On starting over
On starting over
A personal essay on finding the right thing (hopefully)
Being told that you're intelligent from a young age can really fuck you up.
It instills the belief that you're destined for something significant—like becoming a lawyer or a doctor, making a lot of money, and changing the world.
But what if you're not sure about what to do?
The dilemma intensifies in adulthood if the uncertainty remains.
You find yourself stuck in the rat race still trying to “figure it out.”
But your time gets colonized. You end up spending most of your life making someone else rich and if you don’t, you die in the streets like an animal. It’s pretty barbaric if you think about it. This is still how we do things. That we’re still in what Einstein called the “predatory phase” of the human experiment.
But despite all of it, you power through it, giving as much as you can to your side project. Maybe it’s a website, blog, YouTube channel, newsletter or something else. Something that matters. Something you love doing, and (hopefully) people actually care about.
Time goes by—a year, two, maybe five.
It's a slow journey to traction, punctuated by intense moments of doubt.
“Is this really the thing that I want to do with my life?”
They’ve told you to just “stick with it” for so long now that you actually did. Only to realize you stuck with the wrong thing.
And then, you have two options.
Giving up entirely, and letting your potential get relegated to the dust bins of mediocrity
Start over and try to find the right thing that will hopefully bring meaning to your life
I chose the latter.
This is another beginning for me, as I've done many times before—more times than you can possibly imagine
My autobiography is a graveyard of failed aspirations. I’ve spent so many years going from project to project. Thousands of hours thrown at things that don’t even exist anymore. It’s as if they never really existed to begin with.
Yet, here I stand, confident and hopeful—more than I've ever been.
I won’t lie to you. I don’t know that this is the right thing either. It could very well end up like all the other projects. And this might be the time that finally knocks me on my ass. When I give up on trying to change the world. When, after years of fighting the system, it finally crushes me like an insect.
Who can tell?
But the only thing I know with any amount of certainty is that this feels right.
I may have failed at changing the world every other time I’ve ever tried. But I’ve got at least one good attempt left in me. A real one. And I’m gonna hope, maybe even pray, that this is the one that sticks.
So, hopefully this will be the first post of many. If you’re interested in joining the ride, make sure to subscribe.
