REFLECTION
The other night, I stumbled across a monologue by the philosopher Alan Watts, called “The Unspeakable World.” Set to a piece of meditative, orchestral music, Watts’ words jumped into the foreground of my attention. Especially this line: The moment you stop thinking, you come into immediate contact with…the unspeakable world.
The “unspeakable world,” according to Watts, is the fullest version of our reality. It’s the rich, vibrant infinite nature that exists all around us, beyond the names and labels we apply to things in order to understand them and utilize them. It’s where many people, myself included, draw energy, passion and inspiration from—though I didn’t know it had a name until I listened to this monologue.
It’d been a few weeks since that epic ten-day stretch of business I wrote about back at the end of March. It was late. The second night of the draft had just ended and I was doing my normal nighttime rituals. As I listened to Watts, I could feel my connection to this unspeakable world. How it magnified the impact of being back home. How it heightened the sensation I got from putting my feet in the grass every morning, from soaking up the sun, from feeling the breeze off the water. And it made me remember how important these moments of rebalancing have always been on my journey through life as a football player, a father, a broadcaster, a friend, an investor and a partner.
Connecting to the unspeakable world, with our senses wide open, is one of the few reliable ways to reset and recharge our batteries for the things that lay ahead of us on a weekly or monthly basis. By allowing ourselves the time simply to be, we create the conditions to do all the things we care about. It’s the surest way I know to fully live.
When you’re a driven, high-achiever personality with a lot of goals, you need all the energy you can get in order to keep your goals on track and create the life you want. It can be very easy to lose a handle on certain priorities in pursuit of others. It can also be easy to lose track of any single priority while trying to pursue all of them at once. If you try to split your attention equally across ten priorities, not only is it exhausting, but each priority only gets 10% of you, and most important things in this world require much more than that, often for extended periods of time.
Like any young person chasing their dream in a highly competitive environment, the members of the 2026 NFL draft class are very susceptible to running out of gas. But so are older, experienced people trying something new (like I did with broadcasting), who never figured out how to refuel themselves at a core, human level. It’s imperative that we all find our version of the unspeakable world to tap into for energy, inspiration, and focus in pursuit of the life we want to lead.
LESSON
I’ve talked a lot about priorities in this newsletter: how to organize them, how to focus on certain ones, how your actions reflect your priorities. But I haven’t really talked much about how to form your priorities and then how to balance them.
The first priority every person should have is their physical and mental health. I will never tell you what to do with your life, but to me this is a non-negotiable. You can’t achieve maximum desired impact in anything you do if you don’t take care of yourself physically and mentally. I would argue it’s impossible. If you’re sick, people are taking care of you. What are you taking care of?
Beyond that, I think it comes down to finding things you're obsessed with. Things that stimulate your head, your heart or your wallet. If you find something that does all three, like football did for me, then you've truly hit the jackpot. But something doesn’t have to stimulate all three areas to become a priority. Having kids is like that. Doing charity work is like that. Most hobbies are like that.
For some of the guys in this draft class, football might hit all three of those areas. For others it might only hit one or two—the wallet because of the financial benefits; the head, with the mental and intellectual challenges football brings. But how exactly they prioritize football in their lives doesn’t really matter.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter what anyone’s obsessions are or how they prioritize them. What matters is that we give each priority the space, time, and energy it requires to achieve our desired result. What matters is simultaneously being able to compartmentalize all our other priorities, without those priorities suffering or our lives and our happiness suffering as a consequence.
What I mean is, when these young guys hit the field for practice, football has to be their complete focus and everything else needs to go in a box until they walk out of the facility at the end of the day. By the same token, they can’t allow those priorities to suffocate to death in that box. They can’t leave the box in their locker and forget about it. They need to bring it home every night and open it up to give those other priorities a chance to breathe, as well. Because it’s the entire complement of priorities that makes them unique, that defines their life, and determines how they should use their time.
This is an important point because our biggest or most demanding priorities have a tendency to swallow us up. Work. Family. School. They can start to define our lives beyond the limits of our obligations to them. We take work home with us; we let family issues affect our work. That one priority starts to dominate our lives. And if we’re not conscientious about it or self-aware, it can consume all the energy we have for our other priorities, and all the time we have for just simply being.
The problem is, we’re very comfortable letting this happen. We’re used to giving over control of our entire lives to something bigger than ourselves when it aligns with one of our priorities or it stimulates one of those areas I mentioned. We tend to forget ourselves.
Think about it. Look at your average day. Your typical week. How much of your schedule or your thinking is consciously directed by you? How much of your activity services your priorities on your terms? By contrast, how much of your day feels charted out for you, like you’re operating on auto-pilot doing “what you’re supposed to do”? For most people, those percentages are wildly out of whack.
This isn’t a judgment on anyone. We all deal with this, almost as soon as we’re born. It’s societal conditioning that goes back to childhood. When you're a kid, you’re told how to behave, how to sit, how to walk, how to talk. Then as soon as you get to school, you're taught not to walk, not to talk, to sit at your desk without fidgeting or being a distraction. By the time you’re eighteen years old, you’re so used to being told what to do and how to do it, that you unconsciously start to seek it out in other areas of life—fraternities, employers, romantic partners, social clubs, homeowners associations. Before you know it, your entire life is caught up reacting to external stimuli generated by forces outside your control that are trying to steal your attention and direct your actions. It’s the phones, it’s TV, it’s social media, it’s other people’s drama. It’s even this newsletter.
This is most people. And at some point along the line, most people will find themselves burned out and wrung dry, completely alienated from all the other priorities that brought balance and joy. They find themselves on the other side of their own, much longer version of my exhausting ten day stretch of business, but without the tools for recharging and reconnecting.
It can be an ugly picture, but it’s one we can unmake. After all, we made the choices that got us into our predicament, it didn’t just happen to us. And if we can make those choices, we can unmake them. We are accountable for our choices when they create problems, just as we are responsible for making the choices that solve those problems.
APPLICATION
Life is a permanent, ongoing compromise between priorities. There’s a balancing act that takes place. And it takes a lot of work, a lot of energy. I’ve learned in my life that how you find this energy, how you manage this balancing act, and how you arrive at compromise on a daily, weekly and yearly basis, determines a lot about the success you’re able to create for yourself. It’s how you bring fulfillment to your life, along with financial security and all the other things that come from achieving your goals in a healthy way.
What does this all mean?
It means taking care of yourself—your body and your mind. It means learning and being inspired by the people around you and the expectations that are created by the programs you're involved in. It means experiencing joy and fun and gratification from the things that reach your soul and all the emotions that make us human. It means filling your cup, as I mentioned last week. And even more importantly, it means understanding that producing new or better outputs requires finding new and better inputs.
This is where the “unspeakable world” comes in. A world of infinite possible inputs. There’s a verse from the end of that Alan Watts’ monologue that really crystallizes this idea:
If you force sound into five tones,
If you force color into five colors, you’re blind and deaf.
The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound
And it is only through stopping fixed conceptions on the world of color and sound
That you really begin to hear it and see it.
Engage with the world on its own terms. Look at it through clear eyes. See what you want to see, not what you think your priorities require you to see or what decades of conditioning has told you is worthy of looking at.
That’s how I found surfing and meditation. It’s how I developed a lifelong friendship and working relationship with my best friend, Alex Guerrero. It’s how I developed the routines I follow to this day that ground me, give me joy and energize me to be productive doing the things I love—being with my kids, broadcasting, writing, building businesses, and being a member of a team.
As we get older, this process becomes easier. We hear the clock ticking and watch the years melt away, and it’s less difficult to guard our time and be selfish with our compromises. Priorities become clearer as the time to achieve them shrinks. But you shouldn’t have to be older to understand that you are in the driver’s seat when it comes to life’s compromises. You always have a choice. And the more inputs you have, the clearer many of those choices become.
The work of making it in this world is an act of awareness. Being aware of who we are as individuals, what we need to do as part of larger groups, and how to continually balance all of our interests as life goes along so we find fulfillment from all of them, not just one at the expense of the rest.
Sometimes, as Alan Watts suggests, that means to stop thinking and start feeling. To stop doing and start being. All the while recognizing that a successful life requires all of those things in their own time, at the right proportion for whatever you’re trying to achieve.
