What You're Here to Do
Nobody else is up yet. Good.
Some people carry a thing they were put here to build and never quite talk themselves out of it. Paul Pfanner has spent a career building things and finding the people worth building them with. He thinks their moment is here. This one is for the people who feel it.
Most mornings I'm up before daylight, deciding what the hours are going to hold. I've worked that way for as long as I can remember and it has nothing to do with discipline. It is about intention. There's always something I want to make that isn't here yet, and the pull of what’s possible gets me out of bed.
I grew up inside of racing so I don't think that's rare. Outside of the sport, I think a lot of people carry the same sort of thing but have learned to keep quiet about it. There's a version of you that knows exactly what you'd build if nobody could stop you, and most days you keep that version folded up and put away, because the world spent years teaching you that wanting to make something and being able to make it were two different problems with a wide and expensive gap between them.
Just in case you missed it, that gap is what closed. The structural apparatus you used to need, the people and the overhead and the painfully long runway before you could test a single guess or assumption, most of it has fallen away. One capable person who knows what they want can stand up in an afternoon what used to take a company months or even years to accomplish. The thing standing between you and what you're here to make isn't the money or the team down the hall anymore. It's whether you still mean it.
That is the whole game now, and that game is your personal Super Bowl of life’s potential played in your own mind. Do you want the thing, or did you only enjoy wanting it. The answer stays hidden until the moment you have to move, and then it isn't hidden at all. It’s obvious and it’s the truth.
I can usually spot the people who mean it within a few minutes. There's a particular emotional charge to someone who has quit waiting for permission and started building the world they want to live in. I've been drawn to those people my whole life and worked beside some of the best of them in mobility, motorsport, media and branding, and frankly. they are the only ones I want on the business battlefield with me. If you're one of them, you felt it a paragraph ago.
The only lap there is
I think of every day as a lap I'm already in. Not a warmup, not a formation lap to settle into. The one you're on is the only one you actually have, and you're driving it right now whether you decided to or not. All you really have is now. Use it, or lose it.
So take the thing you've kept folded up in your emotional back pocket and look at it in daylight. Quit rehearsing the wanting it and put your hands and focus on it. And if you find that you mean it, come find the rest of us who do too.
You know where to find me. I'll be up early.
Pfanner Advantage works with clients to turn change into advantage at the intersection of mobility, motorsport, media, technology, and marketing. Learn more or start a conversation: contact us today.
Paul Pfanner’s recent Shift Happens Insights:
Standing Still at 230 Miles Per Hour
A Moonshot Run Out of a Race Shop
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