When I was younger, I was lost.

Really lost.

So lost, in fact, that I believed that life was indeed about finding myself. Finding something that I thought was always there but could never grasp onto it.

I believed that if I looked hard enough for myself, eventually he would show up on my front step and say, “Well here I am. Here you go. Everything you’ve been looking for.” That ideology led to many troubled and anxiety filled years.

I also never found myself.

I’m not a treasure seeker…I’m an adventurer…and there’s a huge difference.

I don’t seek answers, treasure, wisdom, you could extend this list to anything in which you go out into the world to find it. I stopped that a long time ago. Seeking money, women, physique, power doesn’t really lead to a fulfilled life.

I dropped all of that for adventure. I dropped all of that for visions and grand dreams. Because my visions are far bigger than anything that money could buy or all the ego stroking recognition could get someone.

I lead my life in a way where I create opportunities for myself through action, sweat, and tears. I bring visions to reality by understanding that it’s about creating yourself not about finding a version of you somewhere deep in the woods that you’ve never seen before.

I used to say a long time ago that I wanted to go back to “an old version of me” where I thought things were so much better. Those were my teenage years. But what I didn’t realize was that the teenage version of me that existed years before was wishing for another version of me.

So there was no winning. When I was living in the present day I was wishing for something I could find in the future…and then when I got to the future I would be looking back wishing for times of old.

Neither of those lined up very well. Further, I always missed one thing – the present.

Adventurer’s head out with minimal expectations except to explore. yes we have a direction and a heading, but we don’t know what we are going to discover about the landscape, and more importantly, ourselves when we head out.

I think parts of me used to be scared to head out into the deep woods for a long time because deep down I knew that this was the place where I heard my inner voice the most.

I knew that the dialogue would begin and I would discover in those moments that I was powerful beyond measure.

We are. We are powerful beyond measure and we can’t even begin to grasp what we are capable of.

We are capable of creating the world in front of us. Whatever we want it to look like, through the power of our minds and our hands, we can begin to fashion it through effort and action.

Nothing else is capable of that.

We truly are given one of the most powerful tools ever created: ourselves.

There are no perfect moments. There are only the moments, ordinary moments, where you act extraordinarily – that’s what makes them perfect. We wait far too much for the perfect time, the perfect moment, the perfect shoes, the perfect lover, the perfect person to come along and save us. We think that it will in turn make us whole, complete us fully…but the reality is much different. The reality is this: these things will only add to your life (sometimes they subtract), but this journey is mostly yours. You are born into this world as one and you will go out as one. We can add things into our lives that make us happy and we can subtract those that hurt us. There’s an incredibly true balance of life that happens when we fall out of sync with overdoing any one of these things…and we are returned back into finding the middle ground.

The middle ground itself is your balancing point.

Don’t think that means living a life of mediocrity.

This point may sound incredibly unbalanced to others, but it’s not built for them. Those who believe in the beauty of their dreams and take the brave leap of attempting them will have points that move farther and farther off the curve.

Just the way it works…and it comes with its own consequences.

Create. Create. Create.

Every day, create with what you’ve been given.

For me, that’s creating my life through writing, reading, lifting, and interacting with people.

That’s where I feel like I am most alive.

I’ve had to push myself back into action in many ways because I wasn’t doing those things, and when I am not I am most certainly unfulfilled.

We can realize our potential only through one way – you have to go out and compete with it every damn day.

Nuff’ said.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project