Your Body, Mind, Soul, and Story Want Power. Are You Giving It to Them?

Your body wants to be powerful. Your mind wants to be powerful. Your soul wants to be powerful. And your story wants to be powerful.

Make it so.

That is what the Project of You is about. Not just setting a goal. Not just building better habits. Unleashing the essence of you. The bespoke, irreplaceable, unrepeatable version of you that has been sitting patiently in the shadows of all the chaos, all the other people's needs, all the disordered environments and organizations and objects that have been eating your attention, your time, and your oxygen.

I am dying. And so are you. We only have so many minutes left. And the question is not whether you will run out of minutes. The question is whether you will spend them on the Project of You or on somebody else's project while you wait for permission that is never going to come.

You Will Always Have 99 Problems. Double Down on the One That Matters.

Here is the truth I keep coming back to: you will always have 99 problems. Always. The chaos does not stop. The difficult manager does not suddenly become reasonable. The person wasting your money does not stop. The thing that keeps unorganizing itself keeps doing exactly that.

You cannot solve the 99 problems. But you can crowd them out.

The more you double down on expressing the essence of you, the more you magically crowd out the rest. Becoming less useful and less interesting and less desirable to disordered people, environments, and things is a superpower.

Read that again. Becoming less useful to chaos makers is a superpower. Most people spend enormous energy trying to fix the chaos, manage the chaos, prevent the chaos, and absorb the chaos. And all of that energy goes somewhere other than the Project of You.

What if instead you just became less interesting to the chaos? Not by fighting it. By going so deep into your own work, your own building, your own story, that the chaos simply no longer has your number.

Why You Are Exhausted (It Is Not What You Think)

When you are feeling angst or exhausted, the instinct is to blame the chaos. The difficult boss. The family situation. The financial pressure. The overwhelming list of things that need to be managed.

But here is what I have found to be true, consistently, in my own life and in watching others: the exhaustion usually comes from spending good energy on less good causes and people. It comes from pouring your best hours and your best attention into things that are not your secret essence, not your secret sauce, not the creative bespoke thing in the back of your head that you have been meaning to pull out.

You are not exhausted because life is hard. You are exhausted because you are exhausting yourself on the wrong things.

You cannot drive the car for other people. Anyone over the age of eighteen who is not your child is someone you can let manage their own chaos. The project of you is waiting for that energy. Your mind, your body, your soul, and your story are waiting for that investment. And when you redirect even a fraction of it, something shifts.

The Crowding Out Concept: How It Actually Works

This is one of the most powerful ideas in the KindEdge framework, and it is counterintuitive enough that it is worth really sitting with.

Most people think the way to reduce chaos in their life is to confront it, manage it, fix it, or eliminate it directly. And sometimes that is necessary. But there is another way that works even better over time: crowd it out.

When you are spending two full days at an art supply store learning new materials, you are not in the chaos. When you are deep in an online forum at midnight with three hundred other people who are obsessed with mural painting, you are not managing the difficult manager. When you are sitting in the library researching the business plan for the thing you want to start, you are not reorganizing the thing that keeps unorganizing itself.

You are building something. And the building crowds out the chaos, not by defeating it, but by starving it of the thing it needs most to maintain its hold on you: your attention.

• Put on blinders and march into the library to research the thing you want to build
• Spend two full days at the art store learning the materials you have been curious about
• Research the screenwriting conference you have been putting off for years
• Get into the online forum with other people who care about what you care about
• Learn one new thing about the passion — just one — and notice what happens to the clock

Here is what happens when you do any of those things: three hours go by and you are surprised. You were not watching the clock. You were not managing anything. You were so absorbed in the thing you were building that the chaos had no entry point.

That is the crowding out concept in action.

The Chaos Makers Will Face Their Own Chaos

Here is something else worth knowing: when you stop absorbing the chaos for other people, they begin to experience the consequences of their own chaos.

The company that keeps creating mayhem survives because it keeps finding capable, absorbent employees who mop it up. The moment you stop mopping, the mess has nowhere to go except back onto the people who made it. That is not cruelty. That is natural consequence.

The chaos makers will continue to make chaos. That does not change. What changes is your relationship to it. You are no longer the useful, interesting, available target for their output. You are building something that only you can build. And you have become less valuable to them as a consequence — which is exactly the superpower you need.

Scooby Snacks: What It Feels Like When You Are Finally In It

There is a feeling that comes when you are spending your energy on the right thing. I call it Scooby snacks. That cartoonish, childlike, irresistible pull toward the next thing you want to learn. Even when the skill is hard. Even when the progress is slow. It does not feel like drudgery. It feels like discovery.

When you are in it, even the hard parts have a quality of aliveness that the easy things in the wrong lane never have. When you put on hiking boots for the first time because you actually want to climb a mountain, that is different from every other Tuesday. When you see your first screenwriting note get acknowledged by other writers who do this for real, that is different from getting a good performance review for something that was never your dream.

The project of you generates its own energy. That is what makes it sustainable. The chaos drains you because you are giving out more than you are receiving. The project fills you because it is aligned with your essence and your essence replenishes you every time you feed it.

When you see the project of you in action in real life, even in the tiniest inch of progress, you get addicted to it. You want to get up at 5 in the morning and do more. You geek out. You lose your appetite for the chaos makers entirely.

Honor the Power That Is Already in You

The Project of You is not about becoming someone else. It is not about a complete personality overhaul or a dramatic overnight transformation. It is about honoring what is already in you. The power that is already in your body. The hunger that is already in your mind. The story that is already forming in your soul.

Your story wants to be told. Your body wants to be used for something that matters. Your mind wants Scooby snacks, not drudgery. Your soul wants to be seen.

The stamp you leave on this Earth is made of those things. Not of how well you managed the chaos. Not of how available you were to disordered people and organizations that had no intention of returning the investment. Of the work that only you could do, expressed in the only way you could express it, in the time you had.

Use your golden ticket wisely. The minutes are ticking. And the project is waiting.

Join a community of people who are done waiting on the dream in the back of their head and actually doing something about it: kindedge.com/subscribe

And if you want to keep going while you're on the move, the latest Project of You video is right here: youtube.com/@kindedge