So…here we are…

I’ve never been able to track down where I first read it, so it might be apocryphal, but the modernist poet and doctor William Carlos Williams suffered from periods of extraordinarily black depressions, as do so many writers, poets, and artists, touched by that madness that causes one to create.

During a period in the early 1920s, Williams was going through one of these depressions and he vowed that if writing anything was worthwhile, he’d be able to write himself out of this depression.

He must or he’d kill himself.

He set out to write every day no matter what, just getting a specific number of words on the page, every day for one year.

After he had finished, he went back and tried to interpret and understand the paragraphs he had written, writing a paragraph of interpretation underneath the original paragraph.

The resultant work was called Kora in Hell and it is one of his most explosive and truly avant-garde works. 

And, so here we are.

On the heels of a business collapse.

On the heels of a lawsuit.

On the heels of another failed sales funnel.

If writing is anything worthwhile in my life, then it will be the thing that saves me. 

I have always written.

It was a thing that found me, first as poetry and then as criticism.

When Iwas 16, I found myself in a rehab for drug addicts, alcoholics, and troubled and truant youths in a suburb of Salt Lake City, called Magna. 

It’s a farming and mining community, close to the Kennecott Cooper Mine, which is the largest open pit mine on the face of the earth, so big in fact it can be seen from space. 

Anyway, in this nothing town, in this nothing rehab, in this nothing English class, bored, I began flipping through the American literature textbook and came across a poet by the name of Walt Whitman.

Engrossed by what I read, I wrote a letter to my mother, who promptly sent me his most famous collection, Leaves of Grass.

I began writing poetry that day.

And it began a practice that surely reoriented my life and the trajectory in which I was heading.

I wanted to be a poet.

Like I’d be able to claim that on my LinkedIn profile, occupation: poet.

So what does a poet need to truly be a poet, a book published. 

Every single author in that American Literature textbook as well as the companion British Literature textbook in the back of that classroom in that rehab in Magna Utah, transformed into the lessons I could learn to achieve this goal of getting a book published. 

Reading became not something one does for entertainment, as entertaining as it can be, but reading became the key to figuring out how to write.

We all have these seminal events where orientation toward life changes—whether it’s love or having a child or discovering a passion—that event wherein the significance of the everyday changes.

Heidegger uses the example of the hammer in Being and Time to illustrate this.

We only examine the hammer, the thing-at-use to use his term, when it stops being a hammer.

When you hit the nail and the top of the hammer falls off and it causes you to think about the hammer, everything that has gone into it, its construction, its story, its composition—it shifts everything.

Every thing-at-use has its own set of histories and stories outside of its actual use.

The world opens up. 

And so here we are in this seminal event, in this rehab at 16, where the world opens up to all its inherent possibilities, but had been closed off because I was closed off.

Suddenly reality takes on a new construction, a new layer underneath what seems to be a stable and established surface.

It is transformed.

The everyday becomes the radically new.

And to me, this is the true nature of a liberal education.

To illuminate the layers upon which reality is constructed, to see the same view of a room or a sunset or a child from the different perspectives behind its composition—truly the subjective experience of this world we all share is radically shaped by us, our interests, our learnings, our feelings, our experiences.

The chemist and the artist surely see something different when looking at the scene of a tree collapsed in the forest. 

So, here we are.

Today.

In this past month of trying to learn marketing and copywriting and building sales pages and workflows, I came across the “10-day click funnels challenge.”

In this exercise, Russell Brunson said something to the effect that if you just publish something every day for one year, on whatever medium, you’ll never have to worry about income again.

I know it’s true.

I’ve seen it.

Think of Kylie Jenner and her capitalizing her audience to become a billionaire or someone like Jeffree Star or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Audience, it seems, is the new currency. 

Coming across this Russell Brunson idea was one of those seminal events.

Why not just start writing again for a blog, and I’ll find my voice again, and I’ll find my audience, and I’ll find my calling.

I had read Dan Koe’s book last year and have followed his content since then and he built his entire business off of this idea of building an audience through writing.

Success leaves breadcrumbs, as they say. 

I used to write every day for at least four hours.

Working on my poetry.

Alone.

Every day meaning no days off, meaning Saturday and Sunday, meaning 365.

But I had lost that practice when I went into door-to-door sales as money became the thing that I thought would make me feel whole, complete, good enough.

Now being reduced, as I am, to nothing, I must face this proposition of William Carlos Williams, fearlessly, that writing, if it be worthwhile, will bring me out from where I am.

So here we are, writing to save my life.

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If this strikes a chord in you—the hunger to sharpen, to evolve—explore Poetics of Self-Mastery. It’s for those done with distraction, ready to confront the quiet disciplines that forge identity. No hacks. No hype. Just the art of becoming who you were meant to be. Read Poetics of Self-Mastery (Why You’re Still Stuck)

Ready to burn your default thinking? Download Dangerous by Design. Discover the 10 books that fracture, interrupt, and rewire the creative mind. Get the guide & read dangerously.