I spent twenty years searching for something I couldn’t name.
It started in high school. I graduated, went to community college without a direction, and burned out fast — I couldn’t lock into the classes because I had no purpose for being there. So I quit and went to landscaping.
Six years later I went back to community college, this time for a welding certificate. Finished with honors. I thought I’d figured out my next move. Then I took a welding job at a shop in Alton that turned out to be a bad place to work. Breathing in welding fumes for hours every shift. I came home with my back in pieces — what I didn’t know at the time was that I was worsening compression fractures I’d had for years.
Then came sobriety. A year into being sober, I got the Boeing job — and I credit getting sober for getting that job. I hated the work, but it was the kind of opportunity you don’t lose if you can help it. I lost it anyway. I started drinking again, made a choice that cost me the job, and that’s a story for another day. But losing it broke something in me that took a long time to put back together.
After Boeing I didn’t work for a few years. When I finally took a job again, my buddy got me a custodian gig at the same high school where I’d been a star athlete nearly two decades earlier. Cleaning the building I used to run drills in. People expected great things from me when I was eighteen, and now I was running a mop where the trophy case was. That took everything I had to walk into.
But it gave me something I didn’t expect. Being back inside that building, around the things that used to light me up, started to wake something back up in me. There was a line on the locker room door that I read every night when I came in to clean: One day, or day one. You decide.
I read it every shift. I didn’t know it yet, but it was already starting to do its work.
At night, through all of it, I drank myself into blackouts so I wouldn’t have to feel the disappointment of letting my dream go to waste.
I didn’t know what the dream was, exactly. I just knew I was supposed to be doing something else. Something that mattered. Something that was mine. And I couldn’t find it.
That’s the thing nobody warns you about. Not knowing your purpose isn’t just frustrating. It’s physically heavy. It builds anxiety into your bones. And then anxiety drives you to numb. And then the numbing makes the next morning worse. And then the next morning makes you reach for the bottle again. It’s a loop, and most people stuck inside it don’t even see it as a loop. They just think it’s life.
For two decades, that was my life.
The First Time I Got Sober
I quit drinking once before. Two and a half years.
I knew the benefits. I felt the difference. I remember thinking I had finally figured it out.
Then I lost it.
It wasn’t one big dramatic moment. It was depression. It was losing the drive to keep stacking the small daily decisions that kept me sober. I let go of the structure, and the structure was the only thing holding the line. Without it, the old loop was right there waiting for me.
If you’ve ever gotten sober and lost it, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s a specific kind of shame in failing at the thing you proved you could do. Most people who relapse think it’s over. They think they had their shot. They think the second attempt is going to fail too because the first one did.
I’m here to tell you that’s not true.
I had something the first time didn’t have. I had a path. I had sobriety with purpose.
What I Was Missing the First Time
The first time I got sober, I quit drinking. That’s all I did.
The second time, I quit drinking and started building something in its place.
That’s the difference. That’s the whole difference.
When you take away the thing you’ve been numbing with, you create a hole. If you don’t fill that hole with something better, the hole pulls you back to what was filling it before. Quitting alone is not enough. You have to replace. And what you have to replace it with is a direction.
For me, that direction came from a book. Areté by Brian Johnson. I didn’t speed-read it. I read a few pages, went back, reread them. Took my time. Let the principles actually sink in.
What hit me was simple: the goal of life is to become the best version of yourself, every day, in small consistent ways. Not someday. Not when conditions are right. Today. Twenty or thirty minutes of self-development a day, every day, stacked over time.
That sounds small. It is small. That’s the point. The smallness is what makes it sustainable. And sustainable is what makes it work.
The Greeks had a word for the feeling you get when you’re actually doing this — eudaimonia. It’s not happiness exactly. It’s closer to being on purpose. The quiet satisfaction of knowing you’re aimed in the right direction, even when the day is hard.
That’s what I was missing the first time. I quit the bad, but I never built anything in its place that could pull me forward. So the old loop was the only thing pulling at all.
The Identity Shift
Here’s the part I had to learn the hardest way.
The path isn’t just doing different things. It’s being a different person.
For a long time I thought transformation meant changing my behaviors. Stop drinking. Read more. Exercise. Show up to work. And those behaviors do matter — but I kept finding that as soon as life got heavy, I’d snap right back to the old patterns. Because underneath the new behaviors, I was still the same guy. Same internal story. Same idea of who I was.
The thing that finally moved the needle wasn’t another habit. It was deciding — actually deciding — who I was going to be. Not who I wanted to be someday. Who I was now, before the evidence caught up. I had to start treating myself like the person I knew I was capable of being, even when I hadn’t proven it yet.
I started talking to myself like someone I was rooting for instead of someone I was disappointed in. That sounds soft. It isn’t. It’s the hardest discipline I’ve ever practiced. The voice in your head is always running, and if you don’t take charge of it, it defaults to whatever the worst version of you has been practicing for years.
The identity comes first. The behaviors follow. Not the other way around.
When you decide who you are, the daily work stops feeling like willpower and starts feeling like alignment. You’re not forcing yourself to act differently. You’re acting like the person you’ve decided you are. The subconscious eventually catches up. And then the path stops feeling uphill.
The Trap
I want to name one more thing, because I think it’s the part most people get wrong:
If you’re not actively working on yourself, you’re not staying still. You’re going backwards.
Every day you’re not building, you’re accumulating stress hormones, negative imprints, small disappointments. You’re stacking debt. The body keeps the score and so does the mind. There’s no neutral. You’re either climbing or you’re sliding.
This is why the daily work is non-negotiable. Not because you have to be perfect. Because every day you skip is a day you lose ground.
The Decision
If you’re reading this and something in you is starting to move — if you’ve been seeing changes in someone you know, or feeling something shift in yourself, but you haven’t crossed over yet — I want to say something to you directly.
The decision isn’t a feeling. It isn’t a perfect moment. It isn’t waiting until you’re ready, because you’re never going to feel ready. The decision is a commitment you make once and then re-make every single morning. You don’t have to feel strong to make it. You just have to make it.
And here’s what nobody tells you: the moment you make the decision and start aiming at the better version of yourself, the universe starts to feel different. Not because anything magic happened, but because you stopped fighting yourself. The energy you were burning trying to numb the disappointment of not being on purpose — that energy comes back. All of it. And it goes into the building.
I lost twenty years to wheel-spinning. I’m not saying that to scare you. I’m saying it because I want you to know that it’s still available. The path didn’t go anywhere. It was always there. I just couldn’t see it until I committed.
You don’t need to figure out the whole path before you start. You just need to take twenty minutes today and start.
The opportunities haven’t slipped away. They’re still here. They’ve just been waiting for you to be ready to receive them.
I think about that line on the locker room door more than almost anything I’ve ever read. It was waiting for me every night when I walked in to clean. It’s waiting for you now, the same way.
One day, or day one. You decide.
Make it day one.
— John