The Truck Everyone Else Wanted Too

For a long time, I wanted one specific truck. A 1972 Chevy C10. I could tell you how it would sit, how it would sound, what it would feel like to pull up to a curb in it. I chased it the way you chase anything that has quietly become shorthand for “when I get there, I will have made it.”

Then I got it.

It was everything I wanted. It was also, I found out fast, everything everyone else wanted. That truck seemed to be at every major truck show in every city. It is one of the most common classics a person can collect. I had exactly the thing I had always dreamed of, and so did half the parking lot.

I would like to say that was a letdown. It wasn’t, and the reason is the whole point of this post.

The part I did not see coming

Standing there with the keys, I realized the truck was not the best part. The best part was how I came to find it. It was the people I met because I owned it. It was the adventures I got to have in it. The truck was the excuse. The path was the thing.

That is a lot like life along the road of chasing business dreams. The destination is often not as rewarding as the journey, and I would say it is important to enjoy the journey even more than the end goal itself. I wish I had known that sooner.

Make yourself while you make the world

Being an entrepreneur is not only about the goal, or the wins we stack up in our garages and our bank accounts. I like the wins. I am not going to pretend I don’t. But it is about something much bigger than that.

It is about making yourself as much as you are making the world around you. The world adds a little of its fabric to your life, and you add some of yours to its. Every client, every setback, every person who said yes or no, leaves a thread. After enough years, you realize you are woven from all of it.

What I would tell myself at the start

There is an old thing older men say to younger men, and I will admit it gets repeated because it is true: risk more. Risk it when you have less to leverage, before the kids and the responsibilities and the life you have built around you. I wish I had risked even more, and even earlier.

Even now, I have come to see something about the word itself. Risk is only risk if you frame it as win or lose in your own mind. Otherwise it is just a space you step into where you do not know something yet. It is an invitation to get uncomfortable so you can get comfortable, and learn.

So make the game this: get used to newness and the unknown, and seek it out when you have the chance. It is a great place to grow toward.

The 2am idea

I used to get excited by every idea that landed on my pillow at 2am. I was sure each one was the one that would change everything.

What I have come to discover is that I will always have 2am ideas, and they will always feel like they change everything, because I am built to question everything around me from hundreds of different angles. I cannot eat soup without wondering if the spoon itself could be better for eating from. I have been that way since I was a kid.

So instead of getting excited about the one idea, get excited about who you are in pursuit of the world around you. Keep your energy up. Remember it is not a final thing you have to accomplish. It is a place you get to be in, every day.

That changes so much. It changes how you handle the ups and the downs. A bad week stops being a verdict. A great week stops being the finish line.

You are probably a lot like me

If any of this sounds familiar, here is what I most want you to hear. You are most likely not as unique, or as different, or as unusual as you have been told. That is good news. You are probably a lot like me.

Someone born into a world that moves quickly while your mind moves 400 beats faster, watching it all unfold and asking questions about everything. What if it were better? What if it were kinder, brighter, simpler? What if it were ours?

That question is not a flaw to manage. It is the work.

So get the truck. Chase the goal. Just do not mistake it for the point. Watch who you are becoming along the way, who you meet, what the unknown teaches you. And keep asking, the way you always have.

What if.