football was my sport. I was good at it the way some kids are just good at a thing, without earning it. never the biggest, never the strongest, but at my position I was always the most skilled in the room, and skill covers a lot when you’re young. it covers so much that you never notice what you’re not buildi…

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here’s the part that should probably disqualify me from answering. I’m still in the boat. I haven’t gotten out. I’m writing this from the same water everyone’s asking me to describe, and I think that’s exactly why it’s worth saying out loud.

the job is fine. that’s the problem.

nothing’s wrong enough to force my hand. there’s no villain, no blowup, no morning I wake up and can’t go back. just a steady, reasonable thing that quietly asks for the years I wanted to spend on something else, and asks so politely that I keep saying yes. the bad jobs do you a favor. they make leaving obvious. they push so hard you have no choice but to move. the fine ones are more dangerous. they let you stay. they let you stay for a decade, comfortable the whole way, until one day you look up and the life you meant to build is still sitting where you left it, untouched, waiting on a version of you that kept getting postponed.

I don’t want to be that guy. so I stopped waiting for the door to push.

most people carry one enormous dream and no idea where to put their hands on it. they can see the whole thing. the finished version, the life, the work that’s actually theirs. and the size of it puts them flat on the floor. they call this being realistic. they call it not being ready yet. but I’ve come to believe overwhelm is rarely the honest reaction it pretends to be. most of the time it’s a strategy fear uses to make sure nothing ever starts. you stare at the mountain long enough that staring itself starts to feel like effort. it isn’t. it’s the most comfortable way to do nothing ever invented.

the way out of that, for me, has been almost embarrassingly small.

first thing every morning, before the day fills up with everyone else’s priorities, before email and obligation and the hundred reasons it’s not the right time, I take one action pointed at the life I want. one. not the plan. not the strategy. not the whole map. a single bite out of the thing.

it looks like this. teeth, water, shoes, and out the door. and while I walk, I open the notes app on my phone and dump whatever’s in me toward the work. an idea, a line, a half-formed thought I’ll use later or won’t. sometimes it’s paper and a pencil instead. the point isn’t the tool. the point is that I’ve stacked three things I’d do anyway, moving my body, getting the morning light, putting words down, into the first ten minutes of the day, before the day has a chance to talk me out of any of them. by the time the job wants me, I’ve already spent my best, clearest attention on what’s mine.

and if you don’t even know what your thing is yet, the move is the same. the brainstorming is the bite. you don’t need to know the destination to start walking toward something. you just need to stop standing still long enough to feel which direction pulls.

none of this is impressive. it’s not supposed to be. the impressive version, the bold leap, the dramatic exit, the overnight reinvention, is a fantasy that lives in your head and dies there, because it’s too big to ever actually begin. the small version is the only one that’s real, because you can do it. today. and then again tomorrow. and the days stack whether you believe in them or not.

I don’t have the ending where I tell you I made it out. I’m not there. I’m still in the boat, still doing the fine job, still describing the water from inside it. what I can tell you is that I’ve stopped letting the size of the thing be my excuse for doing none of it. and that small shift, taking one honest bite every morning before anything else gets a vote, has done more than any plan I ever wrote and didn’t follow.

one bite. every morning. before the boat gets a vote.

—jo

I was standing in my kitchen. december, 2024. leaning over the counter with my phone in my hand, doing the thing I’d done for years, which was thinking about posting instead of posting. and some quiet question finally cut through. what am I so scared of.

that was it. that was the whole turn. I decided I was going to start and post every day and not stop. not because I had a strategy but because I was tired of being someone who wanted to and didn’t.

here’s the thing I have to admit up front. I was always drawn to this. as a kid I watched hours of youtube, and what fascinated me wasn’t the games or the videos themselves, it was the people. ordinary people making things they cared about and putting them into the world, and somehow that was a life. I started channels myself. gaming, sports, skateboarding. whatever I was obsessed with that month got a channel. I never stuck with any of them.

I look back now and feel the pull of that. who knows where I’d be if I’d kept going at twelve, at fifteen, at twenty. but I’ve stopped letting that be a sad story. the kid who kept starting channels was the same kid standing in that kitchen. he just finally stopped quitting.

so I posted. and for a long time I posted to no one. it took months. I put things into the void and the void said nothing back. five likes felt like a holiday.

then I found my people. a group on X, a bunch of guys from every corner of the world who ran and lifted and all carried the same slightly unhinged obsessiveness I did. we called ourselves The Pit. nobody big. we just showed up under each other’s posts, every day, without fail. ten likes. a hundred impressions. it doesn’t sound like anything, yet it was everything. it was the difference between shouting into a room and finding out the room had a few people in it who shouted back.

and from there it grew. slowly. unglamorously.

so here’s the advice, the one I give every single time someone asks. post. that’s it. it almost doesn’t matter what you make or what you’re aiming at. building something in public and putting yourself into the world is one of the highest return things you can do right now, and almost no one will actually do it, because it asks you to be bad in front of people first.

I know there are a million versions of this advice floating around. I’m adding one more anyway, because the people in my dms asking how to start are usually one kitchen counter moment away from starting, and they’re spending that energy looking for permission instead. there’s no permission coming. there’s just the decision to stop waiting.

posting will put you in rooms you had no business being in. you’ll meet people you’d never have met. opportunities show up that you couldn’t have planned for, because you can’t plan for a door you didn’t know existed. maybe a job. maybe your people, like I found mine. you genuinely cannot predict what it opens, which is exactly the point.

the downside is almost nothing. you might be embarrassed. you might post to no one for a while, like I did. weigh that against everything on the other side and tell me it isn’t the easiest bet you’ll ever make.

pick the thing. start. and then, whatever you do, don’t be the version of me that quit at twelve.

post. and don’t stop.

—jo

I kept finding reasons to wait.

the real one underneath them all was that I didn’t feel worthy of it. who am I to send anyone a letter every week? I have a mind, and some things that have happened to me, and a particular way of seeing them. for a long time that felt too thin to build on. I figured someone would eventually point at me and say it out loud.

then I got tired of waiting for a permission that was never going to come.

there’s no committee or a certificate that arrives in the mail that allows you to do the thing. there’s no event or thing that finally gives you permission. people I admire started while they still felt like frauds and let the work answer the question. this is something I often write about. so why not take my own advice?

what you’ll get here is how I actually think. the way I see things, the stuff I’m working through, the experiences I’ve lived. I’m going to show you my thinking while it’s still moving, before I’ve cleaned it up. X gets the finished lines while this gets the rest of it. the doubt, the process, and the parts I’m still working through.

the relentless pursuit is the name because it’s the truest thing I know about myself. I’m chasing my own potential, out loud, with no arrival in sight. this is a place I hope to document that process. that pursuit.

I don’t know exactly what this becomes. I’m doing it in public so we both find out.

I’m excited you’re here.

—jo

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