Written on Saturday morning, 5/18/24 from my Apartment in Okinawa, Japan.

I want it to be sorted. I want it figured out.

I need life to make sense.

I look at people ahead of me. I think to myself “they’ve got it figured out”. That CEO. That artist. That comedian. They figured it out.

But the more and more I research, the less it seems like any of us truly do. Tim Ferriss interviews “the best of the world in their field” and he repeatedly points out that nobody really ‘has it figured out’.

Winston Churchill noted that “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”

Henry David Thoreau is quoted “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours”

Steve Jobs reflected that “You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

He also pronounced that “You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

He echoed a similar idea from Soren Kierkegaard “Life must be lived forward but understood backwards”

NOBODY HAS IT FIGURED OUT

Nobody gets to figure it out. That’s the whole point of life. That’s just the way it goes. Nobody gets the guarantee.

We crave the control. We crave to know and understand and predict the next step. We think we can manipulate life in to how we want it to look. But there’s always unknowns.

There’s always something that can’t be predicted. We will always deal with surprises and hurdles and confusion and other bullshit. There’s no getting around that. So we might as well say ‘to hell with it all’ and lean in to the unknown in the first place.

I grew up entirely unsure about my future path. I followed the herd because I never knew where else to go. But I had an overwhelming amount of ideas. I didn’t want to forget them so I started writing them down:

• Lyrics
• Quotes
• Speeches
• Names of articles to read
  
  
  

I didn’t want to forget. So I captured all of it. I would jot it down on the back of my math homework. I’d write it on my hand. I’d take notes in my phone, anywhere that ensured it’d survive to see the light of day.

And at one point I had too many g.d. physical pieces of paper that I started to take digital notes.

I accumulated so many ideas and wanted to start to share them with people. I was nervous about it, but I knew it needed to happen so I started a website. That website turned in to blog. That blog turned in to a newsletter.

And now I’ve got a newsletter that I have no clue what to do with, but I know I need to keep moving forward. I know I just need to keep iterating. Stopping is simply not an option. Progress is the only way through.

That being said, it’s an energy managment game. Days I feel like trash, I pivot. I do something else. Days I feel good I keep on going. Thanks Pat Flynn for the tip and trick.

“Chase your passions, don’t chase the money”

Russ, Since I Was Broke

We’ve got it all wrong. We focus on the career and opinions and our perception towards other people. It’s so backwards though. All of that would entail listening to the end goal instead of the process to actually get there.

I’m not sure why we do this to ourselves. We’ve crafted this notion of ‘money’ that supposedly dictates our status and progress. We then use it (societally) as a proxy for our own value. It is quite literally called Net Worth. And so we iterate farther and farther down that path of ‘success’ because the whole time everyone pats us on the back and tells us how good of a job we’re doing.

And so we keep on being ‘successful’. We take the path more travelled. It’s more comforting. At least we know we’ll be good if we walk down this well-trodden path.

Afterall, our parents and our neighbors and our friends are all walking the same path, aren’t they? We’ll stay with the herd. We’ll be in the middle of the pack so at least we know we’ll be safe.

We won’t get left behind and we won’t get eaten by any stray lions.

As long as we stay with the crowd. As long as we color inside the lines…. then we know we’ll be safe. Then we won’t have to worry.

We’ll tick along the same as everyone else because it means survival. It’ll mean being A-Okay because everyone else is in the same boat.

“Well that’s what she’s doing”

She is. He is too. Everyone’s doing it. That’s why it feels safe. We feel heard. We feel understood. We feel like it’ll all be okay.

But if everyone’s doing it… that’s also a recipe for average. That well trodden path, while functioning as a pilgrimage of safety, also works as a 100 lb ankle weights.

I don’t think we’re entirely supposed to know where we’re going. But what’s with this supposed to stuff? We’re free to live our lives as we please.

But it’s starting to seem like the fulfillment comes from the fear. It comes from stepping in to the unknown and learning and growing and helping people. It comes from being scared of the next step but willing to chance on it anyways.

It means taking our lives in to our own damn hands and going forward anyways. It’s taking responsibility for our own actions and accepting the consequences.

I’m not sure where I’m going either. But maybe that’s just the first step towards creating a life I actually want to live.