For years I wrestled with a simple question: What’s Next?
It served me in the past, and I easily answered it. I did new things, took on new challenges, reinvented myself, found more and more success.
I wrote about it here on my website and created tools around it to help others. The problem was, it wasn’t helping me anymore.
I was stuck.
From this stuck place I took some much needed time for healing. Old wounds I had carried most of my life couldn’t be ignored any longer. Habits and behaviors that I developed in childhood, that for a while I considered “beneficial malfunctions” had, over the years and decades, turned into full on malfunctions and no longer served me.
I took the time I needed to vanquish the imposter feelings I carried, and understand the power of my story, that how I got here was hard earned. How I had been forged in fire.
A new problem showed up, and took some time for me to see: My story was so impressive, so hard earned, so much adversity and grit, so big, so successful, without realizing it, I began to believe my best days were behind me.
Thoughts I began to have included that I’ll never make as much money as I did before, and making more money for the sake of making more money had lost interest to me.
I’ll never have as much fame as I did as a DJ.
The hard work I put in, blood, sweat, and tears, that I know so well how to do, I’m simply not interested in working that way at this time in my life. I’m not facing homelessness if I don’t. Much of my early success was because I had to to survive, and failure wasn’t an option. That is no longer the case.
I became “retired”, in a sense. I even played with calling myself that.
I had a desire to help others, and many of you are here right now as a direct result of that. I figured my time was over, and it was time for me to give back. I accomplished this by being a metaphorical “sage on the mountian”, on this tiny slice of internet that you’ve found me on.
A trusted advisor gave me 2 important distinctions to think about:
Who inspires me, as opposed to who can I inspire?
How can I make my next chapter my greatest chapter?
And I realized what I had been doing wrong. I was thinking too small.
I was walking down the other side of the mountain, without looking on to find a new peak.
The people who inspire me now are climbing higher peaks. Not for more money, but to do amazing things.
When I considered for a moment about making my next chapter my greatest chapter, I began to feel giddy. Could that really be possible? The answer was: of course it was.
And if it was possible, then it became plausible. And THAT became a delicious idea.
There will always be a “next”, for as long as you are breathing. So the question isn’t what’s next, the question is: What would make your next chapter your greatest chapter?
