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Hey there,
It’s fun to talk about the things we got right in life. We drop it all on social media, package it in stories we tell, and ride the good energy for as long as we can.
And then there’s the other drawer — the one we’d rather not open. Maybe it’s got a big lock on it, holding in a quit or two here. A false start there. A program or hobby we paid for, shelved, and hoped nobody would ask about.
I’m opening that drawer today. Here’s what’s in mine.
I started writing a thriller novel eight years ago. Wrote the opening scene, loved the premise, and shelved it. Picked it up again. Shelved it again. Repeated for the better part of a decade.
I built 80% of a speaking business course and paid roughly a thousand dollars a year for eighteen months to host it online. Never finished. Shelved the project and ate the cost.
I enrolled in a PhD program, moved across a continent for it, and left after one year.
I spent 400 hours studying for airline transport pilot exams — ATPL theory, the full battery — before deciding it wasn’t the right path at this stage of my life.
That’s four significant commitments of time, money, and identity that went nowhere visible. If you’ve got a version of that list, something you started, invested in, and walked away from, you know it doesn’t just sit in the past. It follows you around. It shows up at 2am when you’re wondering if the next thing will end the same way.
Here’s what actually happened with each of those.
The PhD: I went in because I wanted to teach. I’d been working in IT for a decade and I wanted to help the leaders running technology in real businesses. But the program wasn’t building teachers. It was building researchers who publish for other researchers so the university can attract more funding. Years of generating papers that ticked boxes and didn’t have an impact, all the while the teaching part was almost an afterthought. I could stay and play that game for the fancy suffix, or I could go work directly with the people I wanted to help. I left.
The airline pilot exams: I’d already been flying recreationally and I loved everything about it. But 400 hours deep into the theory, I realized the career at the end wasn’t the life I wanted. Gone all the time, away from everything I was building. The act of flying, I loved. The lifestyle of an airline pilot at this point in my life, I didn’t.
It’s the same thing that happened when I left music school years earlier: I loved studying and performing, but once I understood what the career actually looked like day-to-day, I knew it wasn’t mine.
The speaking course: I was trying to build it alone while running a coaching business, writing books, and managing everything else that comes with being a solo operator. The content was ready. But the production — filming, editing, hosting — needed space I didn’t have. Not just time. Room. The kind of room where you can focus on one hard thing without six other hard things pulling at you. I couldn’t give it that room, and eventually I stopped pretending I could.
And the novel: I never gave myself the creative space to reach orbital velocity. For eight years I tried to juggle it alongside a dozen other projects, thinking in scenes instead of story, picking it up when I had a spare weekend and putting it down when something else demanded attention. A book, especially a first novel, doesn’t get written in the margins. It needs to be the thing, not one of the many things.
Each of those decisions made sense when I made it. But stacked together, they form a pattern I didn’t see until later: I kept walking toward things I loved doing and walking away from end states I didn’t want to live inside. That’s not failure. That’s editing. Expensive, slow, sometimes embarrassing editing — but editing.
When I wrote Flow State Runner eleven years ago, my pre-writing ritual had a lot of steps, probably too many. But one piece of it stuck with me more than any other: I’d imagine one person I’d never met, finding the book somewhere, and getting something from it. Not “this changed my life.” Just “something in this helped me.” That image carried a lot of weight during a two-year writing process.
Once the book was out, the feedback came almost immediately. People started using the techniques and wrote me about it, not an avalanche of praise, but a steady steam of feedback for over a decade now. It still surprises me to this day to receive a note from a reader who just discovered the book and found something helpful. That part of my writer’s ritual worked and is perhaps what kept that project off the “Oops!” list.
Two things worth sharing while we’re together.
The first: I’ve put my heart into building a course this year. It’s called Color Flow, and it launches on May 19.
I filmed it this year on Koh Samui, real locations, real application, no studio. Go have a look. Especially the 7-Eleven one. Trust me.
Check out the Color Flow page here
No pitch. Just an invite to check it out and tell me what you think.
The second: Remember that thriller I kept shelving for eight years?
I’m finally writing it. I’m three months deep and the thing that sat dormant for eight years finally has escape velocity. Every morning I walk a beach on Koh Samui at sunrise with my rescue dog Josie — and those walks have become where the book gets built. Scenes, characters, plot problems talked through out loud before I sit down to write.
I’m sharing the whole journey in something I’m calling Insider Chats. It’s a behind-the-scenes audio look at what it’s really like to write your first thriller and build a series from scratch. The craft, the characters, the transition from non-fiction to fiction, all of it.
It’s intimate, it’s atmospheric, and the page is full of Easter eggs that will unveil as the writing progresses. When you’re on the list, you get the first five episodes immediately.
Two projects. One course that took twenty years of field-testing to earn. One novel that took eight years of false starts to begin. Both born from that list of things that didn’t work.
If you’ve got your own version of that list — the abandoned thesis, the half-built business, the certification you never used — I’m not going to tell you it was all for a reason. But I will say this: sometimes the list is the qualification.
Until next time,
Jeff
— Coach Jeff Grant | Hillseeker | Ko Samui, Thailand
This is an edition of Dispatches, Jeff’s bi-weekly newsletter. Browse the archive · Subscribe
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