The phone rang. I watched it ring. And I told myself the oldest lie I knew: if it matters, they’ll leave a voicemail.
The phone buzzes on the counter. Face up. The name glowing there belongs to a man who believed in me before I gave him a single reason to. A mentor. And I let it ring.
I told myself I was busy. I told myself I’d call back. I told myself the thing every coward tells himself when the phone lights up with the name of someone who sees him clearly: if it’s important, they’ll leave a message.
The truth was uglier than that. I didn’t duck the call because I didn’t want the encouragement. I ducked it because I did. Because I knew if I picked up, he’d ask me how it was going, and I had no honest answer that didn’t sound like an excuse. Because somewhere in the space between his voice and mine, I would feel exactly what I already suspected. That I was stuck in the mud. That the man who bet on me had bet wrong.
You’ve let a call go to voicemail like that. Not because you didn’t respect the person. Because you did, and you couldn’t stand to hear yourself explain the gap between who they think you are and where you actually stand.
The Question That Left Me Naked
There’s a question that used to gut me every time. Four words.
“What is it you do?”
Simple. Innocent. Somebody makes small talk at a table and the room turns to you, and I would feel the floor open. Because I didn’t know how to answer it. I was in marketing. But marketing had trained me to lead with a pain point, to build tension, to make a stranger feel a wound before I offered the cure. So I’d overdo it. I’d perform. I’d talk around the question because I was terrified of the plain version of the answer.
It caught up with me on a stage. Four hundred people in the room. One of Cardone’s top guys standing right there, and he chewed me out in front of every one of them. Not because I lacked talent. Because I could not give a straight answer to a straight question. I had my head so far up my own strategy that I’d forgotten how to just say the thing.
Four hundred witnesses to the fact that I didn’t know who I was yet.
That’s why the phone scared me. Every mentor who called was a version of that stage. Another chance to be exposed. And they never once tore into me. They called with encouragement, with belief, with the kind of words most men would sell a kidney to hear. And it still made me feel like I was sinking, because encouragement handed to a man who isn’t moving just tells him how far he has to go.
The Voicemail That Wasn’t a Voicemail
The one that changed everything wasn’t even a call.
It was a text. Short enough to read in a single breath.
Just execute. The genius isn’t in the idea, it’s in the execution. Once you take the action, you’ll figure it out. Commitment to it is what helps you grow.
I read it standing still and something came loose in my chest.
Because here was my whole disease named in one line. I was a planner. I was thinking so far ahead that I tried to map every step and pre-solve every failure before I made a single move. I wanted the whole staircase lit before I’d put my foot on the first stair. And a staircase you insist on seeing to the top of is a staircase you never climb. The planning stage swallowed everything. The idea would get so heavy with hypotheticals that it never once got born.
Then a man I trust told me to just do the thing, and a light went on that has not gone off since. That was the moment I started executing on every idea I ever had.
Most of them failed. Let me be honest with you, because the truth serves you better than the highlight reel. Most of them failed. But I would rather stand in the wreckage of a thing I actually tried than spend one more night holding an untouched idea in my hands, whispering “what if” to it like a lullaby. A failure I can name is worth ten dreams I never dared to test.
The Parable You Already Know
Jesus told a story about three servants. A master hands each of them a share of his wealth before a journey. Two of them go out and put the money to work, and they double it. The third, afraid of losing what he was given, digs a hole and buries it in the ground. He keeps it safe. He keeps it clean. He keeps it exactly as it was.
And when the master returns, he doesn’t praise the careful one. He calls him wicked and lazy. Not because he lost the money. Because he was so afraid of loss that he never let it move.
I was the third servant. I had gifts, real ones, and I buried them in a field of planning because I couldn’t stand the risk of watching one fail in the open. I called it strategy. God would have called it fear.
The two who were praised were not smarter. They were not luckier. They simply refused to let what they were given sit still. The genius was never in the size of the gift. It was in the courage to put it in motion.
The Man in the Arena
Theodore Roosevelt said it is not the critic who counts. Not the man who points at how the strong stumble, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man actually in the arena, his face marred by dust and sweat and blood, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error.
The man on that Cardone stage who chewed me out was in the crowd for one night. The mentor who texted me was in the arena for life. And what he handed me was a ticket to walk down out of the stands and get my own face dirty.
Here’s what I know now that I ducked the phone to avoid. Every mentor who ever called me was not calling to grade me. They were calling to pull me into the arena beside them. And I kept letting it go to voicemail because I thought the arena was a courtroom. It was never a courtroom. It was a door.
The Midnight Move
Pick the one idea you’ve been protecting. The one you’ve planned to death. The one you keep polishing precisely so you never have to test it.
Tonight, execute the smallest real piece of it. Not the plan for it. Not the outline. The thing itself. Send the message. Publish the post. Make the call you’ve been sending to voicemail. Put your foot on the first stair without needing to see the top.
You will not figure it out before you move. You figure it out because you move. The genius was never in the idea sitting in your hands. It’s in the commitment to let it leave them.
What’s forged at midnight cannot be broken by the dawn.
— Gabriel Vangelatos, The Midnight Visionary