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The days drifted from one to another. I remember how I was simultaneously being successful and at the pinnacle of my game and yet, at the same time, I was struggling and wanted out: a perpetual misery. I wasn’t the person I wanted to be. Every day was a drift. When I woke up, it was as if I put a person suit on of someone that I pretended to be and I accepted that fate.
How many of us are just drifting, not really being whom we want to be. We call it sacrifice, we call it marriage, we call it fatherhood. But all of that is an excuse, a lie told that we can’t also be whom we should be. It usually takes some sort of crisis as an alarm to slam the brakes and for us to truly find ourselves. Un–shelve those passions and find a way to be the person whom others ask us to be while honoring our own selves.
Sometimes you just need some to throw gasoline on the fire from a motivational anarchist like Kat Loterzo. Her style and F-bombs are unmatched. It was one little piece of advice that resonated with me, shook me awake:
Life is now. Press Play.
How many of us drift through fatherhood, spending more time with our fantasy football teams than we do with our sons and daughters? How many of us semi-consciously blame marriage, children, or our job for preventing us from starting a business or taking up something that you’ve desired to do for since you were seven years old?
We get lazy. We lather ourselves in content. If we have adversity, we bathe in suffering. Some of us masquerade in success that isn’t really success. On paper, we may have millions but it’s not the “right” millions. We hide behind our successes hoping for the rain to stop and the sun to shine again. We revel in the years before, when we knew who we were. Whatever happened to you?
It’s more about understanding where you are today is built on your yesterday decisions. That’s not a bad thing. But what is a bad thing is to be in the past in the current moment to the extent you neglect the now. Being just now-oriented is wrong, too. I did the wrong thing which was to take now literally and never plan for the future. It was more about compensating for the period of time in my life where I was always saving for a rainy day. You have to build sustainable gratification. Live in the now and be cognizant that you are crafting your future.
Life is unconditional. We make life conditional.
Loterzo mentioned that what we do is to add “complications” to whatever endeavor we’d like to accomplish. We build the excuse as to why we can’t do something, either a “Don’t know how to” or some variant of timing is off. Those are surface reasons. The true reason why we build excuses is that we are creatures of certainty and new endeavors are uncertain. If you deconstruct anything, there is false certainty.
For the longest time, I had in my mind I wanted to be an entrepreneur but I didn’t feel the “timing” was right and that there was a lot that I didn’ t know about how to become one. Diving deeper, the truth was that I was scared about the uncertainty of being an entrepreneur:
“What about getting paid. Could I rely on my bi-monthly paycheck? What would happen if I were to have a dry spell selling? Am I good at selling? Why would people buy from me?”
Those questions prevented me from starting entrepreneurship earlier. It took a monumental crisis —my divorce—for me to understand how we think we have certainty but we don’t really, it’s just perceived certainty. Those of us who have experienced a divorce know it can destruct everything you once knew and brings a reconstruction phase in the process. The shared identity of a married couple is shattered with divorce. For some, that means that they have to rebuild their own personal identity as that was unconsciously put on the shelf as we took on a more “selfless” role.
The employment that I thought was certain was, to an extent. However, there were signs that it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Due to a computer glitch in accounting the paycheck that automatically appeared in my account like clockwork wasn’t there and it caused a cascade of issues with other automated payments coming out expecting that check be in there. I realized that I took for granted this expecting this pay to be there no issues. It dawned on me that I really wasn’t any better off being an employee then I was as an entrepreneur. The one deciding factor was happiness, I tolerated the job due to the “certainty” and I didn’t pursue my passions due to the “uncertainty”.
You can’t carry the weight of the world if you don’t first take care of yourself and get strong enough to be able to carry the weight of the world.
As creatures of certainty in an uncertain world, how do we get that necessary anchoring needed to pursue our goals? True certainty comes from within. Your loved one can’t provide it to you. Doesn’t matter what vows they may have said. People and events are dynamic. Expect people to shift. Doesn’t matter what things look like today. Expect things to change. To be certain you have to be true to you. Don’t ever lie to yourself and put yourself first. You can’t carry the weight of the world if you don’t first take care of yourself and get strong enough to be able to carry the weight of the world.
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Photo credit: Pixabay