Letting go feels like dying

Hanging on is its own kind of death

I was eighteen years into my career the day my life changed.

It was a sudden, sharp realization on a Sunday morning that I cared more about disappointing my boss than I did my wife. I didn’t realize it then, but the trajectory of my life changed that day. I was two promotions away from my goal: becoming the president of the company I worked for. At that point in my life, I was certain I was going to retire with that company after 45 years of service. Little did I know that five years later, I would walk away from the job 11 months from reaching the top.

In 1990, John Gardner gave a speech to McKinsey and Company about self-renewal. In the opening of his speech, he talked about barnacles. He had recently read an article that made an impression on him, and his reference left an impression on me.

He said, “A barnacle is confronted with an existential decision about where it’s going to live. Once it decides, it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock.”

No need to worry. This isn’t an article about barnacles. It’s about how humans, like barnacles, cement themselves into a way of being.

We adapt our way there. We become attached to our beliefs. Our beliefs shape our perception. Our perception shapes our reality, and over time we become cemented to an identity. The problem isn’t that we have an identity. The problem is we think that identity is who we actually are. When, in reality, it’s just a stack of adaptations: beliefs about ourselves, about others, about the world we live in, and about what we believe is possible for us.

Years of repeating how we think, how we feel, and how we act shape us into who we become. Because, like the barnacle, once you’ve cemented yourself to a rock, you don’t see the whole ocean. You only see the parts that move by in the current around your rock.

Until one day, something comes along and knocks you off your rock.

We get a glimpse of our current reality. For a moment, we see through the illusion. We see we’ve somehow drifted into the life we built. In the hustle and bustle of life, we have somehow ended up somewhere we never intended to go. We adapted, we changed, and we became who we are in the moment.

And in that moment, we have an opportunity to change the trajectory of our lives or to return to the old pattern and pretend like it never happened.

But we are not barnacles. We can think about our thinking, become aware of our awareness, and learn to pay attention to our attention.

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I used to think I was just like my old man: anxious, angry, driven, ambitious. I thought that’s who I was.

I can see that was just the version of me I had become as a result of my life, the things that happened to me, and how I made meaning of them. My drive was never really about ambition. It was a search for acceptance and belonging, and no amount of achievement was ever going to satisfy it.

The acceptance I’d been chasing my whole life had to come from me. I was never going to find it out there.

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The impact on our lives when we stay attached to a rock is significant.

There’s the one who believes that staying quiet protects them, but behind the scenes, resentment builds. The distance in the relationship grows wide until one day the marriage falls apart.

Or the person who stays in a job many years after they know they no longer belong, because they’re unsure of who they’d be without it, or how they would replace the income, how they would maintain their lifestyle. They keep grinding as life continues to pass them by.

I’ve worked with so many men who show up certain that their problem is their job, their marriage, their business, or their money, and it turns out it’s the same rock underneath it all.

We don’t just cement ourselves to jobs or titles or stuff. We cement ourselves to a way of seeing, and then we treat anyone who sees the world differently as the enemy instead of recognizing that they have a unique perspective.

We continue to have the same conflicts with the same types of people. We continue to struggle with the same problems manifesting in different ways across many domains of our lives. Unable to see that the attachment to the rock is the problem. An unwillingness to see from a different point of view.

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I thought that leaving my corporate job was the end of my journey, but nine and a half years later, I can tell you that it was just the beginning. I thought that by leaving, I had overcome my ego. I thought I had broken through my identity.

But what transpired was a series of wake-up calls: life smacking me upside my head with two-by-fours over and over again until I finally saw the truth.

I have spent the last six years trying to understand how I became the person I had become. The output of that work is my publication Chasing Maximus and the Maximus Method. I launched Chasing Maximus on Substack in May of 2025. I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I just knew I needed to share my message.

I have always been curious, skeptical, and driven to understand. I love to learn, and I love to share what I learn with others.

But there’s one thing I’ve come to learn: just as barnacles cement themselves to the rock, we humans build our lives on BS. Our belief systems, our blind spots, and the bullshit stories we tell ourselves. And that BS can be really hard to overcome.

My B.S. was my rock, a belief that it was not safe to be me. That eventually solidified into a belief that my path to acceptance was through achievement.

One of my favorite quotes is from Dawson Trotman. He says, “Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips and the fingertips.”

Over the last 15 months of writing articles and notes, I’ve been standing in my own BS. I’ve been focused on building an audience instead of building a community. I’ve sanded the edges. I’ve polished my words, and I’ve tried to be the version I thought I was supposed to be.

I recently realized I’ve spent years building the Maximus method, refining my frameworks, building the process, unraveling my story, and yet not stepping into the person I want to become.

Somewhere along the way, the belief that it wasn’t safe to be me became a belief that I wasn’t good enough. It turns out that was a belief, that was a bullshit story, that was stuck in my blind spot.

I finally realized that I must detach myself from my rock, drift into the unknown, and allow this to become what it’s supposed to become.

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My journey began by trying to understand myself, trying to understand how I got so attached to my rock. What I found were invisible forces, not just in me, but running underneath everything.

Once you see them, you can’t unsee them. You start noticing the same pattern everywhere: in a marriage, in a boardroom, in institutions, in relationships, and in families.

The cementing isn’t a character flaw. It’s what any organism does. They protect themselves. They fight like hell to stay attached to their rocks because they think it’s safer. They think it’s responsible.

It isn’t that we chose the rock. It’s that we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that the rock is the ocean.

And when enough people stay attached to their rock and fight against anyone who sees the world differently than they are, we become distracted. When individuals stay attached, the systems we collectively create start to wobble.

Because we are so attached to our rock and protecting it with everything we have, we don’t see the drift in our relationships, our jobs, our businesses, our institutions, or in our country.

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The path to renewal is really about closing the gap between who you are and who you want to be.

The process begins by noticing what you’ve attached yourself to, then challenging your own B.S.: your belief systems, your blind spots, and the bullshit stories that you’ve been telling yourself.

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If you recognized your own rock, the belief you’ve been standing on so long you forgot you ever chose it, you don’t have to figure out what to do with it alone.

I work with men who’ve built lives that look right but feels like something is missing.