25 Years of Peace – Year 1

In the months leading up to my 25th birthday, I focused on who I wanted to be at 50. What did I want my life to be like? What type of person did I want to become?

I didn’t want to plan everything out, but I wanted to identify the one or two key characteristics I wanted in my life. My intention was to spend the next 25 years building that future.

I remember I had a list of all the things I wanted my life to be. I wanted to become a published author, so maybe I would write a little book each quarter for 25 years like Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach does. Maybe I would exercise each day, fast each day, or cut out caffeine. I wrestled with the question of “Who do I want to be at 50?” for months.

At the time, the business was growing, but it was very, very painful. Each day was difficult, and it felt like we were scraping by all the time. I was stressed a lot, so much so that my parents would check in on me by asking my roommate if I was doing okay. I was losing my hair (although that could be genetic) and while I exercised several days per week, I wouldn’t have considered myself to be a paragon of health. At the time I was over 23% body fat, not eating well, and could do no pull-ups. I know that because my 25th birthday was the first time my trainer had me do pull-ups during a workout. I used a step stool and did negatives.

I had recently heard Naval Ravikant on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Naval said something I had never heard before. He said “Peace is happiness at rest, and joy is happiness in motion.”

That was it. I was going to spend the next 25 years of my life becoming an unbelievably peaceful person.

By the time I was 50, I wanted to be completely unfazed by external events around me, particularly ones that I couldn’t control. I wanted to have control over my emotions. Most importantly, I wanted to have a quiet mind.

Back in college, I took a StrengthsFinder test where one of my top 5 strengths was “Input”.((It is no longer in my top 10)). Because of who I am as a person, I didn’t read the report detailing what these strengths meant, I simply asked people to explain them to me. I was told by a facilitator of a StrengthsFinder workshop that “People with ‘Input’ (as a strength) have way more thoughts than the average person.” ((I’ve since learned this isn’t true. It means that people can make sense of far more data points at a time, but not that they have more thoughts.)). Even in college, that struck me as a bug and not a feature.

I proceeded to tell myself a story about my input strength. All the thoughts I had starting a business and building the life I want to live.

“What could go wrong?”

“If X goes wrong, what happens?”

“If X goes wrong and then Y goes wrong, what happens?”

“What if we did this new marketing initiative?”

“What if I hired a project manager?” “What if I hired an assistant?” “What if I hired an assistant and then we lose our top clients and then I have to fire them, what would that conversation look like?” “What if I hire an assistant and a project manager but we don’t get the new business to support them?” “Maybe we could start a different marketing initiative…”

This is what I thought Input was. Yes, I know I could have read the document and learned it wasn’t correct, but I didn’t, and I thought that was a strength! It was certainly a problem of my own doing, but that didn’t mean my constantly racing mind wasn’t a problem.

So I had settled on my focus for the next 25 years to be someone who is full of peace. If peace is happiness at rest, I defined “at rest” to mean “when there is very little going on and there aren’t ways to get small hits of dopamine, I am happy.” It could be on a walk or in a room with white walls and nothing else. In this sense, “happy” means something closer to “content” than it does “excited” or “joyful.”

My first prescription was going to be that I was going to write something down each day that brought me peace. This was much harder than I expected.

I remember the first day, my 25th birthday. I was sitting in my room, I told myself “Peace is happiness at rest,” and I asked myself “what brings me happiness when I am at rest?” It took me about 15 minutes to come up with my first item.

“Friends who wake up early for breakfast, family who loves me, a business that supports me, and a purpose that fulfills me.”((it’s worth mentioning that I don’t remember that my purpose was at the time, but I know what it is now, and I’m confident that purpose is different.))

My 25th birthday ended up being one of the worst days of my business career.

At the time we had a service that grew our clients’ Pinterest accounts. We had figured out how to beat the algorithm, using AI, to drive millions of impressions and thousands of website visitors for our clients. We were so successful at organic growth that Pinterest took action against our accounts. On my 25th birthday, over 50% of our clients got suspended from Pinterest.((This isn’t something I’m proud of, but the only thing we did that was against their terms of service was website scraping, which everyone does and is against all terms of service for every software service on the planet. Because of this experience, however, we never even bend the rules. It was that unpleasant.))

A member of my team called me, told me what happened, and told me, since it was my birthday, he would communicate with our clients and he would take care of it.

That night, my girlfriend and I went to a concert to go see one of our favorite bands. I was clearly distracted, but she did a great job calming me down and making the evening an amazing time.

Day 2((Abridged. It was very long because I was emotional about the situation at work)): A team who cares, and Miranda.

The next week, all clients were back online, we stopped using the AI, and all was well.

In about 6 months I had transformed from taking 10-15 minutes to identify something that brings me peace to being able to do it on command. In the next 6 months, I stopped needing to write down items that bring peace, because I started to notice it everywhere, subconsciously.((I still write down something each day.)) What started as very long winded responses that bring peace transformed into one word responses. Oftentimes, my responses surround a person or an idea ((“Freedom” is one of my most common responses.))

After the first year, around my 26th birthday, I was chatting with my girlfriend who asked how my 25 years of peace was going. I told her that one of the really interesting things I didn’t expect was not that I spent my first year becoming more peaceful, although I had, but instead I discovered what (and who) don’t bring me peace, or, better yet, take my peace.

There were certain people that I spent time with over that year who never made it into my journal. I would start to dread some events. I would fire clients, and I would end up shutting down products because they didn’t bring peace.

I noticed, that while I had become more sensitive to all the things in the world that brought me peace, I was also more sensitive to all the things that didn’t bring peace. I would stop giving energy to peace-takers and peace-taking events in my personal life((I certainly didn’t watch the news)). I started spending more time with the people who appeared more and more in my journal.

My 26th birthday was small. I don’t remember what happened at work that day.

Day 366: “Another year.”