Burn the Origin Story They Gave You
Stop Adopting Other People's Limits
đ Iâm JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, youâre in the right place.
While youâre here, a few things Iâve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.
You can buy my book Permissionless here.
I donât know who first told you that you couldnât.
It might have been your parents, a teacher, a well-meaning family friend.
But somewhere in your origin story, somebody looked at you and decided you were too weak or too small, and told you the dreams in your head were outside your reach.
They told you that you werenât meant to be a dancer, or an artist, a programmer, a games developer, a performer, a musician, an entrepreneur.
They said it because they looked at you and saw themselves: who theyâd wanted to be, who they became instead, and every belief theyâd collected along the way about what a life can and canât hold.
Maybe they were trying to spare you the way their own heart broke, and maybe it was love that made them do it. Or maybe they just thought little girls should be ballerinas and little boys should be CEOs. Either way, they were trying to press you into their shape, pushing when you didnât want to be that or do that, and they werenât the only ones doing the pushing. Everybody who told you to play it safe told you the same thing. Never start a business, never join a startup, never be a comic book artist. And when you pushed back, they told you that you were going to fail.
They drag you down, call you pathetic, predict your ruin, mock you, laugh at you. You can burn all of it. Thereâs no more reliable fuel than the need to prove those assholes wrong; it will get you running when your body aches and working when your eyes are closing.
Youâll never reach a point where people stop telling you No, or stop describing the failure youâre supposedly hurtling toward. F\*\*k them. Nothing will ever oblige you to believe them. âStop kidding yourselfâ and âIâm just trying to be realisticâ are opinions with better PR.
When people hand you limitations, theyâre handing you *their* limits, not laws, and you donât have to build your walls around them. Some things really will limit you, as they do everyone, but those things donât arrive as a gift from somebody else.
When people told me I could never build the life I wanted, it became fuel. When they told me I could never do it my own way and be happy, it became fuel. When they told me I didnât stand a chance, it became fuel. And it got me here.
For all I know, you could change the world. Whoever is reading this could be the art student who goes on to draw a comic that changes my life, or design the shoes I wear and the car I drive, or write the book that reshapes how I see things, or record the punk rock anthem that makes me break down and cry.
You get to make that happen, because youâre the one who can say Yes to it.
When I think about the people who have already changed the world, I donât think of demigods. I think of human beings who were told No, looked up at whoever said it, and went out and did it anyway.
I think about the ones who take the shot without knowing what happens next. There have been hundreds of thousands of them, and there will be hundreds of thousands more. People who hear the limits and reject them. People who ignore what everyone else wrote down and write something new. People who do it themselves, their way.
People like you.