I saved a baby from a burning house

I take a deep breath, then bust the door open, look to my left, to my right… nothing. I hear a cry a few feet away. I get low to get through the smoke. The cries got louder as I keep moving forward. I kick the door open, scoop the baby. The flames got higher and hotter. The way I got in is now blocked by flames. I see the window. The people outside, waiting, all they hear is the sound of the burning crackling wood. The crowd gasps, they see a 6’5″ man break through a window, like an old western where the drunk is getting kicked out. I land on my back with the baby safe and sound in my arms.

These are the kinds of stories most people think they need to tell personal stories online. Or how in the movies it cuts to an unfunny punchline yet everyone in the room is laughing. Or how they went from being a broke guy living in his mother’s basement to now six months later making 100k. So now they sell a course on how you can too if you follow this easy 7 step formula.

I used to think I didn’t have any cool success stories, like the one I made up in the beginning lol. I didn’t take a client from earning $800 a month to $10k months. I never hiked Pikes Peak and survived a bear attack. Who’s going to care that I swirl all my drinks for no reason, I even do it with water sometimes. Or that I lost my tolerance for caffeine and now have to drink matcha and chai. Or that I buried six cats and my dog all within two months.

That last one I keep dropping into sentences like it’s nothing. It isn’t. That dog was eleven years. The cats were years before that. Two months, six funerals, and then you have to keep going because what else do you do.

Some of these are everyday slices of life. But every now and then you have the ones that hit different. And those matter too.

Take Peter McKinnon. One of the main reasons I became a fan is because when I was around 16 I was into magic card tricks. In one of his videos I see him pull out a deck of cards and start doing some of the handling moves I knew back then. He says he used to do magic. Boom. Instant fan. I now have a connection with him. He didn’t have to tell me his come up story or how he got from zero to five million subscribers. I connected with him over magic and leather goods.

I started writing down my everyday moments, the ones I’d text my friends about and forget. The time Kyro ran off and the second I caught up to him and picked him up it started pouring. The random thing I noticed on a walk that I kept thinking about. The client call that didn’t go the way I planned and how I sat with it after.

Those are the kinds of moments I now turn into posts, captions, newsletters, blog entries like this one lol. And I keep discovering how many stories I had inside me the whole time that I never thought to write down.