Summer is when I go quiet.

I call it hibernating, though nothing about it is sleep. It is the season I am most free, most able to imagine what a new year could hold. For the past few weeks I have been in Nigeria, brewing and stewing, asking the only question that has ever moved my career forward: where else can this work go?

What I keep returning to is a phrase. Reciprocal innovation. The idea that what we have built in Nigeria can travel the other way. To Missouri. To St. Louis. That the exchange runs in both directions, and that the Midwest has as much to receive as it has to give.

I have tried this before. The grants failed. The reviewers were not moved. The money went somewhere else.

I am telling you this because the failure is not the footnote. The failure is the practice.

Grant writing is where I live out my wildest dreams

I understand that many of them will fail. I am not opposed to failing. What I am always excited about is what comes after. The beginning again. The sitting down with an idea that was refused and asking whether the idea was wrong, or only the shape of it.

Most of the time it is only the shape.

So this year I will write two. One is a transformative innovations for health award, which I have written before and came so close to winning that I can still feel the edge of it. One is a small business grant, which is entirely new to me and which I have no idea how to do yet. That is the point. One carries the memory of a near miss. One carries nothing at all. Both require the same thing from me.

The daily practice of beginning again

This is what I have learned to do, and what I would offer you, whether you write grants or raise children or run a business or are simply trying to get through August.

• Go quiet before you go forward. Hibernation is not laziness. It is where the imagining happens. Protect it.
• Name the no plainly. Say it out loud. It failed. They did not fund it. Naming it takes its weight down to a size you can carry.
• Keep the idea, change the shape. A rejected dream is not a dead one. It is a dream still waiting for its right container.
• Begin one small thing today. Not the whole application. One paragraph. One call. One page. Beginning again is a verb you do daily, not a decision you make once.

Yes, you may lose sometimes. Yes, you may not succeed. But that does not mean you cannot reimagine what you want your day to look like, or your week, or your whole year.

August is coming. In my life, August is when the school year opens its doors. I want to walk through them already running.

So I am spending these last quiet days doing the work that no one will ever see on a CV. I am hibernating. I am reimagining. I am beginning again.

You can too. Today. One day at a time.

Keep this.