Find the Thing That Makes You Stupidly Happy (and Do It Anyway)
I was twelve the first time I rode the Rotor at Six Flags — that human centrifuge that pins you to the wall, then drops the floor. My friends and I rode it eighteen times in a row, stumbling off each time laughing like lunatics, begging for one more spin. Six years later the same ride left me green and praying for death. Bodies change. Bliss doesn’t have to.
We all know that electric feeling: the first kiss that stops time, the song you figure out on guitar that makes the room disappear, the blank page that suddenly isn’t blank anymore. It’s the moment you forget to breathe because something inside you is breathing for you.
Too many of us file those moments under “childhood” or “someday” and get on with the grown-up business of paying bills. Shelter, clothing, food — non-negotiable. But as someone wiser than me once pointed out, man cannot live by bread alone. I’ve tried. It’s a dry, crumbly existence.
I could have taken the safe route: steady paycheck, 401(k), a life that looked responsible on paper. Every time I edged toward it, the road seemed to shift under my feet. Jobs dried up. Opportunities in acting, music, and writing appeared like bread crumbs leading somewhere else. I finally quit pretending I hadn’t noticed the trail.
Has it been easy? Not even close. There were years I measured success by whether I could afford both rent and guitar strings. But every time I finish a book, record a song, or step off stage, I’m twelve again — dizzy, alive, certain I was born for this exact second.
Creating is the only high I’ve found that doesn’t fade with age or punish you the next morning. Better yet, when someone hears a song I wrote during my own dark night and tells me it carried them through theirs — that’s a relay race across generations. Beethoven’s still running laps around us 200 years later. Shakespeare won’t quit. Even the cave painters at Lascaux are still whispering, “I was here, and it was beautiful.”
I won’t pretend my work will outlive me by centuries. Most art doesn’t. But even if every note I’ve played and every word I’ve written ends up deleted, recycled, or lost, I will have spent my days doing the thing that makes me stupidly, embarrassingly happy.
That’s not a bad epitaph.
So here’s my question to you: What makes you forget to eat, forget to check your phone, forget the clock even exists? What would you stay up until 3 a.m. doing if money were no object and failure were impossible?
Whatever it is — pottery, poetry, welding, welding poetry out of scrap metal — do it today. Do it badly. Do it with gusto.
The world has enough sensible people.
It will never have enough people who are fully, recklessly alive.
Go get dizzy.
