stop chasing

somebody i orange pilled years ago asked me how the business is going, and i answered with something i had not planned to say.

three years ago she and i used to talk about mornings. waking before anyone needs anything. training. sitting still. writing it down. she remembered those conversations word for word. i had half forgotten them, the way you forget a road you drive every day.

and what came out of my mouth was that all of this, the calendar packed twelve hours deep, the shows, the machine behind them, is downstream of one decision. i got tired of chasing.

chasing money. chasing partners. chasing customers. chasing investors. it is exhausting, and it does not work, and the reason it does not work is that need has a smell and people detect it from across a room. you have felt it from the other side. somebody walks in wanting something from you and every word after that gets discounted.

so i tried the other thing. stop chasing, start attracting.

here is the first principles version, because i do not trust anything i cannot reason about. thinking about bitcoin does not get me more bitcoin. the only way i get more of it is to become worth more to other people. the only way i become worth more is to become somebody worth more, and that happens in the hours before the day starts pulling at me. wake early. move the body. get quiet. write it down. feel the thing you say you want as though it already arrived, until the body believes it.

then walk into the day as the person who has it, rather than the one who needs it.

i know exactly how that reads sitting next to a pipeline review. it is not soft. i have lost deals over twenty years for plenty of reasons, and some of them, i can admit now, i lost because i needed them and the person across the table could tell. nothing in the deck fixes that. it was never a messaging problem.

the strange part is that the calendar filled up after i stopped trying to fill it. i do not think there is anything mystical in that. a person who is not grasping asks better questions, listens longer, and is more enjoyable to spend an hour with, and those three things are the entire job.

what would you stop chasing today, if you decided you had already become the person who has it?