Stopping Is Also a Decision

This past week, I shared a story with you about Naked Magazine and how it eventually inspired Go Naked Magazine.
I still have most of the original issues sitting here with me, and I’ve been hunting down the few that are missing. Somewhere along the way, a shiny idea grabbed me by the shoulders: what if I scanned them all and made them available to you?
Yes, I know. Making old magazines available raises copyright questions and sits in a morally gray area, even though they’re nearly forty years old. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make here.
The point is how quickly excitement can turn into momentum, and how momentum can trick us into thinking we’re already committed.
I got genuinely jazzed about the idea. Enough that I spent about four hours researching document scanners, specifically ones that could handle magazines without destroying them. And because I don’t like to buy twice, I zeroed in on a “good” one. Not cheap. Not entry-level. Six hundred and eighty dollars.
I mulled it over for a couple of hours. Then a check landed in my bank account from one of my employers for just over three hundred dollars. I took that as a sign. Not a nudge. A sign. So I pulled the trigger and ordered the scanner.
It arrived Saturday morning.
I promptly ignored everything else I was supposed to do and began setting up what can only be described as a small mechanical octopus on my dining room table. Between the scanner itself, the cables, and the laptop, it took up more than a third of the table. Software installs. Cord wrangling. Furniture rearranging. The manual was thin on words and thick on assumptions, so I jumped over to YouTube.
The videos were… not great.
Still, I managed to make a few scans. The first three were terrible, but I figured that was user error. So I adjusted some settings and tried again. Marginal improvement. For the next seventy-five minutes, I scanned a single magazine. Forty-two pages. I rescanned pages again and again, chasing the result I wanted and never quite getting there.
That little voice in my head kept saying, “You just spent seven hundred dollars on this. You need to master it.”

But then another voice, calmer and far less dramatic, chimed in and said, “For seven hundred dollars, this shouldn’t feel like work.”
So I grabbed my phone. Downloaded a scanner app. Took a photo of the same page.
Side by side, the phone scan was better.
Clearer. Cleaner. Less fuss. Less rage.
Now, I hate going out in winter. And today is the coldest it’s been in over a week. But I also knew that if I didn’t return that scanner immediately, it would sit there for two weeks quietly judging me. So I carefully packed everything back into the box, printed the return label, and dropped it off at UPS.
Amazon already confirmed receipt. The refund is on its way.
Then I took twenty dollars from that original three hundred and walked over to the Dollar Tree. I bought a few sheets of black poster board to make a little DIY scanning setup for my phone. I also bought a birthday hat and a couple of other completely unnecessary doodads, because apparently joy is non-negotiable.
Total spent: thirteen dollars.
And here’s the part that surprised me most.
I got the same rush from spending that thirteen dollars as I did from spending the seven hundred.
The lesson here isn’t “don’t invest in good tools” or “your phone can do everything.” The lesson is simpler, and maybe harder to swallow. It’s okay to stop. It’s okay to pause. It’s okay to reconsider, even after you’ve started. Even after you’ve spent money. Even after you’ve told yourself a story about what something should be.
Changing your mind isn’t failure. Sometimes it’s clarity finally catching up.
So if there’s something you’ve been pushing through just because you already started… or already paid… or already told someone you would… this is your permission slip to step back and ask, “Is this actually working?”
Sometimes the smarter move isn’t doubling down.
Sometimes it’s packing the box back up, walking into the cold, and choosing a simpler way forward.