NO DOLPHINS IN THE DESERT

I saw my first desert in 2016. It was a beautiful place. Sand, rocks, the landscape, the views, the heat with no humidity, and its own laws. But I didn’t see any dolphins. Because the thing that makes a desert a desert is the same thing that makes it impossible for a dolphin to live there. You see?

Life has a lot of natural laws. Most of them are straightforward. Some of them present themselves to you precisely at the time necessary. Necessary can be a loaded word, but it’s necessary when necessary. Another thing you won’t see is a cactus on the beach. The beach has what it has, the cactus needs what it needs, and the environment separates the two. The desert has its own terms too, and the things that live there adapted. Certain things only grow in certain places. One of my favorite authors, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, tells the story of Darwin on the Beagle, sent to catalog plants and animals, getting puzzled by similar species living in different niches, until he saw the connection between the shape of a bird’s beak and the food that was available. Traits match environment. That’s the whole law, and Darwin needed a boat to see it. Over time, life will show you itself.

The Courage to Be Disliked was highly influential for me. It helped me get past worrying about how my thoughts and my life’s journey looked from the outside. I’ve always leaned towards taking the risk, but sometimes the outside noise did get loud. I read it in the summer of 2023 and put it on Twitter, and it went far. Strangers read it, a few even told me it helped them, which is always something I love to hear. Along the same thread, friends have always asked me for recommendations. Books, music, shows. I don’t take that lightly. A recommendation means they trust your taste, they trust your opinion, and they’re about to try something new with you as the one pointing the way. That’s a lot of trust. Take that seriously.

Some books are full of great ideas that don’t land until long after you’ve read them. Four months after I read this one, I searched online for the word to describe a person who’s “clueless to the harsh reality of the world”. I was thirty two. That phrase stuck with me for a long time, because I first experienced that thought with a woman I met in college a decade earlier. The book resurfaced this in a completely different way and although it took a while to register, the book’s shift in perspective would be key going forward.

She was extremely sweet. At that time, one of the nicest people I’d ever met, and it confused me, because I hadn’t experienced that before. The way she approached life, the smile, everything about being around her. A friend of hers asked me once what I thought of her and I said, “I mean, she’s really nice. But it kind of seems like her head is in the clouds. Everything is so good all the time. That’s not the real world.” Needless to say, the friend reported back, and that chapter closed pretty abruptly.

I think about that sometimes, because it really does describe one of my life’s paradigm shifts. At that time my view of the world and the world I knew were still very limited. It “could be worse”. That’s the thing people always say, it “could be worse”, and it’s comfortable because it’s true. But it could be better too. See, she was a genuinely happy person and I didn’t have the vocabulary for the state she was in. The life she came from was so different from mine that I decided something was wrong with her. She came from one of the best cities in America and at that time I truly didn’t understand how different places were because I’d only seen the same one. Head in the clouds, you must don’t know what’s down here? How is she so happy all the time? I had one answer for that, and it was the wrong one, and nearly a decade later the new wiring still hadn’t formed. The right answer is one word. Environment.

I grew up in the Bible Belt. Southeast Alabama, the Black Belt to be exact. Before the Civil War it was one of the wealthiest farming regions in the country. You can guess where that wealth came from. When freedom came, and over the hundred years after it, a sizable number migrated for better horizons. Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other lesser known places. Many stayed, because of family and because of that fear of the great unknown, and many worked the same land as sharecroppers. Leaving something stable and everything you’ve ever known for a chance isn’t easy. A few generations later that same ground became the center of the Civil Rights Movement, Selma to Montgomery runs right through it. Today it holds one of the highest concentrations of Black residents in the country and some of the deepest rural poverty. That’s the region. My town sits deep inside it, six hundred people when I was a kid and under four hundred now, and all of that rich history is deep in the ground. The Heart of Dixie.

What’s there now? Not a lot, but that’s by design. The people are strong, the people are serious, and the people are funny. Extremely funny, natural comedians. Humor is a necessity when nothing’s funny, the ability to make the best out of the worst situation. That was the first light I ever saw in the desert. The situation is actually very unfunny. Our nearest hospital was thirty miles away. Closer than that, we had two state prisons, both built the year before I was born, with room for three thousand men between them. Both of my parents worked at those. Grocery shopping was a thirty minute trip and we stocked up, because the local store didn’t have much, and a Keystone chicken plant employed a ton of the community. The trap also provided. The heat made the cactus bear fruit. That’s the environment. Hold that geography for a minute. You feel like everything is limited when your introduction to the world was limit.

One thing about the environment, it teaches. It teaches you so fast. When I was a kid, every tax season the radio filled up with the same ads. Rims and speakers. Rim and speaker deals, rim and speaker giveaways, some kind of new car deal, every time, right in between the music people came for each day. I don’t remember the first age I noticed it. I just remember always seeing that combination, and it didn’t make sense to me. Why do these two things always happen at the same time? If I’m hearing those ads, it’s tax season. If it’s tax season, I’m about to hear those ads. Fast forward twenty years. I learned targeted advertising, how you find exactly who you’re looking for and get the result you want. And I understood. Somebody found a population with very low financial literacy, learned its triggers, and timed the dream to a very specific check that came every year. Sneaky or amazing, depends on who’s looking at it. I didn’t travel much as a kid, so I can’t tell you what the radio said everywhere else, but I just don’t think it was presented that way. Watch a group that always gets targeted and you’ll watch the resources drain and drain and drain, and it stays that way. It turns into lack. That’s what a desert is. Lack.

Every environment has slots. Positions, things people do, paths people take. I told you in the last one that I got my first job at thirteen. That was a slot, and I took it because I wanted money and my dad had a way to help me get some. At the same time, why would a thirteen year old be looking for money? Because there was a lack of it. Cause and effect, all of it related to the environment. If he never told me, I’d never know and the opportunity wouldn’t have appeared. You only know what you’ve seen as possible. What’s expected of you. What everyone else has done. Each environment has its limits. The amount of life you’d see in a desert versus an ocean is vastly different, and each has its own rule book. The desert teaches you to compare up, against where you came from and against the people with less, and by that ruler a bad deal looks good and “it could be worse” is always true. The other ruler is comparing across, against your actual peers, against what’s really available in the world. The desert doesn’t hand you that one. You have to go find it.

I found the first piece of it at Auburn. I talk about my fraternity a lot because it changed my life. The men I met there showed me what a Black man can truly be if you lock in, don’t chase every woman you see, roll the dice, and don’t be afraid to be selfish and committed to a greater cause at the same time. I’d seen that before, but always as an archetype. Somebody on TV, somebody in a story. Never as something that I could actually do. I can vividly remember nights where we’d party, have amazing times, and then later I’d watch them go home, stay up, and study for a test or work on a project that was make or break. Life had always made it seem like an either or thing. Then I met men who did both and were happy to do it. They lived life while also loving every moment of it.

Gurdjieff has a passage I didn’t read until recently, and it explained twenty years of my life in a paragraph. You are in prison, he says, and all a sensible man can want is to get out. But nobody tunnels out alone. You need the help of the ones who escaped before you. Only they can tell you how it’s done. Only they can send tools. Two prisons within fifteen minutes of my house, and the third one had no walls. My frat brothers were the ones who had already tunneled out and I trusted what they were showing me. Older men have always taken an interest in teaching me the ropes. It just happens. This has probably been a thing for me since at least sixth grade. So when it happens, I listen, because I can be all gas and no brakes. Even after seeing the way, I’d still downplay myself out of a need for humility. One of my friends called it out one day and said, “Nigga, you went to Auburn.” Nobody experiences their own life from the outside. That’s why the ones who escaped before you matter. They can see you.

I talked a bit about fees in my last essay. The years in Charlotte called for nonstop payments, and I was fully dedicated. The brand reached over a hundred thousand people in fifty countries and I hosted my first art show. I came into the city as a data analyst and left as a Principal Data Engineer in cybersecurity. I gave out free masks during COVID and sent intentional gifts to kids back home. All of this was very demanding but I knew what I signed up for and was happy to do it. As much as life demanded, the rewards were just as great, and I didn’t realize how intoxicating that was. For the first time in my life, I truly felt comfort and man was it a beautiful thing.

The one downside of all of this is that once comfort comes, it can truly do something to you. It holds you, it stops you. In the right season that’s a beautiful thing. Too early and it’s an eternity of “what ifs.” I lived in the same apartment for seven years and I absolutely loved it. Old industrial style, exposed ceilings, concrete floors, floor to ceiling windows, and a view that I just knew couldn’t get any better. Where I’m from, once you find something stable you don’t let it go, so I didn’t. Remember my initial description of that environment. Good is hard to come by. Eventually you start to notice the redundancy, and like all things, once you notice it, then comes the decision. I noticed the loop I mentioned in the last essay. Three weeks in a row, same order, same days. I had completely stopped considering that there could be more. I didn’t realize new views could come with new environments. Views you can’t even imagine, because your brain doesn’t have a container or a frame of reference for the imagery yet. As long as you pursue it, there’s a chance. It stops once you stop. That’s the entire thing.

Let’s pause and reset here, because based on these words so far, it would be easy to get it wrong about home. The desert wasn’t a bad place. It made me. Under everything, an unshakable foundation of love, and it came from that environment. On top of that foundation, the threat detection, the eye for pieces coming together, the ability to make something out of nothing, I got all of that from watching people do it every day where I’m from. Those are desert adaptations, and they turned out to be the best tools I own in the ocean. The brain calibrated correctly to scarce terrain, and it kept running after the terrain changed. That’s the part you have to catch. What the desert couldn’t give me was more water than it had. A place can only give you what it has.

My last month in Charlotte was so interesting, and it’s another thing that sticks with me when I think about life. So many people told me how they had always viewed me and what they really thought, once they realized I’d no longer be around. I was there for years and these were things I never knew and never would have guessed. The decision to leave and relocate across the country cost a lot. Great friends, amazing times, a few things I may never experience again. At the same time, it unlocked the door to many other things I’d never experienced before. There’s almost always a cost or an exchange required, and this wasn’t any different. So make sure this isn’t romanticized. There’s a cost associated with every environment, and you choose to stay or go. Either way, your experience changes once you make the choice.

After living in Seattle for a while, it’s interesting to see the other side of the spectrum. Fruit on the side of the street. Literally. I was walking over an overpass and saw people reaching over the rail into some vines, eating. Wild blackberries. Rose bushes on the sidewalk. Community gardens nobody messes with, because people respect what the community is building and know there’s enough to go around. I’m a huge basketball fan, and the kids here have NBA talent around them. The pros come to their schools, show up at their games. And when you see stuff, you know it’s possible. It changes your whole perspective. I said it in the last one and I’ll say it again. You just have to see it.

Convenience is something I cared about for a long time, because I never had it. Early in my career I was still doing the thirty minute grocery haul out of habit, until it clicked that I was running a habit loop. The store was eight minutes away. There was one I could walk to. Why in the hell am I stocking up like I have a full family at home? The haul had no value or use anymore, it was just something I saw, reenacted, and never questioned. When you’re in a loop, nobody tells you you’re in a loop. Look at a hamster on the wheel. He doesn’t know he’s on a wheel. He’s chasing a snack. The hamster would argue you down if you tried to tell him he’s on a wheel. He’s not on a wheel, he’s trying to eat. A lot more of that goes on every day than we realize, and it’s easy to get stuck in it. Life is full of those scenarios and you’ll outgrow many, many things, but it’s easy to miss if you’re not constantly resizing yourself. The first time I had pizza delivered I was a freshman in college. You’re telling me I can call these people, tell them what I want, and they bring it to me? From stocking up to on demand. That’s a different world.

Enough about me though, back to the book, because the book had the right answer years before I could use it, and so did the man behind it. Alfred Adler was a doctor in Vienna, one of the three men who started modern psychotherapy next to Freud and Jung, and the one most people have never heard of. He sat in Freud’s circle from the beginning, and by 1911 he was out. Yo to the Bruhs. Freud said the past drives you, the wound explains you. Adler said we’re pulled by our goals, and we choose the meaning of what happened to us. Freud’s version got adopted first and became the way the whole century thought, and the way America still thinks about itself. What happened to you is why you are how you are. Freud is a popular name, people love it, and it’s one school of thought. It was never the only one. For most of the last century, doctors knew ulcers came from stress. In 1984 an Australian doctor drank a glass of the bacteria he’d found in his patients, gave himself the disease, and cured it with antibiotics. It still took years before anybody believed him, and then they gave him a Nobel Prize. Adler’s ideas kept moving anyway, under other people’s names, all the way into a dialogue two Japanese writers put out in 2013, which a man in Charlotte found and put on Twitter. They kicked Adler out of the room and the room was wrong.

I think I related to Adler because I’m consistently too early with my thoughts, and sometimes that causes friction. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to keep sharing what I think and get more careful about who I share it with. The right audience makes all the difference. Winning the room and being right are two different things, and the question is what works for the organism in front of you. The three prisons were real. The thirty mile hospital was real. “It could be worse” was true. All of it was true inside one answer, and a better answer can sit there for a hundred years while the louder one runs every room.

Now the part that’s for you, wherever you’re standing when you read this. Everything is a choice. When a situation isn’t favorable, you have a few options. Be the person who complains and does nothing. Be the person who devotes their life to changing it. Be the person who ignores it and acts like it doesn’t exist. Be the person who understands it, acknowledges what it is, and learns how to make it work. There may be more, but those are the four I know. And if you’re not doing anything, ask yourself why? What are you afraid of? What’s the worst that could happen? I hope it’s not what people will say. The outside noise. That isn’t even a thing. Don’t give it your attention. Your attention is the most valuable thing you have, which is why companies build things to take it. The rims and speakers never left. They’re on your phone now. At all times. Guard your attention, and you get to choose the environment instead of the environment choosing you.

And if you’re caught in one of those loops, it’s not your fault. Your brain is up against something that has run the same play an almost infinite number of times. The hamster was chasing a snack. Somebody built the wheel. You can’t compete with that. You just can’t. So you play it like boxing, the counterpuncher against the slugger. If the counterpuncher stands there and trades, he loses quick. The slugger only has to catch him once and it’s over. But if it’s miss, miss, miss, mink, miss, mink, mink, sooner or later the slugger gets tired, and then the counterpuncher does what he does. You have to know what game you’re playing before you play. And sometimes the game you’re in was never your game. You might be on the wrong board. You might be a dolphin in a desert. There’s water out there.

Some environments make it easier to do the things you want to do. I’d had the idea for Transcend for a while, but I was afraid of it. Such a big concept. Hiring a dev team, designers, artists, composers, audio engineers, grant researchers, startup advisors, finance professionals. A paralyzing thought. Then I got to Seattle and met so many people who were doing all of it, with a smile. You can do it. The person next to you just did it. Do it. Annie Duke has a line about that: our lives are too short to learn enough from our own results, so the fix that evolved is watching other people do stuff. The exact same way I learned everything back home, watching people do it every day, but a new chapter of the book. I started building as soon as I moved. If you want to do it, there are people around who did it. The “it” changes with the person, but win or fail, somebody took the first step.

Which brings me back to my dear old friend. Not long ago I heard two people describe me to other people, and what they said sounded a lot like how I once described her. The difference was that they didn’t see it as a bad thing. It was complimentary, that a person could even think or see the world that way. Perspective always makes the difference. Over time I became the person I once thought had their head in the clouds. It was a state I wasn’t aware of, a state my containers at the time couldn’t place. Nothing was wrong. She was just the first one showing me things I didn’t have a container for yet. Baklava’s still one of my favorite desserts.

One night I ended up at a bar with a glass of Demerara rum. The story came with it. Cane from Guyana, the last wooden stills in the world, the finest thing cane ever becomes, the pride of a country. Three of those bottles were on the shelf and they were visibly better than everything around them. The bartender’s story reminded me of the sugar cane my grandmother grew in her front yard. The sweet thing that grows in the dry place. Same ingredient, different environment, different result.

Be honest about what you’re standing in. Is it you, or is it the “water”?

You may not be a dolphin. The desert may be what you love. Maybe you’re a cactus, and the conditions that would actually break most things are where you bear fruit. Think about that when weighing the trade for water.

Even further, what if you’re neither? There are crocodiles in the Sahara right now, in rock pools scattered across Mauritania, left over from when it was green. When the pool shrinks they go into the caves and shut down. When the rain comes back, they come out. There’s a frog in the Australian desert that fills itself with water, digs down, and waits years for rain. Nothing lives in both at full speed. The ones that do learned the timing, and what the dry built in them still works in the water. Maybe that’s you. Maybe you’re a crocodile, or a frog that carries its own water, and the important part is that you never forget that. You thrive in both because you carry what each one built. The frog that stays buried after the rain dies in its own skin.

Never let the fear of something new keep you underground.