I found myself backstage at a rock concert, my hands holding black curtains and my face peeking through. The place smelled of cigarettes, perfume, beer, and old amps—the scent of youth and expectation.
It felt familiar. At first, I thought I was in the present time, at a concert in one of the small venues here in Manhattan, where I now live in my 50s.
Then came the realization that sent shivers through my body: The concert was in Croatia, the capital city of Zagreb, where I grew up as an asphalt kid. I knew the venue very well. It gradually dawned on me that I was in the exact place I frequented, the same band, and the event I attended when I was 15!
The teenager me might be out there in the audience. Oh, the thrill of the possibility of meeting my younger self! What would I tell him? Then I saw him, curly hair, plaid shirt, and jeans, calm, fresh, unlived.
"I know," I thought, "I can make his coming decades so much easier. I can warn him about three wrong turns he doesn't have to take, share with him three revelations about the future that would make all the difference, or gift him with three tried and tested life tips that he could keep in his pocket for the moments when he would need them the most."
And then, like it happens in dreams, the next scene was me walking up to him at the concert's end.
I stepped before him, our eyes met, and I asked, "Do you know who I am?"
"I think I do," he said, slightly nodding.
I walked straight into the gravity of it all. No coyness. No circling. Just transmission. And the ache to offer something that might change a life and say, "I can tell you things."
He looked at me with the peace I had back then:
"You're trying too hard. Let me live it."
Silence. The silence of the handing off of a gift.
And the realization that it wasn't I giving it.
His words didn't sting. They settled. They landed with a quiet mercy.
When I woke up—in my bed, in Harlem, New York City—I knew I was trying too hard.
For so long.
My realization wasn't a resignation. It was clarity.
The dream dragged something out of sleep and into my waking life. I thought the dream was about the past. It wasn't. It was about now. It was about the part of me and all of us that keeps trying to fix, optimize, and solve life.
Even joy gets project-managed.
Even rest becomes effortful.
My younger self pleaded with me: "Let me live it," as if saying, "Don't take it away. I want it all."
Carl Jung once said, "In each of us there's another whom we don't know," and that unknown part of myself found a way, through the dream, to speak to me.
And now, I take freedom here to speak to you, the reader of this, my friend who wants to live fully, change the world, die alive, and have it all: "You might be trying too hard. Let yourself live it all."
As someone who has been helping leaders transform themselves, others, and the world for 20 years, I know this: Transformation should look more like experiencing life than working on it.
Let yourself live.