The Guy Holding the Knife
Napoleon Hill, and the book that sat in a drawer for 73 years.
The hero is you. The guy with the knife is also you. And the most dangerous moment is right after things start working.
Twenty-five years ago I had it going. Young, work was good, I was building life up and it was good. Then I took it apart with my own hands - alcohol and dark alleys, over months, in a hundred small decisions to go back to what I already knew how to survive.
That was a different life. But a sneaky devil is still there. It just got quieter.
I know my tells now. I start getting critical - picking people apart, hunting for what is wrong with them instead of what is right. And underneath it there is still a part of me that wants to go wild. Rarely, and nothing like it used to be. Same voice.
But here is the one that costs me the most, because it does not look like sabotage at all. I play small. I do not tell people my dreams and goals. I keep the big thing to myself, where nobody can judge me as arrogant - and where nobody can hold me to it either.
That is the quiet version. It does not look like a man wrecking his life. It looks like a reasonable guy being humble. And it buries just as much.
Napoleon Hill finished a book in 1938. He had already written Think and Grow Rich. This one went further. It was about drift - the thing in a person that keeps them from ever deciding, that eats a life one unremarkable year at a time.
It was not published until 2011. Seventy-three years in a drawer. Hill’s wife, Annie Lou, did not want it out. After her, her nephew’s wife felt the same way. Not malice. They loved him, and they were afraid of how it would land.
Sit with that for a second. A book about refusing to let your life drift stayed hidden for three generations because the people closest to the author were scared of what people would think.
That is the whole mechanism, and it works exactly the same on a dream you have never said out loud. The people who love you will talk you out of the risk, gently, because they do not want to watch you get hurt. And most of the time, you help them do it.
Hill put the whole thing in one sentence on the last page of the book.
“No plan, no purpose, no policy except that of drifting along, hoping that something may turn up to help them.”
Hoping something may turn up. That is what a dream you never say out loud is doing while you wait.
“The wealthiest place on the planet is the graveyard, because in the graveyard we will find inventions that we were never ever exposed to, ideas, dreams that never became a reality, hopes and aspirations that were never acted upon.”
Read that again and sit in it. Not failures. Not people who swung and missed. Things that were never acted upon. The richest ground on earth is full of heroes somebody killed, and in almost every case the person holding the knife was the one in the mirror.
So how do you not be that guy? You make the cost real before you pay it.
Jordan Peterson built an exercise around exactly this in his Future Authoring work. Write the life you want, in vivid detail - that part you would expect. Then write the other one. The life you get if you let the bad habits run and end up bitter about it. In writing. No flinching.
It sounds dark. It is a scouting report. You cannot dodge a thing you refuse to look at.
“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
The emperor wrote that to himself, in private, as a man who could have had anything. Not as a morbid thought - as a clock.
Think About It.
Picture yourself at the end of it, and the dream you set down is standing at the foot of the bed looking at you. It asks one question: why did you leave me?
Do you have an answer you could say out loud? Or is it going to sound like an excuse even to you?
That is the whole thing. Not fear of failing. Fear of getting to the end holding an answer you cannot stand behind.
“Life, like the car, goes where you are looking. Dream big. Set goals. Take massive action.”
That is what we mean at Bjerk by Powerful Heart: the courage to dream big, set goals, and take massive action to win, together. Courage is not the absence of the old voice. It is aiming anyway, with the voice still talking.
PLAYING TO LOSE VS. PLAYING TO WIN
KILLS THE HERO → PLAYING TO LOSE
- Manufactures a crisis to manage.
- Gets critical. Picks people apart.
- Keeps the dream to himself.
- Calls the old voice realism.
- Never writes it down.
KEEPS THE HERO ALIVE → PLAYING TO WIN
- Names the pattern out loud.
- Hunts for what is right in people.
- Says the dream to one person.
- Calls the old voice what it is.
- Puts both futures on paper.
Let’s Play to Win
Make the cost real.
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Write the one you want. Five minutes. Three to five years out, in detail: the work, the family, the body, the man or woman you are. No editing, no being reasonable. If it does not
scare you a little, aim higher.
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Then write the other one. Five minutes. The life you get if the old patterns win, if you stay off the path, if you end up bitter about it. Be specific and do not soften it. This
is the half that does the work.
- Say one of them out loud. Pick one person. Tell them one dream and one tell - the move you make right before you sabotage. Not the whole list. One of each.
That is ten minutes. You can write a lot in ten minutes, and you have been carrying this thing around a lot longer than that.
And if you only do one of the three, do the third. It takes two minutes, and it is the only one that puts somebody else in the room with you.
And if you are sitting on something you have never said out loud, say it to somebody. If it is construction, say it to me - we will lean in, and if it is not our work we will point you to who it is.
You are allowed to want it. Drop the knife and LET’S Freakin’ GO!
Let’s get after it in life, family, and business. AND LET’S PLAY TO WIN!!!
Lots of love, Nate
