This companion piece pulls from the closing minutes of Episode #106. The full conversation includes considerably more discussion of Bojangles, flotation pods, and whether dwarves are only capable of relaxing while drunk.
You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.
Fair warning before you read any further: most of this episode is Justin and I trying to invent a premium salted water brand, discussing whether it’s ethically sound to lie in a flotation pod together, and eventually landing on a tagline that we both agreed sounds uncomfortably close to Papa John’s.
None of that is in this article. You’re welcome, or I’m sorry, depending on how much you enjoy nonsense.
What I do want to pull out, because it snuck up on both of us near the end of the recording and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, is a sentence we apparently wrote together back in November and had mostly forgotten about until we said it out loud again on the mic.
Here it is, more or less as it came out:
If you’re somewhere in life right now where you feel like there’s more to it, you wake up, you look back, and five or ten years just passed like this, and you’re like, this is it, and you’re really curious about it, because you know there’s someone inside you, and you know there’s more to do, and there are other people who think the same thing, and they’re doing cool shit, and they want you to come do it with them.
I’m not going to pretend that’s a polished line. It wasn’t written to be quoted back, it was written in a doc somewhere as a note to ourselves about why any of this exists in the first place. But that’s usually how you know a sentence is actually true, it survives getting said out loud months later without either of us wincing.
We’ve been at this almost a year now. Not even a full year, technically, which is a strange thing to sit with when you consider how much has actually shifted underneath it, the programming, the messaging, the whole shape of what we’re building. And in a year like that there are always the moments neither of us puts in the highlight reel, the ones where something feels stuck, where you’re staring at a WhatsApp thread wondering if the thing you’re building is landing the way you hoped it would, where doubt shows up uninvited and starts asking questions you don’t have quick answers to.
What I keep coming back to is that none of that doubt has actually been the enemy. If anything it’s been the proof that we’re building something we actually care about, because you don’t lose sleep over things you’re indifferent to.
And the thing underneath all of it, the thing we keep circling back to no matter how many tangents we take to get there, salted water included, is genuinely simple. It starts with knowing yourself. Not as a slogan, as a practice, one that takes longer than anyone wants it to and rarely happens alone.
We really do believe that. We built a place around the belief that you can explore your own honest voice alongside other people, create whatever wants to come through you, and get supported in that process instead of doing it in isolation, which is the harder and lonelier way, even if it’s the more common one.
If any part of that resonates, if you’ve had your own version of looking up and realizing five years went by, we’d love for you to come find out what we’re building. And if none of it resonates and you just came here for the salted water content, honestly, fair enough, that’s most of the episode anyway.
Fnd your voice, find your people, and create the impossible: https://elevendunbar.com/
