Keep preparing, planning, waiting.
I managed to deceive myself this way for an entire year.
The seductive siren of endless preparation will fight to pull you in. To keep you preparing for the perfect plan.
Of course, the hilarity is that it doesn’t exist.
The perfect path/plan/project is a giant fucking myth – and it’s responsible for the countless toll of dreamers dying with their plans inside of them.
I almost got sucked down this road to nowhere, luckily I have smart people around me to call me out on my shit.
So, here we go. It’s time to launch.
Of course, probably like you, I wanted things to be more perfect.
I wanted…
- A mesmerizing teaser video that tortured you with curiosity.
- A viral manifesto ready to disperse to the four corners of the world.
- A whole archive of content that you could spend hours pouring over and through.
The reality is all this pressure to make things epic led me to not doing any of them. Unrealistic pressure has a way of suffocating the life from the most hopeful and excited plans.
I literally had to set a timer on my phone just to write this post. It’s got to get done by the time it runs out.
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
Time to launch.
Of course, in Trailblazer and in many posts I’ve said over and over, paths are made by walking.
I believe this, so I suppose it’s time to take my own medicine.
Gulp.
Imperfection is hard pill to swallow for a kid that was always expected to score 100% on every test.
You know the best part about all of this?
After six and a half years of working, building, waving the flag for getting paid to exist, I realized the irony behind it all.
Through all this time, I built Paid to Exist for… myself.
It was through helping all of you, taking a stand for you to follow your heart’s deepest calling, that I was finally able to give myself the same permission.
The truth is that I was scared to make my passion into a pursuit of livelihood. I thought I might kill my love for it with capitalism. I thought maybe it wasn’t “respectable” enough.
Year by year, I came closer and closer to allowing myself to pursue this path fully. Until one day the force became overwhelming. A tipping point in my heart had been reached. And I finally regained the courage to…
Say Yes.
6:55 left on the timer.
Some of you will follow me along on this next phase of my journey. For others, it may not interest you. This is something I’ve had to come to accept.
The thread that ties this chapter into the next is firmly the same:
Rebellion against what is keeping us trapped and safe.
What’s the big unveiling after all this time?
My passion is movement. Moving the human body, exploring what it’s truly capable of.
“The art of expressing the human body,” as Bruce Lee, one of my childhood heroes would say.
I’m interested in the intersection between reclaiming our primal strength (our ancestral movement heritage) and pursuing our modern evolution.
We’ve outsourced our movement as humans to technology, machines and other countries (hat tip to Katy Bowman for that lovely phrase). Our domesticated lives have given us a lot, but they’ve made us fragile and weak.
It’s time to reclaim our robust, multi-faceted capabilities as movers. It’s time to stop compartmentalizing fitness into a box that we visit for 30 minutes three times a week.
Our bodies are our vehicles for creating change in the world. If we don’t move more, how can we have the capacity to move others? How can we serve our families, communities and the world if we can’t move without pain?
These are the questions I’ve been asking.
0:57
Time to launch.
I don’t have all the answers, but I hope you’ll join me in reclaiming your primal, natural, robust strength.
Cool, in a weird way you did a full circle as jonathanmead.com became illuminated mind which became this website which has now lead you back to the start. Your new topic is a perfect fit for a guy in the kind of physical shape like you.
Awesome! :}
Sweet. Onwards and upwards :)