“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have it.”
Thomas Jefferson
Most men want a good return on the life they’re pouring themselves into. And most of us go looking for it in the wrong place. We wait on a break. We wait on the right timing, the right room, the right person to finally notice. We treat the good things like a lottery, like they land on the lucky and skip the rest of us for reasons we can’t control. I lived that way for a long time. What I’ve come to believe is closer to what Jefferson was getting at. The returns grow for the man who works the ground. Luck isn’t a number that hits. It’s a harvest, and it goes to whoever kept showing up to work the field when no one was watching.
I got a small reminder of that this week. It was my first full week home after ten days away, and before I left I’d set something up on purpose. I filled the week with men who’d reached out to me over the last few months, and I walked into every one of those meetings with no agenda and nothing I wanted out of them. Five in the morning at the gym, one man at seven, another at eight thirty, another at noon, all week long. I wasn’t working an angle. I was there to connect and to give whatever I had to give. And here’s what I didn’t see coming. Those conversations put life back into corners of my own world that had gone quiet while I was gone. I worked ground with no guarantee it would produce anything, and it produced everywhere. That’s the part most men never test. When you put in the work without demanding the harvest on your schedule, things grow that you could never have planted on purpose.
The first ground I ever had to face was my own, and it was a wreck. I got sober at twenty-two. It started with months of waking up to decisions I wasn’t proud of, and it came to a head the night I got drunk and told the woman I was with something I’d forgotten she didn’t already know. That ended it. My sister and her husband sat me down after and said the thing no one had said to my face: you have a problem with alcohol. I didn’t believe them. I figured I needed a pill for some imbalance, not twenty-eight days in a treatment center. Here’s what I understand now that I couldn’t then. I had stopped growing the day I found my exit. The drinking wasn’t just a habit. It was arrested development. Every time I felt something hard, I knew a way out of the feeling, so I never had to grow through it. A boy’s insides walking around in a man’s life.
Walking out of that place was the scary part, not walking in. Inside, your choices get made for you. Then all at once every bit of that freedom is back in your hands, and you’re standing in a field you let go to seed with no idea how to work it. And the thing I was most afraid of turned out to be nothing. I was terrified people would find out I was an alcoholic. Most of them already knew. Some had known for years. The ground was already what it was. All that was left was to stop pretending and start working it.
Men, you can’t skip the season. The returns you want, in your business, your marriage, your own head, grow for the man who works the ground every day without a guarantee, and they rot for the man who keeps waiting on a break. The work is the whole thing. Jefferson called what it produces luck. It isn’t luck. It’s what grows when you keep showing up.
This week’s lesson: quitting the thing that’s hurting you is not the same as growing past it, and only one of those actually changes the man.
