think bigger

Every so often I encounter something that pulls me out of the box that I’m currently in. It’s 2:51pm and I’m really sleepy.  

The thing that pulled me out of my box for a short few minutes was reading about Elon Musk’s tunnel-boring company. It just seemed so ludicrous – the man is in a position to do whatever he likes. He thinks from first principles. He can say, “What’s the biggest hole we can make in the ground this week”, and then make a goddamn big hole in the ground. What is the equivalent in my life? 

I think one of my challenges is to change the way I think about my money, my time, my power, my ability to effect change. And I think one of the reasons I feel so tired, flustered, frustrated, is that I feel like I haven’t been an agent in a long time. I haven’t executed properly in a long time. I haven’t made a big hole in the ground. And it sort of saps away at me. A man needs to continually be working on himself, I think. There’s probably a counterpoint to that, but I don’t care for the counterpoint right now. I want to explore the simple idea of – what am I doing? How can I do it more? 

What am I doing? The main things in my life – first of all I’m working in marketing for a software company. It’s a team I love. It’s an environment I love. But I feel like I haven’t made a huge dent or impact in a long time. The best thing I did was almost 3 years ago, and there hasn’t been a new best thing in way too long. In a thousand days, what do I have to show for myself? A sort of steadily increasing graph, sure. But the thing I own isn’t as beautiful as it should be. It doesn’t sing the way it should. And I have been slow and hesitant to make that happen. I should just make that happen. 

(2023 update: cool to note, while going through old notes etc, that I subsequently grew a twitter audience, wrote FAN and Introspect… nice progress. Let’s think bigger again.)