A companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is the organised part, edited and cleaned up with AI.
You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.
Hey you.
We started this podcast, recorded four episodes, and only this week worked out that neither of us had ever said who we are. No names, no introduction, nothing. We just started talking and assumed everybody had followed us over from the other show, which is not how any of this works.
So we fixed it, and then the fixing turned into the episode. If you have ever been asked what you do and felt yourself reaching for a line you don’t quite believe, this one is for you.
The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)
“I don’t know, but I’m looking forward to finding out” is a real answer. Most people have a business card version of themselves ready to go. Not having one is uncomfortable for about four seconds and then it’s freedom.
The macro purpose question paralyses people. The micro one doesn’t. Am I a teacher, a healer, a father, what am I here for, all of that opens a gap between who you are now and who you might be, and the gap is what stops people. Three things you want to do today does not have that problem.
Reinventing yourself takes years, not a decision. You can wake up tomorrow and decide to think and act differently, and then you meet every pattern that wants you back where you were. The suit wants comfort. The thing inside the suit wants something else.
Flirt with life. An Argentinian gentleman at a men’s circle in Miami, two hours into a conversation about purpose, said we needed to stop talking and go do things. Then he said flirt with life. Not romantically. Talk to the doorman, talk to the people in the lift, make somebody feel good, watch them light up.
Hi, we’re Gerhard and Justin
Gerhard is from Vienna, co-founder of Eleven Dunbar, and describes himself as a creative, playful builder and dreamer, though when asked who he is the honest answer is that he doesn’t know and is looking forward to finding out. He does not enjoy the question what do you do, partly because it expects a rehearsed answer and he has never had one, so every time it comes up he starts from wherever he happens to be that day.
Justin is from a town of eight hundred people in North Carolina, currently in Miami, leaving in about a month with no fixed idea of where he is going. When he tried to answer who he is, what came out was a family: his mother a schoolteacher, his grandmother a schoolteacher, his sister twice named teacher of the state, her husband running the county, nurses in the family, his father running youth leagues including Buddy Ball for kids with special needs, his great aunt Peggy running a camp, and his grandfather, 92, still working at a grocery store where he puts on a dragon suit to make people laugh. He had never put it together before, and the phrase he landed on was a long line of helpers.
What’s underneath the suit
You arrive here and put on the most advanced biological machine we know of, and underneath it is something that isn’t the machine at all.
The zodiac sign, the human design chart, the personality system of your choice, each of those peels off one layer of the onion and none of them gets to the bottom. Underneath all of them there’s just energy, and the four-letter word for that energy is love. You can tell because of how we’re built. Almost everyone wants to belong to something and give to something larger than themselves, a partnership, a community, a dog, a group. That longing to belong is love wearing ordinary clothes.
The useful part of a system like astrology is being able to say yes, that’s a version I chose for this life, I can feel the traits, and also I’m not only that. You can’t be put in the box.
Two years to become someone else
Justin burned down the boats of a previous life in tech after the last company, and it took two years to reinvent himself in his forties. September was when it finally wrapped up.
That’s the part people don’t hear. You can decide in a morning, and then you hit resistance after resistance, because the body and the mind want comfort and want what they already know. The thing inside the suit wants something else entirely and keeps saying let me out of this skin.
The purpose trap
People read about purpose and feel worse, because purpose is usually presented at the macro scale. What am I on this planet for. And there’s such a gap between where you are and whatever that answer is that the gap itself becomes the obstacle.
Handpan is the live example. Justin watches players on YouTube, went to a sound bath in Fort Lauderdale where a guy named Adam played singing bowls, gongs and handpan, and thought I want to do that. The distance between now and that is exactly the kind of distance that stops people from starting.
The micro version is where it actually works. Yesterday was the most he’s worked in two years, cycling between two AI tools and a game he loves, hitting a usage limit on one of them for the first time ever, and taking breaks into play when something needed to process. None of it was tied to the big thing. It felt like progress anyway.
The other quote that fits here, roughly: someone’s father took the safe job at the safe company to provide, hated it, and got laid off anyway. The lesson passed down was that if you can fail at something you hate, you might as well fail at something you love.
Sensations, then feelings, then thoughts
Justin has been folding the Gestalt cycle of experience into his morning meditation, and the order matters.
Start with sensations. The sun, the air, sweat, sound, whatever your senses are actually reporting. Then move to feelings, and stay there without explaining them, so anxious or excited or nervous without asking why yet. Only then let the thinking mind in. The premise is that by the time you get to your head, your body has already told you what you need, and you can direct the thinking instead of being dragged around by it.
Gerhard’s version has become something without words at all. He shows up as a student, he listens, there’s often a pressure point between his eyes that helps him drop in, and sometimes a koan. What he notices most easily is tension in how he’s sitting, which is the body reporting before anything else gets a say.
Both of us keep coming back to the same phrase from the manifesto. I feel, therefore I am.
If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.
Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community of dreamers, builders, and founders: a place to play, connect, and grow together. A place to find your voice, find your people, and create the impossible, without doing it all alone.
Our home is Elfen Town, a cozy virtual town that is open around the clock. Members drop in at any hour to work side by side, play without an agenda, and have the kind of conversations where you can be your actual self.
Beyond the town there are live gatherings, in-person meet-ups, and people who notice when you go quiet.
The community is capped at 150.
Font watching
Gerhard’s exercise this week was to collect twenty things noticed while walking around, and what he kept noticing in Helsinki were the old sixties and seventies typefaces on buildings, lit in white, handmade and specific. The post office sign is the example he sent over mid-recording.
Which raises the question of why we went from those to logos and design systems that all look the same, and how much the architecture of a city shapes what people think is beautiful without anyone noticing it happening.
Justin does not have this ability and would fail a font lineup. He has, however, correctly identified that the real hobby here is font watching, in the same category as the boy who can do any bird call.
Everyone has already designed a font
Shower thought from the same conversation: your handwriting is your own font, unique to you, made without trying.
Gerhard has journals going back years, one small page a day, and can no longer read some of his own entries because his handwriting keeps changing between cursive and not. Somewhere out there is a landfill with a treasure trove of discarded Gerhard journals in it, next to the buried Atari cartridges, waiting for someone to find them and ask who this poet was.
Justin does not journal and has requested one for his birthday, in two months, with the caveat that his hand will cramp.
The invitation
Show up every day and do one thing that is not a chore. An hour, three hours, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s something that puts the creative muscle to work rather than clearing admin.
There’s no timeline on it. It’s like fishing. You keep throwing the net, the ideas come, and one day you feel one properly and commit to it. All of it depends on having been there every day beforehand.
Gerhard & Justin
P.S. Who are you? We’re going to start every episode with that question from now on, and the answer is allowed to be different every week.
