THREE THINGS
Friday night on the porch. The kids were back, the air had that pre-summer Florida thickness, and Bean came outside looking for a break from her iPad. She sat down next to me.
“You wanna play a game?”
I said sure. She said, “Not that kind of game. I want to talk.”
Okay. What game.
“You name three things from your day. Something that made you happy. Something you wish you could take back. And something you’ll remember.”
She went first. I won’t tell her things for her, but I’ll say that watching a twelve-year-old name something she’d take back from her own day, out loud, to her father, is the kind of thing that makes you think emotional intelligence is a teachable skill. She has more of it than I did at her age. She has more of it than most adults I’ve worked with.
Then it was my turn.
For my proud thing, I told her about Jessica. She’d been laid off three weeks ago and was deep in the loop of “I’m not good enough.” Every silent inbox was more evidence. Before I left to pick up Savannah from her eighth-grade dance, I’d handed Jessica a copy of Don’t Believe Everything You Think, which usually lives on my coffee table. When I got back, she met me at the door with the book open. She’d flipped to the first page she landed on. The section was called Thoughts versus Thinking. The example on the page was: You lost your job. The thought: I lost my job. The thinking: I’m not good enough. Everyone is judging me. I’ll never recover. Word for word what she’d been saying to herself for three weeks.
She looked at me and said, if that’s not the universe talking, I don’t know what is.
For my take-back, I said I wished I’d taken a picture of Savannah when I brought her home from the dance, before she changed out of her dress. She looked beautiful and I let the moment pass.
For my remember, I told Bean about my director using the term exemplary employee to describe me in a conversation that morning. He’s retiring at the end of May. He didn’t have to say it. He said it.
Bean was satisfied with that. So was I.
A few minutes later I said, “Actually, can I redo my proud thing?”
A few months ago I built a document in my second brain called What I’m Building. The subtitle is A Marine who learned to tell stories now builds the infrastructure to say something that lasts. Under it are four pillars.
The first is a public voice. Essays, field notes, ideas under my own byline that compound over time. The second is meaningful work, which is my day job at VA ORD: communicating research that saves veterans’ lives, treating it as a craft, leading with veteran impact instead of data. The third is systems that outlast the moment. The Second Brain itself. The capture habit. The tools that turn insight into output. The fourth is the man I’m becoming. Acting from my word and not my mood. Knowing my values. Holding ground. Staying present for the people who matter. Asking hard questions and writing the answers down.
At the bottom there’s one question I’m supposed to ask myself daily. What did I do today that moves one of these forward? Just one.
I told her that what I was proud of, really, was that when I sat back at the end of work that day, I could feel I’d touched all four. Not because I’d planned to. Because the pillars are real, and when I’m walking inside them I know. When I’m not, I also know. I spin my wheels and I feel it in my chest before I can name it.
Her eyes lit up. She tried to find a word for the feeling I was describing. She landed somewhere close. She got it.
When I was twenty-two I worked at Home Depot with a man named Tommy. He passed last year. The first real thing he ever told me was that my most valuable asset was time, and that I needed to start investing money immediately, because compounding doesn’t care how smart you are. It only cares how long you give it. Someone who starts at sixty-five will never catch the person who started at twenty-two.
The same arithmetic applies to the self. I wrote down what I was building at forty-eight. If I’d written it at twelve, the body of work would already exist. The systems would have been compounding for thirty-six years instead of three months. The man I’m becoming would be further along the road.
I don’t know if Bean will internalize any of this. She’s twelve. The conversation might land tonight and disappear by Monday. That’s fine. The seed isn’t the four pillars. It’s the habit of deciding who you are on purpose and writing it down so you don’t lose the thread. It can be three pillars, six, one sentence on an index card. The number doesn’t matter. The deciding matters. The writing it down matters. The coming back to it matters.
Years ago I posted something online that I cringe at now. I said that if half of what I thought ever touched paper, people would think I was a genius. It was an arrogant line and I deserved to be called on it. But what I was actually trying to say, badly, was that I knew I was losing the most useful thing I had. Insights kept arriving and kept leaving, and I wasn’t keeping any of them.
It took me about fifteen more years to start.
Bean got bored of the game eventually and went back to her iPad. I sat on the porch a while longer. I thought, if she ever asks me what I’d really take back, the answer is that one. The fifteen years between knowing what to do and doing it.
I don’t plan to tell her that. Not yet. But I’ll be ready when she asks.
