The Myth of Maintenance

There’s a comforting lie we tell ourselves: that we can maintain. Maintain our fitness. Maintain our skills. Maintain our relationships. Maintain our organizations.

It’s a crock.

I learned this the hard way at 5 AM on countless training runs. You know what happens when you try to “maintain” your fitness? You get slower. You lose power. Your endurance drops. The body doesn’t have a pause button. It’s either adapting to stimulus or decaying from lack of it. Maintenance is just a polite word for managed decline.

The same principle applies everywhere else, but we’re too polite to admit it.

When I hear nonprofit leaders say they’re “maintaining operations,” I know what that actually means. They’re falling behind. Their staff is getting less engaged. Their programs are becoming less relevant. Their funding sources are drifting away. Because while you’re maintaining, your competitors are innovating. The needs in your community are evolving. The world is moving forward, and standing still is the same as moving backward.

This isn’t hype or a motivational meme. This is physics. Entropy is real. Everything tends toward disorder unless energy is consistently applied to create order. Your fitness, your career, your organization, your relationships—they’re all subject to the same law.

Look at your own life. Think about a skill you used to have that you haven’t practiced in years. Can you still do it as well? Of course not. That’s not maintenance - that’s atrophy with a friendlier name attached to it.

The trap is that maintenance feels responsible. It feels sustainable. It feels like wisdom—knowing your limits, being realistic, avoiding burnout. And there’s some truth to those concerns. But there’s a difference between strategic rest and pretending you can hold your position indefinitely.

Athletes understand this instinctively. You don’t train hard every day—that’s how you get injured. But you also don’t just maintain. You periodize. You have hard phases and recovery phases. You build, then consolidate, then build again. The recovery isn’t maintenance; it’s strategic preparation for the next growth phase.

I’ve survived cancer twice. During treatment, I couldn’t train. I lost fitness. That’s reality. But I never pretended I was maintaining. I was losing ground, and I knew I’d have to fight to get it back. The honesty mattered. It kept me from the dangerous delusion that I could pick up where I left off.

Here’s what actually works: Instead of trying to maintain, acknowledge what you’re willing to let slide and what you’re committed to improving. You can’t grow everything simultaneously. But pretending you’re maintaining everything while actually letting it all slowly decline is a recipe for waking up five years from now wondering what the hell happened.

At Family & Children’s Association (FCA), we don’t have maintenance mode. We have programs that are growing, programs we’re actively improving, and programs we’re honest about sunsetting. The last category is uncomfortable, but it’s real. Resources are finite. Energy is finite. Attention is finite. Acknowledging this lets us put our energy where it matters instead of spreading it thin trying to maintain everything at a slowly declining level.

The question isn’t whether you’re comfortable with constant growth. The question is whether you’re comfortable with the reality that standing still isn’t an option. The world keeps moving. Your body keeps aging. Your skills keep rusting without use. Your relationships keep evolving or dissolving.

You’re either putting in the work to move forward or you’re falling behind. There’s no third option, no matter how much we wish there was.