Tomorrow is supposed to be a track day. Motorcycle, full leathers, the kind of day I book months out and think about more than I admit to people. The forecast says severe thunderstorms. Lightning, the whole show.
So I’ve been doing the math on not going.
It starts where everyone’s starts: the money. I paid for the session. That’s the obvious cost of staying home, the number with a dollar sign on it, sitting there like a receipt I have to keep looking at. Fine. But the receipt was just the front door.
Because once I started paying attention, the list got longer on its own. The cost of not going isn’t only the session fee. It’s the months I told myself I’d get faster and didn’t. It’s the friends who’ll be there without me. It’s the version of me that books the day and then flinches. It’s the small erosion that happens every time I let weather decide who I am. Give it ten minutes of honest attention and I find ten more. Give it an hour and I’ll find a hundred.
And that’s what I want to tell you, because it’s the part I almost walked right past.
The list of what it costs to stay the same has no bottom. You can always find one more cost.
That feels like wisdom.
It feels like you’re finally being honest with yourself. But a list that never closes isn’t clarity. It’s an engine. And the engine has a job, which is to make standing still feel so expensive that you’ll do anything to make the feeling stop.
We sell with this engine constantly. The whole agitation move in marketing runs on it. Name the prospect’s pain, then the next one, then the next, until doing nothing feels unbearable and the only relief on the table happens to be your product.
It works. People buy to make the dread stop. I’ve written those emails. I’ve felt the pull from the other side of them.
What the engine will never say is the thing that actually matters. It will never tell you to stay home in the lightning.
The salesman who lives inside “what does it cost NOT to do this” is paid by the length of the list. He is very good at his job and he is not on your side. He’ll itemize every reason to ride and he will leave one thing off every single time: the actual conditions. The storm. The wet track. The fact that some costs of inaction are real and some are just the dread wearing a suit, and that telling those two apart is the only skill in the whole exercise.
So I’ve stopped trying to make the list longer. The list always wins that game. What I’m doing instead is putting a floor under it. I let the costs of not going say their piece, all of them, and then I make them stand next to the one variable they keep trying to talk over. The sky.
There’s a lesson in here for the work too, and it isn’t the one the funnel-builders learned. The strongest thing a brand can do is be the voice that tells you to stay home. The one that says not today, not for you, the conditions are wrong. That brand costs itself a sale and buys something the agitation engine can never afford. You believe it the next time the sky clears. Trust is just the residue of every time someone told you the truth when the lie would have paid better.
I still don’t know if I’m going. The list is loud. The sky is the real answer, and the sky hasn’t finished deciding either.
But I know which voice I’m listening to now. Not the one counting costs. The one looking up.
Stay Positive & I Guess You’ll Know If I’ve Gone Based On When I Actually Publish A Post Tomorrow….
- The List That Never Closes - June 7, 2026
- One Name Fits On The Bottle - June 6, 2026
- Powered By… Somebody Else - June 5, 2026
