Chocolate Dreams and Ditto Paper Lessons

Have you ever received a box from your family home stuffed with papers, clippings, and half-forgotten projects from childhood and school days?

Those boxes are tricky. My first impulse is to throw everything away. Then I open it... and suddenly I'm pulling out old programs and newspapers, studying them like artifacts, amazed they ever existed.

A professional organizer might tell me to take a picture and toss the actual items. Sensible advice. Efficient. Very 2026.

And still, there are moments when the item itself feels like a magical key to the past.

That's what happened when I found my third-grade class cookbook.

It's the kind of cookbook that takes you back in an instant. Not because the recipes are extraordinary, but because the effort is. I can still feel how hard I worked to write neatly, carefully, and clearly. The assignment required every student to bring in a recipe for a specific category, then copy it onto ditto paper so we could assemble class cookbooks for everyone.

Ditto paper. Purple ink. That faint smell that told you you were holding something freshly "printed." If you know, you know.

My contribution was Chocolate Dreams, my mother's brownie recipe. So rich they made you think you were dreaming them.

Holding that cookbook, I realized how much has changed in my lifetime. Today, if I want a recipe, I don't go looking for a binder. I Google it. Or I ask ChatGPT on my phone. I don't flip pages and hunt for the right section. I don't squint at smudged handwriting and debate whether it says "tsp" or "Tbsp" (a difference that matters when brownies are on the line).

And yet... I didn't want to throw that cookbook away.

Because cookbooks aren't just instructions. They're memories. They're people. They're proof that something mattered.

That small discovery got me thinking about change in a different way.

Most change isn't rejected because the new way is bad. Many times, the new way is better. Faster. Cleaner. More secure. Easier to access. More consistent.

Change is rejected when the past is treated like it was pointless.

When we say, "We're moving forward," but what people hear is, "Everything you learned before doesn't matter now."

In organizations, the "old way" often holds more than process. It holds identity. Pride. Competence. Confidence. It holds the relationships and small routines that made work feel steady. The shortcuts people invented because they cared enough to make things work. The workarounds that quietly kept the train on the tracks.

When the old way is dismissed too quickly, people don't just grieve the tool. They grieve the expertise they built around it.

That's why thoughtful change honors what came before. It doesn't romanticize outdated systems or cling to inefficiency. But it does recognize effort. It acknowledges history. It respects the people who carried the organization to the point where change is even possible.

In practical terms, it's the difference between saying: "We' re replacing your system,"

and saying:

"We're building on what you've done. We're keeping what works. We're making improvements that reduce frustration. And we'll support you as you learn the new way."

Because when people feel respected, they're far more willing to adapt.

The goal isn't to preserve every old step or every old tool. The goal is to preserve what matters: the relationships, the learning, the pride, the purpose, the sense that your work counts.

As I look at that third-grade cookbook, I'm grateful we live in a world where recipes are easy to find. I wouldn't trade the convenience.

But I also know why the cookbook still matters. It's not about brownies. It's about belonging.
And that's a lesson every change effort needs to remember.

Change will keep modernizing the tools - but the stories, skills, and traditions we carry forward are what make it stick.