Chasing the Dream Is the Whole Game
Chasing the Dream Is the Whole Game
The prize was never the finish.
What the Research Says
I am suspicious of studies that tell you what you want to hear, so I went looking for the ones that would hold up.
In 2014 two researchers, Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiano, took data from a national American study that followed more than six thousand adults for fourteen years. People who reported a strong sense of purpose in life were less likely to die during that period. The effect held after controlling for other measures of psychological wellbeing, and it did not depend on the person's age or on whether they had retired. A meta analysis of ten prospective studies published two years later found the same association with lower mortality from all causes.
Read that again. Not happiness. Not comfort. Not success. A sense that you are going somewhere on purpose.
The people in that study were not asked whether they had arrived anywhere. They were asked whether they were wandering. That is the variable.
Ten Years of Not Arriving
I found a dormant name from Seattle's past and spent a decade putting it back on its feet. There was no moment where it was finished.
I flew to Okayama with patterns in my hands and no guarantee that anyone would make what I wanted. I got told no. I went back. I rode a motorcycle from Washington to Texas in February to sit in a room I had no business being in. Somewhere in Montana I ended up inside a running cattle drive in a canyon, cowboys shouting, and I stayed in the middle of it for twenty miles rather than pull off.
None of that was strategy. All of it was the chase.
The jackets I am proudest of took years. The chore coat I dreamed about for so long that people stopped asking. The vest I could not build until I found the right people. If I needed to finish things to feel good, I would have quit in year two.
Why the Chase Beats the Arrival
Arrival is a single afternoon. The chase is every day.
An arrival is also a problem, because the moment you get the thing, the thing has to carry the whole weight of what you expected from it. It never can. So people arrive and feel nothing and immediately go looking for a bigger arrival. I have watched that ruin more people than failure ever did.
The chase does not work that way. The chase gives you a reason to get up, a problem to hold, a standard to fail against, people to seek out who are better than you. It gives shape to a week. It makes a Tuesday matter.
I am sober. That is the part of my life I hold most sacred. I carried myself to the edge and was allowed to walk back, and I do not regret a mile of the road that took me there. What I know from that is simple and hard: a person without something to chase will find something to fill the hole, and most of the things available are worse than a dream.
How to Actually Do It
Pick something you would still want if nobody was watching. If the dream needs an audience, it is not yours.
Get in beside people who are the best in the world at it. That is the entire method I have used to learn everything I know. Do not try to impress them. Do the work next to them and keep your mouth shut for a while.
Give it years, not months. Nothing I am proud of took less than a few.
Do it with your hands, or at least with your body in the room. The dream stops being abstract the moment you are physically present for it.
And keep the standard higher than the deadline. That is the difference between a chase and a hustle.
Everything We Make Is Evidence
I make clothes for the version of a life that gets used. Jackets that carry a decade of weather. Jeans that fade into the shape of a person who was somewhere. Sweats you put on the day you are building something.
None of it is decoration. It is equipment for the chase.
Nothing in my life is accidental. Everything I do, I do in order to feel. That is the shape of it, and the chase is what keeps the feeling coming.
A Way Of Life.
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