One Life. That's All You Get.
Make It a Masterpiece.
What do you want out of life?
No, really. What do you actually want? What are you chasing? What does your future look like? What makes your heart tick? Why are you here?
I asked myself these questions during COVID, about six years ago. i didn't have answers then. i still don't have all of them now.
But i understand the questions better. And that understanding, the act of sitting down and truly interrogating my existence, changed everything. I can trace almost everything i do back to that moment. Writing. Lifting. Running. Coding. Dating. All of it stems from asking those questions and refusing to look away.
So take a moment. Ask yourself the same question…
You might be thinking what I thought when I first started out(questioning) : I don't know what I want to do with my life.
But if I have learnt anything over the years, it’s that: deep down, in our heart of hearts we all know what we want and that everyone carries an internal compass that somehow, inexplicably, points them toward where they should go.
We are just afraid to look at where it's pointing. Afraid to take the first step.
I started young with the big questions. What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Why do I even have the consciousness i do? or why was i born at all? I asked everyone i knew. And you know what?
No one freaking knew shit. Not a single person.
And for a while, it frustrated the hell out of me. Until one day it didn’t — I had some sort of epiphany, where i realized there was no answer to find.
But more than that, I realized I'd been asking the wrong question entirely.
“What is the meaning of life?” As if someone out there owed me an explanation or it was someone else’s responsibility to answer, i realized succinctly that the answers weren’t engraved in the stars. The world wasn't supposed to answer me.
Why?
Because the world was asking me the same question.
Life needed answers from me far more than I needed answers from it and that the responsibility was mine to answer each of the question that life asked to the best of my ability.
If that sounded like some twisted philosophical jargon, what i am trying to say is, life inherently has no objective meaning. We are grains of sand in the dust, tiny specks in the grand scheme of evolution. Fragments in an incomprehensible universe.
And if that terrifies you, good. It terrifies me too.
But flip it.
If life has no objective meaning then you have been handed something incredible. A blank canvas. Everyone gets to paint whatever they want. Essentially everyone paintings will be different, Yours will look different from different mine and mine from yours. And different doesn't mean better or worse. It just means it's yours.
The beautiful thing about this ?
There’s no specific thing to paint. What to paint is totally up to you.
Hence, the meaning of life is whatever we give to it.
So how do you paint the blank canvas into something beautiful?
How do you answer the question life asks of you?
Only one way.
Through your actions, by being solemnly responsible for your existence. The answer is always yours to create.
So what are you going to paint on your canvas?
I think we all want the same thing. To be happy. Whatever happiness means for you. Money. Kids. A big house. Good health. Sure, these things matter. But the thing is : these are all goals society handed to us. Pre-packaged dreams.
And a part of you will chase them instinctively without even questioning why, because that’s what you’ve been taught to want.
But deep down, i think happiness is a search for something else. Something more.
In our heart of hearts, we know our time is short. Really short. Shorter than we’ll ever truly understand. And we want ours to mean something. To be purposeful. Creative. Different.
A part of you wants to leave a mark on the world, to say “i was here and i mattered”
So if we're all chasing happiness, chasing meaning, chasing a life that matters, then our first instinct should be to avoid whatever the opposite of happiness is.
You’d think that’s sadness, right?
But it’s not.
Happiness and sadness are two sides of the same coin. They’re both active states. Both proof that you’re feeling something real, something alive. Just like love and hate aren’t opposites. They can’t be, because they both require you to care deeply about something or someone.
The opposite of love is indifference. When you stop caring entirely.
The opposite of happiness is boredom.
The opposite of love is indifference. When you stop caring entirely.
The opposite of happiness is boredom. That dead, flat feeling where nothing excites you anymore. Where you’re just going through the motions, watching life happen instead of living it.
And if boredom is the real enemy, then excitement is what you should be chasing. Not some distant, abstract version of happiness that lives in your future, always just out of reach.
Excitement is different.
It’s visceral. Immediate. It’s that electricity running through you when you’re doing something that matters to you right now. When you’re creating something. Building something. Chasing something that makes you feel fully alive in this exact moment.
That’s the cure for boredom. That’s the answer to what makes life meaningful.
When people tell you to follow your “passion” or discover your “bliss,” they’re really talking about excitement. The pull toward something that makes your heart race.
Excitement is the answer to the blank canvas. It’s how you know what to paint.
So how do you chase it?
Adventures Only Happen To The Adventurous.
You appear. You get a chance to blaze across the sky. Then you disappear.
Why the hell would you waste that?
I don’t think you understand that this moment, this life you’re living so mundanely, is not happening again. You’ve got one shot. After that, you’re gone.
Maybe there’s a life after this one, but that’s a bet. No one actually knows. All you know for certain is that you exist right now, in this exact moment, in this liminal space between nothing and nothing.
You have your blank canvas. The paintbrush is in your hands. So why not paint the Mona Lisa? Why not actually live? You want to sit in your room all day drowning in Netflix, watching shows acted by people no better than you?
Look around. Everything you can objectively see right now. The phone in your hands. Your AirPods. Your TV. Substack.
All of it was a product of someone’s imagination. Someone imagined it, then converted that imagination into reality. That’s all painting is. Imagination made visible.
And your painting isn’t just defined by what you create. It’s shaped by your lived experiences. The moments that take your breath away. The adventures you chase. The risks you take. The stories you collect along the way.
For me, that looks like climbing Mount Fuji in Japan. Hiking Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Seeing the Northern Lights in Norway. Standing in front of the Himalayas in Nepal.
Visiting Vancouver and British Columbia because their names sound beautiful. And most importantly, inspiring people to paint their own canvases.
There are dumb dreams on my list too. Really dumb ones. And that's fine.
Your canvas doesn't have to look like mine. That's the whole point. The only thing that matters is that it's yours. That when you're old and looking back, you're not haunted by the question: “Who could i have been if i'd just tried?”
Everybody has experiences in their lives. Only some choose to make them into stories worth telling.
so…
Promise me that you will go get the experiences. Chase the excitement and be adventurous enough to let adventures find you.
Bite Off More Than You Can Chew.
I have one rule I live by: Always bite off more than you can chew. You’ll figure out how to chew it later.
If you want something, go get it. Don’t sit there planning the perfect approach. Don’t wait until you have more experience, more money, more time, more certainty. Don’t overthink it.
Because overthinking creates nervousness. Nervousness creates hesitation. Hesitation turns into “i’ll do it tomorrow.” And tomorrow becomes next week. Next week becomes next year. And next year becomes never.
That thing you want, even if it seems bigger than you and it terrifies the hell out of you, go chase it.
You don’t need experience first. You don’t need to know how it’s going to work. You just need three things: heart, discipline, and desire. The rest shows up along the way.
There’s this quote from Rumi i think about constantly, he says: “As you walk on the way, the way appears.”
Not before. Not while you’re mapping out every possible scenario. The path only reveals itself when you start moving.
So you have to embrace the uncertainty. You have to be okay with not knowing what you’re doing. You chip at the dream every single day, even when you’re not sure it’s working. Even when it feels messy, chaotic and nothing like you imagined.
And if you keep at it? something strange happens.
The act itself becomes the destination. You stop obsessing over the finish line because you realize there is no finish line and the point was never to arrive.
The point is to always be in motion. To be building. To be alive in the uncertainty.
cliche, but…
Most people never start because they’re waiting for certainty. They’re waiting to feel ready.
But you’re never going to feel ready. That feeling doesn’t exist. Start messy. Start scared. Start before you know what you’re doing.
Because what would life be if we never had the courage to attempt anything?
Don’t Be Afraid To Take A Bet On Yourself
Let me warn you, at that moment you bite off more than you can chew, everyone around you will tell you you’re in over your head.
They’ll point out all the reasons it won’t work. They’ll remind you that you don’t have the experience, the resources, the connections, the credentials.
But you have to believe in yourself anyway.
Not just a little bit. Not “i think i can do this.” You have to believe in yourself to the point where people call you delusional. To the point where it makes them uncomfortable. That level of belief.
Because if you’re going to do anything big, anything that actually matters (Like going to Mars), you need that irrational optimism. You have to believe you’re capable even when there’s no evidence yet. You have to believe it can happen even when everyone’s betting against you.
Otherwise, it won’t.
Belief isn’t optional. It’s the fuel. Without it, you’ll quit at the first real obstacle. You’ll take the doubt seriously. You’ll listen to the voices saying “who do you think you are?”
People’s opinion don’t determine what you become. Your environment doesn’t even get the final say.
They might shape who you are right now, sure. They might even make things harder. But only you have the power to decide what you become.
if you’re going to be worth something later, you’re already worth something now.
You don’t become valuable when you succeed. You don’t earn worth through achievement. You already have it. Wheat is wheat, even when people mistake it for grass in the beginning. They just can’t see what you’re growing into yet.
So have faith in yourself when no one else will.
Not faith in the religious sense. Not faith as someone else defined it for you. Faith as you define it. Faith in your ability to figure it out. Faith in your capacity to become more than you are right now. Faith that the path will appear as you walk it.
That’s the bet. And it’s the only one worth taking.
So here’s where we are.
You have a blank canvas. You have the paintbrush in your hand. You know what to chase now: excitement.
You know how to find it: bite off more than you can chew, take the bet on yourself, start before you’re ready.
Now you just have to paint.
And i need you to understand something: you’re going to fail while painting your canvas. Not maybe. Not if you’re unlucky. You will fail. You’ll spill paint on the canvas. You’ll make mistakes that feel catastrophic.
You’ll have days where you question everything, where the doubt creeps in and whispers that you’re not good enough, that this was stupid, that you should’ve stayed and played safe.
But don’t give in.
The canvas isn’t perfected through flawless execution. It’s perfected through attempts, mistakes, corrections, and trying again. Every spill teaches you something. Every failure shows you what doesn’t work so you can find what does.
So when you fail, and you will, do it fast. Don’t sit in it. Don’t let it paralyze you. Extract every lesson from it. Learn what it has to teach you. Then get back to painting.
Because what happens when you’re painting your canvas with excitement as your guide is that: the fatigue becomes easier to bear. The disappointments becomes fuel. The highs feel like nothing you’ve ever experienced. You become alive in a way most people never allow themselves to be.
This is written for you as much as it’s written for me. Because it’s all the same drive. The same hunger. The same dream. The same refusal to waste the one shot we get.
You appear. You have this chance to blaze across the sky. And then you disappear.
So forget your limits. Forget your doubts. Forget your pain. Forget your past.
And paint. You only get one life.
Make it a masterpiece.
—Abimbola
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