Not Lurking, Been Living

Where I've Been

I haven't sent one of these in two months, and it’s been five months since I’ve posted content on social media. If you'd unsubscribed somewhere in there, I wouldn't have blamed you.

But I haven’t been sitting still. Here's what happened in the gap:

I finished the second draft of the Stop Lurking, Start Living. It’s not done yet, but I’ve made exciting progress. I decided to practice what I preach and change careers. I rebuilt my resume from a teaching one to a professional one. I sat through a 24-hour licensing course and passed the NMLS exam. Took Lori to Belize for her birthday. Graduated my last class of seniors after 17 years in a classroom. And last week, I started over as a mortgage loan originator with no leads, no book of business, and no salary floor under me.

So I went quiet. But quiet and gone are not the same, and I want to talk about the difference, because you've probably stood at the same fork in the road like me.

The Two Kinds Of Silence

When you stop showing up to something, there are usually two reasons, and they look identical from the outside.

The first is avoidance. The thing got hard and you flinched. The work is still sitting there. You're just not looking at it. The silence is a symptom.

The second is load. You went quiet because every unit of energy you had was already committed to something that mattered more right now, and there was nothing left to spend on the audience. The silence is a side effect of building, not a substitute for it.

Funny enough, the avoidance whispers the same story about both in our minds. You fell off. You lost momentum. You're behind. That story is sometimes true. But it lies often enough that you can't trust it without checking.

Here's the check. Look at the gap and ask what filled it. If the honest answer is “nothing, I just couldn't make myself start,” that's avoidance, and the move is to start small and start now. If the honest answer is a list — even a short one, even an unglamorous one — then you weren't drifting. You were spending.

What The Spending Cost Is

A transition is not a series of tasks you complete. It's a load you carry while you complete them. The exam was four hours. Carrying the weight of the exam, the resume, the goodbye to a career, and the bet on a new one all at the same time ran for weeks. It was mentally taxing in a way that drained me physically. Then I had to come home and fight to be a good husband and father. There were nights I had energy for exactly one more thing, and writing to you was never going to win that contest against sleep.

If you're in your own version of this, that's the part I want you to take seriously. The drain is real, and it's not evidence you chose wrong. I left a job with a guaranteed paycheck and guaranteed raises to start at zero in a career where my income depends entirely on what I produce. By every measure of safety, that's the wrong move. So why am I more energized than I've been in two years?

Because both things are true, the transition emptied my tank, and it was the right call. If you're waiting to feel light and certain before you make your own move, you'll wait forever. The cost shows up first. The payoff comes later, if it comes at all (I’ll keep you posted). 

Life Happens, Don’t apologize.

If you've gone quiet on something that matters to you, don't reflexively file it under failure.

Run the check first. Ask what filled the gap.

If the answer is a real list of things that demanded everything you had, then you don't owe anyone an apology, and you don't owe yourself a guilt trip. You were carrying a load. Set it down when you can, pick the work back up, and keep moving. That's not falling behind. That's what building looks like from the inside, where it's never as clean as it looks from the outside.

I went quiet because I was carrying something. Now I've set enough of it down to talk to you again.

Where have you gone quiet, and which kind of silence is it? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

— Ricky

P.S. The book that came out of all this — Stop Lurking, Start Living — is most of the way there. If you’d like to read the current draft, please reply and I’ll send you a free copy. I'm glad to be back in your inbox.