Get Busy living or Get Busy Dying
Blue pill or Red pill?
There is something peculiar that happens the moment you decide you are in control of your own destiny. And in my experience, it plays out in one of two ways.
The first is somewhat intoxicating. You start reaching for the stars, chasing the life you always imagined, and almost immediately, something in the fabric of reality responds and the world seems to lean in your direction.
You start doing more with less, working half as hard for twice the result, somewhere in your head a voice whispers that you should have done this sooner.
A single pebble rolling down a hill somehow, someway, triggers an avalanche of success. In hindsight, you will know it was beginner's luck, dumb luck even. But hindsight is a luxury you don't have yet.
In the moment it feels like destiny. It feels like you finally understand something other people do not. You start talking like it too, handing out wisdom on becoming the captain of your fate to anyone willing to listen, drunk on the momentum of a life that finally seems to be going your way.
Slowly but surely the beginner's luck runs out. It always runs out. And what is left underneath it is the actual game, unglamorous, unforgiving, indifferent to how badly you want it. There’s a saying among gamblers “Play long enough against the house and the house wins.” you get to discover that life is the house and it’s indifferent to you.
And in its indifference it begins to collect what the first season borrowed.
The universe that once seemed to conspire for your success now seems to conspire against it. You start to wonder what you are doing wrong. The old life starts looking comfortable again. Safe. Maybe even reasonable.
That pull to go back is almost irresistible and most stories end here.
I have been through both of those seasons. The high of the first and the humbling of the second. I say that not to establish credentials but to make clear that I am not a charlatan standing at a podium I have never earned.
I have been in the room and I have lived in the arena.
With that said.
Here is what I know: life is a game, agreed to or not. And the first rule of this game is that you cannot sit it out.
Whoever refuses to play gets left on the sidelines, but paradoxically, sitting on the sidelines is still a move. Choosing not to play is itself a choice within the game.
Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor with every reason to believe he was above the ordinary rules of existence, spent his life internalizing the gritty lessons of the early Stoics. In his private journal, he often wrestled with the famous analogy first taught by the school’s founder, Zeno of Citium
Zeno says : “Man is like a dog tied to a moving wagon. If the dog refuses to run along with the wagon, he will be dragged by it. Yet the choice remains his: to run or be dragged.”
The wagon is life. It does not stop. It has no interest in your comfort or your readiness or your reasons for hesitating. It simply moves forward at the same indifferent pace it has always moved. And you are tied to it from the moment you arrive here.
The only decision that is genuinely yours is how you meet that motion. Running or being dragged. A player or a piece being played.
You are either the main character of your life or you are an NPC.
Now I have not come here to make you scared neither have I come to sand down the edges of what chasing a life you actually want really feels like.
It is hard. Genuinely, unglamorously hard. The degree, the body, the career, requires you to fight for it inside a world that is not expanding to accommodate you.
None of it comes easy because you are not the only one reaching for it.
You want a piece of the pie, I want a piece of the pie. The pie is limited. It has always been limited. There is no new pie being baked. Every slice you claim, you are taking from somewhere, from someone.
So knowing all of that, what then is the alternative? what is the other option?
To accept a smaller life quietly? To become the very thing you used to look at and swear you would never be, trading your hours for a salary that barely justifies the trade, watching people who think less deeply than you achieve things you know you are built for, if only you would commit to the attempt?
That life is genuinely unimaginable to me. It does not enter my mind as a real possibility. And I suspect if you are the kind of person who found their way to reading this, it does not fully enter yours either.
So where does that leave people like us?
The ones who are not interested in a slice. The ones who, if we are being honest, want the whole thing. Every last piece of it. What are our chances? What does the road actually look like for someone who refuses to make a pact with ordinary?
I am nineteen years and some days old. I know what that means for the credibility of everything I am about to say. My advice carries the natural limitations of someone who has not yet lived enough to be proven right or wrong by time.
But from where I stand the only shot I can see is a simple one really. Meet life head on and give what is required. Not your best. What is actually required.
I will not insult you by pretending that road is anything other than what it is.
Vincent van Gogh is the romantic version of this story. The man who gave everything and burned through his entire life in pursuit of a vision, who the world was not ready for until after he was gone. I think about him sometimes.
Not as a model to imitate but as an honest mirror. He did not chase his dream in addition to living. He sacrificed the living to chase the dream. I am not telling you to do that. I am also not telling you not to. I am just asking you to know the difference before you choose.
Because you can choose the smaller life. There is no tribunal or cosmic shame attached to it. The world will not collapse if you decide that the cost of chasing what you want is too high. So if you choose comfort, choose it fully and without apology.
But if you are insane enough to choose the other thing, then you need to hear this before you go any further.
Wanting it badly will not save you. Wishing for it hard enough will not save you. Desire, raw and unexamined, is not the engine you think it is.
Chasing your dreams will strain your health. It will cost you relationships you did not expect to lose. It will give you an underlived version of the years everyone else seems to be enjoying freely. You will feel like an outcast, sometimes from society, more painfully from yourself.
And the cruelest part is that every single person who has ever walked this road believed they would be the exception. That the cost would somehow be lower for them. It is not lower. It is the same price every time.
Do not mistake desire for compulsion.
Desire at best is wanting something. Compulsion is being physically incapable of stopping even when everything rational is screaming at you to stop. When the luck is gone and nobody around you believes in it anymore, desire will not get you through. Only compulsion will.
There is a cliché that says better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all. I understand why people say it. But I think it is wrong, or at least incomplete. The people who confuse desire for compulsion and step onto this road anyway rarely just fail quietly. They fail at great cost, to themselves and to everyone standing close enough to feel it.
What are your inner demons singing?
Not what you wish they were singing. What are they actually singing. Is it desire, that warm and hopeful feeling that would accept another path if life offered one? Or is it compulsion, the relentless hum that has no off switch.
Only you know the answer.
If the song your demons are singing is quiet, if it is open to another road, if somewhere underneath the wanting there is a part of you that could be genuinely satisfied with something smaller, then choose that.
Choose it fully, without guilt or the nagging sense that you settled. A life chosen consciously is never a small life regardless of its size.
But if the song is what I think it is. If it is loud and relentless and has been playing since before you had the language to describe it.
Then you already know what you have to do. You do not need me to tell you.
Pick the red pill. Eyes open. No illusions about the road ahead.
Because the road will be hard. The failures will be many and some of them will be spectacular. There will be seasons that are genuinely exciting and seasons that will test the specific kind of crazy it takes to still be standing.
But this is what I know: the earlier you begin and the more risk you are willing to carry, the more inevitable a small success becomes. And one small success, tended carefully and followed stubbornly, has a way of becoming another. It is just the pattern I have seen and the pattern I am betting my own life on.
So for the iconoclasts, the mutineers, the ones who have read this far and felt recognition rather than inspiration, I have two things to say
Fear Nothing.
"Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once." — Shakespeare
The ancient Japanese understood what Shakespeare was pointing at. They called fear the little death, death by a thousand cuts.
Let me tell you the most important thing I know about fear. It is a storyteller and it is not an honest one.
It is more like a fiction writer with no editorial oversight and unlimited access to your deepest insecurities. It lives in the gap between what might happen and what your brain convinces you will happen.
And your brain, when left alone with uncertainty, is not optimistic. It is a catastrophist. It takes the unknown and constructs the most vivid, most humiliating, most permanently damaging version of events possible and then presents it to you as a forecast.
The actual event, when it comes, if it comes, is almost never that. Reality is less theatrical and significantly more survivable than the production your mind put together.
Cockroaches. Bear with me.
I am afraid of them. Grown, fully functional human being, afraid of cockroaches. But when I actually sat down and followed that fear to its source I found almost nothing there.
Can they kill me? No. Can they bite me in any meaningful way? No. Are they disgusting? Yes.
So my fear is not rooted in genuine danger. Just revulsion dressed up by my brain as a threat. I have seen things more disgusting than a cockroach and survived them without incident.
Fear is never rational. Remember that.
That same anatomy lives inside almost every fear worth examining Be it public speaking. Approaching someone you are attracted to. Starting the thing you have been putting off. Chasing the life we spent the last several pages talking about.
Alex Hormozi articulated this well: fear comes from the vague, not the specific. Fear needs blur. The moment you force it to get specific, it starts losing its structural integrity.
It is not built for direct examination. It loses hold when put under scrutiny. So examine it directly. Follow it all the way to the end of the road and look at what is actually there.
And when you do that exercise honestly, for most fears(aside from cockroaches…) you will find the same thing at the center. You are not afraid of failing. You are afraid of being seen failing, of what the people in the room will think, of embarrassment.
And I need you to get this: that audience is largely fictional.
People are busy. Genuinely and desperately busy with the chaos of their own lives. The person whose judgment you fear most is probably drowning in their own private anxieties and has neither the time nor the sustained attention to maintain a careful record of your stumbles.
You are not the main character in their story. You are a passing scene.
And even when the embarrassment is real and witnessed and lingers longer than you hoped, consider the full picture. You have already survived love. Grief. Jealousy. Rage. The full violent spectrum of human emotion. You did not avoid those experiences because they were uncomfortable.
Embarrassment belongs in the same collection. It was placed in the human experience deliberately, by whatever intelligence arranged that experience. It is survivable. It is, in its strange way, proof that you were present enough to risk something.
The only way to deal with fear is to get close to it, to look it in the eye, feel the adrenaline it produces, and make a decision about what to do with that energy. Translate it into fuel rather than paralysis. Laugh with it rather than at it.
Remember,
It is never as bad as the story it tells. Not once.
Be Delusional and have crazy self belief:
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t , you are right”
—Henry Ford
I want you to think about the sheer improbability of you.
Not your dreams. Just you existing. The specific arrangement of biology and timing and chance that produced this particular version of a human being, reading this particular sentence, at this particular moment.
The numbers are so astronomically small that if you tried to calculate them you would have to conclude that your existence is, by any reasonable measure, a miracle. One in 400 trillion. That is what mathematics says about the odds of you.
You are a statistical impossibility that happened anyway.
Nature ran its most merciless competition, indifferent to outcomes, keeping no favorites, making no promises, and you were what came out of it. Something that ruthless and that impersonal produced you specifically. If you will not believe in what it made, why should anyone else?
Nature did. Destiny did. Or, if you wish, God did. Why not you?
The arrogance, if there is any arrogance in this room, is not in believing in yourself. It is in deciding that whatever made you went to all that trouble for someone who was going to spend their life sitting on the sidelines.
Now I know the belief that creeps in quietly. The belief that certain people are simply born into a different category of human, more capable, more destined, more fundamentally equipped.
It feels like wisdom because it wears the clothes of humility and humility is in some sort comforting. But comfort is not the same as truth and accuracy is not the same as usefulness.
Even if some hierarchy of natural talent exists, what exactly do you do with that information? Sit down? Accept your assigned position? A belief that does not serve your movement is not worth carrying, regardless of how true it might be.
So put it down. Pick up something better.
Have a god complex if you must. Let people call you delusional. Let them call you arrogant. An inflated belief in yourself, even if it overshoots the reality by some distance, is infinitely more useful than a perfectly accurate belief that keeps you exactly where you are.
A slightly delusional self image will take you further than a well calibrated one that gives you precise and comfortable reasons to aim lower.
Morpheus said it to Neo in the Matrix and I have found no better way to say it myself: Don’t think you are. Know that you are.
Thinking you are capable is a position you can be argued out of on a bad day. Knowing you are does not require any external validation.
It does not collapse when someone disagrees or when the road gets harder than you planned for.
Because it will get harder. It is a certainty.
The road you have chosen, the one we have been talking about this entire time, does not come with a crowd.
Not at first. For a long time, possibly a very long time, you will be the only person in the room who believes that what you are doing is going to amount to anything. You will be your own audience. The single clap in an empty auditorium.
In those stretches, and there will be stretches, the only thing standing between you and quitting is the unshakeable, slightly irrational, borderline delusional belief that you are exactly the person for this.
Not because someone told you. Not because the results have confirmed it yet. Because you decided it was true and you refused to un-decide.
You are the evidence. Your belief is the only proof available right now.
And it has to be enough. Because there is nothing else.
That is everything I have got for now.
I want to be clear about what you just read. This was not written from a height. It was not written by someone standing at the finish line looking back at the people still running.
It was written from the middle of the race, by someone still figuring it out, to a version of myself that needed to hear it. If it found you at the right moment, I am glad.
If it felt like it was written for someone else entirely, maybe it was.
But if you are the person I suspect you are, if something in these pages felt less like reading and more like being found out, then I want to leave you with the only thing that matters.
The wagon is moving. It has been moving through every word of this and it will keep moving after you close the page. The world is not waiting for you to feel ready. Life has never once paused to ask whether you were prepared for what came next. You are tied to it and the rope has always been there and the choice has always been the same one.
Run or be dragged.
Get busy living or get busy dying.
The road does not judge which one you choose. But you will spend the rest of your life living inside that choice and that is worth taking seriously.
So if you choose to run, and I hope you do, take these words with you. Benjamin Jowett said it better than I can: never retreat, never explain. Get it done and let them howl.
Do not wait for the fear to leave. You know now that it does not leave. You bring it with you and you go anyway. Do not wait for the crowd to show up before you begin. The crowd always arrives late. And Do not wait until you are ready.
Go now. Imperfectly, with half the answers and all of the uncertainty. Bluff the parts you have not figured out yet. Figure them out on the way.
And when the road gets hard, when the luck runs dry and the house starts collecting and the single clap in the empty auditorium is the only sound in the room, remember what you are.
A one in a trillion event. A statistical impossibility that happened anyway.
You were not made to be dragged. So get up on your feet and run.
Godspeed.
—Abimbola
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