Every builder eventually hears the engine knock. Not catastrophic, just enough to make you pull over and pop the hood. For me, that sound arrives as I turn thirty-six tomorrow, carrying two decades of victories won by wrestling reality into submission through sheer will.
The Battering Ram Years
I’ve been a human battering ram since I was fifteen, when I built a lawncare business that out-earned what my first year of teaching would, though “built” is generous for something held together by my dad’s truck and friends who tolerated my obsession. At seventeen, I decided to shed a hundred pounds the only way I knew how: running into every dawn like I was chasing daylight itself, sustained by one meal a day and nothing but raw determination. The weight fled like it knew it was no longer welcome.
At eighteen, I started working on political campaigns. By twenty-one, I was running the campaign for Delaware’s first African American elected statewide, though “running” makes it sound like I knew what I was doing. We made history through some alchemy of timing, a charismatic candidate, and the intensity I’d once used to remake myself.
Then came the classroom, where my students, brilliant kids who did the actual work, posted the best test scores the state had seen. Maybe ever. But standing at that whiteboard, watching them soar, I felt the truth settle in my bones: I wasn’t meant to teach someone else’s curriculum. I was meant to write my own.
Even with Rachel, I simply decided she was the one and bent reality around that decision, somehow convincing the most brilliant woman I’d ever met that my certainty was its own form of courtship. Seventeen years later, she probably laughs (or cries, depending on the day) about falling for someone who approached love like gravity…not a question, but a fundamental force.
Real estate came next. We built the brokerage from nothing into something people noticed. Then the ecosystem, property management, mortgage, insurance, each business another planet in my expanding universe, each one threatening implosion more than once before finding orbit. Now Archie, the biggest gamble yet.
The Cost of Force
Each venture carved from stone with bleeding knuckles, fueled by the kind of conviction that turns coffee into code and exhaustion into equity. Every ‘victory’ claimed through sheer force of will, as if success was something you could wrestle to the ground and make submit.
But brute force keeps a secret. The bill always comes due. The returns diminish while the costs compound with interest. The shoulders ache. The mind races at 2 AM. The stress and gray hairs stack up like unpaid debts.
[PULLOUT:0]
The universe has been whispering something I’ve been too stubborn to hear, a truth written in the space between effort and elegance. Force and flow aren’t adversaries… they’re dance partners. And I’ve been stepping on toes when I could have been learning to glide.
The Law of Conservation
Physics teaches us that energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transmuted. This is literal instruction for how to build without burning out. When you attack a problem with brute force, you’re converting potential into heat— the stuck bolt that finally turns and strips its threads, the deal you close through exhaustion that poisons the next three. Flow captures and redirects that same energy— the sail trimmed to catch a crosswind, turning resistance into propulsion.
Water cuts through rock by persistence, finding the path of least resistance that somehow achieves maximum impact. The Colorado River didn’t decide to fight the Earth. It simply flowed. And in flowing, carved the Grand Canyon.
The Hidden Invoice
Every time I’ve overridden resistance with pure will, I’ve been running up tabs I didn’t know existed. The physiological debt is obvious: cortisol and adrenaline spike output while flattening your recovery window. Chronic brute force ages your endocrine system the way constant redlining ages an engine. At twenty-five, you run that engine hot. At thirty-five, with more horsepower than ever, you learn to shift gears strategically.
The real costs hide deeper. Cognitive debt accumulates when executive function narrows to the obstacle directly ahead, shrinking your peripheral vision to a pinhole. Creativity, pattern recognition, and luck all live in the periphery, exactly what brute force mortgages for today’s win. You solve the problem in front of you while missing the opportunity gliding past your shoulder.
Then there’s relational debt, the most insidious tax. People feel the friction of your strain even when they admire your results. They mirror it or withdraw from it. Both are poison to a shared mission. Teams follow the leader who makes the impossible feel inevitable, not the one who makes it feel like war.
The Strategic Application of Force
Abandoning force would be like removing the transmission from your car because you discovered cruise control. Force remains essential for escaping inertia wells. First customer. First hire. Impossible deadline. These moments require the battering ram. But deploy it like a scalpel: precise, controlled, brief.
The entrepreneur who builds empires into their seventies doesn’t work harder than the one who flames out at forty. They know when to push and when to pull, when to break doors and when to find windows.
Engineering Flow at Scale
Flow is systematized leverage where external currents do compounding work on your behalf. Picture yourself in the river: you’re guiding the boulder downstream instead of hauling it uphill against the current.
The work feels inevitable rather than forced. Feedback loops tighten like a musician finding rhythm. Signals arrive fast enough to guide iteration without mental lag. The output to input ratio grows exponentially the longer you stay in motion. Flow at scale means effort that compounds rather than depletes.
Learning to Dance
Tomorrow I turn thirty-six, and I’m evolving the force that got me here. I’m learning to find doors instead of breaking through walls. I’m reading currents, finding the streams that flow toward my destination instead of swimming against every tide.
[PULLOUT:1]
The universe has currents: technological, social, economic. Riding them takes you further than fighting them ever could. Pick the right battles and the right lanes. Have the wisdom to drift when drifting serves you, collecting patterns and possibilities that brute force would have missed.
The next phase of building is about alignment. Recognizing which futures want to exist and becoming their conduit. Power is most durable when it almost feels like patience.
For me at thirty-six, with more energy than ever, and for anyone who has heard that knock in their engine and wondered if there is a better way, there is. The knock fades. It flows.
