Find Your Edge

Any biologist will tell you:

It is not deep within biomes that life proliferates, but at their points of overlap.

Whether it be the trout feeding at the lake’s surface, or the deer grazing where field and forest meet…

Life abounds at the edge.

It’s the same with your work.

The greatness, the largess, the kingship you long for will NOT be forged deep within your industry, safely ensconced:

It happens on the edges.

Until you push your craft to the far reaches… until you walk to the cliff edges of your own knowns… your life will never yield the transformations you long for.

For the results you desire are borne of strange couplings…

In the bastardization of pure forms…

In the mongrelization of seemingly unrelated industries and markets.

And you yourself: these parts of you that do not fit… that “should not” exist within one man… they are the key.

You contain lucrative incongruities, if only you had the courage to embrace them.

You’ve been taught that, to be accepted by others, you must sort your beliefs, and instincts, and ways of being into intelligible, ready-made categories.

But what serves the palettes of the masses does NOT serve abundance: yours OR theirs.

The greatness you seek depends not on working harder within a shrunken sphere, but in having the courage to smash the constraining pieces…

In flaunting what you once hid…

In taking your old monstrosities and making them the cornerstone of your inimitable kingdom, the master plank in your world-spanning bridge.

If your mornings do not spark joy…

If your prudent rule-following and best-practices-ing are not creating your kingdom…

It’s time to let go.

It’s time to embrace your edge.

Time to OWN AND UNLOCK the incongruous gifts you’ve wasted too much time suppressing.

Yes, the owning will terrify you.

Yes, you will be, of a sudden, delectably lost.

But that is the point:

There are no maps for the mapmakers;

No trail for the trail-blazers;

No safe harbors for the first ship.

So flee the fetid center.

Find your lonely edge, so that, in a world gone bloodless and dry-eyed, we might bleed and weep upon it.

Related article: How Your Soul Dies

Comments

  1. I will build it!
    The plans are drawn
    In the mind
    First 40 years of preparation .. Next 40 in execution.
    You will see and remember my name.
    I will inspire the youth.. I draw the youth to me effortlessly.
    They are waiting for me to build it!
    What is it they want me to build?

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