Why I felt like my life hadn't yet started

And why traveling won't make you feel like you're living life to its fullest

Beaver Creek, CO

A while back, someone asked me what I write about, and I didn’t know what to say.

Partly because I struggle to distill the nature of my work in a few sentences (and most people don’t want to hear a multi-minute rant in response to that question), but also because I actually didn’t know.

Life? Things that happen to me? The very nature of existence?

And so I pondered . . . What exactly do I write about? What sort of message am I trying to convey? What change do I wish to see in the world?

The more I thought about it, the more apparent it became that I didn’t have an answer!

After five years of writing, the best tagline I’ve managed to conceive is “My public journal.” I mean, c’mon now. How in the world am I going to sell anyone my writing—which is what I must do if I’m to make money—if I tell them to read my public journal??

The problem isn’t just that the phrase itself is inconsistent with today’s brand standards, but that I really do prefer it and would be reluctant to make a change.

And the reason is that, after five years, “my public journal” is the most accurate way to describe my writing.

Still, this doesn’t resolve the fact that I couldn’t pitch my work in an elevator. “Perhaps,” I thought to myself, “this is a good thing. Perhaps, like Naval, I’m incompressible.”

Yeeaaaahhh, or not.

Because there’s no way, if I’d really gone “all in,” that after five years, I couldn’t answer this question.

Clearly, I had been half-assing some element of my work.

And then it hit me: this fact (that I couldn’t provide a tidy explanation of my work) was inextricably bound to the fact that I still felt like I was waiting for my writing career (indeed, my life) to “get started.”

I couldn’t answer the question for the same reason that we don’t speak about the future in the present tense: because it’s not happening yet.

Of course, this feeling I speak of—of having not started—points to a particular pillar of my efforts. Because I have written quite a bit. In fact, over the years, I have typed out hundreds of thousands of words. Not to mention, I wrote a book.

But something was missing, and deep down, I knew it. Even though I’d written a lot, my work wasn’t whole. I hadn’t done everything I could to be a writer.

I felt like I was sitting on the sideline of life.