“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” George Eliot
Something can keep a man exactly where he is for forty years, and it is almost never a lack of desire. It’s a sentence he says about himself so many times he stopped hearing it as a choice. “That’s just who I am.” I heard it said a dozen ways this past weekend, and I’ve said it about myself more times than I want to admit.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe. Every one of us is running an operating system that got installed when we were young, before we had any say in it. It runs our mornings, our marriages, our businesses, most of the decisions we make in a day, and it runs quietly enough that we mistake the programming for our personality. An operating system is not a life sentence. You can pull it out, alter it, and reinstall it. Every time a man reflects and does a little work on himself, he rewrites a line of that code. Do it enough times and the man running the program is no longer the boy who was handed it.
I’ve been sitting with this while I look back at how I built my company. I started it at eighteen with eight hundred dollars and no roadmap, and I loved every hard day of it. What I couldn’t see at the time is that the business was quietly feeding needs that got installed in me long before I ever picked up a squeegee. It gave me certainty, variety, significance, connection, all of it, at a level I’d never had. That isn’t a business story. That’s a man meeting his oldest needs through the thing he built, and having no idea that’s what he was doing.
Here’s what happened this week that drove that idea home for me.
I spent two days at a men’s retreat, about thirty men at every age you can imagine. Real work, real barriers, the better version of ourselves sitting right on the other side of them. And over and over I heard the same resignation dressed up as a fact. “I’m sixty-eight years old.” “I’m just not an organized person.” “It’s just the way it is.” Every one of those men wanted to be different. Not one of them was short on the desire to be different. So what did they think was stopping them?
Themselves, mostly.
They’d confused the program for the person. What I wanted to say to every one of them is this: that’s fair, but is that the man you want to be? Because if it isn’t, you can start today. You can make the small change, take the code out, and put it back in a little different.
One man I worked with was carrying real shame, a handful of addictions he was white-knuckling, and he finally asked the question sitting underneath all of it. How do I fill the hole? I know that hole. For years I filled it with everything I could get my hands on. What I told him is what I’d tell you. It isn’t a massive action that fills it. It’s small promises made to yourself and kept. A morning ritual. A journal. The thing you told yourself you’d do at six, done at six. That’s how a man proves to himself that he’s worth something, and that is the first line of new code.
Men, we don’t get stuck because we stopped wanting more. We get stuck because we decided the install was permanent and quit touching it. It was never permanent. We get a daily reprieve from our addictions, and we get the same reprieve from the man we used to be. Every single day is a new day to reinstall.
This week’s lesson: the person you call “just how I am” is a program you were handed, not a verdict you have to serve.
