From 2013 to 2024, I wandered.
Not dramatically. Not destructively.
But without a firm external anchor.
There was no clear container holding everything together.
No defined structure that said, “This is the arc.”
Those years were tough.
At times, I felt like giving up. Like not caring. Like reducing everything to survival and nothing more.
It would have been easy.
To exist.
To let the days pass without resistance.
To lower the standard quietly.
But I have lived that before.
And I know what happens.
You don’t collapse.
You thin out.
Entropy is not dramatic. It is incremental.
Years ago, I was in sales.
We had motivation. The loud kind.
The cheesy sales-floor type. “Coffee is for closers.”
Big targets.
Bigger speeches.
And it worked.
I achieved MDRT in insurance sales, roughly the top 1 percent worldwide.
Not local. Not regional.
World standard.
Motivation drove performance.
It pushed me to compete. It pushed me to produce. It pushed me into that top 1 percent.
But topping that level came with exhaustion.
With rah-rah motivation, once you achieve the goal, it becomes emotionally draining.
There is a high. Then a drop.
And beneath the drop, there was emptiness.
The advice was always the same.
Set a bigger goal. Aim higher. Push harder. MDRT. Then COT. Then TOT. Then what next?
But the mind rebels.
Not because it is weak.
Because it recognizes the pattern.
Another surge. Another peak. Another crash.
Motivation works in bursts.
It can push you into the top 1 percent.
But it does not hold steady over long arcs.
So during the wandering years, I knew motivation would not be enough.
Discipline alone would not be enough either.
If I had relied on willpower, I would probably have failed.
Motivation fluctuates. Discipline gets tired. Emotion negotiates.
So I stopped relying on them.
Instead, I built architecture.
Certain things simply had to be done.
No negotiation. No emotional debate. No daily justification.
Learning. Moving. Practicing. Thinking.
Not because I felt inspired.
Because the structure required it.
That is why I kept learning.
Data analytics. Psychology. AI systems. Embeddings. Vectors. Probabilities behind tokens.
I kept coding. From mundane scripts to full web applications.
Not for attention. Not for positioning.
To keep the mind alive. To keep updating models. To avoid rigid drift.
I trained creatively.
Guitar. Piano. Harmonica. Now cajón.
Music does not respond to mood.
You either practice or you don’t.
It demanded presence.
I trained spiritually.
Learning to recite the Quran properly.
Not by rote. By reading. By understanding.
Meaning steadies you when everything else feels unstructured.
I trained physically.
At least 10,000 steps daily. Strength work. Cycling again. Repairing my own bike.
The body protects the mind.
Physical entropy accelerates mental entropy.
Movement became non-negotiable.
Those years were not glamorous.
They were not linear.
They were not externally validated.
But they were not wasted.
Because the intent was simple.
Not to entropy.
Motivation pushed me into the top 1 percent of a global industry.
Architecture carried me through a decade.
And that made the difference.