[This week’s fiction touches on suicide. If this isn’t a good thing for you to be reading about, please delete this email. I believe suicide is never the answer, getting help is. For helplines anywhere in the world, click here. We need you.]

There’s a story about Julius Caesar, aged 32, in a temple in Cadiz, Spain. As he wanders around, he stops in front of a statue of Alexander the Great and weeps. When his friends ask why he cries, he says, ‘Do you think I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable?’

Fiction Bite - Failed Attempts

The mist hung low over the tussock grass as they walked through the dark, punctuating the silence with occasional remarks. They’d been walking hours, circling the rutted tracks, each time drawing nearer to the calling question.

‘Why?’

‘I’m done, with the struggle, the fight, the bleak 9-5 that fills my existence.’

‘What about me, the kids?’

‘You’d have been better without me. But I fucked up again.’

‘I’ve found some people that can help, will you look with me?’

‘Are any of them good with knots?’

Quote of the Week

'Almost always, your road to victory goes through a place called "failure".' - Bill Walsh

Something to Try

Do you remember what you wanted to be when you were a kid? Or when you finished school with a career path laid out before you. How much have you changed since then? Not just work, but your hobbies and interests, music taste and habits. Can you write a before and after, and put on paper what has shifted over the years.

Final Words

In my early twenties, a friend looked around at people our age making it big. Movie stars, professional athletes, entrepreneurs making their first million after bootstrapping from their basements. He came to me one day and told me we’d missed the boat, we’d peaked, and from now on all was downhill. All he could see was what other people had. He was staring down sixty plus years of being the little guy, the one who didn’t succeed. The problem wasn’t that we weren’t successful or that he was using success as a proxy for happiness (they’re very different measures), but that he wasn’t allowing for change. Just like Julius Caesar, who years after his despair ruled most of the known world.

The future is hard to predict. When I look at how much has changed in my life in the past five years, I’m blown away. My youthful predictions were way off. While I’m in the game, there’s always hope.

With Love

Joe

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