Fifteen Years Later

I ran across something I wrote in 2011 about Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. The idea that stuck with me then was simple: a character doesn’t change unless they go through hard times and conflict. Without it, the character stays one-dimensional.

I used Braveheart as my example. I’ve always loved that story. Scotland wouldn’t have won their freedom if William Wallace hadn’t gone through the pain of losing his wife. Her death changed the direction of his life.

Some things don’t change. I still reach for Braveheart every time I need to make a point about story.

But here’s what hit me rereading my own words from fifteen years ago.

My wife said something in that post that I quoted at the time: “Life never does quite work out the way we have planned, does it? So why do we wait for it to? We expect to live a neat and tidy life, but we both know it isn’t going to happen.”

That was 2011. She was right then. She’s still right now. Our lives have been anything but neat and tidy. Cancer — twice. Over five years of trying to have our son. Losing people we love. Career changes. Cross-country moves. None of it followed the timeline we set.

In 2011, I ended that post by saying we were “in pursuit of life.” That we were choosing to write a better story. That we didn’t have everything figured out but we didn’t have to.

Here’s what’s different fifteen years later: I actually did it.

Not right away. I spent another decade filling notebooks and making plans I didn’t follow through on. I had the knowledge. I had the books on the shelf. What I didn’t have was a system to turn intention into execution.

On January 1, 2026, I built the system first. A daily blog that forces me to process what I’m learning. A published novel that proved the dreams in those notebooks were real. Eighty-five days in a row of showing up.

The 2011 version of me knew the right words. The 2026 version of me is living them.

Donald Miller wrote that you have to go pursue life — that it won’t come to you. He hiked the Inca Trail. He biked across America. He started a mentoring project. He couldn’t sit and wait.

I didn’t hike a trail or bike across the country. I sat down at a desk with a cup of coffee and started asking better questions. And that turned out to be enough.

My bride said it best fifteen years ago and she’s still right: life isn’t going to be neat and tidy. The story wouldn’t be worth reading if it were.