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This Little Decision Changed the Course of My Career
Right then, my next creative mountain appeared
In the summer of 2019, my wife and I took our two sons for a hike in the Lost Pines Forest in Bastrop, Texas. It was a Saturday or a Sunday. I had a bunch of articles to write, but I put them aside and decided to spend some time outside with the kids in the shade of the prehistoric loblolly forest about thirty minutes from our house.
It was a lovely afternoon, despite the heat. I always love Lost Pines because it’s a freak of nature. The trees appear here in the middle of Texas, hundreds of miles further east than most of their counterparts. Two horrible fires in the last ten years have only added to the mystique, making parts feel like a haunted elephant graveyard.
As we wrapped up the hike and took the kids to the playground, suddenly, it hit me. It was a feeling that most creative people experience from time to time. You’re in the middle of not working and boom, you get hit with an idea. I have run many hundreds of miles in Lost Pines so it was a familiar feeling — I’ve sold business problems and writing problems and personal problems on the trails there.
As I was carrying my son in the backpack, my mind had drifted briefly to the fact that my book Stillness is the Key would soon be released and it would mark the end of what had become a three-book trilogy. What would I tackle next, I thought. A book about courage would be cool.
A few days later, we were on vacation in the panhandle in Florida. I was building a sandcastle with my son. Then the second lightning strike. Not just a book about courage, a series on the four virtues, starting with courage! And like that, the next four years of my life, my next creative mountain had been laid out in front of me.
I tell this story in part because that first book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave is now out in the world. But also because it illustrates something that I learned when I was writing Stillness is the Key: our biggest breakthroughs often come when we are working on them the least, that stillness really is an important part of moving forward.
John Cage, the composer, liked to hunt for mushrooms in the woods. Musashi, the samurai, was also an…
