David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

career

My future plans are solid, but intuition says prepare for change

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When I feel intuition about something I haven’t expected, my mind’s first response is to explain why this gut feeling is wrong. My ego-driven brain likes to think it’s in charge, but my gut-level intuition often has the last word.

It was after 1 a.m. before Lucy and I walked tonight, so the neighborhood was quiet. I had been listening to an audiobook and I started that, but a noisy voice in my heart told me to shut off the audio and listen to the voice instead.

I have a firm work plan in place for the foreseeable future. My company just signed an agreement Friday that’s going to make it possible for us to renovate our office and prepare for substantial growth. I’ll have my real estate broker’s license by November and I’ll have a much larger role in building the future of the company after that. It’s a great financial opportunity for me.

But in the silence of my walk tonight, that little voice in my gut said, “Hold on. Something you don’t expect is about to change.”

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Great men who change the world rarely look impressive from start

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It was a surprise to hear from her, but it was an even bigger surprise to find out why she was calling. An old girlfriend was looking for a recording of an interview I did about six years ago with KFAR radio in Anchorage, Alaska. I didn’t know she had even known of the interview.

I started searching through my archives Saturday afternoon, but the search for the interview turned into a survey of hundreds of other things I’ve written and recorded over the last eight years. I was uneasy with how much I hated most of the older material and I was surprised at how dramatic the shift in tone and emotion had been for my work.

From this perspective, I see something much different in my work over eight years. I see what I’ve written and spoken as a vivid record of a struggle for me to become a different person, as though I knew I was changing but was both impatient and agitated about where I was going. Seeing this clearly made me feel very vulnerable.

When I contacted my ex this evening to say that I couldn’t find the recording she wanted, I mentioned what it had felt like to see my changes through the old work.

“I always thought you were going to change the world,” she wrote in her reply. “What you’re writing now is closer to what I thought you would be than anything you had done before. Every great man goes through a dark night when he’s trying to figure out his purpose, but you feel like you’re about to explode to fame, because you’ve found your voice. I’m sorry it didn’t work out for me to be there when it happens, because you’re quite addictive.”

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I used to ponder who I really am; today I just ask who I am for now

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Most of us are driven to define who we are. We’re not quite comfortable if we can’t put labels on ourselves. We want some feeling of certainty.

I’ve struggled with my sense of identity over the years and I’ve talked about it several times. Eight years ago was the first time I tried to explain what I had gone through in this regard. That article was my first attempt at explaining how I got from being a broken businessman whose company had shut down to being someone eager to create art. It was my best understanding at the time of what I had gone through.

I’ve come to understand so much more since then, though, that I now see that I was asking the wrong questions back then. From the depths of my depression after I shut my company down, I was asking myself, “What am I?” I was asking myself, “Who are you, David?”

I had been a journalist. Then I had become a businessman. Because my company had shut down — which I finally explained last year was because of my father — I felt like a failure. Just being a journalist no longer felt big enough. I felt like a failure as a businessman, so I thrashed around in depression trying to find some new definition of who I really was.

I now know my questions were wrong, so I was destined to find the wrong answers. My understanding of my own story keeps changing.

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