Before he was a rapper, Jesse cold called record labels saying he was Billy Joel’s agent. Then he waited for them to call back and hear him rapping on his answering machine.
It didn’t work.
He had other crazy ideas. He tried them all until one finally worked.
“I’m just not scared of being embarrassed. I don’t like it, but I’m not scared of it,” Jesse says, “Once you give yourself that gift, you’re liberated.”
It’s always been having for me — probably similar to you — always having the end of the movie in my head. And then filling in the script. So I knew I was going to leave there with a sale. I just had to write the script.
The script might change. There might be, you know, call an audible, and you might have to rewrite the script, but the end of the script was always the same.
I’m going to run a hundred miles.
Okay. Well, how are you gonna do that, Jesse? You’ve never — You’re not, like, a crazy endurance runner!
I became very aware of my relationship with time. When we think of relationships, we think of our relationships with our mom or our dad or our kids, or this and that, but no one thinks of a relationship with time.
Now, I’m turning 50. The average American lives to be 78 years old. So, if I’m average, I hope I’m not, but that means I got 28 years of life left. If you reverse engineer that… Like, I just climbed Mount Washington. There were no 70-year-olds climbing Mount Washington. The actual years that you have left to be active and do the shit that we want to do, they shrink significantly as a percentage as you get older.
So once you get aware of your relationship with time, everything shifts. I had a fundamental shift when I came home, as it relates to my relationship with time. Who I want to spend it with and what I want to do. And I want to put more on my plate of the stuff that I love to do, with the people I love to do it with.
And I started getting a lot of clarity around that when I wasn’t getting bombarded with everything else. Like, I don’t spend any time alone. The only I spent alone is if I go for a run. Everything else is… I’m getting influenced by everybody else and everything else. So I’m losing my main superpower, my instinct.
I survive on instinct and gut, and I was losing that, because I was so distracted. So once I started to get that alone time… You don’t have to go to a monastery to do it, you just gotta, you know… Carving out a little bit of time for myself, every day. I started to think a lot clearer on how do I want to live, how do I want to reverse engineer the rest of my life.
