Dear Andre, (4 min read)

Prefer to listen? I recorded this one out loud while detailing.

I'm standing in a driveway with a towel in my hand, detailing a Ford Maverick.

Nothing special about it. Same wash, same pads, same clay bar I've used a thousand times over four years. Except this time I stopped halfway through and just stood there, because I finally understood what this car was paying for.

Let me tell you what I mean.

Last week I went to the Forward event in Vegas with my dad.

I went last year by myself. Sat in those seats alone, took notes alone, had the "whoa, this is bigger than me" moments alone. Good, but solitary.

This year I bought the extra ticket. Booked the extra room. And I got to sit next to my dad while somebody on stage said something that made us both turn and look at each other with the same face.

Do you know what that costs? It costs four years of doing unglamorous work that a lot of the time did not feel like it mattered.

There were entire seasons of this business where I thought I was wasting my twenties on other people's dirty cars. Where I wondered if any of this was building toward anything.

It was. I just couldn't see it from inside the driveway.

Because that Maverick is what let me buy the second ticket. That Maverick is part of what feeds a family in the Philippines. That Maverick is why I was home for a few days, and why I get to be present at my brother's baby shower, and why I have the kind of time freedom I did not know was available to a guy like me four years ago.

Here's the thing.

The work is not the point. The work is the engine. And the engine is quiet and greasy and nobody claps for it.

I hired an assistant this year. Her name is Michelle.

A few weeks in she posted something on her Instagram story. Unprompted. Nobody asked her to.

She wrote that it was a dream job. That the salary isn't six figures, but she has a kind boss, zero toxic coworkers, and she goes home on time every single day. Then she thanked God, and then she thanked her boss.

I read that in my truck and had to sit for a minute.

She has a son on the spectrum. There is a family on the other side of the world whose week is different because of a business that mostly involves me removing bird droppings from clear coat.

I am trying very hard to be a thoughtful employer. I don't always get it right. But that story reframed something permanently for me.

You are probably closer to changing somebody's life than you think. You just have to be willing to believe that the boring thing you do is load bearing.

Here's where it gets strategic.

I've had four real dreams in my life, and every single one of them only became possible because the one before it got finished.

Dream 1: Play drums. Thirteen year old Daniel wanted this more than anything. I've now played in front of hundreds of thousands of people. It's a normal Sunday for me now, which is a wild thing to type.

Dream 2: Live in Latin America. Seventeen year old Daniel wanted two to three months in a South or Central American country. In 2021 I lived in Ecuador for seventy seven days. It went wrong constantly. It happened anyway. (I wrote the whole origin story here.)

Dream 3: Write a book before 35, and drive a car through Europe. The book happened. The car was supposed to be one I bought and shipped home. Instead I rented one and drove the Swiss Alps. Not identical. Still incredible.

Dream 4: Build a media company where people are the center of it.

That's the one I'm on now.

I have been reverse engineering people's lives since I was about fifteen. Trying to figure out how they got where they got. The media company is just that curiosity with a microphone attached. The last book landed on "people over everything," and I didn't find that phrase until the very end, which tells you it was true before I knew it was true.

Notice the pattern. Each dream did not just get accomplished. It cleared space for the next one.

You don't get dream four by staring at dream four. You get it by finishing dream one.

A year ago I recorded a video about Ecuador. The long version. The whole story.

It has been sitting unlisted ever since. Waiting on a thumbnail I never made.

While I was recording the audio for this newsletter, I stopped, opened YouTube on my phone, renamed it "Why I Lived in Ecuador for 77 Days," and hit publish.

Here it is.

The thumbnail is not good. I do not care.

A year of that story being invisible because of an image I was never going to design. That's the whole thing right there. That's the entire disease.

Also, a lot of dreams look like a lot of work when you get close to them. This can sound esoteric from far away. Up close it's spreadsheets and follow ups and eight cars since Wednesday.

But AI plus good people plus systems creates a stupid amount of leverage. Genuinely more than I expected. So the work is heavy, but it is not as heavy as it used to be.

Oh, and one more thing I'm building. I was on a call in The Arena about internal podcasts for church leaders, and I thought: couldn't I do that with my detailing clients?

Because the conversations I have standing in driveways with Bart and Mike and Rick and Alex are already the best part of my week. I'm already doing the podcast. It's just not recorded.

Sometimes the new thing is just the old thing, formalized.

Six years ago I heard a prayer that rearranged something in me.

It was about dreaming great dreams. Not safe ones. Not reasonable ones. Great ones.

I've talked about it before, and I put it here if you want to hear it.

I think about it every time one of these dreams comes due. Because none of them were reasonable when I first said them out loud. Drums. Ecuador. A book. The Alps. A media company built on other people's stories.

Reasonable is a great way to get a life you don't want.

What's the thing you've been thinking about for years and taken zero action on?

Not the big version. The five minute version.

That's it. That's the assignment.

Because I promise you the version of this you're waiting to be ready for is not coming. The version that goes out imperfect on a Saturday is the only version there is.

It's pretty cool what happens when you start building a life you actually love.

Well, that's all for now.

-Daniel

P.S. I detailed eight cars since Wednesday, which means I listened to an absurd number of podcasts. If you want the playlist of the best stuff, just DM me on Instagram and I'll send it over. (I share the best one I hear each day on my stories anyway, but the full list is better.)