My Hamlet paper didn’t land in my hands. It landed on the floor.
My professor flung it back across the desk at me like it had personally insulted him. The disgust on his face was real. “If that’s what you’re going with,” he said, “I’m going to fail you. You can do better than that.”
I picked it up, part mad and part in full agreement. He wasn’t wrong. The paper was garbage. It was scribbled together with the creative effort of Brian Regan’s “Cup of Dirt” science project. (“Here’s a cup of dirt. I call it… Cup of Dirt. Please just give me an F and move on.”)
That was basically the energy I brought to the final term paper of my Intellectual Traditions of the West class. I loved writing. I still do. But I didn’t want to give that class my best, even though a bad grade would mean getting kicked out of the honors program at the University of Utah. But after slogging through books like “Gargantua” all semester and pretending I cared what some 16th-century monk thought about oversized pants and bowel movements, I was just done. “Cs get degrees,” I told myself. I just wanted out of there.
That particular scene took place roughly twenty-three years ago, and it’s stuck with me. It was a bit dramatic, but also familiar. I’d done that move before and have done it a thousand times since: the halfway effort that lets me pre-disqualify myself before someone else can. I should call it the “Cup of Dirt” strategy.
Funny thing though. I’ve never been great at the middle ground. I either show up with the full intensity of a revival preacher, or I ghost the whole thing and blame the lighting.
My running buddies know I don’t do moderation. I repeated it again to them on our last run together. Until about a month ago, it had been almost eighteen months since I’d gone on any runs. So my first week back? Thirty-seven miles. I set a goal to hit 55 this week.
Never mind the fact that I’m thirty pounds heavier than I was the last time I ran seriously. Never mind that every joint in my lower body started filing formal complaints by day three. I had to prove, to no one in particular, that I was still that guy. The one who could pick it back up like nothing had changed.
Spoiler: things have changed.
The real truth is that this isn’t about fitness or mileage or knees that sound like bubble wrap. The real truth is that somewhere inside me, there’s still a version of myself I’m trying to justify. Still an audience I’m performing for — even though I don’t think they were ever really watching.
It reminds me of a quote attributed to David Foster Wallace, “We’d be a lot less worried about what people thought of us if we realized how seldom they do.”
When I think about the work I’m doing now, the clients I’m serving, the way I structure my days — it’s not lost on me that I give the least of myself to the company that believed in me the most. I’ve consulted for them for seven years. They stuck with me when I was figuring things out. They trusted me before the credentials were there.
But now that I’m working with companies that pay more, that challenge different muscles, I don’t bring the same energy to my long-time client. Not because I’m ungrateful. But because my attention is divided. And sometimes I forget to give it my full effort because, in a way, I’ve kind of emotionally left the building.
Nobody explained that to me when I started my own businesses. I ignored what should have been; you carry the ghosts of every past version of yourself into new rooms. And if you’re not careful, they start deciding how you show up.
I used to think the hardest part of change was risk. Or discipline. Or rejection.
Lately, though, I think the hardest part of change is not bringing old habits into new opportunities. Not letting that Hamlet-paper energy seep into projects that actually matter just because I’ve been working on them for so long. Not handing the steering wheel to the part of me that already decided to call it a day.
I’ve wasted so much energy performing for people who were never watching. Trying to prove I’m still the smartest guy in the room. Or the fastest. Or the most competent. Or the most useful.
And all the while, I continue to make it harder for the people who are actually watching — my wife, my kids, close friends, even my future self — to see who I really am underneath the performance (or lack thereof).
I don’t want to keep doing that.
If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.
It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of my reflections on identity, meaning, and building a life I don’t want to run away from.
I don’t want to run 45 miles one week and zero the next because I can’t figure out how to be someone in between.
I don’t want to half-write a term paper just so I can beat the professor to the punch and call it trash before he does.
I don’t want to carry the guilt of low effort into every conversation, every invoice, every mirror.
I want to show up for the life I have now, not the one I’ve already walked away from. I want to stop giving my future over to habits I built just to survive my past.
Maybe that means learning how to give enough. Not all. Not nothing. Enough.
That’s a strange kind of growth — to move from all-or-nothing to something solid and steady.
I’m not there yet. But I think I’m closer than I was. Some days, I can feel the weight lift just a little.
And that is enough.
Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .
I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.
If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along on Medium.com here. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.
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