When I promised myself that I’m going to figure out what I’m meant to work on — or I am going to die (pt 1)
It was April of 2021, and this was the promise that I made to myself. I had no intention of dying, but for me, this felt like a matter of life and death.
I had known for many years that I had a huge amount of untapped potential…but I had no clear outlet for it.
I believe that when we’re using our gifts in the right way, it feels like magic is circulating through our veins.
But when our gifts are lying dormant for far too long, the opposite occurs. Rather than circulating as magic, our gifts pool as poison. An acid that corrodes us from the inside.
Combined with my dire financial outlook, constant mental confusion, feeling physically trapped in a city that was no longer a fit for me, and fresh off of an unexpected and devastating breakup, every day felt like I was getting swallowed further down into the abyss.
While I do not identify with a specific religion (and this book is for everyone, including atheists), there is an ancient Bible quote that summarizes it perfectly:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
And it wasn’t like I was just sitting idly expecting things to come to me, either.
Over the course of the past nine years, I had launched numerous things: a Chrome extension, a potluck dinner community, daily micro-journaling cards, a website-built-over-screenshare agency, and a popular web design course on Udemy.
In between these endeavors, I worked for two successful venture-backed software startups in sales/marketing roles. Throughout this time, I invested a significant amount of time and money in a variety of career change programs + communities.
As an avid reader, I’ve probably finished around 300 books over this period (and read a good portion of hundreds of others). I was a skilled networker and regularly had conversations with wildly-successful entrepreneurs, founders, and executives over the years.
And yet, I continued to barely tread water, and only continued to regress further.
I was comically cursed with a modicum of success in everything that I did. I didn’t outright “fail” in much — I was given signs of just enough traction to lead me down false path after false path. I was able to eke out a living, but I never felt peace.
Every day I inched closer to financial ruin, as I let my web design business wither away. I lost my largest consistent client in December of 2019, and I took it as a sign to finally move on from something that was not remotely representative of who I was anymore.
Here I was, working way harder than the majority of people — trying every project and approach imaginable — all tangible and grounded in solid logical (or at least I could make a good case for everything that I worked on).
But I continued to die a thousand deaths by a million cuts.
Despite having plenty of friends and a network of ‘successful’ people I could technically ask for guidance, I didn’t feel that I had a single person I could truly talk to.
I was paralyzed by both my unrelentingly underwhelming results and not having anyone that could truly understand where I was.
Ever since I quit my first job out of college (where I held on for six months before quitting), I believed that work felt sacred. I wanted to go all-in and pour everything that I had into whatever I pursued (and I did that for the endeavors I just listed).
I didn’t have to ask them to vividly hear what I figured they’d all say: “Just get a job.”
I wasn’t above getting a job (in fact, my full-time job for 2020 was job-hunting!). But the idea of getting a job that I was lukewarm about or actively disliked sounded deeply out of integrity. I had done that three times before; why would this time be different?
Merely getting a job to pay the bills felt like “conventional wisdom.” And I loathe conventional wisdom. The irony is that there’s nothing wise about it at all; it is a well-proved route to living a mediocre and uninspired life.
Under the constant self-reflection and self-inquiry, the core question continued to emerge:
What the fuck is wrong with me?!
I had to own that I was the common denominator in my miserable life.
Nobody ‘understood’ me. Everything I poured myself into eventually withered away and died.
There had to be something wrong with me, right?
There seemed to be only one logical alternative conclusion —
What if the only ‘problem’ with me has been my perception of life? What if all of my past failures were me being protected and elevated to a far grander destiny than my mind could comprehend?
Consuming hundreds of books and podcasts over the years had been helpful, but had not given me the answers.
I was left with no choice but to investigate in a way that nobody else ever has.
[to be continued]
