Success

Success is an unruly thing. It comes when you least expect it, like a cat that ignores you for years and then suddenly decides your lap is the only place it wants to be. You don’t summon it. You don’t manifest it. You just keep doing your thing, and one day, without warning, it taps you on the shoulder and says, "Hey, we should hang out more."

But first, you had to clear out the clutter. The bad habits. The emotional barnacles you’ve let latch onto your ship. The parts of you that believe success belongs to other people—shinier, taller, more symmetrical people who have planners and life coaches and wake up before the sun. Success has never cared about those things. It’s been waiting for you to realize you don’t need to care about them either.

There’s this monkey energy inside you. It’s the thing that keeps going even when you’ve convinced yourself there’s no point. The whatever that refuses to die out. The little, ridiculous, defiant part of you that wants to build, write, create, try, and makes you listen to Gigi D'Agostino after midnight. It doesn’t care about your past mistakes or the time you embarrassed yourself in front of your entire high school class or on that particular board meeting. It just wants to go. And you, in your infinite wisdom, have spent years shushing it.

Now you stop that.

Because here’s the secret: success isn’t about forcing things to happen. It’s about letting go of the stuff that stops things from happening. It’s about realizing that some things don’t deserve your time, your energy, or your heartbreak. And that the best things—the moments when everything clicks—come when you stop gripping the wheel so hard and let the right things find you.

So yeah, be open. Be willing to be happy. Do things the proper way, not the desperate way. And for the love of all that is good, listen to the monkey. It knows what it’s doing.