"Yeah brah. Vibe living. Living life through a vibe."
Kirsten does the impression every time. So Cal surfer, hand riding an invisible swell. That's fair, because vibe living is the term I have been floating for my new way of thinking about life and yes, it sounds a bit San Clemente surfer dude. It is a play on the vibe coding craze that has taken over my world, applied to everything else. Live through a vibe. Be true to it. Cut whatever is off it.
So far that has produced some of the bigger changes I have written about across this BIP. This week is another doozy.
A legacy relationship had to go. I will not name it because it doesn't matter what it is. What I can say is that it was tied to tens of thousands, possibly more, in financial exposure. Which made it complicated. You cannot just walk away from something that owes you that kind of money. That is doubly true when you count on that revenue to survive and you're 43 days into starting a completely new venture.
Even my sixty-minute morning meditation could not bring me back this week. That is rare. The Vipassana taught me how to land at calm in roughly sixty minutes, and I have been running that practice every morning since I walked out of an ashram in Bodh Gaya 2 days before my birthday in 2023 (wrote about that here). This week it did not work. I would sit, finish, open the laptop, see one email, and the rate would spike again. So I made the call. Burn the boats. Out of my life regardless of the financial cost.
I was holding myself to a line from Dan Kennedy. Kennedy is the old direct-response copywriter, a kind of mentor at a distance for me. I am paraphrasing because I do not have the exact quote in front of me. If you are thinking about a person, a client, or anything else more than three times in a single day, that thing is already out of your life. If a relationship is taking three uninvited slots a day, it has won.
I had been past that line nearly all week and it was just getting worse.
Energy. I never fully understood what people meant by it until I noticed my own body reacting before my conscious mind did. The phone buzzes. I see the source. I have not opened the message. Heart racing, dread sitting in the chest, shoulders climbed up the neck, hackles on the back of my neck. Some people may get off on that reading. Not me. If a five-second glance at a contact name produces it, the vibe has spoken.
If my body is doing that to me when their name appears, the same energy is doing something equivalent on their end. They are reading and feeding that energy, getting whatever the mirror version of dread is. Or maybe they're not, maybe they just accept it as a part of life. A relationship that produces that, both ways, is not one anyone is allowed to drag forward on financial inertia.
When the vibe is neutral, sit with it. Let it show itself. Move toward whatever produces the gut feel you know is right. Call it intuition, gut, the still small voice. Something underneath the conscious decision is already telling you the answer. I'm learning to listen to it.
Yesterday I took Kennedy's rule at its word. I sent the last closing email. I deleted the inbox off my phone so the response would not appear in my pocket. To let that energy back in I now have to physically open the laptop and visit an inbox I rarely use. Then I blocked every other route into my day.
To close the day, I rolled the Royal Enfield 500 out and took the first ride of the season. Around town, errands, nothing fast. The single-cylinder thump under me, the wind on the visor, the smell of cut grass on the verges. Exactly what I needed. Came home, grabbed a basket, walked the two dogs to the beach. Kirsten was away this week. Just me, the dogs, and a quiet hour by the water.
By the time I walked back to the house I was at ground zero.
Monthly Revenues $11,800 | Clients 2 | Prospects fading | Employees: me
Day 44 of 365.