If you’ve ever passed a movie shoot, I’m sure you found it as impossible as I have to find out what movie they were actually filming. What is the reason for this? Why all the self-important secrecy? I think this might be another “but we’ve always done it this way.”

To me, this where you create a meaningful relationship between the product and the consumer: “Oh hey, this is the preview for that movie we watched them shoot down the street.” Capturing people’s attention when they are actually interested is a lot easier than when they are trying to do something else. If I were in charge, every truck, every shirt and every camera would have the movie title plastered all over it. But that of course is how Hollywood works–they’d rather pay a half-million dollars for a radio ad than stencil the transportation outside the shoot.

Marketing is about teasing and then reaffirming–hearing people talk and then seeing a lengthy article about it a few months later or seeing a celebrity wearing a logo and then finally identifying it with a brand when you see it in a store. And it is the inability to see things long term–“we need privacy, we can’t have fans bothering us“–that holds people back from doing the little things that add up to a bankable connection.

Over the weekend, I felt stressed and wanted to relax, so I ended up grabbing my skateboard and heading to a parking lot, which I haven’t done since I was like 15. Everything just melted away. The snarl of wheels against concrete like a rottweiler. I really like that edge between messing around and physical activity; you gasp a little for air and your shirt gets hot but you don’t quite sweat. I ended up typing most of this on my Blackberry as I did this–forgetting completely about whatever I had been working on.

What I picked up again quickly was that at a certain point, no matter how hard I would push or the faster I would try to go, I wouldn’t see a different. But if I just toned it down a little, I could ride better. That it is, there was no real correlation between how hard I would push off or how many times I did it and my overall speed. In golf, try to purposely not hit it hard–a half swing often is twice as powerful.

And I think that’s how a lot of things are–the harder you push and struggle and strain the worse you are. A rabbit in a snare grinding the wire down to the bone. We caught this rat as a kid and it chewed itself in half to escape the trap. Needless to say it still died, and not pleasantly. Finesse. Fluidity. Kicking and thrashing–forget what’s more effective, which one feels better?

I have been flipping through the Inner Game of Tennis and he talks about the two selves–the “I am talking to myself” dichotomy. And how the tension between the two is the source of many athletic problems. I sort of realized that this was the same: when I quieted the voice the kept prompting me to push harder, I felt the rattling die off and the speed increase.

I know for me because I am young, the impulse is towards force or passion. But that’s not how things are. All around us there is a natural energy and a flow to things and you can tap into that. You know, the groove, the pocket, the current–all those terms we throw around to describe other people’s freedom of movement but never really bother thinking about for ourselves. Ferriss talks about this–about just letting go and realizing that a little momentum can carry you further than all your frantic scrambling. I am starting to feel that when you stop trying so hard and let your subconscious do what it needs to, you find better results than you do in the Pyrrhic battle for control.

It’s hard. It’s really hard. It doesn’t matter how strong you are or how many maxims you’ve told yourself–when it comes right down to it, many of us are fighting something inside us that we wish we weren’t. That we wish we could move past.

Maybe it was childhood trauma, maybe your parents didn’t love you all that much, maybe it’s your sexuality, maybe you can’t figure out why you’re so lazy. Maybe you don’t feel anything at all.

It’s a strange balance trying to struggle towards strength without relinquishing your humanness. We all fail. We all have buttons that people can push–that thumbscrew that we hope no one notices. You give yourself away to pickpockets when you check for your wallet; it means you have something worth stealing. We are the same way with vulnerabilities. We think we’re hiding them but reveal them in the process.

And the blessing: It is a process. The second dirty secret is that Cicero wrote his finest works in a fit of depression, alone in his country home, following the death of his daughter and a divorce. He did it as an utter hypocrite. By now you’ve seen some of my frenetic, crazy posts. The ones where I’m clearing struggling with something or trying to navigate the chasm between what I want to be and where I actually am. No question, I try to be as honest as possible here but you wouldn’t pick up on that socially. So what is your mask? What do you put up to compensate for where you feel lacking? Because unless you acknowledge it, you’re just living in an illusion and that very often comes crashing down. Tucker quotes Pericles a lot–something to the effect of “there is nothing wrong with poverty, only not doing something about it.”

I know for me, all I want to do is get to point where perturbation doesn’t control me; where the littlest thing doesn’t throw me off; where when I understand that a person shouldn’t affect me I actually don’t let them; where lulls are moments of relaxation instead of worry; where I am as calm as I am after a run, every second of everyday. And I am so far from this that it’s not even funny.

But when you fail–and you surely will: today, tomorrow and the week after–understand that it is a process. And to embark on that process is a journey required for enlightenment and happiness. “Who am I?” “What makes me act the way that I do?” It doesn’t matter what it is, or what you’re trying to “fix,” someone else has done it already and they’d love to talk to you about it. More than anything, don’t compare yourself to where you suspect other people are. Seneca the Stoic is widely considered to just be complete artifice–he mentored Nero for Christ’s sake. Chances are, they’re just pretending.

So back to the question: Can you be happy on the rack; tortured and bloody? Someone can, but I can’t, at least not today. But I’d like to be. I’d like to get to that point. Because really, if your happiness depends on how other people treat you and on the circumstances of life, you’ll find yourself in some dark, dark places. Like the point in your life where you cross streets and just pray for a car.

You don’t want that. No one does.

Whatever you’re after–if it’s influence like I am or solitude like Thoreau–none of it is going to matter if you can’t find tranquility. A thousand additions or a hundred subtractions, the core remains the same. And that has to be the focus of your efforts if you ever want to enjoy the fruits of your labor. You can realize that now or you can wait until time is almost up; that is your call

But lastly, it’s just not fair to treat that journey as anything but a process. You can’t wake up tomorrow unbothered by things or free from a certain sadness, but you can, everyday, get a little closer to where you want to be. Each second you shave off from that is one you can spend enjoying yourself, un-enslaved to the tyranny of fate or circumstance, and actually be happy.