I became very good at being unhappy.
Not unhappy in the sense that I spent every day moping around feeling sorry for myself. Quite the opposite. I became remarkably good at taking almost any unpleasant internal state and finding something useful to do with it.
Angry? Lift weights.
Excessive thoughts? Run the energy off while you process them.
Feel thick? Write up a full textbook chapter.
Every negative emotion, instead of beating me down, beat a path forward. If I were going to fall, I would fall forward. I gained an immense capacity to take the hits and keep moving. My anxiety stopped me standing still. Stress made me move faster. Rage gave me another rep. Even apathy could be put to work if I found the right job for it. The itchy feeling of unresolved tasks got more tasks resolved.
No emotion put to waste.
Understandably, this worked.
By 22 I had finished my second university course, was working as a marketing executive in international fitness media, was already an experienced boxing coach and personal trainer, had bought a house and was renovating it, and had run businesses across six domains. I had been a head chef, done triathlon, moved from 65kg running to 72kg boxing to 93kg weightlifting, and generally treated life as a very long list of things to become competent at.
At 23 I brought Union Jab back. At 25 I completed a master's degree. By 26 I had achieved essentially everything on my lifelong to-do list except a PhD and a pilot's licence.
I had, importantly, already become forklift certified.
I am not listing this because I think it makes me exceptional. Plenty of people have achieved considerably more. The point is that the system worked. Whatever was going on internally, I had found an extremely effective means of transmuting it into something outwardly respectable.
The problem was that the source of all this output was not especially pleasant to live inside.
I perhaps wasn't as aware of the fuelling then as I am now. Hindsight is of course 20/20, although I did know that I wasn't happy.
Knowing and doing are not interchangeable.
I knew that having wasn't equal to achieving, but I had still built a life around the assumption that if I accumulated enough of the things I wanted, I would eventually arrive somewhere that felt different.
At 25 or 26 I looked at my want list and realised that I already had the campervan. I had kayaks. I had pedal bikes. I had enough control over my diary to use them whenever I wanted.
And I wasn't really enjoying them.
I wasn't enjoying much, when I thought about it.
That was an odd discovery because I had spent years becoming very good at acquiring the exact life I had once imagined. I had mistaken having the thing for the joy I expected the thing to provide.
So what do you do?
Well, you find something else to chase, of course.
This was the second mistake.
If having the thing did not provide the feeling I expected, perhaps the enjoyment was in the chase. This is a much more sophisticated idea and was, annoyingly, still not quite right.
The chase certainly provides something. Direction. Intensity. Structure. Progress. A reason to wake up with a list and attack it. It gave the uncomfortable emotions somewhere to go and turned them into evidence that I was moving forward.
But with my ongoing work with clients and all the people I had helped, I finally recognised in myself something I had been helping other people overcome for years: my actions, values, priorities and presence were not aligned.
Worse, because I was successful by most of the means and measures I had assigned myself, I couldn't understand why I wasn't fulfilled.
The problem was no longer that I had failed to get what I wanted.
The problem was that I had.
And, over time, the source began to dry up.
I became less angry. Less rageful. Less anxious. Less permanently stressed. I became calmer, more present, more socially connected, and increasingly responsible to people other than myself.
All objectively good things.
Yet something strange happened alongside them.
I lost my power.
Or, at least, what I had always understood power to be.
I cannot work fifteen hours a day like I used to. I can't work seven days a week indefinitely. The idea of pulling an all-nighter now makes me feel physically sick. I view high-intensity sprint sessions in much the same way other people seem to: something worth doing for the outcome and the challenge, not an exciting opportunity to push myself towards vomiting and see how much discomfort I can tolerate.
Put simply, I am no longer that guy.
For a while, that felt uncomfortably like decline.
There is a strange problem in becoming healthier if part of your identity was built around how much damage you could absorb.
If you have spent years admiring your capacity to work longer, tolerate more, recover from the hit, turn anger into output and anxiety into motion, then peace can initially look suspiciously like softness.
You do less.
You stop volunteering for unnecessary suffering.
You discover limits which, previously, you would have regarded as personal insults.
And from the perspective of raw output, perhaps peace really can make you less productive.
But that depends entirely on what we mean by productive.
Was I more powerful because I could work until 2am and start again at 5am the next morning, or was I simply more willing to expend myself?
Was the ability to convert rage into another personal best evidence of strength, or evidence that I required rage to perform?
Was filling every unoccupied space with another task an extraordinary work ethic, or an inability to be still without feeling that something was wrong?
Probably, annoyingly, some of both.
This is the part I think I missed for a long time.
The opposite of the old way is not to become passive, unambitious, or content.
I still want things. A frankly unreasonable number of things, if my other writing is any indication.
The difference is that I am learning to reconsider the means of attainment.
The first mistake was thinking I would feel joy once I had the thing.
The second was deciding that joy must therefore live in the chase.
I now think both place the feeling in the wrong location.
The pursuit itself has to contain some life worth experiencing.
It is not enough to spend five years miserable because the destination is supposedly meaningful. Nor is it particularly clever to become addicted to wanting things purely because wanting gives you something to do.
The joy wasn’t in attaining the thing, nor a result of pursuing the thing, but perhaps joy should be the thing to be pursued, and to be experienced during the pursuit itself.
I said to a client not too long ago, while discussing the concept of presence, that “the journey is the destination, and to be present on the path is to have arrived.”
This is hardly an original philosophical discovery. Humans have been saying versions of it for thousands of years, presumably because we keep forgetting.
I certainly did.
For most of my life, peace existed somewhere beyond completion.
Once the business worked.
Once the degree was finished.
Once I was fitter.
Once the house was done.
Once the next problem had been resolved.
Peace was the reward at the end of the work.
The problem with that arrangement is that work has a remarkable capacity to reproduce.
I am therefore becoming a beginner again.
Not in ambition, work, training or any of the things I know reasonably well, but in the much less familiar practice of allowing peace, presence and enjoyment to exist before everything else has been completed.
I am learning to notice the water as it flows, as I witness the flow within myself. To enjoy having the bike rather than needing another reason to improve it. To sit with people without half my mind arranging the next task. To let a good day be good without requiring it to also be productive.
I am not particularly advanced at any of this.
The old system had decades of practice and plenty of proof.
But I no longer think peace is the state I will finally earn once I have become sufficiently successful, organised, fit, knowledgeable or useful.
Presence, peace and calm are the foundation, not the goal.
I can still chase.
I probably always will.
I just don't want to require anger, anxiety, stress or dissatisfaction to make me move anymore.
Perhaps I have become less productive.
Or perhaps I am simply learning that the point of having power was never to prove how much of myself I could burn to produce it.
