What Life Was Asking
Don't ask what you want from life. Get quiet enough to hear what life is asking from you. — Steve Martin – Vision-Keeper, Dream Coach, and Grandfather
What Life Was Asking
I spent years interrogating life,
demanding to know what it owed me,
holding out my receipt.
Life never answered.
It is not a debtor.
Then one gray morning I went quiet enough
to hear the question
running the other direction—
not what do you want from me,
but what will you do with this:
this family, this work,
this loss you did not order,
this hour you cannot return.
And I understood
I had been holding the wrong end
of the conversation
my entire life.
Life was not the vending machine.
Life was the one who asked.
So I put away my receipt
and I answered.
My grandpa always said
“The hard part of any season isn’t your legs or your lungs—it’s whether you remember why you laced up the cleats in the first place.”
One Simple Action to Take Right Now
Write your one-sentence why on a card and put it where you’ll see it daily. Not your goal—your reason. “I’m building ___ for ___.” Tape it to your bathroom mirror. The keel works best when you’re reminded it’s there.
Insights From My Advisory Board
Seth Godin — Would say the why is what makes the work matter, what turns a job into art and a tribe into a movement. “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it”—he’d connect it straight to your Four Dreams Movement.