My partner in crime, Gregory Benedikt, and I are putting a hold on our podcast, The Dare to Dream Podcast. That’s pretty wild to say. We’ve been doing it for five and a half years.

We started this thing at the beginning of Covid as a way for us to connect with each other, connect with ourselves and where we are on our personal journeys, and to give a raw, real look at what it’s like striving for our dreams.

Goddamn it, I think we did that.

I’m so proud of what we accomplished — over 230 episodes.

But we’ve decided that it’s time to end the podcast if it’s not giving us the same fulfillment and joy as it once did.

There’s something called the sunk-cost fallacy. You stay in something — be it a relationship, a job, a project — because you think that if you quit, you’d be throwing away all the time already invested. So, people stick with things that don’t serve them anymore.

And well, Greg and I are both trying to simplify our lives right now. It feels good. We both realize that we want to focus on what truly makes us happy. He wants to focus on his business, helping people as a life and leadership coach. I just wanna write books.

It’s the single thing I love the most, and it’s what I must invest all my energy in. How do I know? Because I’d do it for free for the rest of my life if I had to.

Because when I get up and get back to my book on Japan, I feel like the most authentic version of me; my spirit feels elated. I forget about the world and my problems, and I’m absorbed in the domain of creativity, the life of an artist.

That tells me everything I need to know.

There’s so much noise telling us what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives.

This is what it means to be successful.

This is what it means to be a man or a woman.

This is what it means to be a good person.

This is what it means to be a productive and well-informed citizen.

We base our lives on that. We do what other people are doing because if other people are doing it, then at least we’re validated. But it really takes breaking away from that and listening to what our bodies tell us to understand what actually matters to us.

I’m 30 years old. My journey is still in its nascent phase, which is crazy, because I’ve been writing for almost a decade.

But I feel like I’m still just a seedling, showing future promise to sprout and grow and dig roots deep, and find fulfillment in it all.

I’ll keep blogging, too, but you probably have noticed there’s less structure with what I’m doing here. I like it that way. These things online are fleeting. Yet these books that I’ve written, two so far, they’re sitting on the bookshelf — chapters of my life set down in print. I wanna create things that last. I wanna live the life of an artist because I believe I am an artist. You are too if you believe it.

Because it’s not just because of the things we create. It’s how we see the world. I see the world as so beautiful. It’s not just the travel experiences that are most beautiful to me.

It’s the magic in the mundane that I adore.

It’s the mundane that I strive to capture and share with the world because I believe that’s what an artist does. They see connections in daily life, stars in this great constellation, that most people overlook.

That is what I love to write about, what I strive to illuminate, because it’s what I’m experiencing — not just once every six months on a big trip, but every day.

“Great writers,” writes Alain de Botton in one of my favorite books, A Therapeutic Journey, “are ultimately simply those who know how to speak with special honesty about the panic and sadness of ordinary life.”

I’ve been going through shit. We all are.

I’ve felt the profound sadness of going through a breakup; I still feel pain in my body that’s hard to understand, pain that brings tears to my eyes, pain that’s made me who I am. There’s such intrinsic beauty in these difficulties, and that, dear reader, is what I hope my stories convey.

Our pain makes us strange and broken and anything but ordinary, imperfect, really. We are all so incredibly imperfect.

I want a simple life where I’m pursuing the things I love. It’s being a teacher in a way, a teacher sharing what it’s like to be a perpetual student of life.

I like making videos, too. Just talking to the cam, unfiltered. It’s like therapy. Try it. Honestly. Turn on a cam and talk, then post it if you like. You might be surprised who it reaches.

I’m gonna lean into making these videos about writing and about my life, even if nobody watches. Because it doesn’t matter if people are reading your stuff or appreciating your art or what you do. You’ll just be happy that you get to create, that you get to express yourself and do the thing that you love.

And I think that’s what so many people are looking for in life. Genuine expression. But we just don’t know that’s what we’re missing.

I’m not making money really from writing books yet, but I get up every day with a fire in my fucking belly, and man, what a feeling that is.

That’s the life I wanna live. Simple. Creative. Passionate. Feeling all the highs and lows and just rolling with it, expressing myself, living life the way I wanna live it.

I really feel that’s the way things are going.

I’m proud that this is the path I’m on, because I haven’t stopped. I haven’t settled. I’ve never stopped searching. I’ve followed the feeling that burns inside — of sheer curiosity and the wonder of creating.

If you’re deciding between two paths: you want to do this, but are expected to do this, or you want to pursue something that doesn’t look “successful” on paper, let me just say, that nothing could ever give you the same satisfaction as pursuing what you know in your bones you’re meant to pursue.

We’ve got one life.

I won’t regret spending it in a way that was inauthentic to who I truly am.

I’m still very much trying to figure all that out, but man, the journey is everything. I don’t know exactly where I’m headed, but I got this project in front of me that brings me so much joy. I am just gonna keep working on it and see where it leads, see where all of it leads.

Put fear aside. Put my ego aside. Put perfectionism aside and just create the goddamn thing. Get it done, get it out, and move on. You don’t need to do everything. Focus on what matters to you. Whittle away the rest, and don’t settle.

The things we create are just diary entries, snapshots of who we are at a certain point in time. They don’t define our lives. But if we’re afraid to put out the work because we think it has to be perfect, then we’re losing who we were at a specific time.

All the work can be is who we were at a certain point in our lives.

I think that’s so cool. I’m gonna get to look back at the end of my life, and if things keep going the way they’re going, have a collection of chapters, each one a book, that shows my growth as a human being.

And god, what a gift to give myself. What a gift you could give yourself, no matter the medium — if you aren’t afraid to try.

I definitely still have fears and roadblocks. That I’m not good enough to be published. I’m not good enough to work for a real magazine. I’ll never actually make a living from this, yada yada.

Facing those fears is the next step in my progression as a writer, putting myself out there and going for it. I believe in the book I’m working on; it’s gonna be pretty special. I really don’t care if anybody else realizes it or understands it. It’s special to me.

I’m excited by this challenge.

I am proud of my ability to hit publish, and face the fear of what people will think, and just get my work out there.

Steve Jobs would say, “Real artists ship.”

To ship is to get the work out of you and into the world.

Ship the work. It doesn’t matter if you don’t ship it.

People need what you have to say.

They need your specific viewpoint.

They need you and what you have to create.

I’ve taken that to heart over the years.

Just fucking get it out.

Who cares? It doesn’t have to be perfect. It can’t be.

There’ll always be more to edit and polish, but at a certain point you just gotta ship it.

And then that makes space for the next thing.

You never know, maybe one day me and Greg will decide to hop back on the Dare to Dream wagon, but for now, we’re saying sayonara (we will be recording one more in-person episode together, so stay tuned).

It might take months, years, decades to figure out what sort of art you’re meant to create. But I am telling you, once you find it, nothing else matters. Life falls into place.

So don’t settle. I believe in you.

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