It's not until we've lost everything that we are free to be anything.
- Tyler Durden, Fight Club
I started 2010 with a promise to myself that I would take the road less traveled in my life. My first ever post on this blog talked about choices that we have when reacting to what life gives us. While I wasn't exactly conscious of this commitment throughout the year, the results that I have produced may provide evidence that I did my part to make the most of the opportunities that I had.
By all means, I had amazing year attending my first TED Conference, being published, launching and closing Dash & Cooper, and contributing the creation of The Foundry.
Yet in the midst of all this, the most significant thing that occurred this year was the slow death of who I thought I was. At the beginning of the year, I was certain of a lot. Certain of who I was in the world, who I was going to be in the world and how the world worked. As the year went on, these assumptions were smashed - every single one of them. This creative destruction was grinding, purifying, painful and enlightening.
Around February or March, I understood that I was going to need to become the person "I was destined to be" in order to taking advantage of the opportunities coming my way. And while I understood that change was necessary, I didn't realize what exactly was going to take place.
What actually did take place was the erosion of the hidden beliefs and commitments that supported a persona that allowed me to "fake it". And by faking it, I mean playing the entrepreneur prodigy that has it "figured out" (Good Will Hunting, anyone?). A character that I had carefully crafted for almost two decades was stripped of me in last 12 months. All of my assumptions about how things work, should work, failed the litmus test of reality (in my case, the experience of trying to build a company). Furthermore, I had many more hidden assumptions that were brought to light and subsequently obliterated. Everything I knew, everything I thought I knew was gone.
I was literally left with nothing.
The experience was like a product of the Red Pill-Blue Pill scene in The Matrix, the burning-acid-on-your-hand scene from Fight Club and the scene where Ellen Page's character in Inception realizes she has access to pure creation.
The beautiful part is that in sacrificing the person that I thought I was, I was given the ability to be anything - thereby eradicating the "who I've been", "who I am" and "who I'm destined to be" notion. I was free of the confines that limited me from doing what I wanted to do; to be who I wanted to be - a blank canvass to create upon.
Reflecting on it now, I found that I paid a small price in exchange for endless possibilities. Not only just the freedom of self-expression but also a mental model to discover and bring to light more assumptions that I hold but are hidden from me. The benefit of doing so allows me the ability to live my life intentionally rather than letting my assumptions-mistaken-as-truth run my life for me.
I wouldn't say that I'm a 100% different person - humans are too complex to enact durable behavior modification in just a single year. Neither would I say that I am a perfect person. In fact, the quite the opposite. I've just been attempting to put a mechanism into play to identify, analyze and be transformed by my flaws, foibles and intra-contradictions. I'm also not (nor will ever claim to be) an 'expert', like anything in life, proficiency takes practice and time.
And as time goes on this regenerative process will resemble a snake shedding its skin - a constant turnover and departure from what I thought I knew as hidden and undeclared assumptions and commitments are brought to light and transformed into the assumptions and commitments that I hold (like a deck of cards).
So thanks for your patience these last 10 years. Thanks for the patience this last year and I look forward to engaging with you in 2011 and beyond.
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