The Drift

“Drifting, without aim or purpose, is the first cause of failure.”
— Napoleon Hill

Years before this journey, I wrote a song called Binging TV Shows.

At the time, I thought I was writing about information overload.

About endless entertainment.

About advertising.

About news.

About the constant stream of things competing for our attention.

Looking back, I realize I was writing about something much larger.

I was writing about the drift.

I just didn't have a name for it yet.

The drift doesn't come from not being good.

I was good at sports.

Not great.

Good at work.

Not great.

Good at being a father.

Good at making music.

Good at solving problems.

Good.

And that's exactly where the drift lived.

Not because I lacked ambition.

Because my attention had become fragmented.

Every day demanded another piece of it.

Another email.

Another phone call.

Another responsibility.

Another headline.

Another notification.

Another problem that needed solving before I could return to the things that actually mattered.

Years earlier, without realizing it, I had written:

"Can I get a piece of mind...
and not just the kind they're selling...
I'd take just six or seven...
for a moment to myself
without everything surrounding me..."

At the time, I thought those lyrics were about the world.

Now I realize they were also about me.

I wasn't searching for silence.

I was searching for focus.

Another lyric always stood out to me:

"Tell the truth to the people representing..."

For years, I thought I was talking about everyone else.

The media.

The people in power.

The voices competing for our attention.

But somewhere along this journey, I realized I had overlooked the most important person I was supposed to be representing.

Myself.

Because I am the one representing my life.

My family.

My son.

My values.

My future.

Every decision I make—or choose not to make—is a reflection of what I'm representing.

I had spent years asking the world to tell the truth while quietly avoiding one uncomfortable truth of my own.

I wasn't living the life I kept promising myself.

I wasn't failing.

I wasn't giving up.

I was drifting.

The lyrics hadn't changed.

I had.

The drift isn't loud.

It doesn't announce itself.

It arrives one notification at a time.

One obligation at a time.

One postponed dream at a time.

Eventually, everything competes for your attention, and the important begins to lose ground to the merely urgent.

The song questioned a world constantly asking for more of our attention.

But the harder question was the one I had never asked myself:

What am I giving my attention to?

Attention is one of the few resources we can never replenish.

Spend enough of it reacting, and eventually there isn't enough left to intentionally create.

There isn't enough left to explore.

There isn't enough left to dream.

The drift isn't caused by one bad decision.

It's the accumulation of thousands of tiny moments where your attention is borrowed until you forget what you meant to give it to in the first place.

When I wrote Binging TV Shows, I thought I was criticizing the noise around me.

Looking back, I think I was also asking for permission to step outside of it.

I just didn't know how.

That answer wouldn't come until later, when I stopped asking "When?" and began asking different questions.

How.

What.

Where.

Who.

That's when the drift finally met resistance, and how this whole process formed.

A few days after taking this trip, I sat in the familiar setting on the porch in the blistering Florida heat while writing these pages and revisiting the images captured by both of us, another realization quietly surfaced.

The drift wasn't just happening to us.

It was happening in nature, too.

Along the broad rock shelves of the Youghiogheny River were perfectly rounded holes carved deep into solid stone.

At first glance, they looked like a geological curiosity.

A beautiful accident.

But the more I looked, the more I understood what I was actually seeing.

The stone wasn't telling the story.

The current was.

Small rocks, caught in the flow, had circled in the same places for years—centuries—slowly wearing away bedrock that once seemed permanent.

Not through force.

Through persistence.

The rock wasn't weak.

The current was relentless.

And suddenly, the metaphor I'd been searching for was sitting right in front of me.

The drift had always existed.

Nature had been demonstrating it long before I ever gave it a name.

The same persistent current that can carve circles into stone can shape a life.

Not in a single dramatic moment.

But through countless ordinary ones.

And that's the beauty of seeing the current.

Once you recognize it, you begin to understand that every current is shaping something.

The question isn't whether you're being shaped.

You are.

The question is whether the drift is shaping you...

Or whether you've learned to shape your life with the drift.

Standing there beside the river, I didn't have the answers or even the realization.

Looking back now, I didn't need them.

I only needed the right question.

It was a question with more than one answer.

A question that would quietly turn into a quest.

How do you plan chaos?