I’ve read a lot of self-help books.
Dave Ramsey taught me to handle money. Dan Miller, who wrote 48 Days to the Work You Love before he passed, helped me see that passion and entrepreneurship could coexist. Seth Godin has been pushing me to think differently for over a decade. Donald Miller taught me that a good story requires a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.
Good books. Solid principles. Useful frameworks.
So why did I spend twenty years feeling like something was still missing?
Here’s what I wanted: a map. Turn left here. Climb this. Cross this bridge. Here’s the destination, and here’s exactly how to get there.
Every book felt like it was handing me someone else’s map. I’d follow it for a while. I’d feel that surge, this is it, this is the one that works, and somewhere around week three or four, I’d realize I was lost again. The map didn’t fit my terrain.
Put the book down. File it under “good, but not for me.” Pick up the next one.
Repeat for two decades.
The Notebooks
Not long ago I did something I’d been avoiding for years. I went through every notebook, journal, legal pad, and scrap of paper I’d accumulated over twenty years, and I read what was in them. All of it. In one sitting.
I didn’t like what I found.
The same goals, year after year. Lose weight. Write a novel. Build something. Help people. Younger handwriting, then older, but the entries read the same. Not similar. The same. As if I’d never made a single step of progress on any of them.
Here’s what bothered me: I had. I’d lost weight and kept some of it off. I’d written. I’d built things. I’d helped people. But none of that showed up on the page. Every time I sat down with a new book and a fresh notebook, I wrote the goal like I was standing at the trailhead for the first time.
I’d been restarting. Every new map sent me back to the beginning of someone else’s route, and I never once stopped to mark where I already stood on mine.
I’ve spent nearly twenty years in data management, helping organizations make sense of their information. Nobody handed me a map for that either. Early on I was a governance specialist working on projects that mattered but weren’t high-profile enough to get noticed. There was no flowchart that said “do these six things and get promoted in eighteen months.” But when a bigger project came along, I recognized it, grabbed it with both hands, and by the time it was over I’d moved from specialist to analyst to advisor. That took the better part of nine years.
Looking back, there was no map. There was a set of principles I was already living by: Solve the problem in front of you. Own the outcome. Show up consistently. Build trust through character, not credentials.
I’d just never translated those principles to the goals in my notebooks.
Nobody else has your combination of experiences, gifts, wounds, and choices. Nobody else has had your marriage, raised your kids, sat in your cubicle, or carries your particular blend of dreams and doubts. Nobody’s been where you’re going, so nobody has the map.
And here’s the test for anyone who claims otherwise. The honest teacher hands you a compass and tells you it’s a compass. The grifter hands you a map and promises it’s your terrain. I’ve bought both. Only one of them was ever telling the truth.
What Survived
I’ve tried a lot of systems. Forty-day challenges, habit stacks, sprints. Some of them helped for a season. None of them were the map either. What survived every system was the small set of things I keep coming back to: time in Scripture and prayer, moving my body, creative work, and gratitude.
That’s not a map. It’s what I pack. Those four things don’t tell me where I’m going. They keep me pointed somewhere true and keep me moving. The path shows up as I walk it.
Paul wrote to the church at Philippi, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” He didn’t stop there. The next line is “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” We work hard as God works in us. The principles are universal; the path is individual. That’s true in faith. It’s true in work. It’s true in any real change.
The mentors who crossed similar wilderness gave me enough to start cutting my own trail. None of them walked through mine. Nobody’s walking through yours either.
What Twenty Years of “Not Yet” Built
Two cancer battles.
Corporate environments that tested everything I had. A marriage that’s still thriving after 27 years. And now, finally, more finished work in a year than in the previous ten.
What felt like delay was foundation. Character. Work ethic. Know-how built across a lot of different rooms.
Godin wrote a small book called The Dip about the long, unglamorous middle where most people quit, and about knowing which dips are worth staying in. Twenty years ago I wasn’t ready to hear that.
What I have is a compass, a handful of habits, and a God who’s been working in me and making a way for me the whole time.
Still cutting trail.
