Creativity

In 1984, a scientist named Jean-Pierre Petit proposed something strange: what if there were two overlapping worlds—ours and a mirror version of it? A universe layered on top of our own, invisible but just as present.

The idea was mostly ignored. Too weird, too sci-fi. But what if he was onto something? Not necessarily about physics—but about life?

Maybe Petit’s idea describes our lives more than we think.

Because most of what shapes us—and what holds us back—isn’t tangible. It’s internal architecture—rules, beliefs, expectations—built over the years. It can feel like we’re trapped.

We move through this internal world without realizing it, adjusting ourselves to unspoken rules, to barriers no one can see but everyone seems to obey. These are the invisible walls.

Sometimes we run into them. Other times, we build them ourselves. Often, we contort around them, not knowing we could walk straight through.

But here’s the hard part: breaking through these internal barriers doesn’t always feel like progress. It can feel like doubt. Like loss. Like wasted effort. Like nothing at all.

But what if that’s because the barriers don’t actually exist?

It never feels like it’s working…until it is

In 1936, in what’s often called one of the most mentally and physically grueling sports on the planet, the University of Washington crew members Joe Rantz, Roger Morris, and George Hunt led their team to an Olympic gold medal in Berlin, Germany. They won by a fraction of a second.

But that fraction wasn’t won in the race, of course. It was won in the years before, in all the practices, all the invisible miles no one saw.

During their collegiate career, each had taken nearly half a million (469,000) strokes with his oar. Each had rowed approximately 4,344 miles—nearly the equivalent of Seattle to Japan.

But here’s where it gets interesting: of the 4,344 miles rowed, only 28 were during an actual race.

28!

More than 99% of what they did was practice. Invisible.

Each mile, each stroke felt endless—filled with doubt, pain, and exhaustion. Yet they kept rowing, trusting in something they couldn’t see.

There’s the 100/0 rule in relationships (give everything, expect nothing), but what if it applies to anything worth doing? To do the thing you won’t get credit for. To keep showing up when it feels like nothing is changing.

Big wins look like they happen in big moments. They don’t. They happen in the days and months and years of quiet dedication. The problem is that most of us stop when we don’t see immediate proof. We think, If it were working, wouldn’t I feel different by now? Wouldn’t I have something to show for it?

But that’s the thing: it never feels like it’s working—until, one day, it is.

How to escape a room with no door

There’s an old problem in architecture: how do you design a space that feels open, even when it’s enclosed?

The answer?

Natural light.

In other words, you don’t need more doors. You just need a window.

The same is true in life. When Clive Cussler began writing novels in 1965, he produced two manuscripts—Pacific Vortex! and The Mediterranean Caper. There was one problem though: no one would publish them.

So he got creative. “He created a fake letterhead for an agency that didn’t exist,” writes Cal Newport, “and then sent a note to a real agent, Peter Lampack, asking if he was interested in taking on this promising new writer named Clive whom he didn’t have time to represent. The plan worked.”

How often do we feel trapped when a door doesn’t open, as if there was only one route to our destination? How many opportunities do we overlook because the solution isn’t perfect?

Cussler’s solution was another form of invisible effort—quiet, creative, persistent. When the publishing door wouldn’t budge, he was pragmatic enough to spot a window. And flexible enough to slip through.

The real escape

You wouldn’t know it by looking at him today—mentor, author of six books, Director of Strategy and Innovation with #cut50—but in 1991, at just nineteen years old, Shaka Senghor was sentenced to up to 40 years in prison for shooting and killing a man during a paranoid argument.

At first, his sentencing nearly broke him. The grief. The shame. The weight of what he’d done. He’d let his family down. Taken a life. Left his infant son without a father.

But a few years into his sentence, something quietly shifted.

He started to read.

He picked up The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book that would change how he saw himself and the world. He devoured stacks of books—stories about survivors, leaders, men and women who had been shattered and then remade. If they could do it, maybe he could, too.

So he kept reading. He journaled. He faced himself. He mentored younger prisoners. He made plans despite the uncertainty of when he’d be released. Would he get out at age thirty-six? Sixty? Ever? He couldn’t predict his future—that was painfully obvious. But he could do everything in his power to build it.

Over the twenty years he ultimately served—seven of them in solitary confinement—Shaka published essays in national outlets. He co-authored a children’s book. He published a novel. He mentored. He studied. He led.

He did it without physical freedom. Without quiet. Without internet access.

He did it from inside a concrete cell.

Because Shaka had grasped something that few ever do: the strongest walls aren’t made of brick or stone. They’re built from false beliefs. From expectations we accept. From rules we never question. From windows we overlook. From quiet work we leave undone.

What stops us is rarely a lack of skill—it’s a lack of imagination, of flexibility, of will.

Shaka’s greatest rebellion wasn’t against concrete walls—it was against the idea that walls could define him at all.

By rejecting boundaries and doing the invisible, patient work of personal revolution, he freed himself long before his cell door opened.

Here’s a strange thought based on Jean-Pierre Petit’s theory:

Right now, in a parallel version of your life, you’ve already started the thing you’re afraid to start.

You’ve already had the conversation you’re avoiding.

You’ve already let go of what’s weighing you down.

You’ve already become the person you could be.

The only difference between you and that version of you?

That version stopped waiting for permission.

Because the walls were never real.

And you’ve been free this whole time.

Books Read:

-I read Leo Tolstoy’s super short stories The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man, which I really enjoyed. I followed it with another short fictional story that I liked…

–Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Some takeaways I wrote in the flyleaf: consistent, small acts of kindness make up a good life. The fear of not doing something should be bigger than the fear of doing it.

-Oh my gosh, Michael Lewis is just a master storyteller. The Big Short is the story of how a lack of ethics and accountability, doused in greed, led to the housing market’s implosion in ’08. This easily could have been a dull book of numbers. Instead, it’s a thrilling narrative of how it all went down. I’m also eager to read his newest book, released this month, Who is Government?

–Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul by Barry M. Andrews. This is absolutely one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. It’s based on the ideas of Goethe, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and Thoreau, who paved the way for a movement that urged people to think for themselves and follow their unique nature. I need to read Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’sWalden—a book Andrews said “is one of the most memorable treatises ever written on the art of life.” One of the best parts of this book was the bibliography. It led me to the book Writing Down Your Soul by Janet Conner (which I had on my bookshelf and forgot about, and, according to Amazon, I bought it in 2012!), whose recommended reading list led me to Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo—one of the absolute best books I’ve read on writing! (More on that one next month!) DeSalvo’s book is so good that I’ve started reading another of hers, The Art of Slow Writing, which is PHENOMENAL so far.

–Writing My Wrongs by Shaka Senghor. WOW. I only put this book down when I had to. Senghor knows how to tell a story, and he was so candid that I felt like I knew him. I even wrote, “I love this dude!” in the margin. Another favorite read so far this year.

A few weeks ago, Courtney and I were getting ready to go to a Mercury basketball game when I remembered a quote by Henry David Thoreau that I really love.

“Bubs.”

“Yeah.”

“Our shadows never fall between us and the sun,” I smiled.

“Which shoes should I wear?”

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“Our shadows never fall between us and the sun. Which shoes should I wear?”

—

Ah, Thoreau. The great philosopher and bucker of convention. His mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said that the ultimate morality is to be a nonconformist. Not in the sense of shirking responsibilities or being “different” for its own sake—that’s just silly—but in following your natural inclinations.

Thoreau lamented how a person works their whole life to earn the right to follow their calling, but by the time they’re able to follow it, they’ve lost the desire to do so:

“This spending of the best part of one’s life, earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have [become one] at once. ‘What!’ exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, ‘is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?’ Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.”

The more I read, the more I see this same idea: living a happy life means living authentically.

What mainly stands in the way of living authentically is what Ray Bradbury called the enemy of life itself: self-consciousness.

—

In the 1980s, Leonard Mlodinow was beginning his career as a physicist at Caltech. He was given total freedom to research whatever he’d like. This sounded great at first—complete freedom—but it soon became clear he had a problem: he didn’t know what to work on. He became increasingly anxious to find a subject to research. String theory was popular, should he study that? What about that other theory that was gaining traction? That would be good to research, right? Desperate to figure out what he should work on, he sought out Nobel Prize winner and fellow physicist Richard Feynman to ask him what he thought. After some probing, Feynman finally said to Mlodinow, “Look, selecting a research problem isn’t like climbing a mountain. You don’t do it just because it is there. If you really believed in string theory, you wouldn’t come here asking me. You’d come here telling me.”

Knowing what to work on is often the hardest part. But at least there’s a good way to know if you’re on the right track: you won’t be looking around to see what everyone else is doing. You’ll have confidence.

That’s what Bryan Cranston, when he’s working as a director and hiring an actor, looks for. “This whole business is a confidence game,” he says. They need to have a little arrogance about them. Not in their private lives, of course, but in their work. Like an athlete who says, I got this, with the game on the line. “If an actor comes in, and I feel flop sweat and need from them, there is almost no chance I will hire them. Not because they are untalented, but because they haven’t yet come to the place where they trust themselves, so how can I trust they’ll be able to do the job with a sense of ease? Confidence is king.”

To not trust ourselves, to dismiss what we think, Alain de Botton said, is to unwittingly ignore the greatness of our own minds. This is extremely sad. He pointed out that Aristotle was peerless because he placed his faith in the fruits of his own thoughts.

Of course, it would be absurd not to read and learn from the wisest people to have lived. But to not supplement this learning with introspection is also unwise. 

Take Montaigne. He believed that we could derive more wisdom from our own life than anywhere else. Relying solely on books, for instance, to explore our curiosity and intellect is detrimental; they cannot account for our own thoughts and feelings. “Were I a good scholar,” he said, “I would find enough in my own experience to make me wise. Whoever recalls his last bout of anger . . . sees the ugliness of this passion better than in Aristotle. . . . Even the life of Cesar is less exemplary for us than our own. . . . we are richer than we think, each one of us.”

In one of my favorite books, The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton quotes Montaigne in saying that great men and women are often not seen as great by their spouses or those who live with them. This might be because they see the private, less pretty moments of life up close. But it also might be due to our curious nature to not find interest in people too close in proximity and age to us. De Botton notes that Montaigne was not saying this out of pity, but as a way of pointing out the “deleterious impulse to think that the truth always has to lie far from us, in another culture, in an ancient library, in the books of people who lived long ago.”

The wisdom is right here, he was saying. In front of you and, more importantly, inside of you. After all, if wisdom begins in knowledge, it must first be perceived within. It’s why the truth always rings true. “In the minds of geniuses,” Emerson said, “we find—once more—our own neglected thoughts.” 

It’s not that geniuses have all these great thoughts that the rest of us don’t have, de Botton says. It’s that they take them more seriously.

Again, this doesn’t mean we have all the answers or that we shouldn’t learn from others. That would be ridiculous. But we do need to trust ourselves more, especially with our own callings and aspirations.

We need to do, as Feynman suggested, less asking and more telling.

One of the best ways to live authentically is to grow in confidence. And the best way to grow in confidence is to take action. Do the thing now, not tomorrow, not when you retire. Wake up a few hours earlier if you have to.

There’s no shortage of pursuits that are comparatively good. But what’s the point of that? Why not pursue the ultimate good and follow your own nature? Why not start now?

—

We got to the basketball game earlier than expected, so we walked around downtown for a while.

Courtney checked her phone. “We still have time to kill.”

She must have noticed me tense up. “I know, I know,” she sighed. “We can’t kill time because time is literally killing us.”

I laughed. “Hey! Now you’re getting it!”

“Fill is what I meant to say,” she said. “We still have time to fill.”

Books Read This Month:

–The Writing Life by Annie Dillard is a short read on writing from one of the greats. One of the things she said that I keep thinking about is how all writing is hard—whether you’re writing a recipe or an email or a text message. All writing takes effort and concentration, so why not work on writing something substantial?

-I really liked Natalie Goldberg’s Writing on Empty, about a recent time in her life when she felt no inspiration to write, and what she did about it. I got some good stuff and enjoyed reading it. If you’re in a writing slump, it may be just the book you need to get you out.

The following books—all highly recommended by Ryan Holiday (he literally never disappoints)—were the best ones I read this month.

–Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. Long before she became one of Japan’s most famous TV personalities, Kuroyanagi, adorably called Totto-Chan in her youth, attended an elementary school that was run by a teacher with a unique approach to learning. Expelled in the first grade from her previous school for her hyperactivity, she excelled in this new one. She tells her story through the eyes of her child self: each day is full of possibilities, everyone is a friend, everything is exciting. Her enthusiasm for every little thing is heart-warming, and it rubbed off on me. I just loved it.

–Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read, period. It’s seriously so good. It might be too good. I told a few people they needed to read it, and when they asked me what it was about, I was a little stumped. It’s hard to put into words. But talking about it with someone who’s read it is a different story. Courtney (a tough critic) read and loved it, and we went back and forth. Oh my gosh, do you remember this part? Wasn’t that hilarious? Oh man, wasn’t that deep? Isn’t that the meaning of everything? Also mixed in is a bit of a murder mystery. Mary Roach called this book perfect. And I agree, it’s just perfect.

–In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger. Wow, what a crazy story. A few years ago, Junger was on the brink of death on the operating table. He describes his experience in gory detail and then meditates on the possibility of an afterlife. It’s a thrilling and hopeful read. I sent it to my dad and he loved it too.