I want to suggest something that might piss you off a little.

A great deal of what you're experiencing in your life right now may be something you've participated in creating.

Not all of it. I'm not saying you caused your hardships, other people's choices, or the economy. But you probably have more authority over your experience of life than you've been using.

Here's the simple version of something I've spent twenty-some years learning.

You're already a creator. The question is what you're creating, and from where?

Most of the men I know spent years using their imagination to build things. But when it came to their own lives, that same imagination mostly rehearsed what they feared, and then they took actions designed to avoid it. I know I did. I could imagine a hundred ways something might go wrong before I'd taken the first step toward anything. I got so good at it that I could feel the emotional consequences of events that never happened.

And here's the part I want to invite you to sit with a while: we don't stop being creative when we're afraid. Our imagination just gets busy creating possibilities we don't want. Then we hedge, withhold, and keep our escape routes open. Then we wonder why nothing we care about ever builds momentum.

Fear asks one set of questions.

• What could go wrong?
• What might I lose?
• How do I protect myself?

But there's another set available – love.

• What would be beautiful?
• What would I love to experience?
• What kind of person do I want to be?

Same imagination. Different source and fuel.

I see this everywhere in the lives of men and women I encounter and work with. A man waits for his wife to be more affectionate before he'll allow himself to be warm. A woman waits for her man to stop spending time on himself before she feels like she matters. Partners who both wait for the other to change or improve before they'll improve and enjoy their lives. People waiting for more money before abundance, an invitation before friendship, confidence before action.

I understand every one of those waits, because I've been every one of them in some way.

The turn for me came when I finally saw that the thing I kept failing to fix had me in it. The only thing I had real authority over was my own participation. And when I changed that, everything around me began changing too. That's as true in a marriage as it is in a business, a friendship, or a dream you've been carrying for years.

I wrote a longer piece about this. It runs around 9,000 words, and it covers the fear and love streams of imagination, what deciding actually means (and why it matters), why so many of us have lost touch with what we want, the five ingredients of creating something real, and stories of how it's worked in my own life, from the meandering in the Swiss Alps to my giving my marriage entirely different meaning.

I can honestly say it's one of the most important things I've written.

But I don't want to send something you don't want. So if you'd like to read it, just reply to this email, and I'll send it to you as a PDF. That's the whole offer. There's no funnel behind it, no follow-up sequence, no sales pitch, or any gotcha waiting on the other side.

And if you'd rather not, this email stands on its own. Either way, the question at the heart of it is yours to sit with:

You're already a creator who has been creating. What would you love to create now?

– Sven