Reza Saeedi: There is a Persian poem by Rumi I came across recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. It's only four lines and roughly translated the ideas are If you walk the path, the path will appear. If you become nothing, you'll be led toward your true being. If you make yourself small, the world won't be big enough to contain you. And lastly, you'll be shown who you truly are. I love this because almost every line is a contradiction. Walk before you know the path. Become nothing to discover who you are, become smaller to become bigger than the whole world, and lose yourself to find yourself. And the more I've thought about it, the more I think there is one idea connecting all four. Maybe finding yourself isn't a process of addition. Maybe it's a process of subtraction. The first idea is: if you walk the path, the path will open for you. Which sounds simple on the surface, but think about how often we live the exact opposite way. We want the path to open first, then we'll walk. We want to know where the career is heading before we make the change. We want to know if the business is going to be successful before we start it. We want to know whether we are good at writing before we even start writing. We want all the certainty and none of the action. But in my experience, clarity is only available on the other side of movement. Take a step, you learn something, and then and only then that changes what you can see. So you take another step, and eventually you look back, and there is a path behind you that you could have never seen from the starting point. I've definitely had periods of my life where I've tried to think my way into certainty, and usually I just end up thinking more. Then the poem gets stranger. If you become nothing, you'll be led toward your true being. This might be my favorite line because we spend so much of our lives trying to become something. You become an entrepreneur, an executive, an athlete, the smart person, the successful person, the interesting guy, the person who has their shit together. And I'm not trying to say becoming those things are necessarily bad. The problem starts when you build an identity around them. Because now you don't just do something. You have to keep being the person who does that thing. You have an image to maintain, a story to protect. And without really noticing it, you can start making decisions based on what keeps the character intact. What would someone like me do? What will people think? Does this make me look successful? Does this fit the story I've been telling about myself? And eventually the identity that was supposed to help you understand yourself can actually prevent you from seeing yourself clearly. That's why I don't think becoming nothing here means becoming worthless. I actually think it means loosening your grip on the labels, on the status, on the story, on the constant need to prove that you are somebody. Because there is an interesting question here underneath all of that. Who are you when there is nobody around to impress? Who are you when there is nobody around to impress? What do you actually like? What do you actually want? What would you still pursue if nobody ever knew you did it? Those questions get harder to answer the more attached we become to being someone, the more of that identity we have. Okay. The third idea is: if you make yourself small, the world won't be big enough to contain you. Another massive contradiction. You become smaller and somehow you become enormous. I think this is about humility, but not humility in the sense of pretending you're not good enough, you're not good at anything. More like refusing to let the world's judgment and view determine your size. Because there are endless ways to measure yourself. Money. followers, job titles, Who invited you somewhere? Who knows your name? How fit you are, how attractive you are, how much you've accomplished compared to someone else. and if you accept those measurements as the definition of your worth, you spend your entire life moving up and down with them, like a ladder. Someone is always richer, someone is always smarter, someone is always further ahead. Someone is always getting more attention. It's a never-ending loop. But something strange happens when you stop. When you stop needing this measuring stick to tell you who you truly are. It actually loses its power over you. You can still play the game, you can still want things, you can still be ambitious, but the result stops being a verdict on who you are. Maybe that's what it means to become small and suddenly no longer fit inside the world. You stopped asking the world to tell you how big you are. I'm getting goosebumps as I'm talking about this. And then there's a final idea. After you walked, after you've become nothing, after you've made yourself small, you're shown to yourself. Goosewamps again. That ending really got me because after all of this, the poem doesn't say you become some enlightened new person. It says you see you, the thing you were looking for was apparently there the whole time. You just couldn't see it clearly. And honestly, this feels especially relevant now because we live in an incredible age of identity construction. LinkedIn asks us to turn our career into a beautiful narrative. Instagram asks us to turn our life into an aesthetic. Dating apps ask us to compress our personality into freaking prompts. Even self-improvement can become an identity. You can become the person who meditates, the person who wakes up at 5 a.m. The person who runs marathons, the person who reads 50 books a year. Again, let me be clear: none of this is bad. I love ambition. I love working on myself. But I think there is a subtle trap here. You can become so good at constructing the person you want to be that you stop asking whether that person is actually you. And maybe that's why this Persian poem has stayed with me. It offers a completely different model of growth. It's not add more, become more impressive. Construct a stronger identity, prove who you are, but instead walk, let go, become humble, see. Maybe we don't always need another layer. Maybe some of the most important growth in our lives comes from taking layers away. The expectations you inherited, the status you thought you needed. The person you became because people rewarded you for being them. The story you've repeated for so long that you forgot it was a story in the first place. Less to prove, less to protect, less to perform until eventually you stop trying so hard to be someone. And maybe that's when you finally get to meet yourself. Have a great day.