In this episode, the Stubborn Choice to Rise
There’s that tiny, breathless moment during a bicycle crash when you realize gravity has won, and it’s not going to budge.
I recently found myself in that exact situation. My front tire collided with another cyclist, and momentum took over, and I flipped like a sack of uninspired potatoes flung into the back of a truck. As the dust settled and I lay there, thrown from the bike, trembling . . . I did that quick, quiet check we all do: Am I broken? Will I ever be able to swing a golf club again? And, most importantly, can I rise again?
A physical crash is loud, embarrassing, and leaves a mark. But the truth is, most of us are crashing much more quietly every single day.
We crash into the sheer exhaustion of our careers. We collide head-on with the frantic demands of people who treat urgency as a personality trait. Zig Ziglar used to say, “People often complain about lack of time when the lack of direction is the real problem.”
Nowhere is that lack of direction more obvious than in an LED-lit conference room. For years, particularly in the middle of a career, the default reaction to all this directionless chaos is to strap on a cape and try to fix it. We absorb the stress, nod thoughtfully at the latest corporate jargon, and try to rescue meetings that should have been a brief email.
But trying to fix a chaotic world is a guaranteed way to lose your mind in it. Eventually, you have to realize you aren’t the emotional IT department for everyone else’s crisis. Sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do is hang up the cape and just . . . observe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson saw this trap clearly in his essay Self-Reliance. He wrote: “It’s simple to follow what everyone else thinks, especially when you’re alone. But the real hero is someone who, even in a crowd, maintains a sweet sense of independence, like being alone.”
That independence of solitude is like having a superpower in your mid-career. It lets you sit through meetings, watch people act, and listen to them talk about “synergizing their bandwidth,” and just smile inside. You don’t have to fix the mess. You just have to refuse to let it ruin your afternoon.
Writing every day isn’t just a habit; it’s proof of life. It’s how I carve out a slice of silence in a noisy world. It slows the video just enough to catch the small, absurd, and beautiful details that usually slip through our busy fingers. It also keeps my optimism honest. Being optimistic doesn’t mean pretending you’ll never wipe out; it means having the grit to laugh at the bruise, trust your balance, and get right back in the saddle.
Ziglar knew that it’s your attitude, not your skills, that determines how high you go. True optimism is the active, slightly stubborn hope that when you do hit the ground—whether you’re dodging gravel on a trail or dodging egos in a boardroom—you can dust yourself off, laugh at the scrape, and get back in the saddle.
The world will always try to push you to go fast. But the future is what we make it. I choose to keep watching, keep playing, keep riding, and keep looking for the magic in everyday life.
I’m Patrick Ball. Stay curious, ask better questions. See you next time.
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