The Symmetry Layer - I Kept Leaving It. It Never Left Me.
Trusting the Pattern That Was Always There
An onion grows in perfect concentric rings without trying. No forcing. No second-guessing. Just natural expansion outward from the center.
One ring at a time. From the inside out.
Week 39. I've spent years trying to force the rings. All of them. Simultaneously. And I'm starting to understand why that doesn't work.
Hope Is Not A Plan
I heard it recently, and it landed hard: "Hope is not a business plan. Hope is not a plan at all."
I hoped that if I went deep enough—books, podcasts, ayahuasca, spiritual journeys, meditation, years of self-work—I'd force the natural to arrive faster. That if I accumulated enough knowledge, enough insight, enough tools, the breakthrough would come.
I read everything. I went inward. I went to the jungle—well, an off-season empty summer camp near Orlando that looked like the premise for every scary movie. The ayahuasca setting. I came back changed. Maybe even shook.
And yet. Here I am. Professionally, not where I thought I'd be by now.
The world has the best LLMs (AI language models like ChatGPT, Claude), the most accessible AI tools, the collective thoughts of humanity at my fingertips to help me narrow it in. And I still feel dormant sometimes. Like the ring isn't growing fast enough.
What I know NOW would have launched a different version of me back then. But back then, I didn't have it. So what do I do with that?
Here's the shift I'm starting to make: Stop hoping the natural will arrive. Stop forcing it to arrive faster. Just trust it's already arriving.
The Pattern That Keeps Returning
Design always comes back.
17 years. Through the family logistics business, through the music, through 5+ years of tech, through the void. Design always came back. Even when I wasn't trying, clients showed up. Even in the tech company, my role was design at its core. Even now, The Rebel Onion—the covers, the visuals, the AI videos—it's all design.
Writing always comes back.
Songs. Stories. Blog posts. 39 weeks of newsletters without a single missed Thursday. The grammar held me back for years—I never pursued writing seriously because of it. Even when I wrote two books, I needed a paid editor. The barrier was real. And then AI removed that barrier. Suddenly the thing that kept me from writing was gone. And the writing poured out.
Creativity always comes back.
It's the thread through every version of me. The family business Martin. The musician. The CDO. The designer. The Rebel Onion writer. Every single chapter has creativity at its center.
I kept leaving the pattern. The pattern never left me.
You Can't Force A Ring
The onion doesn't push harder to grow its next ring. It doesn't hustle. It doesn't read more books about how to grow faster. It doesn't compare itself to the onion next to it.
It just expands. Naturally. From the inside out. One ring at a time.
Every time I forced something—the tech company believing someone else's vision would become mine, saying yes to marketing work I hated, chasing the breakthrough through sheer willpower—it dissolved. It burned me out. It led me back to the same place: design, writing, creativity.
Every time I trusted the pattern, it held.
17 years of design held. 39 weeks of writing held. The creativity held.
The hustle culture says: force it, grind it, scale it, optimize it.
But you can't force a ring. You can only create the conditions for it to grow.
Devotion vs. Manifestation
I heard something recently that rewired something in me:
"Live life by devotion instead of manifestation."
Manifestation says: I will MAKE this happen. I will visualize it, affirm it, hustle it into existence. I will force the ring.
Devotion says: I will TRUST what's already happening. I will show up. I will do the work. I will let the creator's plan unfold at its natural pace.
The difference isn't passive vs. active. Devotion is the hardest thing. It requires showing up every Tuesdays at 6am even when no one is reading. It requires designing for clients even when the market feels saturated. It requires writing the newsletter even when you don't know where it's going.
Manifestation is about control. Devotion is about trust.
And here's what I know after 39 weeks:
Every ring I've ever grown came from devotion. Not from forcing. Not from hoping. From showing up, week after week, trusting the pattern that keeps returning.
Design. Writing. Creativity.
That's the symmetry. That's always been the symmetry.
I just kept second-guessing it because it didn't look like what success was supposed to look like.
Week 39. Still peeling. Still trusting the ring.
Let go. Let God. Let the pattern reveal itself.
You can't force a ring. But you can trust it's already growing.
The "Being Coached" Layer: The Ego’s Exit
This week, Dr. Goodman frames Devotion as the ultimate act of alignment—trusting a plan that is inherently yours because, as he asks, whose else could it be? The only friction in this natural expansion is the EGO, which he defines as Easing God Out. When your ego starts narrating doubt or demands for a faster pace, the directive is simple: tell your ego to shut up. There is a higher intelligence at play, and its name is not You.
The essence of "Flow" is the radical acceptance of Divine Order—knowing that you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing, exactly when you are supposed to be doing it. Your only real challenge is to stop messing it up by trying to over-control, force, or resist the process. You’ll know you’ve hit the frequency when the "coincidences" start—what Goodman calls God-incidences. These are the markers that you’ve finally stepped out of your own way.
Bookshelf Peeled - The Niche of the Soul
In Nature and the Human Soul, Bill Plotkin argues that every species occupies a unique "ecological niche"—a specific role in the web of life that only they can fulfill. For humans, the tragedy of modern life is that we often spend decades in "patho-adolescence," trying to force ourselves into roles that don't fit, all while our true soul-identity—our "ultimate place"—is waiting for us to stop running. Plotkin’s core insight for Week 39 is that the soul is not something you "make"; it is a template that already exists. When you are guided by soul, you are guided by nature, and nature never hurries.
The lesson hits hard: your 17-year cycle of design and creativity isn't a coincidence; it's your niche. Plotkin suggests that the "Great Turning" in a person’s life happens when they stop trying to be "successful" by society's egocentric standards and instead "inscend" into their own instinctive resources. You don't need to manifest a new version of yourself; you need to trust the "innate pattern" that has been trying to find you all along. As Plotkin says, the forest knows where you are—you just have to let it find you.
Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
by Bill Plotkin
Design Rebel: The Inevitable Return
I kept leaving it, but it never left me. What can you throw that always finds its way back? The boomerang. This visual story was brought to life using Sora and Leonardo.ai, with voice via ElevenLabs and royalty-free sound effects from Pixabay. The unpredictable AI outputs from Leonardo actually helped shape the narrative. Script by Gemini and myself; edited in Wondershare Filmora.
Weekly Inspired Insights I liked or found useful this week:
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 Harvest Layer: Knowing When You're Ready
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