Letting The Work Lead
Why Your Voice Doesn’t Need to Be Original, Perfect, or Ready
One of the first things I had to give up in this work was caring what other people thought. Not in a flippant, surface-level, “I don’t give a shit” kind of way. I mean in the deeper, cellular sense of unhooking myself from external validation, of refusing to let other people’s opinions, reactions, or silence determine what, or whether I create.
Because this process of offering your voice is messy. It’s nonlinear. It’s frustrating and riddled with self-doubt. And it will not produce clean, polished, brilliant results every time. It just won’t. That’s not how voice works. That’s not how nature works. That’s not how art works. That’s not how you work.
So I learned to be almost completely shameless about the messiness of this process. About the failures. About the weird, half-formed expressions that didn’t land. And it turns out that was one of the most liberating and important transformations of my life: becoming more devoted to my intrinsic nature than to the extrinsic responses it generated; more devoted to the thing that wanted to come through me, rather than to results. That is the path.
Originality is not something you perform
There’s this weird thing that happens when we try to be original—we get fake. Because we start performing originality rather than being original. We write a post and it comes out like a robot professor from the 1800s, or like we’re trying to impress an invisible panel of highly-critical judges that exists in our mind.
Originality doesn’t live in the performance. It lives in our nature. Which means we have to unlearn what we’ve been told, stripping away what society and culture told us was good to let the voice that’s always been deep underneath emerge.
You don’t need to be original. You are original, because no one else carries your exact blend of DNA, memory, insight, and lived experience.
But to express yourself from that place takes work. It takes practice. That takes a willingness to speak before it’s eloquent, before it’s clever, before it’s refined. Originality is what emerges after you stop trying. But you have to try first.
You’re not supposed to feel ready
Most people are waiting to feel ready before they speak, post, or start the thing they say they want to start.
But readiness is a myth. I’ve never once felt “ready.” I still don’t feel ready. I don’t expect to. Because readiness is the wrong aim. What we need isn’t readiness—it’s honesty. It’s a willingness to say: “This is true for me right now, and I’m going to say it even though it’s not finished.”
There is no great arrival moment. There’s just a quiet decision to begin.
Most of what you make won’t resonate, and that’s fine
Another place people get stuck: they assume everything they create is supposed to be resonant. That if it doesn’t land, it wasn’t worth making. That’s a dangerous lie.
Most of what we make doesn’t resonate. Not because we suck, but because that’s the nature of the process. Even for the best artists, the most brilliant minds… most of what they make gets thrown out. The ratio is wildly disproportionate.
You don’t find resonance by chasing it. You find resonance by creating everything else first.
And when you hit it, when that one line, one piece, or one moment lands, it shifts something. But you don’t get there unless you’re willing to make a lot of not-that along the way.
Your voice isn’t about you
The deeper I’ve gone into this work, the more I’ve realized: voice isn’t just a tool. It’s a portal. It’s the meeting point between formlessness and form, between what wants to be said and what is able to be said through you.
It’s not just the words you say. It’s the origin of those words. It’s how they move through the unique organism that is your body, your psyche, or your soul, and then get expressed through your mouth, your fingertips, and your content. Voice is your soul made manifest. It’s nature expressing itself through your particular arrangement of cells.
It is, in the purest sense, evolution in motion.
And when you realize that—when you actually feel the immensity of that—you don’t have time to obsess over whether your post gets likes. You’re too busy listening, too busy receiving, and too busy staying available to the mystery moving through you.
If you’re stuck in the loop of “not ready,” or worried your voice isn’t unique enough, or terrified of being misunderstood—welcome. That’s part of it. That’s the price of entry into this process. But just know: your ego will always resist. Because your ego knows the moment you really surrender to your voice, it’s no longer in charge.
So get over yourself. Not because you don’t matter. But because something bigger is trying to come through you, and it’s tired of waiting for you to feel perfect. So show up messy. Speak from the middle. Say it before it’s brilliant. That’s where the work begins.