Vol. 5, Issue 4: The Snake and the Horse
On Shedding, Becoming, and the Courage to Begin Again
The Lunar New Year* is upon us.
*When I was growing up, we called this the Chinese New Year, but the Lunar New Year is not limited to just the Chinese - the Vietnamese also use the lunar calendar for cultural holidays, for instance - so we say Lunar New Year now and I’m all for inclusivity, so let’s make it happen
When I was a kid, this always meant going out for Chinese food - sometimes the restaurant would hand you a small red envelope that had a small denomination Yuan bill in it and that was super cool. Also, I remember a lot of places had paper placemats that showed the 12* year cycle and each of the animals represented with a little explanation of what it meant (astrologically) to be born in each year. I was born in the Year of the Dragon, which is obviously** the best.
*Three may be the magic number, but I’ll put 12 in as a strong second
**Not obvious
As I’ve said more than once in this space, I’m entering my hippie era. I spend a lot of time thinking about my place in the world, how I can be better, what it means to be a very small part of a very large and complex cosmos.* And with the Lunar New Year here, I took a minute to remember that placemat and think through the year behind and the year ahead - not on the Gregorian timeline but on the lunar one.
*I’m not going to lie: there are many times this overwhelms me. The vastness of time and space can be a lot for my tiny brain to deal with.
I didn’t remember this until I looked it up, but 2025 was the Year of the Snake: inward and strategic. The Year of the Snake is quiet and uncomfortable, but necessary to set the table for the year that follows: The Year of the Horse. The Year of the Horse is the natural progression from a year of introspection: it’s kinetic, forward-driving, and exposed. It’s about momentum, movement and courage.
So while the snake says “take your time to hunt” or “chart your path,” the horse says “pick a direction and go.”*
*This is a true story. When I was maybe 12-13 years old, my parents bought a 10% stake in a racehorse that competed at the Meadowlands and Yonkers racetracks. The horse’s name was Keep The Tip. It won its first 7 races and then we never heard from it again
Shedding isn’t a glamorous process. It’s slow and clunky. The work of the snake doesn’t look like progress in the way we’re conditioned to recognize progress. There’s no announcement. No rebrand. No sudden burst of hustle or public momentum. In fact, shedding often looks like a standstill, like nothing is happening at all, when in reality, everything is happening.
This kind of change is deeply personal. It’s the quiet dismantling of old roles you’ve always relied on. Identities that brought you safety or comfort but no longer fit the person you’re becoming. Narratives about success, security, or who you’re supposed to be that once made sense and now feel suffocating.
For longer than I’d like to admit, I kept living inside versions of myself that had already expired. Not because they were right, but because they were familiar.
Ultimately, you have to have a hard reality: you don’t outgrow skin delicately. You have to tear yourself free.
I often cite my favorite Rumi quote* “when you walk on the way, the way appears — action precedes clarity.” But this was the opposite. I couldn’t build something new while dragging the old systems with me. Before anything could take shape, I had to let go of a lot: borrowed definitions of success, metrics I didn’t choose, timelines I inherited, structures that felt safe but were ultimately pretty limiting. Walking away from them didn’t feel bold. It felt crazy.
*I’m actually paraphrasing when I say this. The actual quote is “When you let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love, it will not lead you astray.”
Clarity didn’t arrive first. In this case, release did. Only after letting go of the old notions of what it meant to be successful did the outlines begin to emerge. That’s the work of the snake. It strips away the unnecessary urgency and frivolous motion. It slows you down long enough to ask the only question that counts:
What’s worth building even if it stays small?
The answer to that question came through leaning into nonprofit and community work as a big part of what I do.
It required letting go of the idea that contribution has to be transactional or that impact only counts if it’s scalable or tied to some future return on the investment. It meant releasing the belief that ambition and service sit on opposite ends of the success spectrum.
Service helped to ground me. It was a necessary reminder that showing up, consistently and quietly, can matter just as much (and in many cases more) as building something profitable. Contribution became a counterweight to ambition. Not a distraction from it, but a stabilizing force.
With that, when the time comes to run, the horse moves differently. Lighter. Truer. More enduring.
At the beginning of 2025, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to build with JPEG. It turned out that picture was overly influenced by the concept of what I had been conditioned to believe a business should look like, not what I actually wanted to put together. I needed 2025, needed that Year of the Snake, to get rid of the things that were weighing me down.
And now that we’ve done that work, we’re done with endless refinement and quiet preparation that came in the Year of the Snake. In the Year of the Horse, we don’t linger in analysis. The horse chooses. It commits. It moves. Where the snake turns inward, the horse runs outward: into visibility, into friction, into consequence.
Of course, that outward motion carries risk. Exposure always does. Picking a direction means closing off alternatives. Commitment means accepting that you’ll be judged not by intention, but by execution.
But this kind of movement isn’t reckless. It’s earned.
It comes after the shedding. After the subtraction. After the unnecessary weight has been stripped away. The horse runs because it’s lighter, not because it’s impatient.
You can’t leap into something new while clinging to what no longer fits. Momentum without shedding isn’t progress; it’s drag. A lot of people want the Year of the Horse without ever enduring the Year of the Snake. They want motion without discomfort. But the run only works because of what came before it.
The courage to let go is often quieter than the courage to run. It happens without witnesses, without fanfare, and often without certainty, but it’s the most decisive act in the entire story arc.
Shedding creates the space for movement. It makes commitment possible. It turns intention into momentum.
The horse may get the glory. But the snake does the work.
And you can’t skip it.
Special thanks to amazing human and friend of the newsletter Jay Given for the idea for this issue. This was an outgrowth of a long conversation at CES.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about AI (very unique) and my next two posts will be some of my thoughts around the creative aspect of it and where we are in the lifecycle that inevitably accompanies game-changing technologies.
Also, Notes In Motion has a gala coming up! Can you go? Tickets here! If not, would you like to help us in the mission of bringing the arts to underserved kids? Donate here!
Finally, I’m in NYC for meetings on March 2 and 3. Let’s catch up if you’re around!