My 50th birthday just passed.
I could do one of those “50 Lessons Learned” posts, but I’m not.
Instead, I’ll share one lesson, and it’s the one that’s had the most significant impact on my life.
Pre-prison, I chased everything (money/status/prestige/materialism) I thought would make me accepted by others, feel worthy, and, in turn, happy.
When I chased externals to feel accepted, worthy, and happy, the finish line transformed into a moving target.
It’s the “When I…Then I trap.”
“When I achieve or buy my goal, then I’ll be happy.”
In a life that’s a marathon, I lived in a world of sprints, short-term hits of happiness (really just dopamine), and my life was a constant chase for more.
I was on a treadmill, increasing the speed and incline, thinking I could catch the horizon.
The funny thing about chasing, we move towards something every bit as much as we move away from something.
The more I chased, the more I ran from my true self and who I wanted to be.
I was outsourcing my self-acceptance, self-worth, and happiness to things outside myself.
Believing I needed those Panerai watches to be someone who would be accepted, worthy, and happy reinforced that I couldn’t be any of that without it.
The more I chased, the more of a void I created in my life, it was a success-sized hole, and it was growing exponentially.
It was a gut-wrenching experience.
I was wasting my life, my talents and watching myself burn the childhood vision of my life to the ground as I lived in a self-imposed prison cell of success and fear.
To ease the pain, I chased escapes in the bottom of a bottle, in the magnetic strip of my Amex Platinum card, and in fantasy.
I made, by most metrics, a lot of money.
Yet, I’d buy lottery tickets and live in the fantasy of hitting the jackpot to the point of not even checking the numbers.
I’d rather live in the fantasy, an escape from the mundanity and meaninglessness of how I was living my life than accept that I wasn’t living how I wanted to live, that I was so damn scared of letting the identity I’d crafted go.
My choice to defraud a tech giant destroyed that life and that identity. It burnt it to the ground.
I had to rebuild from scratch; I had to reinvent.
I went back to chasing because it’s what I knew.
I thought I could land that job back in corporate and then be accepted and happy; I chased the answers in a bottomless pit of self-help books and podcasts.
I was back on the treadmill and getting nowhere.
Fortunately, I burnt myself out, and l chose to listen to my inner voice and what I actually needed, not what the books and podcasts told me I needed.
At this point, I stepped off the treadmill. I began the journey of connection, creation, and contribution on the path to meaning and fulfillment.
Because that’s what I was actually after all those years of chasing, I wanted the freedom to be who I was meant to be and to create.
I wanted to unleash my full potential, talents, and abilities to create something more significant than myself that would help or entertain others.
To do that, I had to go within, connect with myself, and understand what really matters to me and the life I want to live.
I stopped chasing, and I started creating.
When I connect deeply with myself, create from that space, and then share my creation in service to others, I cultivate deep meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in my life.
Self-acceptance, self-worth, happiness, and joy ensue naturally.
The journey of connection, creation, and contribution is an act of becoming. I become the person who creates what he set out to create.
Who I become, every expansive iteration of my life expands my sense of self-acceptance and self-worth.
The more fully I live and experience life, the more I have to connect with, create from, and contribute.
It’s a beautiful and empowering synergy that flows from within.
Whatever goal or achievement I’m creating, when it’s done and I share it with the world, it transcends myself as it’s no longer mine; it belongs to the world that allowed for its creation in the first place.
It’s icing on an already delicious cake of becoming.
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