I have not written anything for over two years. There have been no recent publications, no long-form features, no social media interactions of note. My mind and heart have not been able to put words on a page for years. I don’t know why and it doesn’t matter. What does matter is I am writing again. I’ll take some time to organize my thoughts from time-to-time in hopes of producing something worth reading.

The truth is I am a failure. I have failed at most things in my life. The chances are that you have, too. However, one of the biggest barriers to progress in not failure — it is the fear of failure. So much of our lives are tied up in the binary — those things or outcomes that are either good or bad, black or white, success or failure. When you really think about it, many of us are conditioned to believe that we either have good luck or no luck at all. To be fair, for most worthwhile pursuits life has trained us to accept that “close” is nowhere near good enough. It has led us to believe that close might as well be a mile off-target even if we only miss out narrowly on that which we set out to achieve.

When I said I have failed at most things in my life, I was not exaggerating. In just about every notable aspiration laden with targeted objectives, my most steadfast and ever-present companion has been failure. As odd as it may seem or sound, failure, for me, has been a valuable Sherpa carrying the heavy pack filled with doubts, warning signs, and self-inflicted criticisms on the attempted climb up the next proverbial Everest. This, however, has been a large part of any modicum of success I’ve ever experienced because it has reinforced in me the constant reminder to be patient — we must be the Fool before we can become the Master.

There’s a phrase in world football related to the inevitability of being let down that states, “It’s the hope that kills”. While this will mean something different for each of us, the demands, patterns, and pressure of a life lived hard and hurried have convinced us all to be wary of hope. After all, one of the toughest, if not the toughest part of attempting something — let’s call that something “the climb” is the risk of The Fall.

Not all of this is negative, though. There is a trick here and that trick is to learn how to catch yourself before you fall too far. You see, you are going to fall, but if you can recognize how to get yourself up more often, you’ll be climbing again before you know it. The real skill one learns after enough falls is learning how to land and then to get back up, and eventually, to start the ascent back up towards their goals and ambitions.

When I published my first book, “It’s Just a Ball: Exploring the Complexity of a Simple Game” I felt a great sense of accomplishment. Writing is difficult. Writing a book, in my opinion, is extremely difficult. As proud as I am of that book and all of the effort, contributions, the endless hours of research, editing, stressing out about deadlines and omissions — the book would be considered a commercial failure. For a while, this did not bother me in the least. I wanted to write something authentically unique and in doing so, I create a flop that fell flat in both the niche I wrote for and in my social circle. But, to me, it was still meaningful. I fell, but I didn’t fall far and when I landed, I landed on my feet and kept moving. In hindsight, writing a book that failed in the eyes of the critics has been a beautiful failure. In fact, I don’t know if failure is the correct adjective here as I received so many private messages from readers who were positively impacted by the book’s message.

I believe it was at this point, when I noticed there were entire quarters of the year that passed with no book sales, no royalties, no press that I told myself, “Not everything has to be epic” — and isn’t that the truth?

The thing with this particular bout with failure is I never set out to write the next great American novel nor did I ever envision myself on a bestsellers list. The goal was (and remains) to create written works that are original and meaningful to me and relatable and personal to others. In this pursuit, there was no failure in my writing seeing as I did something many will never do — publish a book.

So what can you expect from my writing these days? For starters, you can expect simple, practical and applicable entries. Most of my readership, wherever they are in their lives these days, knows how I write and how it impacts them. They’ve consumed my words in a variety of formats ranging from the book, magazine columns, features online, blog posts, podcast appearances, and on social media feeds. In many ways, being widely-read and heard still holds significance.

However, there is a disclaimer — I am not the same person these days. I am not an expert in anything. I am not great at anything. In many ways, my writing follows a simple principle that I learned many years ago. The best writing is honest writing.

At the core of the my principles, I’m probably like most of you reading this post and at the same time, I’m nothing like you. I’ve made profound mistakes, I’ve zigged when I should have zagged so many times. Some days, I look at life with the glass half-full. Other days I feel like if I had ducks in the pond, they’d drown. My aim is to write again. That’s the only goal.

I’ll compile important mile markers for myself and others to consider. Much of my work will be about sport; some of it won’t. These mile markers are merely there for those interested in paying attention to them as they cruise down the highways of life. Some mile markers will lead to side roads and others will lead to dead-ends but we’ll have fun going down the road less traveled anyway.

In closing, the last two years have taught me that not every road leads to a happy place, not every rainbow leads to a pot of gold, so don’t chase the leprechauns — you’ll only get lost and off path because those little bastards are searching for something elusive and imaginary.

I’m happy to be back. It’s nice to meet you all again.