The vanishing point
The digital opportunity is vast, but standing out from a billion-strong crowd requires you to do something essential and painful to leave the past behind.
To beat the drum again:
A long list of things you can do before getting out of bed — send an email, order an Uber, DM a model on Instagram — would have looked like black magic to your grandparents.
The opportunity is vast. All of us can build lasting relationships, create saleable items and get paid from anywhere in the world, with just an everyday computer and a decent Internet connection.
The size of the opportunity is directly proportionate to the size of the imagination.
Almost 100 years ago, Napoleon Hill wrote:
“Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
Never in the past 100 years has that been more true than it is now.
The vastness of the opportunity is also directly proportionate to the vastness of the competition. Massive upside creates massive downside.
As a pessimist might say, “What goes up must come down.” Or as Simon Kuper, the Financial Times writer, put it during the fast-tracked work-from-home days of Covid-19: “I can do my job from anywhere, but that means anyone anywhere can do my job.”
In the new global marketplace, two things stand out:Intelligent ideas fleshed out courageously over time
Us-versus-them entrenched positionsThe wind in the sails of #1 is aspiration and ambition for a better future.
The oil in the engine of #2 is outrage and fear because the past is lost.
If you prefer camp #2, go right ahead. You’ll find lots of company there.
If you prefer the borderless digital tribe of #1, your next question should be:
How?
The how is two-fold:
- Finding out what you can uniquely say.
- Saying it. (Courageously. In different ways. Over and over again.)
Finding out is always hard, because it means leaving behind what you’ve become, and leaving behind what you’ve become is painful. It requires rebirth — you can’t remember the pain of being born, but you will always remember the pain of being reborn.
Let’s paint a picture.
See that point in the middle?
That’s the place you need to get to.
It’s the “X marks the spot” of the buried treasure.
It’s the vanishing point of the old self and the expanding point of the new.
It’s also a place that’s out of reach for almost everyone.
It’s so far out of reach for most people in camp #1 (the “us-versus-them” crowd) that they don’t even know it’s there.
But even many aspirational, ambitious people have no idea how to get there.
They fire shot after shot after shot and they never come close to the place they need to find.
Their picture is more like this.
So what’s that point in the middle?
It’s different for everyone.
That’s the point.
It’s a collection of thoughts, ideas, concepts, beliefs, experiences and perspectives that make you uniquely you.
Because only by peeling back the layers to see who you uniquely are, and then fully inhabiting it, will you ever get to explore the potential that lies dormant within you.
Most of us spin wheels, expelling great energy but finding no forward motion.
We might post on X, send a hundred connection requests on LinkedIn, write on Substack and upload photos to Instagram. We listen to science and business and technology books on Audible. We have a Kindle full of skimmed samples.
We spend weeks preparing for a job interview nobody has asked us to attend, months working on a product nobody wants to use, years carving out a career nobody will miss when it’s done.
We find our way to work each morning hoping nobody finds us out.
All because we haven’t reached our vanishing and expanding point.
It’s the line in the sand.
It’s the major life crossroads.
It’s the time and place all our thoughts, ideas, concepts, beliefs, experiences and perspectives lead us to, where we must leave our old pupal state behind and shuffle off the cocoon, because what got us here will never get us there.
It’s the time and place where we can unfurl and expand and spread our wings and take a leap of faith and — eventually — soar, into the thing we were born to be, decades after we left the womb.
“Every man has two lives. The second begins when he realizes he has just one.”