The Fourth Kind

Tragedy has a way of sharpening focus and forcing the mind to confront questions we spend most of our lives avoiding.

Growing up, I had two best friends: Mark and Adam. Mark was our cultural oracle. The first among us to discover the Dead Kennedys, to smuggle home copies of Adbusters and 2600, to teach us that rebellion is an art form requiring both passion and precision. Adam and I became his willing disciples, absorbing everything he offered about music, art, and the beautiful futility of suburban insurrection. We were a triumvirate bound by shared discovery, three scrawny boys from manicured neighborhoods trying to import the chaos of punk clubs into our parents' Costco-adorned garages.

Then, in our junior year of high school, Adam picked up a paintbrush.

As it pertains to impact, I've found that there are three kinds of people: those who claw their way toward mastery, spending years in deliberate practice, toiling day and night with calloused fingers under drooping, greasy eyelids. There is no secret to their success, only the source of their grit. Then there are those born with gifts so innate that debating their origins is a futile exercise. We read about them in the history books and idealize the impossible ease with which they produce masterpiece after masterpiece. But there's also that third kind, perhaps the most haunting: those who possess the capacity for greatness yet never discover the key that unlocks it.

Adam surely wasn't the third kind. The day he touched brush to canvas, something ancient awakened in him. What poured forth seemed effortless to Mark and me, though we could see Adam putting in the work, holed up in the second-story bedroom of his childhood home, acrylic and graphite merging with the skin under his fingernails. In mere months, he had mastered drawing, painting, and design with a fluency that seemed to come from somewhere beyond practice.

As Adam disappeared deeper into his craft, Mark and I found our own outlet. The band we had started in our freshman year was releasing its second record, touring on every school break, playing at bigger and bigger venues. Somewhere around junior year, Mark lost his taste for it, but I still craved the brutality of relentless touring. I thrived on cartons of cigarettes and handles of booze mixed with heart-stopping handfuls of No-Doz, as the uninsulated cargo van shepherded me and my bandmates from gig to gig; cig to cig. From Jacksonville to Syracuse, I basked in the adoration of fans and thrived on the chaos of makeshift moshpits, the stinking sweat of adolescence greasing linoleum floors, the way they would scream our lyrics back at us like incantations against their own suburban prisons, leaving the venue hoarse but somehow still engaged and alive.

For Adam, impact was meticulous mastery of craft. For me, it was the stage, the brutal communion between performer and crowd. For Mark, it was the art he shared with us. As young as we were, each of us had found our answer to that restless, magnetic pull toward consequence, toward leaving the world different from how we found it.

After I left the band, recognizing that staying would have probably killed me, I spent years trying to deny that pull. Trying to retire it. Convincing myself that the comfortable path, the safe path, was more than enough.

For many people, "impact" is a mere marketing term, something we claim in pitch decks or LinkedIn profiles: an ironic return to paper bags from plastic, the purchase of carbon credits to offset business class air travel, a commitment to no-waste packaging while conveniently ignoring the environmental hostility that is direct-to-consumer shipping. But for those who have tasted the possibility of real change, denial becomes its own form of hypocrisy.

Since those early years, I've always chased consequence and purpose, failing as many times as I've succeeded, even if that success was only for a fleeting moment. Sometimes those failures were devastating and set me back financially, to say nothing of the bruised ego that took as many years to repair. But to know you have the tools, the vision, the creative fire, and to not deploy every ounce of will toward fulfilling your own prophecy is to live in a particular kind of hell, far worse than the sting brought on by any memory of previous failures.

So I share with you today an idea about consequence.

To those grinding away on projects that feel like elaborate games of corporate solitaire. To those building systems that serve someone else's vision. To those who've outlined the book in their mind a thousand times but never let ink flow to page. To those dreaming of their own café where the cacophony of ceramic and metal merges with the sweet smell of butter and bread, giving way to the conversation and community you've craved all along. To those suffocating in bureaucracies that mistake process for purpose, confusing the labor of paperwork with the labor of love.

Your source of impact is waiting. Waiting for you to say no to the seductive comfort of almost-enough. To throw off the yoke of incremental progress and build something that bears your name, serves your people, honors the things you love.

As the years grow on and the hairs gray, then depart, the temptation does not retire. It doesn't fade with age or dim with disappointment. It only grows more urgent, more insistent, more unforgiving. Because there is no fourth kind of person. None of us departs this world without at least that momentary wonder if we did our part, or anything at all. The question has never been whether you have the capacity to make an impact. The question is whether you have the simple bravery to run toward it instead of away.