The Hollow Layer: Why Emptiness Is What Lets Something Through #67
Useful space lives in the hollow. Week 67 explores Lao Tzu’s wisdom, reclaiming your inner kingdom, Dr. Larry Goodman’s critique of the "shoulds," and Dr. Wayne Dyer’s lessons on clearing out the noise so what actually belongs can enter.
A flute is just a tube of holes. The music is the emptiness, shaped.
Lao Tzu said it 2,500 years ago and nobody in the West wanted to hear it. The wheel works because of the hole at the hub. The cup works because of the empty space inside. The room works because of what isn't there. Usefulness lives in the hollow, not in what surrounds it.
Everything I've been trained to fill was actually blocking what wanted to move through me.
Two Lives
For years I lived with one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake.
Miami. Early thirties. My twenties were even wilder. I was inspired by Coelho and Campbell in the morning about following your bliss and following your Personal Legend. Then, going out on Friday night to drink, chase women, work the network, do the kickboxing, the volleyball two to four times a week, the kickball club, the going out, the going out, the going out. I told myself I was building something. I was building a schedule. Every hour full so I wouldn't have to notice what was underneath it.
I called myself spiritual. I quoted Rumi. And I'd hear my father saying, be as spiritual as you want but you still have to pay your bills. And I'd use that as permission to go right back to the vices. You fall back to what you know.
I was so full of it. And I mean that both ways.
Full inbox. Full weekend. Full head. Full excuses. Full of rage I hadn't named. Full of a father wound I hadn't done a thing about. Full of women I wasted time with because we were both faking it. Full of the version of me who was going to figure it out on Monday.
Then the big watch account left. And the whole thing started coming down.
The Kingdom I Gave Away
Years later, tech.
A couple of us formed and launched a tech start-up. We got investors. Smart people. Real problems. And I did the thing you're supposed to do. I let them be god. I said they know better. I doubted my own gut for years because their processes and titles and dashboards were more polished than my inner voice.
The line I've been carrying is the kingdom of God is within you. That's Campbell's read of Luke. That's the whole point.
In tech I handed that kingdom to the company we built. Every day. Quietly.
When we dissolved the startup in November 2025, the pain I felt wasn't just financial. It was the pain of a kingdom coming home to a house it had been renting out to strangers. I had Nitram active but only a handful of clients. So from January to March I went all in on Claude Premium and followed the exact coaching-branding plan the LLM laid out. Turns out I'd just handed my kingdom to a new landlord. My range is full agency, not one narrow niche, and around March I had to fight the LLM to stop obeying it and start using it as the tool it actually is.
I had to hollow out the version of me that had outsourced my own knowing twice in a row. First to the company. Then to the machine. That took six months of miserable LinkedIn hunting, second-guessed everything, lost some early clients while I figured out how to work with LLMs on my own terms.
Somewhere around month three, the gut kicked back in. Not loud. Just present. The intuition that had always been there started returning to a room that had been emptied out enough to hear it.
What Was Left
Here's what I found in the hollow.
My wife. My son. A stretch of beach in South Palm Beach that doesn't ask anything of me except to be here. One real friend in California who still calls. That's the count. And it's the exact right count.
I stopped drinking three and a half years ago. Haven't missed it once. What used to fill Friday nights became mornings with my son, real presence with my wife, and Tuesday 6am at the desk with this newsletter.
The branding and design work became easier once I stopped performing certainty and started actually knowing what I know. Full agency range, real clients, work I can stand behind. They came back. New ones came. Old ones came. This past month was the best month I've had in this whole chapter. Not because I got busier. Because I got emptier. Room for what was already trying to come through.
The kingdom of God is within me. It always was. I just had to hollow out everything I'd been renting the space to.
What Are You Filling
Ask yourself the honest question.
What are you still filling that's actually blocking what wants to move through?
A schedule that keeps you from feeling what you'd feel if the schedule stopped. An inbox that lets you avoid the one hard conversation. A feed that fills the moments when your own thought was about to arrive. A drink that fills the loneliness before it could name itself. A job whose certainty you're renting because your own is uncomfortable to sit with.
You don't have to overhaul your life. Just hollow one thing. See what shows up in the space.
The flute doesn't play by being solid. It plays because of what's missing.
Still here, hollowed out, letting the music through. Same peel, less full. Let's build from here. 🧅
Want to write through these same layers and make them your own?
The "Being Coached" Layer: The Tyranny of the Shoulds
A good buddy of mine is about to sell his practice. One of the top 18 in the country. He's completely burnt out and needs to stop. I asked him, "What are you going to fill the void with?" He said he didn't know. When I asked if he was afraid he'd miss it, he admitted, "I don't know. I've just been doing this my whole life." Life is what happens while we're busy trying to force what we told ourselves should happen. Karen Horney called this the tyranny of the shoulds, and it's at the root of so much modern burnout. The danger is trying to replace a something with a nothing, especially when that something was the foundation of your identity and value. That's why so many people crash after retirement. They drop the routine without ever discovering what comes next.
Years ago, my own affirmation was, "If I have to keep running from room to room for the rest of my life, I'm going to lose my mind." Today, my reality is simple. I do what I love, I love what I do, and if it doesn't feel good, I don't do it. That isn't a schedule change. That's real freedom.
The Takeaway for You: Stop running on the treadmill of what you think you should be doing just to avoid facing the empty space. You can't replace a lifetime of hustle with a void and expect to feel fulfilled. Before you drop the load, get clear on what actually makes you feel alive. Real freedom isn't stopping the grind. It's choosing what you fill your life with next.
Bookshelf Peeled: Living from the Space Within
In Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life, Dr. Wayne Dyer breaks down Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching to expose a trap most of us fall into: obsessing over the "vessel"—the outer form, the job title, the packed calendar, and the status—while completely ignoring the non-physical space inside where our actual life happens. Dyer points out that we spend our lives decorating the walls of the cup, forgetting that it's the emptiness inside that holds the nourishment.
This is the exact mechanics of hollowing out. When you spend years filling every hour of your day and every corner of your mind with noise, you leave no room for your actual intuition to operate. Peace and creative power don't come from managing the outer walls or adding more to your plate; they come from honoring the quiet center inside you. The goal isn't to build a heavier, busier structure—it’s to clear out the clutter so your real signal can finally be heard.
The Takeaway for You: Stop trying to solve your burnout by adding another system, another task, or more noise to your day. The most functional part of your life right now is the space you leave empty. Stop decorating the outer walls, clear out what isn't serving you, and let the space within do the heavy lifting.
Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao
by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
Design Rebel: The Hollow and the Found
This week was inspired by the concept of hollowing out—going from the chaos of one foot on the gas and one on the brake to a truly vacant, peaceful room. It’s about the vital transition of clearing out the clutter so that what ultimately fills the space is what actually belongs in your life. This is one sequence I was particularly proud to deliver.
Behind the Build: Bringing this sequence to life required far more than a single prompt. While Leonardo.ai, Veo 3.1, and ElevenLabs generated the raw assets, the real breakthrough happened in post-production. Everything was manually edited, structured, and synchronized frame-by-frame in Wondershare Filmora to protect the creative vision.
This week's creative
This Got Me Thinking:
In honor of this week’s book, I want to share my love for Wayne Dyer’s interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Change Your Thoughts—Change Your Life. I resonated with it so deeply in my early days that I even wrote a song about it, which you can watch here on YouTube.
P.S. If this resonates with you, share it with someone. I'm dedicated to helping fellow explorers—or anyone who found this page—uncover their authentic self with humor and insight. We're all in this together, finding the courage to truly live from our core essence (or as close as we can get!).
The Transmission Layer: Passing the Light, Not Hoarding It
Fridays with Goodman: A striving artist, a Good-man and the Universal Principles at Play. by Martin Casado
