Free the man, free the world
There was a time when writing down your goals electrified you:
The worlds you would build…
The companies you would start…
The LIFE you would make for yourself and your family…
It all made you shiver with delight, like a long piss on a cold winter’s day.
But that was a long time ago.
Now, when you sit at your desk, journal in hand, and try to recreate it…
To dream and scheme as in the old days…
To tap into that old heat…
…you feel nothing.
Your goals carry no fire, no heat:
You look out, brooding from your chair:
You see the shimmering cities… the vast works… the raw power, wielded by those so seemingly far above you…
But you, too, have a kingdom:
Every Starbucks run…
Every gas station fill-up…
Every dental checkup, every physical, every UPS package left at your door…
You think of all these people you encounter as the employees of others, but they are YOUR loyal subjects:
Yours AND mine.
For unlike the stark and solitary kingdoms of old, with one king atop the pile, we stand in a new reality.
If anyone needs a boost, it’s you and me.
The demands of fatherhood…
The ultimate stakes…
The bludgeoning we take… It’s downright chemical.
It’s only logical, then, to fight fire with fire: to fortify ourselves with countermeasures as powerful as the onslaught itself.
You won’t find my drug of choice among the usual suspects:
It’s not marijuana, or alcohol.
It’s not heroin, coke, mushrooms, or meth.
It’s not adderall or caffeine.
It’s not sleep, exercise, meditation, or gratitude, either.
You stare at your newborn child, ghostly and smeared in your arms.
Others assume your first thoughts are of wonder.
Of joy.
Of the marvel and miracle of new life.
More likely, it was for you, as it was for me:
Don’t fuck this up.
And truly, how could it be otherwise:
For you and I were taught to see ourselves as abominations: blunt instruments of procreation: as creatures helplessly, unthinkingly base… taught to live our entire life as a self-mitigation.
And so of course you come stumbling to fatherhood, as determined to “not fuck this up” as you are to succeed.
You aren’t a “family man.”
You’re a man with a family.
Here’s why that distinction matters:
You were taught to think of family life as a promised land; a blissful state wherein, once won, you collapse into the arms of an all-loving, all-sustaining woman, carried along in a nirvana of procreation and whelp-tending…
That once you enter the paradise of marriage and family life, the need for seeking and striving and straining and proving will at last be behind you…
There’s always one.
Some smug prick at the dinner party who announces he will not be having children.
Because, overpopulation.
And “man as disease.”
Not to mention the mess, and the work, and the annihilation of one’s personal life.
The subtext being that having children is an “indulgence,” a surrender to base, unenlightened instinct, an act both unconscious and unconscionable.
Three things, asshole:
1. Population Winter
We do not only proliferate.
Winter is coming.
I need to show you something.
It’s ugly and crass… but you need to see it.
If you have things to create… if you wish to share your thoughts, ideas, products, services, artworks on a public stage…
Then truly, this may well save your creative life.
Dabbling at creation in private, when there is no risk of critique, is easy.
But the moment you ship…
The moment you pull the trigger and put your creations out into the world…
That is when you expose yourself not only to the fans you seek, but the haters you dread.
After last week’s Move Or Die message, a reader wrote me this:
In other words… what are some practical examples of move or die in action?
So, game on.
If you know the life you want DEMANDS bold moves…
If you know it’s move or die time but don’t know WHAT or HOW…
Let’s get in the shit.
I’ll start with a personal example:
Death by a Thousand Google Campaigns
As I’ve shared before elsewhere, I was stuck in marketing purgatory for years.
I’d become very good at specific form of affiliate marketing called “direct linking.”
Stay the course.
Double down.
Hold the line.
Press on.
Those are the words you console yourself with.
The bandied sayings of the grimly perseverant male.
And while they are, for some men, the right admonition… for most they merely excuse a particular form of dying.
For here’s the problem:
You love the slog.
You crave the long, endless night… the slow, tolerable gnaw.
After all, you are a man. You, like the rest of us, are hardwired for suffering.
But there are two kinds of suffering:
Suffering long and mild, leading nowhere of consequence…
Lost.
Ruined.
Destroyed.
That’s what they said about Chernobyl in 1986, after the worst nuclear accident in history spewed thousands of tons of radioactive waste into the surrounding forests.
When scientists returned years later to inspect, they braced themselves, expecting some nightmare carnival of two-headed frogs and tumor-riddled deer… of an animal population rendered freakish and frail.
Instead they found paradise.
Wolves.
Bison.
Boar.
Elk and red deer in hearty abundance.
They even found a species of bear not seen in those parts for over a hundred years.
