Happy Sunday. Thanks for spending it with me.

Look, I'll be honest. I put more time into this little magazine than I care to admit. Like, a lot of hours.

Part of it is that I'm a dreamer... I can't quit come to a place where I say "This is as good as it can be."

Even now, it's an hour before I need to send, and I'm up early tinkering. But it doesn't feel like work. I lunged out of bed to write. To share. To create.

I say this a lot and I think it misses people. I've literally opened my calendar to 1500 people since 2022. I had no idea who would show up when I put a link on my website.

But the people who have booked a call, are people just like you. People who would trade what they have, even though it's effing incredible, but they don't know for sure what they would trade it for.

Well, that was me once, too. Sitting right where you are. I had given so much to get so far. College. Leaving home. Nights. Weekends. Airports. Pissedoff spouse....

Then, I just thought about this: Why cling to the emptiness just because it's been paid for?

I couldn't get back what I had given up to get here. But I could trade it all for something I wanted more.

Knowing that doesn't make it easier. But it changes what you do about it.

I remember this call like it was yesterday. I know I say that a lot, but I really do.

Four years ago, I didn't know Jeff. I didn't know anyone who knew Jeff. I'd never been to rural Missouri. And he had never given up five days of his life to be at the Ranch in South Dakota. But along the way, all of that has changed.

It was late December, 2022. I hit join meeting, and there he was.

Jeff told me about the chainsaw before he told me about the medicine.

Sixteen years in emergency rooms. A schedule other people envied out loud. And when he finally sat down to talk with me, the job came up late. Almost as an aside.

That stayed with me.

Because I know what it means when a person buries the biggest word on their résumé at the bottom of the conversation. It means the word stopped fitting a long time ago. They just haven't said it yet.

Jeff said it. Out loud. To me. And the sentence he used was not polished. It was raw and honest and it is in this issue exactly the way he said it.

Here is what I keep thinking about since that call.

Nobody made Jeff take that job. He chose it. 20 years earlier, when different things were more important, he chose it. At twenty-two.

And then he never chose it again. he either didn't have to, or he didn't need to. But this is for sure -- he didn't get to.

He just kept showing up while everyone around him used his title to tell their own story about who he was. The doctor. The provider. The guy who made it.

The title got heavier every year. Not because it changed. Because he did. Not because the job was growing. Because he was.

I have my own version of that. We all do. Making this issue sent me back to mine, to the question I now ask myself more often than I'd like to admit: if this was my last day of work ever, is this the work I want to be doing?

That question is the spine of everything inside. There is a story about a man, a cabin called Camp Willis, and 375 acres of Missouri timber that did something no title ever could. There is a question in the Q&A I get on almost every call, answered straight. And there is a tool that names the feeling most of us have been calling ingratitude, and tells the truth about what it actually is.

You are not going to find a single step-by-step anything in here. You will find a person who was winning by every measure and stopped believing the prize was real.

If you have ever felt that in the driveway on a Sunday, keep reading.

This one was written for you.

Lon -

PS -- Oh, and there's a cool check-in from the Ranch. And by the way, the Normal 40 Ranch Retreat (At the Stroschein Ranch in SD) starts in a few weeks. This year is full. But I hope you think about joining me -- us -- next year.

I've had the privilege of sitting across the table from more than 1,500 people since I left my job in 2022.

People who, from the outside, had everything they'd chased. And on the inside, had arrived at a place where they'd trade all of it. They just didn't know what they'd trade it for.

They called me because I had been there.

In the modern success system, elite performers are represented by two separate yet equally powerful forces.

The image they've built…
and the truth they can no longer ignore.

One protects the life they constructed.
The other calls them to the life they're meant to live.

When those two forces collide, a decision must be made. To wait, or to start.

Most people wait. Some finally act.

These are their stories.

Today, meet Jeff.

F***. Here we go again.

In 2014 he started buying timber. A few acres at a time, off a two-lane road in southwest Missouri, until it added up to three hundred and seventy-five. He named it Camp Willis. He had no plan for it then. He just wanted to own something that didn't need him to be a certain way.

Jeff has a dream. Something simple, but seemingly impossible. The dream he described had nothing to do with more land, and everything to do with more control.

"Waking up and just being happy to pop out of bed; to pet the dog and kiss the wife and enjoy the day. There's nothing specific. That's all I need," he said. "I need to find the thing that allows me to do that."

Then he added this, "Oh, and to never have to work another Christmas or Thanksgiving again."

The dream? To wake up happy. To be present with family. To have control over his hours.

He is a doctor — he'll tell you that last, and he'll tell you it flat. Sixteen years in emergency medicine, five as a trauma center director, a staffing company he owned and wound down. Five 24-hour shifts a month. Good money. Twenty-five days off. A log cabin on the land. A blessed twenty-year marriage. Two awesome boys. The kind of resume you'd read out loud at a reunion and watch people go quiet.

The kind that allows you to tell the parts of the story everyone will admire, but leave out all of the parts that are slowly killing you.

"I work five 24-hour shifts a month and make good money doing it. I'm off 25 days a month. Should be super happy. I'm just not."

The job had stopped teaching him anything years back. He knew that, but he thought it would get better.

"It's not mentally stimulating at all. There's nothing exciting about it. There's nothing I haven't done, nothing I haven't seen."

"I've been trying to do this on my own for a year."

He'd walk into a shift and something in him would settle into a flat line. A shift on the calendar could eat the whole week in front of it.

And every morning, the same sentence arrived before he opened his eyes.

"I wake up each day, I'm just like, f***, here we go again. That's no way to live."

He said it the way you'd read a grocery list. Not burnout. Not a breakdown. Just the flat repeating fact of a life that had stopped surprising him.

The thing that held him wasn't the money, though the money held him. It was the word. Doctor. The one in the family. The one everyone pointed at. The grandson, son or brother who made it. It wasn't that he needed to be a doctor. It's that he didn't know how to tell everyone around him he no longer needed to be one.

"The thought of just that vanishing and me just being some dude again, it's tough. I'm not particularly proud of it. I don't care that I'm a doctor. It's just a job to me."

So he performed, or survived, the life instead. The coping mechanism? Cocktails when it was time to make dinner. Two, sometimes three, during the cooking.

Never drunk. Just habit. Like Jeff, I've been there. Alone. On a couch. Mind-numbing TV. Just escaping...if only for a moment.

"I would find myself just sitting on the couch, death scrolling or staring at the TV, you know, with a glass of whiskey beside me for no reason other than the fact that I really want to get a nice sleep tonight. I think this is going to help me, which is the opposite truth, right?"

The job carved something out of him he could name.

(As a doctor) "You become pretty emotionally closed off and pretty emotionally shut down. And because of all the horrible stuff I see, there are very few things that frustrate me to the point of true sadness or tears."

One night he found some writing on LinkedIn and read it, and read the people underneath it. He could relate. In fact, it was the first time he could relate to a feeling he was unable to put his own definition to.

"I thought I was pretty unique. I thought I was alone. And then I ran across your stuff and all the people that follow your stuff and realize that I'm about as not unique as you can imagine."

Then he came into Vintage, Lon's private coaching cohort of 6, and sat with other people just like him. People whose lives, from where he sat, looked finished and good. People who had waht they chased. People who has the lives anyone else would trade to have. People like Jeff.

But, one by one, each of them named something they've been waiting for. Something they had been holding in. Something they knew they would do someday, but they didn't know exactly what it was. But for each of them, it was more of what they were already doing.

But each of them started to come alive as they started to gain clarity around it.

"Seeing that gave me permission to know that, despite my life looking so perfect to the rest of the world, it's okay to not be happy with what you have."

It's okay to be done with something you once wanted, and to start to build something new, instead. It's not okay to keep waiting on it. To think it was easier for others. To think it will find you.

The morning it turned for good, he was at the kitchen table in Springfield, in the middle of a Tuesday, having lunch with his wife. His thumb kept moving. Director-level medicine, hospital administration, a listing three states away. He'd been scrolling for ten minutes before he noticed he was reading the same words he'd already memorized.

"I realized I'd been scrolling past the same jobs that were going to solve my problem for 10 minutes that day. And it was the same jobs I'd looked at the week before and the week before, and nothing was clicking."

A man trying to solve a feeling with a search bar. Looking for the same problem under a new name.

He set the phone down. He looked at his wife Cindy.

"I said, Cindy, I need help. And it wasn't like I need a psychiatrist or anything like that. It was this, I've been trying to do this on my own for a year. I'm absolutely no further than I was. And I'm just as miserable as I was."

Then he called his mom. Worried about what she would say if he decided to step away from his job.

He'd rehearsed saying it out loud alone. This time he said it to someone else. Hey, mom. It's it. I'm done. And he watched for the shock.

"When I said that to her and she was like, 'cool,' I was like, oh, okay, well, mom gave me permission. I can do this."

She was the opposite of shocked. Thank goodness, she said. Let's get you doing something else.

That was the whole turn. The women in his life, his wife across the table, his mother on the phone, didn't hold him to the man he'd spent sixteen years saying he wanted to be. They handed him permission to set that man down.