The Morning I Stopped Chasing and Started Living

In early 2007, something happened to me that I’ve never fully been able to explain.

I won’t get into the specifics here — this isn’t that kind of post. What I will say is that one morning, after a few weeks of consistent early rising and meditation, something shifted. Fundamentally. In a way I could feel in my body and observe in my behavior over the weeks and months that followed.

I became more aware. More present. More creative. More compassionate. More curious. The quality of my attention changed. The way I processed experience changed. For a long time I called it a spiritual awakening, because that’s the most honest description I have. You can call it whatever you want.

What happened next is what I actually want to talk about.

The trap that follows every peak experience

I spent years trying to get back to that morning.

Not consciously, not always. But underneath the daily life — the company, the family, the work — there was a quiet, persistent sense that I had touched something extraordinary and then lost it. That I needed to find my way back. That I was somehow failing to recreate the conditions that had produced that experience.

This, I now understand, was completely backwards.

Here’s the thing about peak experiences — and I don’t just mean spiritual ones. I mean the moment you shipped the product that changed everything. The conversation that cracked open a problem you’d been stuck on for months. The run where everything clicked and you felt like you could go forever. The day you realized you were actually good at something you’d been quietly doubting yourself about.

Those moments feel like arrivals. Like you’ve finally gotten somewhere. And the natural human response is to try to get back there — to treat the peak as the destination rather than as a door.

But peaks are not destinations. They’re calibrations. What they show you is a possibility — a version of yourself, a quality of attention, a level of performance — that you didn’t know was available to you. The actual work is integrating that possibility into ordinary life. Not recreating the peak. Living differently because of it.

The tennis match you can’t recreate

I play tennis twice a week. Some days, without warning, everything clicks. I’m not thinking about my footwork or my grip or where my opponent is going. I’m just playing — fluidly, instinctively, at a level that surprises even me. Commentators have a word for this state: unconscious. As in, he’s playing unconscious right now.

And then the next match arrives, and I walk onto the court with expectations. I remember what it felt like last time. I try to find that feeling again. I think about it. I monitor myself for signs of it.

And I play worse. Every time.

Which resets the expectations. Which allows the unconscious to return. Which raises the expectations again. The cycle continues indefinitely.

This is not a tennis problem. This is the fundamental problem of trying to consciously recreate what the unconscious did naturally. The moment self-awareness enters the room, it disrupts the very thing it’s trying to observe. Psychologists call it the centipede’s dilemma — the centipede walks perfectly until someone asks it how it coordinates a hundred legs, and then it can’t walk at all.

Morpheus says it to Neo, and it’s the truest thing in the film: “Don’t think you are. Know you are.”

Thinking is effortful, analytical, self-monitoring. Knowing is prior to all that — it’s the state before the mind starts narrating. The unconscious tennis happens when you’re operating from knowing. The next match, trying to recreate it, is you back in thinking. The mind got in the way.

Peak experiences work the same way. The moment you start trying to manufacture them, you’ve already left the state that produces them.

The steady light

Here’s what I eventually understood, much later than I should have:

I hadn’t lost what I found that morning. I had been living it.

The heightened awareness I was searching for had become my baseline. The creativity I was trying to manufacture had been showing up consistently in my work for years. The quality of attention I was chasing had quietly woven itself into how I led, how I listened, how I approached problems.

I was so busy looking for another explosion that I had stopped noticing the steady light.

This is one of the stranger features of genuine growth: it becomes invisible to you precisely because it becomes normal. You can’t see the water you’re swimming in. The capabilities you’ve integrated stop feeling like capabilities and start feeling like just… how you are. And then you look around for proof that you’ve grown, can’t find it in the immediate moment, and conclude that you’ve stalled.

You haven’t stalled. You’ve absorbed.

The lesson I keep having to relearn

Find the Artist is a piece I wrote about a meditation I once had — a dream in which I traveled across a city, over water, up a mountain, looking for the artist behind a photograph on my wall that I found extraordinary. At the end of the journey, exhausted, I looked at the photograph again and found my own name in the corner.

I keep having to relearn that lesson in different forms.

The spiritual version: I searched for the awakening I already had.

The professional version: I’ve watched founders and leaders spend years trying to recreate their best moment rather than building on it.

The personal version: I’ve looked everywhere for validation of growth that was already quietly present.

The pattern is always the same. We had something real. We didn’t trust it. We went looking for proof of it instead of living from it.

What actually works

Here is the most practical thing I know about sustaining any kind of peak performance, creative output, or personal growth over a long period of time:

Stop measuring the practice against the peak.

The peak was a signal, not the standard. What it pointed at — a quality of attention, a depth of presence, a level of creative or personal engagement — that’s what you’re actually after. And that quality is cultivated through consistency, not through recreation.

Show up. Create the conditions. Do the work. Release the attachment to what the work produces.

This is not a spiritual idea. It’s a practical one. The best leaders I know don’t manage for peak performance moments — they manage for the conditions that make peak performance likely. The best athletes don’t try to recreate their best race. They train the substrate that makes their best race possible.

The Bhagavad Gita, which I’ve returned to many times over the years, puts it more bluntly than any management book I’ve read: you are not entitled to the fruits of your labor. Only the labor itself.

Do the work. Let the chips fall.

The question worth sitting with

Whatever your version of that morning was — and you have one, even if it wasn’t dramatic — ask yourself honestly:

Are you still trying to get back to it? Or are you living forward from it?

Because the door it opened is still there. It was never locked from the outside.

You just have to stop staring at the door and walk through the house.

Related: Find the Artist — on searching everywhere for what was already on your wall.