I Did Not Begin as an Expert

I began as a person trying to understand his own life.

For years, I noticed moments that seemed like coincidences: an opportunity arriving after I had decided I would find a way, a conversation echoing words I had already felt within, or a physical improvement that followed a shift from helplessness toward possibility.

I also noticed the other side. When I expected not to be chosen, I could find evidence everywhere. When I anticipated financial struggle, my attention narrowed around scarcity. When I feared an outcome, I could emotionally experience it before anything had actually happened.

I was using assumption and imagination long before I knew those words belonged to a spiritual or personal-development practice.

This book is not written from a mountaintop. It is written from the barber chair, the recovery room, the gym, the unpaid bill, the relationship uncertainty, the grief, the business idea, and the ordinary morning when I chose to begin again.

My hope is not that you copy my declarations. My hope is that my life helps you recognize your own. You may discover that you have been telling a story about yourself for years without realizing it. If so, you are not condemned by that discovery. You have become conscious of the place where choice begins.

Read slowly. Write honestly. Keep what strengthens you. Revise what no longer belongs to the person you choose to be.

— Jesse