Let Go, Rebuild, Repeat: The Biology of Becoming Better
I never set out to become familiar with the world of blood donation. Or blood in general, really. I knew I had some, and that I needed it, and that was enough. But then came a series of tests, and follow-ups to the tests, and something called “monitoring,” which sounds innocuous until you realize it means forever.
Before long, I was visiting a lab so often I started to wonder if I should bring the staff holiday gifts. I knew which phlebotomists treated your arm like fine china and which ones came at you like they were harpooning a whale. I developed an almost spiritual appreciation for the phrase “good flow.”
It became, in a strange way, routine.
What I hadn’t expected, amid all that poking and draining, was how it would change the way I looked at people who donate blood on purpose. Repeatedly. Cheerfully.
These were people who signed up for it. Volunteered, even. I once met someone who made a donation every 3 months for the past 20 years. Not because he was cursed or had some kind of blood surplus issue—but because he wanted to.
Naturally, I assumed he was a saint, a vampire, or deeply unwell.
But then I learned something that caught me completely off guard: people who give blood regularly don’t get weaker.
They get stronger.
Not in the Hallmark-card sense. Not spiritually. Not emotionally. Not metaphorically.
Physically. Biologically.
Hematopathologists have studied this. People who’ve given blood more than 100 times don’t come out depleted. They come out stronger. Their blood adapts. Their systems adjust. Red blood cells replenish faster, more efficiently. Certain mutations arise—mutations that make those cells more resilient, quicker to grow, harder to kill. The body doesn’t just recover from giving. It evolves because of it.
The act of giving, in this case, isn’t just virtuous. It’s adaptive.
And that’s something we were never taught.
We’ve trained ourselves to talk about change and growth in poetic terms. Embrace the unknown. Lean into discomfort. Cultivate resilience. All lovely ideas. All very shareable. But too often, they exist as ideas only—philosophical abstractions floating just out of reach, divorced from the mechanisms that actually govern the way things live or die.
We treat change like it’s a feeling. Something that blooms within us if we just believe in it hard enough. We post quotes about courage and grit. We listen to podcasts that tell us how growth feels. But the truth is: growth doesn’t feel like anything. It’s not an emotional state.
It’s a function of biology.
Systems evolve under pressure. That is not an opinion or a motivational cliche. It is a law of nature. Muscles grow by tearing. Forests regenerate by burning. Blood improves by leaving the body and forcing the marrow to build something better in its place.
But humans, especially those with platforms and followers and hashtags, have convinced themselves that the laws of physics and biology do not apply to them. We are told to adapt, but rarely shown what adaptation looks like mechanically. Instead, we’re handed mantras: trust the process, follow your bliss, visualize your future.
No one says: stress the system. Regularly. Often. Or risk becoming irrelevant.
And this has consequences.
Because when we confuse inspiration with application, when we mistake sentiment for strategy, we don’t become more adaptable—we become more vulnerable.
We sit in organizations waiting for change to feel right. We wait to feel emotionally ready to let go of bad ideas, outdated models, or broken relationships. But the people who survive—not just in theory, but in practice—are the ones who don’t wait to be inspired. They stress their own systems on purpose. They subtract what isn’t working before the market, or the world, or nature does it for them.
That’s change. That’s evolution. Not the performance of growth. Not the brand of transformation. But the physics of survival.
So maybe donating blood really is a metaphor—but not the one we think. It’s not about selflessness or goodness. It’s about the reality that the more you give up, the stronger you become. Not just once. Not when it’s convenient. But repeatedly. Deliberately.
Because if you want to adapt—truly adapt—you have to force yourself to do what systems are built to do under pressure:
Let go, rebuild, repeat.