it’s supposed to be fun, remember?

I believe that the threshold of how much embarrassment a person can tolerate determines the size of the life they can live. every meaningful act requires the risk of looking foolish: beginning anything, speaking your truth, wanting visibly, attempting what you might fail at publicly. the people who cannot tolerate embarrassment do not get to do these things, or they do them only in secret, where the embarrassment is contained. the people who have made their peace with embarrassment, who have decided it isn’t a verdict but a sensation, get access to a larger version of being alive. the difference between the two lives is enormous and it is almost entirely about embarrassment.

be the person who means it. in a world full of beautiful, empty language - mean it. mean the handshake. mean the “how are you.” mean the offer you made when it was easy to make and keep it when it’s inconvenient to keep. because people remember the person who showed up. your name will live in rooms you forgot you entered because you did the thing you said you’d do.

the scale of what you’re after doesn’t make sense to anyone including you sometimes, but it makes even less sense to aim small and to ration your effort across safe bets when the thing you actually want is sitting there waiting for someone crazy enough to try. you’re going to die either way so you might as well die having swung for something that scared you.

I wrote down exactly who I want to be and what I want my life to look like. then I asked what does he do. how does he start his day. what does he eat. when does he sleep. how does he handle the hard conversations. what does his work look like. I wrote all of it down. then I just started doing it. you don't have to feel like him first. you act like him until you are him.

if the ache is there, the answer is yes. yes you’re meant for more. yes you can have it. yes it’s worth chasing. the only question left is whether you’ll listen to it or spend your life pretending you never felt it. you felt it. you still feel it. go.

you’ll get rejected and dumped and fired and you’ll fail at things you were sure about, that’s just the cost of being alive. the question isn’t whether it’ll happen but how quickly you can get yourself back to swinging at the next opportunity. every day you spend hostage to what already happened is a day you’re not creating what’s next. reset fast.

you’re allowed to love this. the boring part. the unglamorous part. the part you would not put on the internet, the part nobody is going to praise you for. that’s where the joy actually lives. in the small wins nobody saw, behind the closed door, where it was just you and the work and the slow movement of something getting better. taste that. that’s the game.

WHAT’S PULLING AT YOUR HEART? DO THAT. AND DONT STOP.

let the world do what the world does. I’m focused on what I can control: my hands. my hours. my standard. my effort. my consistency. these are mine. and when I maximize what’s mine the world tends to respond. not always on my schedule, but it responds. and the response has been reliable enough over enough years that Ive stopped chasing the things I can’t control and started trusting the thing I can.

learn to be bad at the thing for as long as it takes. the slow way. where you do it badly on a tuesday and again on a wednesday and again every day for three years. where you make a hundred things you would not show anyone. where you absorb the craft through your hands before your mind has any idea what is happening. almost nobody stays in this room. the room of being bad is a room they cannot tolerate. they need the proof, the progress, the visible improvement - and the visible improvement does not come for a long time. it comes after enough mornings have passed that the badness has started to refine itself, quietly, without your supervision, into something else. you have to fall in love with being bad at it. nothing else will keep you in the room long enough.

you’re still in the game as long as your heart is beating and there is air in your lungs. keep going.

you cannot pour poison and expect honey. whatever energy you’re putting into the room is the energy the room gives back. you want people to believe in you? believe in them first. you want loyalty? be loyal to people with nothing to give you yet. the return is slower than you want but it’s real

fall in love with the practice itself or you won’t last long enough for the practice to matter. the meditation, the lifting, the reading, the writing, the learning - whatever it is. if you need it to feel good to keep doing it, you’re done. you have to love it like an athlete loves the training itself, the repetition and the way his body answers to it, far more than he’ll ever love a trophy. the production follows the love of the work.

keep it to yourself longer than feels natural. the urge to tell people is the urge to get a little credit before you’ve done anything, and their reaction, good or bad, will move you off the thing. you don’t need their belief loaded on top of yours yet. yours is still fragile. guard it the way you’d guard a flame walking across a windy lot.

the basics feel too small to bother with, and that’s the trap. show up on time. keep your word. move your body every day. eat real food. work the dream when you’d rather rest. nothing on that list will impress anyone the day you do it. it’s the thousandth time, stacked, that puts you ahead of almost everyone.

your life doesn’t suck you’ve just been inside all day

there is no secret recipe. it really is about showing up every single day no matter what with your actions aimed at a specific goal. you can't break someone with patience and purpose.

the calling usually starts smaller than your pride can accept. you wanted a burning bush and you got a quiet pull toward something unglamorous and you almost missed it because you were scanning the sky for something dramatic. He rarely shouts. He nudges. and the nudge will embarrass you because it is so much more ordinary than the destiny you imagined for yourself. obey the small thing. the small thing is the door. you do not get the large thing without walking through the small door first.

YOU MUST BELIEVE YOU ARE GREAT BEFORE THERE IS EVIDENCE