🍽️ Issue #42: The Tile in Front of You

Tribe - First, an apology. To everyone who pre-ordered & became a pre-sales leader for Set Your Table: the first print run is taking far longer to ship than I promised. You bet on this book before it existed in your hands, & you are STILL waiting. That is on me. The signed copies are coming; I am riding the printer & the fulfillment line hard. Thank you for your patience & your faith. I will not forget who stood at the table first.

Now, a hat tip.

I just finished Jim Collins’s new book, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. Ten years of research. Thirty-four lives studied in matched pairs. If you know Collins from Good to Great, know this one cuts closer to the bone.

His core idea: each of us arrives “encoded” for certain work, & every life will meet its cliffs; the sudden drops that scramble clarity into fog. The question is never whether the cliff comes. The question is what you do at the edge.

One line from Chapter Thirteen stopped me cold. He titles it “Questions Are Better Than Answers.”

Here is what shifted in me.

For YEARS I worked toward legacy. How would I be remembered? What would the thirty-three years & five combat tours finally add up to? I treated my life like a finished portrait I was painting for an audience I would never meet.

I do not believe that anymore.

I now believe in the life & the work right at hand. The conversation in front of me. The chapter I write today. The table I set tonight. Not the legacy. The TILE.

Here is the connection to everything we do.

A mosaic is never built by staring at the finished image. It is built one tile at a time, each piece set with full attention, grout still wet, & the whole picture invisible from where you kneel. You do not get to see the mosaic. You only get to set the tile.

That IS Set Your Table.

The Freedom Gap™ does not close because you finally decode your legacy. It closes because you set THIS table; the personal one, the relationship in front of you, the professional work on today’s calendar, the community within arm’s reach. Clarity, positioning, execution, applied to the tile under your hand right now.

Legacy is a question for the dead. The work at hand is a question for the living. Collins is right: the better question beats the tidy answer every time.

Set the tile. Trust the mosaic.

We go live on June eighteenth at Patriots Hall in Dripping Springs. The Kindle sale is complete, the print is on its way, & the table is set for everyone who built this with me.

Grab the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX3733HQ

Join the Tribe: https://setyourtable.kit.com/b75d4d8f27

Start the work today with the Starter Workbook: https://setyourtable.kit.com/products/set-your-table-starter-workbook

Stay in the Stay in the fight. Set your table.​​ ~ Brian

Connect: LinkedIn | Substack | Heroic | Bluesky​
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