The Reclaimed Man · Episode 9

You Buried The Dream Then You Called It Wisdom

This is longer than step 6 on purpose. The Apple and Spotify description is short; the website page is not.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

INTRO

A while back I was having a chat with a mate about his business.

He was telling me his numbers.

I’m not going to tell you what they were, because they don’t matter.

What matters is how he said them.

He wasn’t proud of them.

You could hear that straight away.

There was a number he thought he should have been at, and he wasn’t at it.

But here’s the thing.

He didn’t say that.

What he said was that he’d learnt to be happy with where things were.

That the goals he’d set back at the start were probably unreasonable anyway.

And then something very close to this.

I’ve realised I don’t need those numbers.

Now I want you to sit with that sentence for a second.

Because there is nothing wrong with it.

If you heard a man say that at a barbecue, you’d nod.

You might even admire him for it.

It sounds like a bloke who has worked out what actually matters.

And he meant it.

That’s the part that got me.

He wasn’t putting on a brave face for my benefit.

He believed every word of it.

Here’s the strange part, though.

That one line is about all I can give you.

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since, and I could not tell you how the rest of it went.

Not really.

That’s not me having a bad memory.

That’s the whole point of this episode.

Because the tell was never in the words.

The words were fine.

The words were reasonable, and measured, and wise.

It was in how he said them.

He wasn’t telling me his numbers.

He was explaining them.

And he’d got so good at the explanation that he’d stopped hearing it as one.

I’ve had a version of that conversation with three different men now.

Different lives, different numbers, the same sentence sitting underneath all of it.

And I’ve done it myself.

I’ll get to that.

So that’s what today is about.

Not the dream you lost.

The story you told yourself about why you never needed it.

Here’s how it works.

And it happens in two stages.

Stage one is the story.

Something didn’t go the way you wanted.

The business didn’t get there.

The book didn’t get written.

The body you had at thirty-five never came back.

And you need a reason for that, because a man can’t sit in a result he doesn’t like with no explanation attached to it.

So he builds one.

The market changed.

The timing was wrong.

The kids came along.

The economy.

The council.

The landlord.

And I want to say something about those reasons, because it matters.

Most of them are true.

That’s not the problem.

The problem is what happens next.

Stage two is the bit nobody notices.

The story gets promoted.

It stops being an explanation, and it becomes wisdom.

So it’s no longer I didn’t get there.

It’s I’ve grown past needing to get there.

It’s no longer that didn’t work out.

It’s I understand now what actually matters.

Silly old you.

Chasing all that.

You never needed any of it to be happy.

And that upgrade is the whole trick.

Because a story you can argue with.

A story is a claim about the world, and claims can be tested.

But you can’t argue with wisdom.

Wisdom is protected.

The moment your reason becomes maturity, anyone who questions it is the naive one — and that includes you.

Which is why this is so hard to see from the inside.

You haven’t lied to yourself.

You’ve done something far cleverer than lying.

You’ve taken something true and promoted it until it sits above questioning.

What my mate had done — and I’ve thought about this a lot since — is he’d put another ceiling on himself.

And then painted it a respectable colour.

Now, this is not a new observation.

I want to read you something.

Henry David Thoreau.

Writing in 1854.

Not a coach, not a chiropractor — a bloke living in a hut by a pond, a hundred and seventy years ago.

“What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”

A hundred and seventy years, and that sentence hasn’t needed updating once.

Resignation.

The thing we dress up as maturity.

He saw straight through it.

Desperation that has simply given up making any noise about itself.

Now before I go any further, I need to say something, because I think I know where your head might be going.

I am not about to tell you that your contentment is fake.

Some men genuinely do outgrow a goal.

That happens.

It’s real.

And it’s a good thing when it does.

I am not here to make every settled man listening suspicious of his own peace.

So the question was never whether you let something go.

The question is which kind of letting go it was.

And there’s a way to tell.

But before I give it to you, I have to be honest about something.

I meant what I said a minute ago.

Sometimes a man really has moved past it — he looks at what he was chasing at thirty-two and he honestly does not want it any more.

That isn’t resignation.

That’s growth, and I’ve watched it happen to good men.

So sitting there with my mate, I have to tell you honestly: there is a version of that conversation he could have had with me that would have been completely true.

I know that.

I’m not claiming I can see inside another man.

But I do think there’s a question that gets you close.

Two, actually.

Here’s the first one.

Where did the goal come from?

Now stay with me, because I want to give you a word.

Desire.

It comes from the Latin.

De sidere.

[say: day SID-eh-reh]

From the stars.

I love that, because of what it says about the nature of the thing.

A desire isn’t manufactured.

You don’t sit down on a Tuesday afternoon and decide to want something at the level of your gut.

It arrives.

It comes to you from somewhere outside of you, and it lands.

That’s what I believe.

Our real desires are given to us.

And I want to go further than that, because I don’t want to be vague about what I’m saying here.

I do not believe there is a desire sitting in your gut that you cannot get to.

Not a smaller version of it.

Not a sensible, scaled-back, realistic version of it.

The thing itself.

I don’t care how big it is.

If it is genuinely in there — if it’s the thing that turns up when you’re driving home on your own with the radio off — then it was given to you.

And it was given to you with the capacity to reach it.

Now hear the other half of that, because it matters just as much.

That is not the same as saying you can achieve anything.

I’m fifty-one.

I am not going to play in the NFL.

But notice what’s actually going on there.

I don’t have a desire to play in the NFL.

I never have.

I have never once woken up with that sitting on my chest.

No desire, no capacity.

The two line up.

And that’s the point.

You can achieve anything is a lie.

Every man over forty knows it’s a lie, and that’s exactly why the whole genre of it makes him switch off inside ten seconds.

What I’m telling you is narrower than that.

It’s also a lot more useful.

You can’t achieve anything.

You can achieve the thing that is actually in you.

And here’s why that matters.

Most men have this backwards.

They look at what they let go of and they decide the dream was too big.

Almost always, the dream was the right size.

It was the story about it that was too small.

So the first question is this.

Was it ever yours?

Because a lot of what men are carrying around isn’t.

That revenue number — did you want it?

Or did you think a man in your position ought to have it?

That relationship — did you want it?

Or were you told you should?

And if you go back and look at the thing you let go of, and you find it never came from you — it wasn’t from the stars, wasn’t from the Father, wasn’t from your Creator, whatever language works for you — then letting it go isn’t resignation.

That’s honesty.

That’s a man putting down something he was never meant to be carrying in the first place.

And I’m all for that.

Good on you.

But if it was yours.

If it really did come from somewhere in you.

Then here’s the second question.

And this is the one.

Is the reason I’m stopping that I’m fighting for my strength — or am I fighting for my weakness?

Let me say that again, because it’s the whole episode.

Am I fighting for my strength, or am I fighting for my weakness?

Fighting for the weakness sounds like this.

I can’t do it.

It was never realistic.

It’s too hard.

People wouldn’t approve.

And every one of those might be true.

I’m not calling them lies.

I’m saying they are worth investigating before you accept them, because that is exactly the list a frightened man reaches for.

Fighting for the strength sounds different.

It sounds like this.

That was never mine, and I’m putting it down so I can pick up something that is.

Or sometimes it’s simpler than that.

That’s just not important to me any more.

No trade, no replacement dream, nothing underneath it.

It stopped mattering, and it stopped quietly, and when you go looking there’s genuinely nothing there.

That’s a real answer.

Not everything a man puts down has to be swapped for something else.

One of those is a man choosing.

The other is a man justifying.

Now.

I’ve been sitting here talking about my mate for ten minutes.

Which is comfortable.

It is a great deal easier to talk about his ceiling than it is to talk about mine.

So let me do mine.

For twenty-odd years I have worked in and around the chiropractic profession.

Practice owner.

Coach.

Four hundred and sixty-five episodes of a podcast made for chiropractors.

And somewhere in all of that, I decided something about myself.

I decided that my area of expertise was working with chiropractors.

That’s how I said it, too.

My area of expertise.

Sounds professional, doesn’t it.

Sounds like focus.

Sounds like a man who knows his lane and has the discipline to stay in it — and every business book you have ever read will tell you that is a virtue.

I had put myself underneath an umbrella.

And I would have told you the umbrella was strategy.

It wasn’t strategy.

It was a ceiling.

My mate’s ceiling was called maturity.

Mine was called specialism.

Different paint.

Same ceiling.

Because here’s what was actually going on underneath it.

There was something in me that wanted to take this work beyond the profession.

Not away from it — beyond it.

And it had been sitting there for years.

And I want to be careful about how I say that, because it was never that chiropractic was too small.

That profession has given me everything I’ve got.

It’s where I learned nearly everything I know, and it is still where I do some of my best work.

The limit was never them.

It was the line I had drawn around myself.

The one that said this is the only room you’re qualified to stand in.

I didn’t listen to it.

For all the reasons I just gave you.

It’s not realistic.

Who do you think you are.

That’s not your lane.

People wouldn’t approve.

Every one of them dressed up as good judgement.

You know what changed it?

Cancer.

That’s not a nice sentence and I’m not going to dress it up for you.

I told that story properly in episode one and I’m not telling it again today.

But I will tell you what it did.

It did not give me the desire.

The desire was already there.

It had been there for years.

What it did was make not listening to it impossible.

And I want to be very clear about something, because I do not want you sitting there waiting for a diagnosis to hand you your permission slip.

You don’t need one.

I just wasn’t paying attention until I got one.

Now.

Some of you have been getting quietly annoyed with me for the last few minutes.

Because you did go for it.

You went for it with everything you had, for years, and it did not come off.

I haven’t forgotten you.

You did the work.

You backed yourself.

You put years into it and it did not come off — and now here’s some bloke on a podcast telling you there’s no desire you can’t get to.

I know exactly how that sounds from where you’re sitting.

So let me say three things to you specifically.

The first one is about what going for it actually buys you.

Theodore Roosevelt, Paris, nineteen ten.

Most people know a piece of this speech.

The man in the arena, the face marred by dust and sweat and blood.

But it’s the ending that matters.

“…if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Neither victory nor defeat.

That’s the line I keep coming back to.

Because I am not frightened of failing.

I’ve failed at plenty of things.

What frightens me is the other one — getting to the end and finding out I never actually found out.

Dying with the music still in me.

You went for it and you missed.

Brother, you are in the arena.

You are not the man I’m worried about.

Second thing.

You’re fifty-one, not eighty-one.

I know the sentence running underneath this one, because I’ve had it running underneath me.

I’m at the fucking tail end of my life.

Tail end of what, exactly?

Do the arithmetic on that.

Not the feeling — the arithmetic.

If you’re fifty-one, you have likely got thirty years in front of you, and maybe twenty of them with a body that still does what you tell it.

Frank McCourt taught school in New York for thirty years.

He published his first book at sixty-six and won the Pulitzer Prize for it.

Thirty years of ordinary Tuesdays, and then that.

This is not the time to put the cue in the rack.

There’s a line in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel I’ve never forgotten.

Everything will be all right in the end — and if it’s not all right, it’s not yet the end.

You are not at the end.

Third thing.

This is the useful one, so stay with me, because it’s also the least comfortable.

Going again is not the same as going again the same way.

I’m not going to stand here and tell you to try harder.

Some of you do need to work harder, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, because that would be flattery and you’d smell it on me.

But plenty of you have been working extremely hard, in exactly the same direction, for a very long time.

And there’s one question that sorts those two men apart.

Did you have thirty years of trying that?

Or did you have one year of trying that — and repeat it thirty times?

Because if it’s the second one, the problem was never your effort.

It was never your commitment.

And it was certainly never the size of the dream.

You just kept walking into the same wall and calling it persistence.

So the real question isn’t whether you go again.

It’s what you would do differently if you did.

And to answer that, you have to go back and look at what actually happened.

So let’s put you where you actually are.

You’re fifty-one.

Or fifty-five, or forty-eight.

Near enough.

And somewhere back there is a thing you wanted.

Not a passing fancy — the thing.

The business at the size you first pictured it.

The book.

The move overseas.

The body.

The relationship with your son that you can still remember wanting when he was nine years old.

You let it go somewhere in your thirties, or your early forties.

You had reasons.

They were decent reasons.

And you’ve repeated them often enough now that they’ve set like concrete.

And here you are, with some bloke on a podcast telling you it might still be down there.

So what do you actually do with that?

On a Tuesday.

With a mortgage, and a business, and three people who need you to be the reliable one.

Here’s what you don’t do.

You don’t burn it down.

I’m serious about that.

A man in his fifties gets one flash of clarity and detonates something he can’t rebuild.

That happens.

It happens more than you’d think, and it is not what I’m asking of you.

What I’m asking is much smaller than that.

Go and find out what you’re actually dealing with.

Because right now, you don’t know.

You’ve got a story about it, and that story has been sitting there unexamined for fifteen years.

There are four questions.

Get a pen, because the order matters more than you’d think.

One.

What was it — and was it actually a desire, or something you picked up?

We’ve done this one.

Was it from the stars, or was it from a magazine, or your father, or the bloke you went through uni with who’s doing better than you?

And if the honest answer is that it was never yours — then hear this properly, because it’s the reason I put this question first.

You have my permission to let it go.

I mean that.

Not as a consolation prize, not as second best.

Some of you have been dragging something around for twenty years that was never yours to carry, and quietly flogging yourself the whole way for not getting there.

Put it down.

You’re allowed to.

And stop beating yourself up over a thing you were never meant to want in the first place.

That isn’t giving up.

That is finally telling the truth about whose dream it was.

Then go and find the one that’s actually yours.

Two.

When did you stop — and what actually happened?

Notice I’m not asking why.

Why hands you the story, and the story is the thing we’re investigating.

Why is the suspect.

When and what hands you an event.

The year the numbers went backwards.

The second site that didn’t work.

The one conversation with somebody whose opinion mattered to you more than it should have.

Get the event.

Just the facts of it, the way you’d tell a stranger.

Let me show you the difference, because this is where most men slip straight back into the story without noticing.

The story version sounds like this.

I tried to grow the business, but the market turned, and I’m not a natural salesman anyway — and by then we had two kids under five, so it was never really going to work.

The facts version sounds like this.

In 2011 I opened a second site.

It ran at a loss for fourteen months.

I closed it in March 2013.

That’s it.

No adjectives.

No “because”.

Dates, numbers, and what happened.

And listen to what’s different.

The first version already has the verdict baked into it.

It’s not a description, it’s a closing argument.

The second one contains nothing but what occurred — which is exactly why it’s the only one you can actually examine.

Three.

What did you tell yourself it meant — and were you fighting for the best in you, or justifying a weakness?

Now the story comes out.

And here’s why this had to be third and not first.

Ask a man why he let go and he hands you the polished version before he’s even finished the sentence.

You want it out of his mouth before he knows it’s about to be looked at.

So say it out loud.

Then hold it up next to the event and see whether the two are the same size.

Take our man with the second site.

The event: it ran at a loss for fourteen months and he closed it.

The story he built on top of it: I’m not a multi-site operator.

I’m better hands-on.

I know my strengths now.

Listen to that last part.

I know my strengths now.

That’s the promotion, right there in four words.

Fourteen months of trading have just become a permanent fact about who he is.

Not something that happened to him — something he is.

It’s come off the ledger and gone into his DNA.

And that’s what it costs him.

Because you don’t go back and re-examine your own DNA.

You just live out of it.

So run the test on it.

Is that a man fighting for his strength — or a man making sure he never has to try that again?

Because there is a true version.

I found out I don’t want to spend my life managing managers.

I’d rather go deep than wide.

That’s real.

And if that’s you, good.

You’ve learned something about what you actually want.

But I’m not the sort of bloke who can do that is a completely different sentence.

And only one man alive knows which of those you’re saying.

Four.

Did you have thirty years of trying that — or one year of trying it, thirty times?

And notice the thing our man never did.

He never opened a third site and ran it differently.

One attempt.

One conclusion.

Twelve years.

That’s not thirty years of evidence.

That’s a single data point in a lab coat.

Now, those four questions are all asking one thing.

It’s one question wearing four hats.

Is this thing dead — or did you bury it?

Because they are not the same, and they need completely different things from you.

A dead thing needs grieving, and there’s no shame in that.

Buried is different.

Buried means it’s still down there.

So.

Two moves.

The first is that you change the story.

Be careful how you do this, because most men get it wrong and then decide the whole thing doesn’t work.

Do not stand in your kitchen tomorrow morning and announce that you’re going to hit the number.

You won’t believe yourself.

You’ve got twenty years of evidence stacked against it and your own head will laugh at you.

You need a bridge, not a leap.

The bridge sounds like this.

I’m open to the idea that I stopped too early.

That’s it.

That’s the whole sentence.

It’s small enough to actually say, which is exactly why it works.

You’re not claiming anything.

You’re leaving a door open that’s been shut for fifteen years.

And go gently, because you will slip back into the old story.

Of course you will.

It’s had decades of practice and you’ve had about a week.

The second move is that you take an action.

One.

This week.

Not a plan.

Not a strategy day.

Not a folder on your laptop called New Direction.

An action that costs you something and can’t be quietly undone by Thursday.

Make the call.

Send the email.

Book the thing.

Tell one person out loud what you’re doing, so that it exists somewhere outside your own head.

Small and real beats big and theoretical.

Every time.

One warning, because you’ll hit this the moment you move.

The people around you will have opinions, and some of them will tell you it isn’t realistic.

And some of those people love you.

It’ll be coming from care, which makes it much harder to hear for what it is.

But understand what’s happening there.

You are not the only man who has built himself a ceiling.

When you start pushing on yours, you make every man standing near you aware of his.

Not all of them will thank you for it.

I’ll tell you where I am with all this, because I’m not standing on the far side of it looking back.

I’m in the middle of it.

Fifty-one, in the hardest health fight I’ve had, with a desire I ignored for years and can’t ignore any more.

And there is plenty of noise around me about what’s realistic.

I haven’t finished this.

I’m doing it while I’m telling you about it.

So here’s my question for you this week.

What have you been calling wisdom — that’s actually just a ceiling?

Sit with that one.

Don’t answer it quickly, and don’t answer it out loud to anyone yet.

Because the thing you’re looking for isn’t something you have to go away and build.

It was yours.

You put it down.

This was always more about remembering than becoming.

I’ll see you next week.