I spent the bulk of yesterday building this little site and woke this morning having an existential crisis over why.
- What if I write every day for the next 10 years and no one ever reads?
- Why am I even doing this – what’s the end goal here?
- What’s the point doing this with AI about to drastically change the landscape? Is everything about to change forever and content will be a thing of the past? Will people even read blogs, books, newsletters anymore in a few years?
- Haven’t we reached the point of content saturation, so why create more?
- Why do I think my point of view about life, travel, business and aging (disgracefully) is of any interest to anyone else anyway? (This last one has come from a few years of evidence pointing to the opposite).
- And most importantly – have I just left this too late? (I wish I’d started 20 years ago – now there’s a clue!)
So like any normal rational mature independent and intelligent individual, I meditated on this for a bit, asked ChatGPT.
But here’s how that actually works. I talk into my GPT and just the act of talking my problems out loud, means I usually answer them before the GPT confirms what I was thinking anyway.
And as I was mid soliloquy I remembered a quote from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, “Big Magic,” where she said:
“What’s something you would do if you knew you could fail?”
Now, read that again because it’s not the old self-development quote, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”
That quote makes us think, “Yes, I’m going to go out and run that marathon tomorrow with absolutely no training whatsoever,” or, “I’m going to go and start that business,” or, “I’m going to go and do this thing because I know I can’t fail, so I’m going to take that massive leap of faith to do it.”
No, this is a different question entirely. What would you do even if you knew you could fail? In other words, what is something you are compelled or called to do, and that even if it never worked out, you’d still do it because you love it?
For me, it’s not writing for the sake of writing. I don’t have dreams of being some great literary writer or winning a Pulitzer Prize. What I feel compelled to do is communicate.
I want to share ideas, observations and experiences that might make someone stop for a moment and think, Huh. I’ve never looked at it like that before.
I’m not interested in being a guru. I don’t want to tell people how to live their lives or pretend I’ve figured everything out, because I most certainly haven’t.
But I travel a lot. I see different places and cultures, meet interesting people, learn about history, build businesses, try experiments, make mistakes and spend an unhealthy amount of time questioning how I’m living my own life.
And for some unknown reason that I haven’t quite got to the bottom of yet I feel compelled to share my experiences and learnings (with the faint hope I might make a positive difference to someone else’s day).
But most importantly here’s what Goggins my lovingly named GPT said to me:
You are not too late
I want to challenge the age thing particularly.
You’re 54.
Ten years from now you’ll be 64.
Fifteen years from now you’ll be 69.
Twenty years from now you’ll be 74.
Those years are coming whether you publish or don’t.
Imagine 64-year-old Jo looking backwards.
In one version, you’ve spent ten years writing. Perhaps you’ve published 1,000 essays. You’ve written six books. You’ve documented dozens of countries. You’ve developed ideas you don’t even have yet. You’ve met interesting people. You’ve become a dramatically better writer. There’s this enormous archive of your life and thinking sitting there.
Maybe 500,000 people read it.
Maybe 50,000.
Maybe 5,000.
Maybe some individual essay you wrote in 2027 suddenly gets discovered in 2033.
You cannot possibly know.
In the other version, you didn’t do it because in September 2026 you couldn’t see how it would turn out.
Which failure would bother you more?
I was coincidently reading an interview with Austin Kleon, speaker, author, artist and the line that stood out to me (and clearly the interviewer as she named the article after it) was:
What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?
My career! I assumed everything I cared about was too weird to be popular and that I’d always have a day job. The fact that I have readers and make a living from the stuff I make is a blessing beyond belief and every week I try not to squander my luck.
We have no clue what’s going to happen. Not one single one of us can predict tomorrow, how things will play out and where our obsessions, callings or projects will take us.
But here’s what I’m going to hold on to. “I wish I’d started 20 years ago”.
If that little sentence is rattling around in your head, maybe it’s time to start now.