Anytime

I was digging through old notes the other day and found something I wrote ten years ago.

It’s a list. No introduction, no conclusion. Just a refrain.

Anytime I need an attitude adjustment…

Anytime I think the world is being unfair to me…

Anytime I’m having a “rough” day…

Anytime I can’t go any further…

Anytime my frustrations seem to get the better of me…

Anytime I feel like there’s no solution to a problem…

Anytime I feel like throwing in the towel…

Anytime I think I need a bigger roof…

Anytime I “want” that shiny new thing…

Anytime I need a reality check…

Anytime I get too comfortable with my life…

Anytime I feel like I can’t get better…

Anytime I want to be inspired to do more…

… I just “restart” the Pursuit Of Happyness.

I don’t remember the exact week I wrote it. I don’t remember what was going wrong. What I remember is the movie — The Pursuit of Happyness, Will Smith playing Chris Gardner. Real story. A man who lost everything and rebuilt a life from a public bathroom in San Francisco where he and his son slept the night they had nowhere else to go.

I watched it the first time and something in me shifted. Not dramatically. Quietly. Like a small knob turning inside a dark room.

I started writing the list shortly after.

The lens

I used to be a glass-half-empty kind of guy. Things didn’t go right and I wore it. The bad day became the bad week became the lens through which I saw the next month. I wasn’t dramatic about it — I just carried things heavier than I needed to.

Tennis was the cleanest example. I’d be too hard on myself when things weren’t working on the court, and one bad point would trigger a freefall. The rest of the match was already lost the moment the spiral started. These days I shake off the bad play, look at the positives, ignore what I can’t control — and invariably play better. Same body, same strokes, different lens.

The lens changed slowly. I can name a moment that mattered — the morning in 2007 when something I’ve called my spiritual awakening cracked something open. But it wasn’t only that morning. It was Krishnamurti, the Gita, meditation, and probably hundreds of small unrecorded shifts that added up over years. The result was that I started looking at hard situations differently. Not as this is bad — but as what’s actually here?

That’s the part most people get wrong about gratitude practice. It’s not feeling better because someone else has it worse. That’s a borrowed kind of comfort, and it leaks. Schadenfreude in slow motion.

It’s perspective. It’s seeing the actual size of the thing in front of you, against the actual size of what’s possible to lose, against the actual size of what others carry every day without complaint. The realization isn’t they have it worse, so I should shut up. The realization is the situation in front of me is not the situation I’m making it in my head.

That distinction matters.

The steady hand

I run a technology company. As CTO, my job is partly architecture, partly mentorship, and a surprisingly large part is being the person in the room who doesn’t panic.

Every business has problems. Every system has bugs. Every roadmap meets reality and reality wins half the rounds. The question is never will something go wrong. The question is who do you have when it does.

I’ve seen leaders make mountains out of molehills. A bug in production becomes the company is on fire. A missed deadline becomes we’re losing the deal. A customer complaint becomes the brand is collapsing. They convey panic and the panic spreads. By the time you finish triaging the problem, you’re also triaging morale.

The leaders I’ve admired — and the kind I try to be — convey something different. Steady hand at the helm. Eyes on the actual problem, not the imagined catastrophe around it. Voice that reassures people we’ve seen this kind of thing before, here’s what we do, everything will be alright.

That’s not denial. That’s perspective applied at scale.

The list is part of the upstream work that makes the steady hand possible.

The two who taught me

I didn’t write the list in a vacuum. I had two living examples in my own family.

My father went through the worst financial periods you can imagine. He came from nothing, built a career from nothing, lost it, rebuilt it, lost it again. I watched him handle each cycle with a steadiness that should have looked impossible from inside. From inside, it didn’t look like steadiness — it looked like what else am I going to do. He had a family. He kept walking.

My mother has had Parkinson’s for twenty-five years. Twenty-five. Most people don’t get twenty-five years to do anything well, let alone fight a disease that takes from you slowly and without remorse. She has fought it without ever framing it as fighting. She just keeps doing the next thing. Reaching for the cup. Walking to the door. Holding the conversation.

If they had thrown in the towel — and any reasonable person would have understood — I would not be writing this. Or running a company. Or any of it.

So when I find myself “having a rough day,” there is a calibration. It is not chosen and it is not performed. It just rises, the way a horizon line rises when you climb a hill.

What changes is the reader

Ten years later, the list still works.

But here’s what I didn’t expect when I wrote it: the list means different things at different times. The lines haven’t changed, but the man reading them has.

Anytime I think the world is being unfair to me meant something simple in my early forties. Usually that I’d been working hard and the happiness I expected to find at the end of a high-paying career wasn’t there. Now the line means something else. Now it usually means I can’t find time for the little things — the experiences, the conversations, the slow afternoons. The unfairness moved from the reward isn’t here to the time isn’t here. Same line. Different ache.

Anytime I “want” that shiny new thing used to be about a car or a gadget. The wanting was material and easy to name. Now the wanting is for experiences — places, time, presence. Less material, more intangible, and harder to satisfy by buying something.

Anytime I get too comfortable with my life — that one didn’t even make sense to me when I wrote it. Now I read it and nod.

The list is a mirror. The truth doesn’t change. What it reflects does.

The trick of perspective

I still restart The Pursuit of Happyness. Not as often as I used to. But when I need it, I know it’s there. Two hours of a man who refused to give up on his son, on himself, on the future he could not yet see.

That’s the trick of perspective. The future you can’t yet see is bigger than the problem you’re standing inside of.

Most days, I remember that on my own.

The rest of the days, I have a list.