Getting into a groove can be a great thing.

You can get a lot done in the groove. The groove gives you the opportunity to show off your expertise and flex muscles that you’ve been building for a long time (the feeling of being really great at something is incredibly powerful). The groove gives you a vehicle to help others.

But sometimes we’ve been in our groove so long we fail to realize it no longer serves us. Or maybe it does serve us, just not to the highest degree. Maybe our groove looks great on paper but feels uninspiring in reality so we think: “Maybe I need to get in a new groove.”

This is a common theme with many of my business owner friends. Everything is working with the business, it’s just not as fulfilling as it should be. They’re frustrated by the groove they're in and are questioning if they should get out and start digging a new groove.

They fail to see that the groove they're in is actually a blessing. The groove gives them stability. A strong foundation and sense of security. While being in the groove isn’t a reason to keep doing what you’re doing if it’s not serving you, it does provide a foundation from which to experiment. A home base. It’s power, safety, and potential all in one.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the “get out of your comfort zone” speech. While well-intended it’s incredibly oversimplified and potentially irresponsible advice. It conjures up images of leaving everything behind and starting over. Taking bold big action on something new. Abandoning your groove. the groove you’ve spent so much time digging.

Bold action is sometimes necessary but a healthier, more sustainable method is small changes over time. Leaving one foot in your groove, a place where you have a reputation, skill, influence, and leverage, while lifting one foot out and dipping a toe in the water somewhere adjacent. A 5-degree shift instead of a complete 180.

So if you’re in a groove but it’s not as fulfilling as it should be, instead of reshaping your life from the ground up, ask yourself: “What’s one small step I could take today in a direction that would tickle my brain and make my heart sing?”

Over time maybe you dig a whole new groove. Maybe after a series of experiments, you appreciate your groove so much more and decide to dig it even deeper–maybe you tweak it just a bit.

Most of us will have multiple deep grooves in our lifetime, all connected by a common thread. Whether or not you stay in a particular groove forever it’s important to note that if you’re in a groove that’s working, you shouldn't take it for granted.

It’s easy to look at someone who makes music or paints pictures and say “I wish I could do that.”

The truth is you can. You just have to recognize what you’re seeing.

What makes the picture beautiful is the emotion it elicits–how it makes us feel.

We all have the power to create an emotional connection through sharing our gifts if we can:

• Accept that we have something unique to offer the world. That’s a big first step and it might take some time and exploration to convince yourself that this is true but I hope you’ll get there. Perhaps a better way to think about it is we all have the opportunity to tap into energy that allows us to contribute, connect, and inspire in our own unique way.

• Have the courage to share that unique thing with the world. This is much harder than it seems when there’s a barrage of information and influence telling us who we should be and what we should be doing.

I hope you’ll take this on.

Partially out of service. I know how it feels to pretend to be something you’re not or to live a life that feels muffled. When close friends have had the care and courage to tell me the truth and nudge me in the right direction it meant the world to me.

Partially out of selfishness. I want to experience what you create when you lean into your gifts. I want to have more thoughtful, personal, inspired experiences.

We don’t need another generic copy/paste brand or watered-down idea. We need you to tune out the noise, tune into yourself, and get to work!

If you want to start a business, I have good news. You already know what it feels like. You might not be great at it but you have more experience than you think.

Taking care of a business isn’t too different from taking care of yourself. Just as you have an idea of what the business should be, so do you have an idea of who you should be.

You have a vision. A strong sense of purpose that gives your life meaning.

You have a mission. A goal or series of goals that align with that vision.

You have values. A code that you operate by in pursuit of your vision and mission.

You must be honest with yourself and others, have strong relationships, put in more than you take out, and understand that anything that has meaning will never be hands-off. There’s no cruising altitude for life. As you progress, challenges evolve and shift rather than disappear.

In business, just as in life, people will try, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes maliciously, to knock you off your path. Some people won’t understand your decisions. That’s ok. Building something worthwhile doesn’t mean building something that’s perfect for everyone.

Your vision can spread. Hopefully it does. Hopefully you inspire others to pick up a piece of your dream and run with it.

But this is your life. This is your business. Even when done in great service for the benefit of others, it starts and ends with you.

In a previous post, we referenced the parable of the three bricklayers to illustrate what it can feel like to see our work as a calling, and how taking that viewpoint can make jobs that some people would see as monotonous and even boring, incredibly fulfilling.

We’ve also talked about stumbling into something you thought would be a temporary or part-time job, attacking it with intention, falling in love with it, and having it turn into a career.

I’m an advocate of actively seeking a workplace that resonates with our values, a place where employee and organization can grow together. But what if we don’t have a clear idea of what our values are or how they can come to life in the workplace, does this mean we can’t have a rewarding work experience?

Finding work can be like flipping a coin. We don’t always have the luxury of choice, or perhaps we don’t have much skill–forget about finding our calling, we just need to find a job. So we interview and interview and eventually the coin lands.

Maybe it lands on heads and we’re lucky to land a job with an inspired company that believes what we believe.

If the coin lands on tails, that’s good too. We still have a job. Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with what we believe or resonate on a deeper level but we still have an opportunity.

An opportunity to do good work. To build the muscle of doing things that are hard. To be of service. To connect. To learn to take responsibility and honor ourselves.

If we see ourselves as worthwhile, as someone who wants to grow and actively pursue better, we can channel a level of investment and engagement that’s often reserved for a calling for any job we might have. We don’t have to let our relationship with our job be the predetermining factor of the level of pride and ownership we put forth but rather our relationship with ourselves.

We have one life to build the muscle of doing things that matter, one body through which to channel our energy and intention. I’m not far from the cliche of “how you do anything is how you do everything” but we’re taking it one step deeper: why is that true?

Why? Because you respect yourself. Because you’re building a reputation that will last longer than the job you have now. You have something to give that will benefit others around you and inspire them to give as well. Because you're a professional. Not because you wear a suit and tie but because you approach your work, life, and relationships with intention.

An exercise I share with my team for writing copy that doesn’t sound like it came from a robot or some generic virtual assistant is to read what they’ve written out loud.

How does it sound? What’s your emotional reaction? Does it make you cringe? Does it make you smile?

The written word and spoken word are not perfectly in alignment. I don't write the way I speak stylistically (different formats lend themselves different approaches) but generally, when I read my writing out loud it at least sounds somewhat human.

Reading our writing out loud allows us to listen from a different perspective. The words come out of our brains and into the real world. It helps us tweak, bend and shape the writing into something that feels aligned with what we’re trying to say.

The same is true for sharing ideas. Often we have the urge to keep our best ideas to ourselves. We’ll save them for a rainy day and make sure no one steals them.

We'll keep them to ourselves because they're not fully developed and we're a bit embarrassed by them or can't articulate them clearly (this is me).

We'll tweak and change and perfect them until they're perfect–then, with perfect timing, we’ll unleash them on the world and be showered with praise.

Except this rarely happens. Ideas need to be exercised. They need to be challenged. They need to work out and build some muscle. Sharing them in their imperfect, unfinished state helps build that muscle.

Talk to your friends about them, talk to strangers about them, talk to your family about them. The simple task of sharing your ideas with other people will help you develop them in the same way that teaching others helps you understand the things you already know on a deeper level.

Not sharing your ideas isn’t keeping them safe, it’s just making them weaker, or even worse, making them obscure.

In the way I hope others will benefit from my ideas, I’d bet that there’s someone out there who would benefit from yours. No need for them to be perfect, they just have to exist.

“My employees are lazy and unmotivated.”
“What makes you continue to employ lazy and unmotivated people?”

“It’s impossible to find good people. People just don’t care these days.”
“What could you do differently to find the right people?”

“I’ve tried everything, no matter who I hire it’s always the same.”
“Is it possible that you have good people, and your environment is part of the problem?”

“I’m sure it’s not me or our work environment, I just have lazy unmotivated employees.”
“What makes you continue to employ lazy and unmotivated people?”

Repeat.

I have some version of this conversation about once a month and it’s incredibly frustrating. In the moment I often find myself so put-off that it's hard for me to articulate what I believe, so here it is.

• If you have a business that requires employees and there are actually no people who want to participate in what you’ve created, you don’t have a viable business model.

• You may very well have some employees that aren’t right for you, but operating on the presupposition that it’s impossible to find good people is not likely to help you find the right people or help the right people find you.

• Most of our jobs are routine. We come in and do some approximation of the exact same thing we did yesterday. This doesn’t mean we can’t create a culture where our team is engaged and takes pride in what they’re helping to create on this perpetual groundhog day. (The parable of the three bricklayers comes to mind.)

• Inspiring people and connecting their work to a bigger cause is as much a part of the job as hiring and paying rent.

As business owners, a defeatist attitude gives us a cop-out. If our troubles are beyond our control we still get to see ourselves as the good boss in an impossible system. A victim to some ethereal cause that’s completely outside of our control. It erases the possibility for us to create meaningful experiences for our employees, our guests, and ourselves.

Taking ownership puts us in the position to change the outcome, we just have to acknowledge that instead of only focusing on what’s wrong with our employees, we might need to look at ourselves first.

As someone who felt like their voice had often been muffled at work, I always wanted to create a space where our employees could feel like they could contribute in their own unique way.

I thought that letting people choose their own adventure would lead to a healthy, happy workplace culture. Birds would sing, rainbows would fly out of everyone's ass, and we’d all walk around high fiving each other with perpetual grins stuck to our faces.

That’s what the best organizations do right? Freedom leads to creativity and people's highest contribution, I thought. This is how healthy cultures are born.

So I loosened my grip, took a step back, and waited for the magic to happen.

Our culture started to evolve. But instead of creating one healthy culture, this hands-off approach created multiple cultural factions with different goals and different rules. Even though we all shared the same value structure, each culture interpreted those values differently.

Everyone was doing their thing which is what I thought I wanted, but instead of feeling pride for letting people follow their dreams, I felt ashamed and embarrassed of the organization I’d helped create. It was nothing like the vision I saw in my head.

I remember saying to my business partners. “I’m pretty sure I would never get hired here, actually, I’m pretty sure I would never even apply to work here.”

We had no North Star. No common sense of direction or purpose. Working together took a back seat to individual ambitions. Our desire to let people build their own little slice of heaven inside our organization had created a fucking mess.

We had to rebuild our culture, this time by design. What we discovered was quite amazing.

A strong sense of culture doesn’t constrict people's creativity, it channels it. It gives people who resonate with your vision a place to fit in and use their gifts to contribute to their highest potential. A place to learn and grow, to discover more about the world around them and themselves at the same time.

It empowers people to make decisions, experiment, hold each other accountable to a higher cause, and makes it clear when it’s time for them to seek their happiness elsewhere.

Almost paradoxically, with stronger leadership and a shared cultural vision, people have taken ownership on a level we’ve never seen. Quite frankly I’m blown away by our leadership team and what they’ve been able to accomplish. It wasn’t instantaneous–we had to build trust, and it took some time to let go of the past but we made it through the rough waters.

You don't need to run a business to appreciate navigating with intentionality. Taking your hands off the wheel and coasting through your work, a project, your relationships, or the long game of life is a recipe for ending up somewhere that doesn't feel quite right.

So go steer the ship. If you don’t, someone else will. In fact, many other people will, and you might get lost at sea.

While recounting workplace horror stories with my business partner, I mentioned that one of the keys to my sanity at work over the years has been actively avoiding responsibility. I was reasonably good at saying “no.”

In reality, I wasn’t avoiding responsibility as much as I was being selective about where I was channeling my energy.

This required some restraint and often meant accepting a lower status (and lower pay) at work to be closer to the things I cared about.

Of course, you don’t help anyone or make any personal progress by avoiding responsibility. At some point, you have to lean in and take a swing. At some point, you have to say yes.

It's not a science. I haven’t found a golden yes to no ratio, nor have I ever found a job that perfectly aligns with all my gifts and desires with no strings attached (I think that might be a hobby).

I did, however, approach my work with intentionality. I wanted to make a career out of coffee and to do that I knew I needed to act like a professional. Professionals are intentional with their career paths. They’re not perfect but on average they know when to say no, and perhaps more importantly, they aren’t afraid to say yes.

I went on a Why discovery binge a couple years ago. I felt completely lost and hoped if I could find my why, I’d find myself, and hopefully my happiness along the way.

Of course, I already knew my why. I already knew what made my heart sing and how I could use that to help others, it just didn’t fit into the day to day reality I’d created.

I also already knew what was bumming me out. I didn’t particularly like my job. I didn’t particularly enjoy working with most of the people I was working with. Kind of an odd place to be when you own the company.

I hated pretty much everything that we did. I hated the time I wasted in meetings. I hated the over the top bubblegum service in our cafes. I hated our merch designs. I hated our product photography, our social media posts, our website copy, our leadership team dynamic. I hated my relationships with my business partners. I hated how people offered up ideas I’d brought up years ago and acted like they’d fucking discovered Atlantis. I hated it.

But I’d never admit it. I lied about loving my job all the time. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?

So I showed up and clocked in. Then I’d go home and work on my why discovery. I was shocked that happiness wasn’t flying off the page. There was no electricity like I’d been promised. No “Aha!” moment. No clouds parting and no epic ray of light to illuminate my path to glory. These why discoveries were about as big of a letdown as owning a business was.

But I’d never admit it.

“Maybe this isn’t the place for me,” I thought. Maybe I could get a regular job. Maybe I could be a writer–I like writing!

I told one of my closest friends I wanted to write instead of owning a coffee company. He looked at me like I was out of my mind and asked me what I’d written that anyone had paid for. I hate honest friends.

I couldn’t figure out what the fuck I was supposed to be doing. Everything that was supposed to feel good didn’t.

So in a last-ditch effort, I started having honest conversations. I said things to my partners like:

“I feel really shitty when you do this,” and “There’s no way this can happen.”

They said similar things to me. It was stressful and refreshing at the same time.

I asked people who worked for us that seemed to be even more unhappy than me questions like: “What makes you want to work here?” and “Is there a better path for you to use your passions and skills?”

There was a mix of tears, anger, blame, then (sometimes) acceptance.

I handled the whole thing pretty poorly but it bore fruit.

I stopped doing my why discoveries and started doing projects instead. Writing, drawing, filming and editing. I channeled my inner self. What would young me do? What has consistently brought me joy over the years? Brought me closer to other people? Brought me closer to myself?

I didn’t journal about it, I didn’t make graphs, I simply did it.

Through the work, I slowly rediscovered my why. Of course, I’d known my why the whole time. All I had to do was have the courage to be honest with myself and share that honesty with others.

So here I am on a new journey. Rebuilding my love for this thing I helped create. Taking ownership of the part I played in letting it feel so underwhelming. Letting go of what doesn’t serve me. Using my rediscovered gifts. Building new relationships and rebuilding old ones.

Is it perfect? No. But I accept and embrace my power to help mold and shape it instead of just being mad about it.

I never wanted to own a business because I knew that if the vision in my head didn’t line up with what existed in reality, I couldn’t deal with that. I couldn’t own that. I didn’t want that weight on my shoulders. I didn’t want that glaring imperfection to be so closely attached to my name.

But a business is like a person. It’s got quirks. It can never be more perfect than the people that are helping to shape and build it, and imperfect people build imperfect things. The same rule that applies to all the amazing people in your life also applies to your business, project, or idea:

You don’t fall in love with something because it’s perfect, it’s perfect because you fall in love with it, and to fall in love with it you have to show up.

I love sharing what I’ve learned.

I haven’t always been good at it–my methods early on were often more destructive than constructive. My passion and ego regularly got in the way of helping others learn.

I see this time and time again in well-meaning educators. They are so wrapped up in what the subject matter means to them, they fail to realize their job:

To be an assistant to discovery for others.
To engage curiosity.
To create emotional connection.
To empower.
To inspire.
To develop.

This requires restraint. A powerful yet humble approach. A mindset of service.

How do we identify true educators?

It’s not a certain skill threshold, number of accolades, or fame.

It’s simple:

True educators put the student at the front of the class.

From a marketing perspective, the wrapper is important. The wrapper sends a signal about what’s inside. If you roast great coffee it makes sense to design a bag that's equally engaging. A bag that people will want to leave on the counter instead of putting in the cupboard.

The bag design doesn’t affect the quality of the coffee but it affects our perception of the quality of the coffee. This is fairly straightforward when we’re dealing with inanimate objects.

When we’re talking about people it’s much more tricky. While we’d like to pretend the wrapper is indicative of quality or potential, all we’re really doing is being judgmental. Removing the chance for discovery.

As a business owner, I’ve yet to find a correlation between how people look or dress and their performance or engagement at work.

There are people all around us who are hungry—ready to step up and do amazing things if given the opportunity.

If you're having trouble finding great people to walk with you on your journey, it’s possible you need to spend less time focusing on the wrapper and more time engaging with what’s inside.

No one faults the actor for putting on a show.

Most people don’t find Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayal of Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood to be inauthentic. They find it entertaining and memorable.

That’s the beauty of a great film or play — they transport us to another world and create intense emotions that we remember long after the experience is over. That the world we’re engulfed in doesn’t exist and is simply a carefully crafted cocktail of people pretending to be other people doesn’t detract from the experience at all, in fact, it adds to it.

If you’re in the service industry you’re also in the entertainment industry. Every day you have the opportunity to create a memorable experience for someone. Creating that experience often means checking your emotional baggage at the door.

Feeling down? Overly stressed? Angry?

That’s fine. It happens to all of us.

It’s ok to name and claim our emotions but once we decide to clock in, step behind the counter, and enter into the realm of guest service we’re making a choice.

A choice to not let our negative energy bleed into the show and detract from the experience we’re trying to create.

Is it a challenge to do our best work when we’re not feeling our best? Sure. The flip side is, if we only do our best work when we feel our best, we won’t get much done.

So we put on a show. For the benefit of those around us. To build the muscle of doing hard, important work even when we don’t feel like it. To generate energy and create an emotional connection that will have a positive impact long after the experience is over.

There's no switch to be flipped. No big changes to be made. Only consistency.

One foot in front of the other. We're all going somewhere - sometimes with intentionality, sometimes blown by the whims of other people or a misplaced sense of obligation.

The forced reflection isn't bad. But reflection doesn't serve us well if it only comes once every 365 days. The other 364 deserve attention as well.

If we reserve this deep reflection for once in a blue moon it shouldn't be surprising to look back after many years to find we've been cultivating a life that feels a bit off.

Every day matters. Happy New Year.

When we started our organization we felt passionate about giving our employees more. More took the form of profit-sharing, trips to coffee growing regions, employee ownership, and the like.

We built a culture of: “This is your journey, Cat & Cloud can be whatever you want it to be!”

A choose your own adventure book of work.

As someone who values freedom and individuality, this idea felt really amazing. Give people the gift of freedom plus a few signals of our trust and belief in them, and they’ll do their best work, be rewarded along the way, and feel like they’re a part of something special.

It didn’t work. Too many captains with their own compasses sailing in different directions creating factions on factions. Factions I at times allowed myself to participate in. A workplace at times resembling a shattered window.

It would be easy to blame the people around us who took our gift of more and ran amuck with it, the people who misinterpreted our words and used them in ways we never intended but that would be passing the buck. I know the person responsible is the one I see in the mirror.

Our failure to be able to confidently say: “This is who we are, this is what we believe, this is where we’re going.” Our failure to own our expertise and honor the work we’d put in for decades. To trust our gut. To realize that honoring our vision is the best way to help others.

That bump in the road has led me down a path of rediscovering things I’ve always believed.

Culture

That there are a ton of amazing, talented, and capable people in this world. But for someone to shine as bright as they possibly can they need to be in the right place with the right people.

I believe we’re all more similar than we are different - we have this huge shared human experience that gives us the ability to respect each other and treat each other with care, and at the same time on the subculture scale which our jobs fit into, we don’t all fit in everywhere and that’s ok.

These subcultures of close friends, family, and work provide environments that channel powerful expressions for what I believe are people's superpowers. When we’re lucky enough to find these subcultures that truly spark the fire in our soul we’re capable of almost anything.

This is my hope. That more of us can feel empowered to seek out and find those places that align with our passions, talents, and beliefs. We’ll all have to make some stops along the way that are out of alignment for us — a first job, a summer, job, a job that we hate but keep anyway because hey, we gotta eat — and in those cases it behooves us to do our best work as much for our own practice and reputation as the ability to be of service for others.

More 2.0

I still feel strongly about workplaces giving their employees more. In looking back on the life cycle of Cat & Cloud and also my own experience as an employee it’s easy to see that not all gifts are created equally. Gifts like profit-sharing and employee ownership can’t create a strong culture. That would be too easy. Too transactional.

Gifts like freedom without limits won’t guide people to do their best work for the organization and others around them but only for themselves.

So what can you give? If you’re an employee what do you expect? You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. In our case we’ve found that a strong sense of direction, leadership, and giving people something to work for is better than simply giving them something.

At some point, most of us will have a job we don’t love. A job we see as a pit stop between points A and B. Our first job. The summer job. A job that’s purely functional.

Here's the story of mine.

A Detour

When I was 21 I had back surgery. At the time my whole world revolved around skateboarding. I worked at the skateshop, I skated all day, I made skate videos, skateboarding was everything.

After about 6 months of recovery I could move but not well enough to skate. I was tired of playing video games and felt like it was time to get back to work.

I didn’t want to go back to the skateshop. Well, I did want to go back to the skateshop but the thought of being around a culture I felt so strongly about while not being able to participate in felt painful.

One day I was chatting with a friend of mine who worked at the coffee shop down the street from my house, talking about my job hunt and he said:

“Dude, why don’t you just work here? You kick it here all the time — I’ll put in a good word and we’ll make it happen.”

Now I always loved and drank coffee. My friend Josh and I used to keep a thermal carafe of coffee in our high school locker that we could sip off throughout the day. I mean, it was Folgers but this was the late 90’s.

Despite loving coffee, I’d never thought about working at a coffee shop or being a barista but I remember thinking: “Fuck it, I can do this for a few months until I’m super healthy again and then move on.”

Then something very strange happened. In between making paninis, chicken wraps, and 16oz white mochas, I began to fall in love.

Espresso seemed so magical, so mysterious and intriguing. I had to figure it out. I didn’t exactly know why but I just had to.

When Scott the espresso machine repair dude came through I always hung out after hours and peppered him with questions.

I started disassembling the grinders and putting them back together.

I would buy gallons of milk and come in after-hours to practice milk steaming and latte art.

I bought my own tampers and brought them into work.

This escalated into buying my own grinders on eBay.

In a pre-Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube world, I would scour obscure corners of the internet looking for any coffee knowledge I could find.

Everyone I worked with thought I was nuts and they were right.

Showing Up

Part of this was my personality. I have a hard time having a casual relationship with anything. I’ve always had the attitude that if you’re going to clock in for 8 hours, you might as well make it count.

I’ve always felt the need to do my best work even when I didn’t care about the job. That my work was representative of who I am and because I respected myself, simply doing an average job wasn't an option.

Almost 20 years later my entire professional life revolves around something that was supposed to be a pit stop. A summer job. A detour that turned into its own path.

This speaks volumes about what can happen when we show up. When we respect the work and respect ourselves.

We constantly have the opportunity to open the door to the possibility of discovery, surprise, new beginnings, and growth, but only if we’re engaged.

So if you’re phoning it in right now, do yourself a favor and give it your all. Worst case scenario you build your work ethic and reputation, best case scenario you might just fall in love.

I posted on Instagram yesterday. You know. One of those posts you don’t really want to make but you feel like you have to, if only to let everyone know: “I’m still here!”

So I trudged through it. My weekly contribution to the ever-growing mountain of digital garbage.

During the process of trying to find the perfect words to express my emotions, I was repeatedly interrupted by people who love and care about me.

A text from a good friend. Ignore.
A call from my mom. Declined.
Even my dog wanted my attention.

I don’t know what was going on yesterday but people seemed hell-bent on connecting with me. They must not have known I was already busy staying connected.

I finished my post and put my phone away.

Two hours later I picked my phone back up and went straight to my post to like the comments and write small blurbs of thanks to people I don’t really know.

I never called my mom back but hey, at least the rest of the world knows I’m still here.

When I first started falling in love with the world of coffee I fell head over heels. The excitement and magnetism I felt towards this new journey was strong — I spent nearly every waking moment engaging with this new love in some way shape or form.

In many ways it was amazing. I got to spend my days doing work I was deeply engaged in and the side-effects of my hard work and dedication were wild.

“Do you want to come to Colombia and teach coffee producers about coffee culture in the states?”

“Do you want to visit Milan to make espresso at the biggest coffee machine show on earth?”

“You planning on going to World Coffee Expo in Vienna?”
“No.”
“Well your plans just changed, I’m paying for your trip.”

It blows my mind to think of how fortunate I was, but there was a cost.

When I started itching for the next level of my journey I pulled my head out of the sand to realize that I didn’t really know who I was or what was fueling me at my core anymore.

I went so deep in one dimension that most aspects of my life were unrecognizable to my former self.

My health, my close relationships and marriage, my connection with things that had always been safe places (skateboarding, music, drawing), every aspect of my life outside of coffee suffered.

I’m still reeling from the aftershocks of this one-dimensional mindset nearly 10 years later.

Every day is a step forward in the process of rediscovering myself and reclaiming my happiness.

Sacrifice

While my effort and attention were rewarded with some amazing, irreplaceable experiences, and a strong foundation of skill and knowledge in a certain niche, looking back I realize I would have had the potential to go much farther and had more fun along the way if I would have split my energy 80/20 or even 70/30 instead of 100/0.

Some level of sacrifice is necessary to make big changes in our lives. The question is how much do we sacrifice, what do we sacrifice, and for how long? We will trade our time. We will trade some amount of energy. But do we need to trade our sense of self?

I’ve always had the problem of fully abandoning the past when looking to move towards a new future. Every time I start a new project I feel as if I have to reinvent myself. Start from scratch. I hate it. It’s exhausting. I don’t want to do that anymore.

So now I’m playing catch up.

Something may have knocked you off your path. Taken you away from yourself. We’ve all experienced it. It’s easy to blame the obvious causes: work, school, some sort of societal pressure, a task we had to do to survive, something we hate.

But it could just as easily be something we love that’s pulling us away from ourselves.

The ’90s are hitting hard right now. As someone who grew up skating in the ’90s and having all of my deep-seated cultural references tied to that era, I’m getting blasted with a barrage of nostalgia that’s just begging me to open up my wallet.

The formula is simple. The kids grew up and now they have money. Money they’ll gladly spend in hopes of recapturing the feeling of days gone by.

It’s a game and it’s fun to play as long as your expectations are in the right place.

Nostalgia is spending way too much money on that pair of skate shoes you had back in the day because you hope it will bring back that feeling you had on those warm summer nights, staying out till all hours with your friends and the adventure, possibility, and mystery that goes along with having a car, no cell phone, and no responsibility.

It’s a great fucking feeling. But the shoes don’t have anything to do with how you felt, and buying them now won’t recreate those feelings. They’re simply a souvenir of a time gone by.

So maybe instead of trying to purchase the feeling of the past, we can let go of the story that our best days are behind us. We can own that we have the power to generate equally powerful feelings by creating new experiences.

Experiences created by understanding that what was truly special about those nights wasn't the clothes or the music or even our youth but the strong connection we felt with ourselves and the people around us, the freedom that came with having no expectations and being fully present, and the naivety of believing anything is possible. Because it just might be.

I’m really good at poking holes in plans, exposing weaknesses, and playing devil's advocate. Guess what? So is everybody else. Turns out these things aren’t particularly challenging or useful.

They’re the lowest level of pseudo contribution. They make us feel smart. They make us feel like we’re contributing. But unless there’s something ridiculously wrong, a glaringly dangerous miscalculation - this approach is less than useful.

I already know most of what’s wrong with my idea. I already know it’s not perfect. I don’t need anyone to tell me every single way my idea has fallen short, I need someone to pick it up and run with it despite its imperfection.

If we’re brainstorming I need someone to give me thoughtful input on how to make the plan better. Here lives the crux of this idea: Poking holes in a plan isn’t the same thing as creating a better plan.

If you’re in the habit of constantly poking holes in the plan without offering up a meaningful, actionable, culturally relevant alternative, just know that your boss notices. Your teammates notice. Your organization notices. (Copy and paste to all the people in your personal life: your partners, friends, and family.)

While you genuinely might be trying to help, you’re likely creating a situation where you’re seen as a cultural outsider. Inadvertently lowering the value of your potential contribution.

“Should we bring in Chris?”
“No, Chris’ contribution is never constructive, he just talks shit about everything.”

Over time my negative attitude had taken me out of the conversation of how to make things better.

I deeply wanted to be a part of the conversation so I made a pivot in my default response from: “This is why this won’t work” to “I can make that happen for you.”

Have you ever reached out to someone whose work you admire and gotten no response?

I’ve done this quite a bit and although I eagerly await their response at first, I’m always pleasantly relieved when I don’t hear back.

Why?

Because if they're communicating directly with me there’s a good chance that they’re communicating directly with a number of other people as well.

If they’re communicating directly with enough people there’s a good chance they have less time to do the work for which I admire them.

Almost paradoxically, if the energy put into connecting directly overtakes the energy put into doing their work, my desire to connect and interact with that person will disappear.

While we all matter as humans, the reality is that people feel connected to us because of the work we do. No one is cool enough to be able to just sit around all day and inspire people. No one gets flooded with praise for simply responding to messages. It’s the work that person has done that gives those messages value.

Our favorite authors aren’t our favorite authors because they respond to our DM’s, they’re our favorite authors because they write stories that matter to us.

While we might make one or two real friendships from the crazy world of comments and messages (I certainly have), the reality is that most of this interaction is a hamster wheel to nowhere. We’re trading our time, energy, and attention for a quick buzz at the expense of something much more important.

When people do work that matters deeply to us, it builds connection that goes beyond the dopamine hit we get from a simple message. The same is true for our work. When we do work that matters to other people, we have the potential to create true connection.

This is freedom. This is power. Power to put that phone down and stop chasing connection by spending all your time responding to dings, pings, and zaps, and start spending your time creating more thoughtful work.

We have our close friends and family to scratch our person to person connection itch. In most other cases we all benefit from realizing that creativity is connection.

P.S. Here’s the note I wrote that turned into this blog. It made me laugh and may very well be better than the actual blog so I’m sharing it with you. Maybe you’ll find it useful.

Creativity Is Connection: The inverse relationship between DM’s, inspiration, and connection.

• Person makes work.

• People are inspired by work.

• People reach out to person to show appreciation.

• Person feels obligated to respond (it feels nice to be appreciated).

• People like it when person responds.

• Person now spends more time responding than creating new work.

• People stop reaching out because there’s nothing to appreciate.

• Person realizes that creativity is connection.

• Person makes work.