Saturday, October 10th, 2026

This was supposed to be race day.

If you've been reading for the last few weeks, you know I've been training for a Spartan race here in Orlando. Today was the day. And I'm not on the course.

I made the call not to run. I'm not going to turn the reasons into a story, because the reasons aren't the interesting part. The interesting part is what happened in my head after I made the decision, and that's what this whole letter turned into.

Sheldon, for the record, is thrilled. He gets a normal Saturday walk instead of watching me lace up shoes and leave without him.

Three things I've been carrying around this week.

There's an idea in the book I've been reading this week, The Courage to Be Disliked, that I thought I was going to write about on race morning. It turns out it's even more useful on a morning when the race doesn't happen.

The philosopher in the book draws a line between two kinds of movement. One kind is about getting somewhere. You're on a trip, and the trip only counts if you arrive. Every step along the way is incomplete, just a fraction of the real thing, which is the destination. If you stop halfway, it's a failure.

The other kind is like dancing. Nobody dances to get to the other side of the room. The dancing is the point. Every moment of it is complete. If the music stops halfway through the song, you still danced.

Here's what I noticed the minute I decided not to run. My first instinct was to file the last two months under wasted. All those early runs. The intervals. The mornings I got up when I didn't want to. If there's no finish line, what was any of it for?

That's the first kind of movement talking. The trip only counts if you arrive.

And it's wrong.

I'm in better shape than I was in August. My knee held up. I proved to myself that a forty seven year old who hadn't run in a long time could get back out there and stack weeks of work on top of each other. I learned what my body does on a bad night of sleep and what it does on a good one. I learned that the second mile lies to you and the third mile tells the truth.

None of that needed a medal to be real. It happened. It's in my legs right now, whether or not I ran a single obstacle today.

I think a lot of us treat our goals like the first kind of movement, and it quietly ruins the work. We launch something and only count it if it hits the number. We start a habit and only count it if we hold it for a year. We train for a thing and only count the training if we cross the line. Then when the line moves, or disappears, we decide the whole thing was a waste.

It wasn't. The work counted on the days you did it.

That's not a consolation prize. That's how it actually works.

There was one more piece of this I didn't see coming. The harder thing wasn't the decision. It was telling people.

I've written about this race for weeks. I put it in this newsletter more than once. People asked about it. And when I decided not to run, the first thing I felt wasn't disappointment about the race. It was a low hum of worry about how it would look. The guy who talks about discipline every Sunday, bailing on the thing he talked about.

That's the exact trap the book is about. Whether I run is my task. What anybody thinks about whether I run is theirs. I can't manage that for them, and the energy I'd spend trying is energy I'd be stealing from the things I actually control.

So I'm telling you plainly. I didn't run. The training counted. There will be other races, and when there are, I'll tell you about those too.

That's the whole announcement. No spin.

There's a song I've had on repeat this month called Jesus Have It All. It's a spontaneous moment from a Bethel live record, about eight minutes long, and the whole thing is one idea said over and over until it gets past your defenses. Take all of it.

I've been listening to it on early walks, and somewhere around the fourth or fifth time this week, it started bothering me. Not the song. Me.

Because I realized I've gotten really good at a particular kind of surrender. The easy kind.

I'm great at letting go of things I can't control anyway. The economy. Whether a client decides to renew. Whether some algorithm decides to show my posts to anybody this week. I hand those over gladly. I sound very spiritual about it. Look at me, trusting the process.

But those were never mine to begin with. Surrendering them doesn't cost me anything. It's like announcing that I'm generously giving up my claim to the weather.

The things I don't surrender are the things I can control. Or think I can.

The timeline of the rebuild. I have a very specific idea of how fast this is supposed to happen, and every week it doesn't, I take it personally.

What people think of the comeback. I care more than I'd like to admit about how this chapter looks from the outside.

The plan. I hold my plans like they're promises somebody made to me.

None of those are things I'm actually asking anyone to take. I just keep a hand on them while singing about letting go of everything.

That's the drawer. Everybody has one. The stuff you've decided is too important, too personal, too much yours to hand over. You surrender the rest of the house and keep that one drawer locked.

I don't have a neat answer for this one. I'm not going to tell you I opened the drawer this week and everything got peaceful. I didn't, and it didn't.

But I noticed it. I noticed that when I sing "all of it," I mean "most of it." And I noticed that the parts I'm keeping are exactly the parts that keep me up at night.

That's probably not a coincidence.

The things we refuse to hand over are usually the things we've tied our identity to. If the rebuild goes slower than I planned, what does that say about me? If people look at this chapter and see a guy starting over at forty seven, what does that make me? Those questions feel like they need me to keep a grip on the answer. Like if I let go of the timeline, I'm letting go of the proof that I'm still good at this.

But gripping hasn't made the timeline move any faster. It's just made me tired.

What I'm trying now is small. When I catch myself gripping one of those things, the timeline especially, I say it plainly. Not as a prayer with fancy words. Just: this one too. I don't know how this is supposed to go, and I'm tired of pretending I do.

It doesn't fix anything. But my shoulders come down about an inch. Lately that's been worth a lot.

I watched Toy Story 5 this week. I know. A grown man getting emotional over a cartoon cowboy. Stay with me.

The setup is that Bonnie gets a tablet, Lilypad, and suddenly the old toys are competing with something that listens, remembers, responds, and never gets tired. Woody and the gang have spent their whole lives being needed by a kid. Now there's something in the room that does the job faster and better and never runs out of batteries.

I sat there thinking, well, that's uncomfortably close to home.

I've been in marketing for twenty five years. I've built a career on being the guy who can figure out the message, write the copy, map the funnel, find the angle. And now I spend my days working alongside tools that can produce a passable version of any of those things in about four seconds.

Most days I'm fine with it. I use the tools. I teach people how to use them. I write about them every week.

But some nights, the honest version of the feeling is closer to Woody's. Not "am I going to be replaced." That's the headline version. The real one underneath is quieter. Am I still going to be needed?

And there's a dad version of the same feeling, which is worse. My daughters are growing up. They need me differently now than they did when they were small. Less for the practical stuff, more for things I'm not always sure I'm good at. It's supposed to happen. It's the whole point. And it still stings in a way that has nothing to do with AI.

Here's where the book helped, unexpectedly.

The philosopher talks about what he calls a feeling of contribution. The idea that people feel worth when they feel useful to others. Fine. That part tracks. But then he pushes further. He argues that a person can be of value simply by being, whether or not they're doing anything useful at the moment. A newborn can't do anything for anyone, and nobody thinks a newborn is worthless. Somebody at the end of their life who can't do much anymore still matters to the people around them.

Worth at the level of being, not just the level of doing.

That reframed the toys for me. Woody's value was never that he was the best entertainment option in the room. He'd lose that contest today, and he lost it in the first movie too. His value was that he was there. He paid attention. He cared about the kid more than he cared about being the favorite.

The tablet can do a lot of things. It can't do that.

And I'm starting to think that's true for me too. The tools can write copy. They can't sit across the table from a business owner who just realized their business can't survive without them and say, I've been there, here's what we do next. They can't be the dad who shows up.

I don't need to be the fastest option in the room. I need to be the one who's actually there.

And that's a different kind of work than I'm used to. Being useful, I know how to do. Give me a problem and a deadline and I'll get after it. Being present is harder to measure, harder to brag about, and impossible to automate. It's putting the phone face down at dinner. It's asking the second question on a client call instead of jumping to the answer. It's letting the people I love need me in whatever new way they need me now, instead of the way I'm used to being needed.

I'm not great at it yet. But I think it's the job now.

———————————————————————————

That's the week.

Not the week I planned. Probably a more honest one.

If you've got something you trained for, built toward, or announced that isn't going to happen the way you pictured it, give yourself the same deal I'm giving myself today. The work still counted. Say it out loud if you need to.

I'll be back tomorrow with three things I actually learned.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt. — Dan Kaufman