“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” – Franz Kafka
In late 2014, I had coffee with one of the most interesting entrepreneurs I’ve ever met.
He and his team were building what he described as:
“A Google Maps for outer space.”
An enormous project, to be sure — and I could see the stress and exhaustion lining his face like a battle scar.
As Elon once said…
“Running a start-up is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss.”
But underneath that stress and exhaustion was an unmistakable fire that hadn’t burned out, or even flickered for a moment.
He was tired, over-worked, and probably under-paid.
But I could see it in his eyes:
He was loving every damn minute of it.
Then he asked me a question I’ve thought about many times since:
“Why did you start your company?”
I paused for a moment, thinking of the blossoming Elite Guard Training platform I’d been building for nearly half a decade at that point.
And answered as honestly as I could:
“Because I couldn’t not do it.”
He smiled:
“Same here.”
That one simple answer has become a guiding principle for my life:
Do the thing you can’t not do.
Not the thing you think you “should” do, or the thing that “might be cool” to do.
But the thing that refuses to be ignored, that is leaping out of you like a wild animal, charging you like lightning.
Each time I’ve discovered the next evolution of “the thing I can’t not do”…
From EGT, to my 5 year pilgrimage around the world, to my 18 month monastic apprenticeship, to DeepGame, to writing these emails…
(because it evolves over time, of course)
…It has felt remarkable similar to falling in love:
Nothing can stop it.
In fact, I’ve come to see “finding the thing you can’t not do” as one of the central missions in life — right up there with finding the person you can’t not be with.
And so, in the words of the immortal Steve Jobs:
“Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
– T
P.S. Much more on this in The 9th Law.
