The Business Found Me

I've grown 10 years in the past 12 months.

But somehow, I feel younger.

Like my mind is much more open and...

My financial situation hasn't changed at all.

I didn't come upon $1million.

It's my mindset that's done a 180º turn.

And the truth is I've spent thousands of dollars on coaching, often 3 days each week, which might as well be therapy. And you're saying, I can't afford that. And I understand. But I MUST go deeper on this path of understanding.

And you know what, it's worked.

Or rather, examining myself instead of the outside world has been fruitful in a deep, non-cosmetic way.

And so much of the "fixes" of our society today are cosmetic, literally and figuratively.

Covering up the superficial, rather than taking us deep, giving us lasting change.

What we're all seeking is to become deeply engaged in our lives, while we're here.

The problem is our obsession with productivity, and with money. Both are a part of the quality of life, it's just that in our voracious search for them we've become lost.

We've got the sequence all wrong.

We've placed the analytical before the feeling.

We become entrapped by the sheer number of choices and possibilities, analyzing all the potentials with so much fervor that we can't hear our own desires and inspirations. And then when things don't go our way, we shame ourselves for being "unproductive."

Our personal genius comes from feeling and instinct, rather than following any model or step by step program.

And innovation happens at the edges, in unexplored territories. How can you explore the unexplored by following someone else's route that has already been trodden?

We're scared to go out there on our own limb, because of fear.

Fear is the most destructive disease of our time, affecting Billions, leading us to disastrous outcomes; large ones like war, medium ones like hiding our best work, and small ones like alcoholic dependency.

I say this without any judgment, as someone trying to unravel this, and only to begin the discussion.

Fear is the mental chatter that drowns out our experiences, covers up our inspirations, and prevents us from deeply connecting with each other.

See, in the last few years, I was totally trapped, I just didn't know it.I only realized this once I started becoming aware of my fears, the ones hiding in the deep corners of my mind. I began unpacking them, seeing them in a new light.

This is how you change the world.

You change how you see the world.

You remove the distortion, and fear is the ultimate distortion. It provides a cloudy haze around our vision, and how we experience life.

People often ask how Death to Stock took off.

And I can tell by the way that they ask the question that they want tricks and hacks that they can simply apply to see results.

But the reality is that the mindset I was in allowed for me to freely act without expectation from anyone.

The truth is I didn't set out to start a business. But I did have something inside of me.

So, in some ways, the business found me. It started with a pull, one that was felt, and one that had no analytical outline for how things should be done. One that I couldn't help but not do.

Which started with a desire to explore something new and different. It wasn't overcomplicated. And I didn't set out to "build a following."

Can you simply work hard to build an audience?I'm not so sure.

Give someone $10,000 and 6 months and with that time and money will they truly build an authentic audience around their work if that's their goal?

Hard work is a part of it, but it's not the impetus.

Building an audience is a byproduct of a person becoming something.

Because we all seek to become something (ourselves).

And so we're attracted by it.

And so it can't be faked.

I already know that this post will be misunderstood. When it's so against the way that the world does things, what we've been taught, the thousands of podcasts and posts about the steps to wealth, or the steps to starting a business. We should learn from them but they should not be our guide.

If the business was a byproduct, unfolding from personal growth and listening to my own voice, which I believe many others who have found success would say, then the step-by-step methods are cosmetic information.

They're the output, rather than the source of the output.

And people who continually make magic happen in art or business have found a source to pull from that is opaque to the outside world and then disguised as tactics which are faintly retold, years later.

The leaders we follow provide us with incredibly valuable feelings, not simply information.

We internalize their worldview, and the tactics they share are tiny compared to the feelings they transmit, the feeling of that source that they pull from which creates their work.

And as we study the output, I believe what we're really searching for is the source of the output.

Which can be found if we go deeper ourselves, in our own way.

So this is the beginning of a discussion about seeing fear as our largest burden. About creating a space for us to stand out from the crowd, by simply being ourselves without the cover-up, the hiding, or the distortion of fear.

And asking the question that maybe we've taken the "how-tos" and "productivity" a bit too far?

I feel some fear as I hit send on this post. That I'll be misunderstood.

But that's just the analytical part of me layering on top, asking if I'm "doing it the right way."

Which is good to recognize. And I've taken it into consideration...

Then I click "Send."

xx David