Stay Big

The world will never cease to try to make you smaller.

It will tell you to be reasonable, manage expectations, and to stop chasing things at your age. It will try to convince you to accept the version of yourself that fits in the room you happen to be standing in.

Refuse.

Most will trim their ambitions to fit. They water down what they wanted at twenty-five until it is something they can survive at fifty. They call this maturity. It is not maturity. It is surrender.

You are not a side character or making a cameo in your own life. You are the man living it — every hour, every choice, every drift toward the smaller version.

The pressure to shrink does not come from one place. It comes from the room. The peers who already gave up. The family that wants you safe. The voice in your head that has been listening to all of them for decades.

Fight it.

Dream the thing you stopped letting yourself want. Build the thing the smart people told you was impractical. Walk the path the room said you were too old for.

Go against the grain when the grain is wrong. The grain is often wrong.

The only approval that matters is the one you give yourself when no one is looking. The people whose lives you envy stopped waiting for permission a long time ago.

Stay big.

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” — George Eliot