Nothing Comes Out Fully Formed
I was on my fall walk.
I live close to a bike path, and this time of year — leaves changing, air sharp, that particular quiet that only October brings — it is one of my favorite places to be. I had just finished recording a YouTube video for Business Fire Drills and I was doing what I always do after I create something: I walked.
A biker rolled past me. And I don't know what made me turn around — I didn't look at him as he passed — but something made me look back as he was riding away.
His shirt said, in big letters across the back: A DRILL.
I mean. The universe.
I'm telling you this story because it's the whole point of what I want to talk to you about today. And because that's how life works — the things that shift us don't always announce themselves. Sometimes they're just riding a bike on a Tuesday afternoon.
I just got back from a world schooling cruise. Fifty families. Two hundred people. All of us doing school — and life — in a deliberately different way.
One of our stops was CocoCay, Royal Caribbean's private island. And there is a water slide there called the Daredevil. You step into a capsule. The floor drops out from under you. It is not gradual. It is not gentle. And I screamed the entire eight seconds down — and I would do it again immediately.
But what I kept thinking about on that cruise, and what I'm still thinking about now as I walk this bike path and watch the leaves turn, is this:
Nothing comes out fully formed.
Not you. Not what you're building. Not the thing you've been rethinking and relaunching and renaming for the past two years.
Business Fire Drills — the thing I was just recording about before this walk — is fifteen years in the making. Fifteen years and fifty-one years of life experience. It looks like what it looks like now because of all of that time, all of those iterations, all of those stages where I thought I should have had it figured out already.
I spent years feeling like I was behind. Like if I had just been smarter, more focused, had better instincts — it would have been called Business Fire Drills from the beginning. But it wasn't. It had other names first. Because I was in a different stage each time.
And here's the thing about stages: a leaf doesn't go from bud to full color in a single day. It buds. It grows. It fills out. It turns. It drops. And then it starts again. At every single stage of that cycle, it is exactly what it's supposed to be.
The bud is not a failed leaf. It's a leaf in process.
If what you're building feels messy or unfinished or like it should be further along — you're not behind. You're in a stage. And that is exactly where you're supposed to be.
This is what The Scenic Route is. These walks. These moments. The things I notice and can't stop thinking about until I record them.
If you want someone to ride along with — in your car, on your walk, wherever you listen — I'd love for you to press play.
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