I try to remind myself that it is impossible to see things clearly from the position you are standing in.
I think that is one of the more important things I’ve learned.
Your view of your life is always being distorted by where you happen to be standing inside of it.
A year ago, I worked for an old bastard.
I had a place.
It wasn’t a good place. It was a shitty place, really. But it was a place, and I earned it. I fixed machines for men who had laborious jobs. I kept their equipment running so they could go back out and work with their hands.
There was something honest about that.
I had a purpose. I had a roof. I had tools. I had customers. I had a direction.
I thought I knew what came next.
I was going to carry on the business the old man left behind.
That didn’t happen.
Because of circumstances outside of my control, because of decisions made by people who had no idea what they were disrupting, and because I wasn’t given enough time to collect what belonged to the business and its customers, I ended up watching an entire structure disappear.
Now I have a list of more than several hundred people who are furious because their property is gone.
And I’m sitting inside a tarp box in somebody else’s garage.
I’m an inconvenience to them at best.
That’s a strange sentence to write.
A year ago, I had a business.
Now I’m sleeping inside a tarp enclosure in somebody else’s house.
I don’t say that for pity.
I don’t even particularly want pity.
I’m simply trying to describe where I’m standing.
And from here, it is difficult not to look backward.
I can see what I’ve lost.
I can see what I haven’t accomplished.
I can see the distance between where I thought I’d be and where I actually am.
But I can also see something else.
I’ve grown.
I’ve accumulated skills.
I’ve accumulated tools.
I’ve accumulated ideas.
I’ve accumulated knowledge.
I’ve learned how to adapt.
When the business I thought I was going to inherit disappeared, I didn’t just sit down and mourn it. I came up with another business model entirely.
I still have enough personal property to start something.
I still have things I can sell.
I still have a mind that works.
I still have hands that work.
I still have ideas.
I still have the ability to build.
So I know better than to call this the end.
But knowing that doesn’t make it enjoyable.
That’s the contradiction I keep running into.
I know I am responsible for how I experience my life.
I know perception is paramount.
I know that the way I interpret what is happening changes the way I am able to move through it.
I’ve spent years studying this.
I’ve written about it.
I’ve built entire systems around it.
I’ve gotten better at controlling my emotional state than I ever was before.
I’ve learned conscious disembodiment.
I’ve learned how to step outside of myself and observe what is happening instead of immediately becoming what is happening.
I know how to turn a struggle into a game.
I know how to look at a problem and ask what can be learned from it.
I know how to get back up.
I’ve done it enough times that I don’t even feel like I’ve failed at anything yet.
And yet I’m depressed.
I’m irritated.
I’m bored.
I don’t like my life right now.
I don’t think those things contradict what I believe.
Maybe they actually prove something about it.
Because conscious control isn’t the same thing as liking your circumstances.
I can accept reality without enjoying it.
I can refuse to become a victim without pretending that I wasn’t hurt.
I can understand that something happened for reasons that have nothing to do with fairness and still be fucking angry about it.
I think there is a difference between surrendering to reality and acknowledging it.
I’m trying to learn that difference.
I’m also learning that some habits go much deeper than the ones we normally talk about.
I’ve written about breaking habits.
I’ve written about addiction.
I’ve written about laziness and discipline.
But there is another habit underneath all of that.
The habit of believing that effort should produce something.
That’s a much harder one to break.
I work.
I push.
I sacrifice.
I learn.
I adapt.
I build.
And somewhere underneath all of that is a quiet little assumption that says:
Surely this will eventually amount to something.
But why?
Who signed that agreement?
Nobody.
There is no law of the universe that says effort must be rewarded.
There is no contract guaranteeing that if you do everything right, you’ll get the life you imagined.
I’ve never signed one.
Nobody promised me ease.
Nobody promised me success.
Nobody promised me stability.
I believe in the Hard Line:
Hold no expectations.
And yet I still catch myself expecting.
Not consciously.
Deeper than that.
I hear my father’s voice sometimes.
“Work isn’t supposed to be easy. You want to live under a bridge?”
I’ve thought about that sentence a lot.
I used to hear it as a command.
Now I hear something else in it.
My father came from a generation of people who believed that you worked because work had to be done.
They didn’t have the luxury of turning everything into a philosophical question.
They built.
They fixed.
They carried.
They dug.
They welded.
They worked until the thing worked.
And if it didn’t work, they worked on it some more.
There is something I deeply admire about that.
If it weren’t for people like my father and mother, and all the men and women of their kind and their era, we’d live in a much darker world.
So much of the leisure we enjoy was built on somebody else’s backbreaking labor.
They used their hands to bend the earth.
They built roads and houses and machines and factories and systems.
They threw muscle and will at the landscape until it became civilization.
They did that for us.
They left us a better set of blocks to build with.
I don’t want to forget that.
I don’t want to look backward at those people and think they were simply wrong because I have a different philosophy.
Maybe they built the foundation.
Maybe our job is to figure out what to build on it.
I hope I can leave something behind that my son can use.
Something he can take apart if he wants to.
Something he can improve.
Something he can ignore completely if he’d rather build his own thing.
I’d be okay with that too.
I just hope he’s doing okay.
I hope he knows I love him.
That’s another strange thing about writing philosophy.
Eventually you discover that underneath all the systems and theories and principles, you’re still just a person who wants the people you love to be okay.
And maybe that’s why I’m writing any of this in the first place.
Because I don’t want to teach from above people.
I don’t have the fucking position to do that.
I’m not writing from the penthouse.
I’m not writing from the other side of some great financial victory.
I can’t tell you how to become rich.
I can’t tell you how to get promoted.
I can’t tell you how to build a successful business.
Not yet.
I’m still figuring that shit out.
I’m drawing my blueprints from the same ground you’re standing on.
I’m shoulder to shoulder with the same lot of people.
I’m still trying to figure out how to make this work.
And maybe that makes my words irrelevant.
I don’t know.
But maybe it makes them relevant to somebody else.
If you’re reading this on the first day you got out of prison, maybe you need something different than a person telling you how successful they became.
If you’re standing in line at a food bank, maybe you don’t need another person telling you to manifest abundance.
If you’re half-drunk behind a grocery store, maybe the problem isn’t that you haven’t learned enough about positive thinking.
If you’re sitting in a room in a house scheduled to be torn down, maybe you don’t need somebody standing on a stage telling you to believe in yourself.
If you’re high as fuck on your way toward something you’re probably going to regret, maybe you need somebody who understands what that road actually looks like.
If you’re sitting next to somebody you love more than life itself but who is slowly destroying you, maybe you don’t need to hear that you should simply leave.
Maybe you need somebody to understand why you haven’t.
Maybe you’re broke.
Maybe you’re ashamed.
Maybe you’re angry.
Maybe you’re exhausted.
Maybe you’ve fucked your life up so badly that you don’t know how to explain it to anybody.
Maybe you’re sitting there wondering if you’re too far gone.
I don’t know what words you’ll need.
I don’t know if I’ll have them.
But I might.
I might show you something you missed.
I might give you a different way to look at the thing you’re standing inside.
I might help you recognize something in your own character that you didn’t know was there.
Or maybe I won’t.
Maybe nobody really needs to be taught anything.
Maybe we all just have to experience our lives.
Maybe some storms can’t be explained.
Maybe they just have to be lived through.
I’m willing to admit that I don’t know.
That’s important to me.
I’m not interested in pretending certainty where there isn’t any.
So I’m going to keep working.
I’m going to keep building my systems.
I’m going to keep testing my theories.
I’m going to write the books.
I’m going to build the courses.
I’m going to make the game.
I’m going to try to turn the things I’ve learned through decades of fucking things up into something useful.
Maybe it will work.
Maybe it won’t.
Maybe nobody will care.
Maybe I’ll spend years making something that never finds an audience.
That’s possible.
I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But I’m going to do it anyway.
Because there is something strange about building things when you have nothing.
You start to realize that the building itself may be the point.
Not the applause at the end.
Not the money.
Not the status.
Not even the proof that you were right.
The act of taking what is available and making something from it.
That’s what I know how to do.
And right now, I have to do it again.
I have to look at what is actually in front of me instead of staring at what should have been there.
I have to take inventory.
I have to find the places where I still have room to move.
Maybe the online work will eventually produce something.
Maybe the books will sell.
Maybe the game will find its people.
Maybe the business will work.
Maybe something I haven’t even thought of yet will open up.
I don’t know.
But I know what I can survive.
I’ve already learned that.
And because I know what I can survive, I don’t have to be terrified of what happens next.
That doesn’t mean I like it.
It means I’m not afraid of it in the same way I used to be.
That’s something.
The obstacle is the way.
I’ve heard that sentence enough times that it almost becomes meaningless.
But the older I get, the more complicated it becomes.
The obstacle isn’t necessarily something you overcome.
Sometimes the obstacle changes what you were trying to become.
Sometimes it forces you to abandon the plan.
Sometimes it strips away something you thought you needed.
Sometimes it shows you that the person who made the original plan isn’t the person who has to finish it.
Maybe that’s where I am.
Maybe this isn’t a detour.
Maybe I’m just looking at the next section of the map from the wrong side.
Either way, I’m here.
And apparently I’m still building.
My next system should probably be about chaos management.
Which is funny, because I seem to have acquired an unreasonable amount of practical experience in the subject.
So that’s where I’m leaving this.
Not with a promise that everything will work out.
I don’t know that.
Not with some inspirational declaration that I’m going to conquer the world.
I don’t know that either.
Just this:
I am still here.
I still have things to build.
I still have things to learn.
I still have things to say.
And I still have something to give.
Maybe that’s enough for today.
Tomorrow I’ll take another look at the wreckage.
I’ll see what survived.
I’ll pick something up.
And I’ll build.
