40 For 40

40 days from today is my 40th birthday and for anyone who knows me, I love when numbers all come together around important dates. This feels like a good one to get excited about and I'm going all-in on it.

For the next 40 days, I am going to write about a lesson or principle I've learned that I associate with each year of my life. My hope is to pull together a solid record of what my first 40 years have taught me as I prepare for the next 80 years of my life, but even more tangibly, for the next decade.

I will look back on my 30s as an amazing decade of worldwide adventures, tragic loss, painstaking discovery, and a pursuit of my own truth.  What I brought with me into my 30s was a lot of pie-in-the-sky visions and lofty goals that I much later realized were based on the scariest foundation of all time: other people's expectations. As I achieved some of those goals, I realized they had nothing to do with me. As I watched some of those visions evaporate in my hands, I learned that the timing wasn't what was meant for me. As I worked to reinvent myself, I swung a big stick at a lot of vulnerable pieces of me and might have left a bigger wake of destruction than I intended.

But now, going into this new year and arriving at my 40th birthday, I am carrying with me an enthusiasm for life that I have never had before. I am committed to just enough reality to make sure that my visions and goals for the future are ambitious, but not offensive to my future self; that they are core to who I am and not to what others expect me to be. I have learned the value of selfishness and that by putting myself first at times, I truly am able to serve others in a way and with a power and force that I never have unlocked before.

I am more in love than I knew was humanly possible. The love that I have in my life is the love a million songwriters and poets would kill to experience firsthand. It is a love that calls me to the greatest heights and inspires me to fight for the best version of myself. It is a love that gave purpose to the past decade of destroying my old self so I was prepared and ready to step into a new chapter with space already cleared out for everything that we'd begin to create together. And we both know we are just getting started.  

I am more inspired by the decade ahead than any future plans I've ever made. I also am holding space, making room, for things unseen that lie ahead, not gripping any one expectation or contrived next milestone for my life with judgment or undue pressure. I am one of the luckiest men in history. I want to live into that gratitude and dedicate my future to being a part of others doing their own work to find this joy.

So here we go - 40 days until my 40th birthday - 40 lessons of life ahead!