An Open Thank You Letter to Tim Ferriss (et al.)
Tim,
I’m sure you get a lot of fan mail, but…just. Wow.
I offer my preemptive apologies for the effusiveness of what I’m about to write—but I’m bleeding at the typewriter1. I still haven’t taken my boots off after a grueling fourteen-hour workday2, but this can’t wait. I don’t have a choice. This letter has been writing itself in my head for the past hour and a half, to the point that this now feels as effortless and necessary and visceral as a sneeze or a really good shit you’ve been holding in for awhile. This is the first time in over two years that I’ve done a lick of introspective writing, and I sincerely contemplated pulling my car over on Texas State Highway 71 a few minutes ago to pen this. If there hadn’t been a dog in my apartment desperately waiting for a walk upon my return, I think I actually would have stopped.
I’m confident I will count my drive back from the job site in Houston earlier tonight amongst the most transformative moments of my life. One of my dearest friends calls them “lightning flash” moments—profoundly formative instants in your life that crystallize into enduring memories woven tightly into the fabric of your very being, and of which you are really only capable of experiencing precious few in an entire lifetime. I’m confident I have just experienced one of my own. I finally feel as though I’ve made amends with my irrational yet enduring belief that I can achieve anything that any other human being is or has ever been or will ever be capable of achieving—even capable of believing that this belief is, in fact, not irrational at all. Despite my usual incessant, negative self-talk and nagging doubts, I’m on top of the world right now; I’m on cloud nine. I feel like self-actualization3 is within my grasp. And all this because of your little podcast4.
I was ambitious—maybe even to an unhealthy degree—from a very young age. When I was in kindergarten, if asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered—without hesitation—“a rocket scientist”. Shortly thereafter, it was “architect,” and for awhile I even managed to settle on “roboticist.” I obsessed over grades, and even more so over my reclusive extracurricular dabblings in electrical engineering and computer programming. Some nights, I’d stay up writing code until I heard my dad getting up to get ready for work, and then quickly sneak off to bed hoping he hadn’t realized I was still awake. My favorite gift was the drill press he bought me for my sixteenth birthday—and that I stayed up assembling until past 2:00am on a school night. I used it to build little Bluetooth-enabled robots and a test stand for my home-brewed solid rocket engines, earning me the endearing nickname “professor” from my father.
Somehow, though, after making it through an undergraduate degree and the first years of my professional life, I seemed to have lost that fire. Drifting into my mid-twenties, I couldn’t forgive myself for not living up to my own unrealistic expectations of success, all the while wallowing in self-pity as I read about yet another twelve-year-old founder of some trillion-dollar startup that I wished I had founded. Ironically, my failure to reach my goals had eroded the very motivations required to achieve them—likely owing, in large part, to the seemingly sisyphean slog of attempting to simultaneously grow two vastly different startups5 from scratch over the past few years. Despite my passion for the missions each of my businesses represents, it’s been a grind, and lately I’ve felt utterly beaten by it—like I’ve bitten off far more than I can chew. There have been victories here and there, sure—but most have felt minor in comparison to the cumulative time and effort expended to achieve them.
And then there, while sitting in rush hour traffic on the outskirts of Houston—deleriously tired and with bleary eyes after a long day of installing energy monitoring equipment at a hospital—I decided to listen to the second episode of your podcast4 to try and keep myself awake for the long drive back to Austin. Some of my favorite personal mantras over the years have included “always be a student” and “you have something to learn from everyone.” In the same vein, I’m also deeply passionate about self-improvement. So, naturally, it was “clicking” for me right away. It began innocently enough, but there was something special about this specific dialog between two world-class learners that soon resonated in me with a fervor that is nigh impossible to portray with words, despite these meager efforts, that nearly instantly dislodged the long-atrophied ambition from the strangleholds of my subconscious. In a matter of seconds, it flipped some sort of switch in my psyche. Maybe it’s best to describe it as the feeling you might experience if you ever managed to meet two kindred spirits—at the same time. I was so enchanted that I frequently had to hit pause or even rewind, sometimes in rapid succession, because my mind was racing so fast I could no longer devote any attention to what I was hearing. It was as if my mind had gotten lost in the whir and the vastness of its own freshly-reawakened potential. I felt like I’d just woken up from the Matrix or something.
At the end of it, I sat in the driver’s seat in a silent, exhausted stupor, barreling on into the Texas night and feeling as if I’d just been given a gift of immense value that shouldn’t possibly be free. I literally thought to myself, ”I should have paid money for this.“ The value of this free little podcast4 for me, for whatever reason, was that good.
I guess there hasn’t really been a definitive point to all this rambling so far, other than to express my gratitude for those—specifically, you and Josh, in this instance—who have freely lent their inspiration to myself and others and to serve as somewhat of an exposé of the resurgence of the human spirit that fills me. If it can succeed in inspiring in one other human even a glimmer of what’s burning in my spirit right now—or if you actually read it—then it has more than served its intended purpose.
So, here I am, somehow freed of my burdens—if only temporarily—by a most unexpected fit of mania, wanting to start meditating, to write again, to improve my morning routine, to put the love back into what I do every day and a million other things to achieve my grand vision of being the change I want to see in the world6. I am confident in my resolve and eager to test my mettle. I can’t wait to get up in the morning and kick ass.
In closing, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for doing what you do—for sharing your art. Here is a piece of mine; this is my blood.
Sincerely,
Brian
Footnotes #
1. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway
2. So much for the ”4-Hour Work Week.“
3. "Maslow describes [self-actualization] as the desire to accomplish everything that one can, to become the most that one can be.” — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs#Self-actualization
4. The Tim Ferriss Show Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin
5. By day, I am cofounder and CTO of Bractlet, maker of a hardware/software solution for commercial energy efficiency. By early morning and weekend, I am also “co-Groover” and CTO of Groove, maker of an iPhone app by the same name that assists women in naturally conceiving, avoiding pregnancy, or tracking their cycles.
6. “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” — Mahatma Gandhi