To master your direction, you must first master your mirror.
I have twenty-two free hours a day and I haven't written a single page of the book I've been talking about for six years. Not one page. Not a chapter. Not even a real outline.
I bought the domain for it. I have a folder on my desktop called "Book Draft" with nothing in it except a screenshot of a quote about writing I saved from somewhere.
When I was running my logistics company, I used to tell people about this book constantly. At dinners, on calls, in those late-night conversations where you talk about who you'd be if you weren't stuck doing what you're doing. "When I have the time," I'd say. "When I'm not buried in this business."
I could see it. I could feel it. I just didn't have the time. Now I have nothing but time.
I wake up in a town on the coast of Mexico. No alarm. I check maybe fifteen messages before lunch. I surf if the waves are decent. By noon, my work is done. The rest of the day is mine. Every single day.
And I spend it doing everything except the thing I said I'd do if I ever got free.
That's the trap. The busy years weren't keeping you from your real work. They were protecting you from finding out whether you could actually do it.
As long as I had seventy-hour weeks and a warehouse full of problems, the book was safe. It lived in the future. It was always this beautiful, unfinished thing I'd get to someday. It never had to be bad. It never had to be mediocre. It never had to exist in any form that could be judged.
The minute I had the time, the excuse evaporated. And what was underneath it wasn't laziness. It was fear. Straight up, gut-level fear that I might sit down to write the thing I'd been telling everyone about for half a decade and find out I had nothing to say.
You know this one. Maybe it's not a book for you. Maybe it's the business idea you've been sketching on napkins for three years while you clock in somewhere else. Maybe it's the music. The move. The conversation you keep rehearsing but never starting. The thing you swore you'd do "when things calm down."
Things calmed down. You didn't do it.
And now you can't even use the excuse anymore. You can't say "I don't have time." You have all the time. The only thing between you and the thing is you. And that's a way worse position than being busy ever was.
Being busy is comfortable. Being busy means you're needed, you're in demand, there's a reason you haven't gotten to it yet. Take the busyness away and you're just a person with a dream and no excuses and an empty folder on your desktop.
I sat on the sand last week after a morning session. Board still wet, coffee getting cold. A guy I paddle out with asked what I was working on besides the product stuff. I told him about the book. He asked how far along I was.
I lied. Said I had some rough chapters.
That's when I knew it wasn't procrastination. It was something I was actively protecting. The idea of the book was part of who I told myself I was. The guy with this thing inside him. This story only he could tell. As long as it stayed inside, it stayed perfect.
Writing it would mean killing that version of myself. The one with the beautiful unwritten thing. And replacing him with a guy sitting at a table in Mexico typing sentences that might be shit.
I opened the folder yesterday. Created a blank document. Wrote one paragraph. It was bad. I sat there looking at it for ten minutes feeling like I'd just broken something I'd been keeping safe for six years.
Then I wrote another one.
I don't know if I'll finish. I don't know if it'll be any good. But I know that six years of "when I have the time" was never about the time. It was about keeping the dream at a distance where it couldn't disappoint me.
The scariest thing about getting everything you wanted is finding out what you were hiding behind the wanting.
— Best, Jose
