on becoming the art

The more we live in this abundant modern world, the more we become fragile — not in our sentiment, but in our bravery to make a choice.

You’re sitting at a café alone on a Sunday afternoon. Airpods in, but you’ve paused the podcast. You’ve scrolled through every app twice already. The coffee is getting cold and you’re not sure why you’re still sitting here. You got bored of partying with friends, posting and counting likes. You even miss the dread on Monday like you used to. At least dread gave you direction.

Things are cheaper than before. Content is endless in our feeds. Our social relationships, our attention, our intent in life — all scattered. We have too many things that make us care, so nothing really does. We feel like we’re better when we’re busy, so we try to feed ourselves as much as possible — material stuff, fashion, content, connections.

Working is reaching closer to meaningless, thanks to AI. You just need 2–3 days a week to pay the bills. That sounds like a crazy easy life.

But at the end of the day, none of it makes you feel alive. You finished the project. You got the promotion. You posted the announcement on LinkedIn and watched the congratulations pour in. By Thursday, you forgot why it mattered. You still feel like you’re lacking something.

Something that can’t reach its best potential. Something that can’t be reached by material stuff. Something deeper than any social conversation can touch. Something in you that hasn’t been touched yet.

It’s the dilemma of this era. The lack of purpose. The lack of force that pushes your life. The lack of condition for the seed inside you to start growing.

this era is a one-of-a-kind condition to give humans the chance to create

For most people, it’s a tragedy. We don’t know what to do with our time. There’s no urgency that forces you to become something. AI will do everything you can think about, faster and cheaper than you can imagine. So we fill our days scrolling, seeking attention, chasing fake happiness to cover the meaninglessness.

But through another lens, this emptiness pushes us closer to the ultimate purpose of humanity — to create. Because only when we stop putting importance on the things we do for survival, we actually create something that doesn’t depend on our bosses, salary, or outer recognition. Something full of beauty and freedom.

Remember when you made something just because you wanted to? No brief, no client, no deadline. Maybe it was a sketch at 2am, a song in your notes app, a random side project nobody asked for. That feeling — that was the closest you’ve been to alive in months.

That feeling is what we call art.

yourself is the ultimate art

Think about that friend or mentor who walks into the room and you just feel something shift. They’re not the loudest. They don’t perform confidence. But when they speak, you listen. When they fail, they don’t collapse — they adjust. You don’t admire them for their job title. You admire them for what they’ve clearly been through and how it shaped them.

The books, businesses, music — those are byproducts. The real creation is who they became. Their personality, their presence, the energy they absorb and radiate every day. How they carry pain. How they move through the world. That wasn’t given to them. They sculpted it. That’s the art.

Realizing purpose is when you start feeling alive again. When you don’t fear anything but try everything to realize it. When you see clearly that you’re nothing but a creature from the emptiness, and will soon come back to the emptiness. And in that gap of time, you decided to create an art — the art of making yourself become something, without being attached to anything it becomes.

But here’s what most people miss: you can’t create art in a vacuum.

Art needs the right conditions. Art needs soil.

you can grow from anywhere, but you still want to find the soil your seed can grow from

This is where strategy meets soul.

Roger Martin said: strategy is not a plan. It’s choosing Where to Play and How to Win.

Where to Play is choosing your soil — the environment, the people, the challenges you place yourself in. How to Win is the craft — exploring, building skills, sharpening your mindset, growing your relationships. All to actualize the art of becoming.

But the soil doesn’t always go your way. Most of the time, it gives you challenges. It makes you feel the pain. And then you have to recalibrate yourself and grow from that.

Wrong soil looks like:

• Staying in the city where everyone validates you but nobody challenges you. Comfortable conversations that never go past surface level.
• The friend group that celebrates your wins but never asks “is this actually what you want?”
• Working on things that pay well but teach you nothing about yourself, drain your energy, and erode your creativity.
• An easy lifestyle that makes you more dependent on the cycle of work, consume, and work again.

The right soil feels like:

• Moving somewhere you don’t speak the language and realizing your confidence was borrowed from your environment, not built from within.
• Working with someone who’s brutally better than you — the kind of discomfort that makes you either quit or transform. No middle ground.
• The relationship or project or place that breaks your pattern. You were one person before it and someone different after. That’s how you know the soil was real.
• The phase of life where you cry more than usual — not from sadness, but from something cracking open. You’re shedding a version of yourself that used to fit but doesn’t anymore.

A seed that falls on concrete can still sprout. But it will never become a tree. It needs depth, darkness, resistance from the earth pressing against it. Comfort is concrete. Growth requires being buried for a while.

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are you seeking challenge or comfort? it defines your soil.

You can grow anywhere. But not every soil will let you become what you’re supposed to be.

And you already know which one you’re sitting in.

Now go find your soil.