The Puzzle Origin Story

One hot summer night during an extremely stressful and confusing time of my life I went to an event with a bunch of other entrepreneurs. I had been struggling with events like these cause of what's called Imposter Syndrome - which is when you don't feel like you deserve the recognition you're receiving or you feel inadequate or a fraud despite there being evidence to the contrary.

My imposter syndrome was a little different in that I was in the middle of a struggling venture, but everyone still associated me with my prior successful one. Even that one had taken some blows from covid. So at events some people would congratulate me on my success and intensify the pain of struggling to pay the bills (both personal and professional) and not seeing a path to success for my current project. I didn't see a way out of my current mental state.

At the event that night all the self-doubt came crashing in as we all said hi. As an extrovert there's always a little benefit to getting out and socializing. So I told myself to 'buck up' and be present - focus on connecting with the people around me. After some genuine connections talking about good times, past and future, my stress melted away for a while. It felt great but as the event wound down the pressure of life was building back up on my shoulders. Someone handed me a cigar on the way out. I usually only smoke cigars to celebrate and hadn't felt like that in some time, but I took it and gave it a good sniff through the package. It extended the good feeling for a bit longer.

Trying to resist the stress returning, back at home, an idea came to me that I'd never done before. It was late-evening, dark out, and the house was quiet. I put on my swimsuit and slipped into the pool and into my favorite floatie. Floating face up, resting a glass of wine on my chest and with a cigar in-hand it all seemed to balance and with all the competing priorities of not spilling wine or getting cigar wet I held the balance and seemed to enter a high quality state of presence.

Mesmerized by what's called crown shyness, where trees don't fully touch each other and form a zig-zag pattern, something incredible happened.

Now, for a little context, I'm an engineer by training and thought patterns and while I've had some wild experiences and unexplained phenomena I can usually convince myself that most things we don't fully understand are limitations of our brain or subconscious doing the hard work. I don't really believe in magic, I believe in amazing science that seems like magic.

But that night I felt a connection to...something. I started to have this vision. Memories still fresh like it was yesterday, it filled my brain. It didn't feel like it was my creative juices flowing. It was being handed to me, in a conversation of sorts. I would ask questions and the vision would answer them.

The vision was about looking at our lives as a puzzle. While that is not earth-shattering nor even that unique the detail and structure of the vision and information was earth-shattering to me. Most of my life has been spent struggling with the 'why' of it all. For me it has been a constant and vicious cycle of being dragged down by pointlessness and fighting my way back to a manageable reality.

The Puzzle is a framework of how we can live our lives - compatible with any religion or spirituality or lack thereof. A framework that can be applied to the most complex of lives and yet still connect completely with the simplicity and importance of presence and stillness. It ties the two things together for what I think is an extremely powerful guide to getting more of what we want but also being happier with what we already have. It has guided me for the last 1.5 years and this all may end up in a much longer format wrapping.

Let me know your thoughts and stay tuned.

'Not a word of AI-generated anything. Apologies if I ramble at times.'

---