The Voices In The Car

I was driving to a meeting tonight.

Melbourne winter arrives exactly on schedule. It brings gifts of the cold, the dark, the rain. There’s a funeral silence to it that makes my sunshine reggae playlist inappropriate to play. So I pulled up a YouTube video on how great entrepreneurs workmaxxed their way to fame and fortune. Found a good one. Carnegie. Rockefeller. Ford. The inspiration hit like a shot of cinnamon whiskey.

Then I zoomed out.

Built different, sure. Yet they walked into a world already tilted their way, and bent it a little further still. The video calls them geniuses. My read was that a bunch of men who started ahead, got further ahead, then shut the door behind them.

False gods.

I’ve spent a career coming up against systems built by men like that. The part of me caught in between is the part worth writing. That’s the part I skip. These voices aren’t mine. But they sound credible, so I called it learning.

The truth is they’re company. They fill the car and ask for nothing back. That’s why I keep them on - it’s easy, and easy feels safe.

Some voices fill the silence. Mine has to break it.