You have a one-way ticket to the future.

No coming back.

No do-overs.

No detours.

Every single day, you’re packing your bag for the future.

The question is: Are you carefully preparing for what’s ahead, or just throwing random shit in a bag and hoping for the best?

The greatest lie we tell ourselves?

"I'm just waiting for the right moment."

In 1961, at 26 years old, Diana Nyad stood on a beach in Florida, staring at the horizon. Her dream? Swimming from Cuba to Florida. A feat many experts deemed impossible.

For 50 years, she waited:
For perfect conditions.
For better technology.
For someone to prove it was possible.

At 76, she realized something profound: The cavalry wasn't coming.

No one was going to make the waters calmer.
No one was going to make the jellyfish kinder.
No one was going to make the distance shorter.

So she stopped waiting.

At age 64, she became the first person to complete the swim. Without a shark cage. 110 miles. 53 hours of continuous swimming.

The lesson?
Your dreams don't expire, but your time to start does.
The only question is: Will you decide before time decides for you?

Marathons are strange beasts. They don’t just test your body—they test your mind, your soul, and your purpose. On November 24th, at the Philadelphia Marathon, I learned that lesson firsthand. By Mile 23, my hamstring seized up, and a lightning bolt of pain shot through my body. I gasped for air and thought, This is it. My race is over. But marathons are also stories, and this was mine.

The morning sun hadn’t yet broken over the trees when my dog, Max, began his daily ritual. He sat at the sliding glass doors, ears perked, eyes locked onto our backyard. On schedule, a happy squirrel appeared, bouncing along the fence top. Max immediately spotted the little acrobat and his excitement built rapidly: first a whine, then a wiggle, until he popped up on his hind legs scratching at the door in a frenzy of excitement. As soon as I slid the door open, he exploded into the yard—a blur of fur and pure determination—charging toward his target.

“We don’t get burned out by what we do. We get burned out by forgetting why we do it.” Jon Gordon 

I heard John say this while on a run listening to the Ed Mylett podcast and it stuck with me. 

It’s a truth that underpins what’s at the core of Run The Hills. 

Losing sight of your “why” is the fastest way to lose your drive. Many people argue that time is the most valuable resource. But if you stop and think about it, it’s actually energy that holds the real power. You can have an endless amount of hours on the clock, but if you're out of energy, those hours will slip away, unproductive and empty.

When we arrive at the face of a hill, almost immediately we hear whispers of doubt, echoes of fear, and a chorus of naysayers within the walls of our mind. These thoughts are so vivid that we can picture the words coming out of the mouths of our friends, family and even strangers we will never meet.

Have you heard of the Cherokee parable of the Two Wolves? It goes something like this: An old Cherokee chief is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret..."

Pressfield's 20 qualities of the professional are not just a checklist to tick off, but a compass to guide us in our own pursuits. They remind us that true success is not about reaching a destination, but about the person we become in the process—and that the path to mastery is paved with the unglamorous but essential qualities of the professional.

Life is full of obstacles, but the biggest ones often come from within.

Each day presents a choice: to push forward or to hold back.

Photo by Milan Popovic

Resistance is your enemy. It does not want you to succeed. Resistance is the voice in your head giving you every reason not to do the thing you want to do. It could be anything - big, little, and everything in between.

The answer is → start. There is wanting something. And there is doing something. Everything in between is just resistance.

Our rational soul, our inner self, has the power to examine itself, to shape itself according to our own will, and to find contentment in the pursuit of virtue and integrity.

Turning pro is a complete mindset shift, a transformation in how we approach our work and lives.