6d • Journal Entries
Identity War
Living Louder Journal
Entry 14
TL/DR Lesson: Become it before you explain it.
I did not wake up this morning with some grand epiphany. There was no lightning strike. It was more like pulling a splinter that has been working its way to the surface for months. I have been trying to find my identity, and I have been doing it the wrong way with my mouth instead of my hands.
Yesterday I spent the better part of an hour on the phone with a guy who has been helping me sort out the operations side of what I am building. I did what I always do. I spread out every idea like a deck of cards on the table. All the things I could build, all the ways I could leave a mark, all the things that would make my family proud, all the accomplishments that would feel like they mattered when I am old and looking back. Then he asked me one question that landed like a fist to the sternum.
Why are you trying to do this?
I had no clean answer. I had been circling the drain for an hour, talking about vehicles and structures and strategies, but I never named the thing underneath. The truth is I am looking for something that feels like me. Something that fits like a worn in pair of boots, not a costume I picked off a rack.
Money, by the way, never comes up in these conversations. Not directly. It sits in the corner of the room with its arms crossed, watching. It is the elephant nobody points at. That is its own journal entry. This one is about something that sits deeper in the chest.
This morning I was doing what I do every Saturday before the house wakes up and the day swallows me whole. Costco run. Headphones on. Cart rattling across the parking lot. I happened to land on a Gary Vaynerchuk clip, which caught me off guard because I have not listened to him in years. He was one of my heroes when I was building my first agency. He was actually my first podcast guest, back when I was hungry enough to cold call anyone and stubborn enough to think I belonged in the room. He was talking about how his identity has shifted over the years from a kid with calloused hands stacking wine boxes in his father’s liquor store to a guy running multiple brands across categories most people cannot even spell. But here is what stuck with me: he said the vehicles changed, the scale changed, the money changed, but the thread running through all of it was the same. Kindness. Empathy. That was his spine. Everything else was just muscle built on top of it.
That hit me in the ribs because I have been grinding on this studio project for weeks, and I think I have been building the wrong thing. Or at least building from the wrong end. I keep sketching out this vision of a studio, a show, interviews, production, a whole media machine. But standing in the cereal aisle this morning with a cart full of bulk paper towels, I realized the studio is not the point. It might be a megaphone, but a megaphone is useless if the person holding it has nothing real to say.
What I have always done, the thing that has calluses on it, is solve problems. I walk into a business, I find where it bleeds, I stitch it up, and I make sure the stitching holds. That is the craft. Not the podcast. Not the interview set. Not the lighting rig. The craft is the gritty, unglamorous, Tuesday afternoon work of making something broken work again. It is the story of learning the guitar parts with raw fingertips, not performing the solo on stage. It is the story of rebuilding a Facebook ad at midnight because the numbers were ugly. It is the story of tearing apart a landing page and putting it back together until the conversion rate stops embarrassing you.
That is the war I have been fighting in my own skull. One side of me wants to build the stage. The other side knows the stage means nothing if I have not bled for what I am putting on it. And bleeding is not a metaphor here. It is the sore back from sitting too long at the desk. It is the tension headache from staring at data that does not make sense yet. It is the bruised ego from launching something that flopped and having to go back to the drawing board with dirt under your fingernails and zero applause.
This matters even more right now because AI has changed the entire playing field, and it is not slowing down for anyone. This is not some novelty anymore. Over the next five years it is going to rewire how businesses run, how people earn, how entire industries breathe. We have done real work with it already, enough to know it is not a toy. But not enough for me to stand on a stage and pound my chest about it. If I am going to talk about AI, I need grease under my nails from building with it. I need the scars from projects that broke. I need the muscle memory of doing it wrong enough times that I finally started doing it right.
This is the line between a talker and a doer, and it is not a blurry line. The talker reads the book. The doer dog ears the pages, spills coffee on chapter six, and rewrites the ending because the author got it wrong. The talker has opinions. The doer has bruises. Gary Vaynerchuk did not become Gary Vaynerchuk by explaining wine. He became him by sweating through his shirt in a stockroom and knowing every bottle by the dirt it grew out of.
So I am done trying to figure out my identity like it is a riddle. It is not a word. It is not a brand. It is not a tagline some designer puts on a business card. Identity is the scar tissue from showing up and doing the work when nobody is clapping. It is the accumulation of ten thousand small, unglamorous, physically exhausting acts of craft.
If I want to be known as someone who solves problems, I need to have skinned knuckles from solving them every single day. If I want to understand AI, I need to be elbow deep in it until I smell like the machine. If I want to play guitar, the calluses on my fingertips need to be thick enough to prove it. If I want to make content that matters, it has to be wrung out of real work like water from a rag, not manufactured in a studio with good lighting and a script.
That means my calendar needs to look like a construction site, not a boardroom. Every hour accounted for. Hands busy. Mind in the weeds. I need to be dirty all day. Not figuratively. I mean I want to look down at the end of the day and see the evidence. The mud. The wear. The proof that I was in it and not just talking about being in it.
Because identity is not something you declare. It is something that accumulates like grime on a mechanic’s hands. You can wash it off, but everyone already saw it. They already know what you have been doing all day.
Maybe I need to stop trying to explain who I am and start becoming someone who does not need to.
Lessons From This Entry
Identity is scar tissue, not a mission statement.
The studio is a megaphone. Useless without something real to say.
Content wrung from real work beats content designed to look relevant.
The practitioner has bruises. The theorist has opinions. Pick one.
If I want a stronger identity, I need a dirtier calendar.
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Identity War
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