to No University will become one of those tools that allow you to Ignite your Neurosparkle and Embrace your Bird Brain.

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