I turned 28 today.

So far, I’ve spent my twenties in pursuit of lots of different things.

That list includes (but is not limited to) money earned formatting PowerPoints, non-fiction books finished, SQL queries written, cities visited, consecutive days journaling, Instagram likes, job title, salary, random facts memorized, newsletter subscribers, etc.

I’ve often stopped to ask myself why I was spending my time engaged in such pursuits.

But a strange thing kept happening.

I generally seemed to have good answers, but things never quite felt right.

My life seemed to continuously lack resonance with a certain elusive frequency.

When the results are not quite resulting (when the vibes are not quite vibing), there are a few options.

You can question your strategy. You can question your execution. Or you can blame the world / other people.

After thoroughly assessing all three, I decided that I had spent the last several years optimizing my execution of a suboptimal strategy.

And that (unfortunately) it was all my fault.

I realized that I had been asking myself the wrong questions.

And that the right answers to the wrong questions are indistinguishable from the wrong answers.

If you asked my parents, they’d probably tell you that I’ve always been good at arguing. They’d probably actually** tell you that I am insufferable to argue with.

But as far as I’m concerned, those are the same thing.

Being good at arguing is a useful skill…if your goal in life is to win arguments.

If, however, your goal is to live authentically — in alignment with the core essence of your being — it is not always very useful.

It can actually be quite harmful.

For some reason, it took me a while to understand this.