The Tropism Layer: What You Called a Distraction Was the Signal #65
The lean isn't laziness or procrastination—it's data. Week 65 explores following your internal signal, reframing "chance" occurrences through the lens of divine choreography, and realizing the audience you thought was missing was listening the entire time.
Plants lean.
They don't debate whether to. They don't ask if the light source is worthy or profitable or on-brand. A signal reaches them, and they turn toward it. Silently. Slowly. Over years. That's tropism. It's how a sunflower ends up facing east all morning without ever taking a class on decision-making.
What have you been leaning toward your whole life and calling a distraction?
Because the lean isn't laziness. It isn't procrastination. It's data. It's the oldest, quietest signal in you telling you where your light is. And most of us have been overriding it so long we think the override is the personality.
Nine Years Old with a Tape Recorder
I remember penciling A, B, C, and bridge on the lyrics inserts of records and tapes when I was nine. Marking first verse, chorus, second verse, bridge. Not because someone taught me. Because I couldn't NOT do it. The songs I was hearing had a shape and I wanted to know the shape.
By thirteen, I wrote a ballad called Blaze of Love.
Standing by you,
looking at your beautiful face,
hard to look away because you're simply a blaze of love.
(Chorus)
Love, love, love, love
Simply a blaze of love.
Young love, obviously. But the plant was already leaning.
That kid grew up. Hundreds of songs on yellow pads I carried around. Fifty structured in Word documents. Twenty recorded in studios. A Spanish album cut in Ecuador in my twenties when I thought maybe I'd be the next Ricky Martin. Years later, a full English album with an Argentinian producer in Miami. Nine originals. I loved that work. Loved getting the lyrical thought. That connection when a lyric lands so clean it makes you say out loud, that's it, or I can't believe I wrote that.
The industry didn't hand me the outcome I'd imagined. The lean didn't care. It kept going.
The CD Rack
Here's the story I want to tell because it's the whole layer in one moment.
My dad doesn't say son you did great. He tells strangers, and they tell me later. But he doesn't tell me directly. That's how he is. I stopped waiting for it.
Years ago I looked in his car's CD rack, back when that was a thing, and my Spanish album was in there. Didn't say anything. Later at a BBQ at his house, his friends asked me to sing one of my songs. I got the guitar. Started one. Forgot the lyric mid-song.
From the back of the crowd, my dad sang the line so I could pick it back up.
He knew the whole album by heart.
That is what the lean produces. Things that land on people you thought weren't listening. Quietly. For years. Without anyone ever telling you they're listening. The plant doesn't lean for applause. It leans because the light is there. And sometimes decades later you find out who else was in the room.
The Lean Changes Costumes
What I keep getting wrong.
I've been telling myself I'm not going to be the next Latin heartthrob songwriter in the AI era. True. That door is not this door. And I've used that to quietly file the whole lean under "not my path anymore."
But look at what's actually happening.
I still write lyrics on Songer AI most weeks. The chorus structure is mine. Most of the words are mine. The AI is just the studio.
I write these layers every Tuesday at 6am and hunt for the line that lands hard. Same feeling as writing a ballad at thirteen. Different medium. Identical signal.
My clients are growing because I extract someone's brand voice the way I used to extract a lyric. Coaching. Veterinarian. Dog trainer. A singing competition in Miami, ironic, and more interesting ones coming in. The old friend who produced my English album now hires me as the graphic designer on his projects. The lean brought back the exact collaborator, just wearing a different job.
And the moment I feel it strongest now is the weekly video. I imagine the next scene for the onion. Something wild. Morph into the roots. Ground cracks. Bark grows in an instant. I type it into Leonardo, wait a minute or two, hit preview. And when it lands on the onion character in the crazy scene I imagined, my heart sparks —I literally get goosebumps.
That's the same spark that lit me up at nine. Same nervous system. Same signal.
The lean was never about the label. The label was one possible costume. The lean itself is thriving. I just have to stop only recognizing it when it wears the outfit I imagined at twenty-five.
Follow the Lean
The songwriting saved me back then. It was how I coped, how I made meaning, how I stayed in relationship with my own life. This newsletter is doing the same thing now. Same lean, different chapter. I've told my wife and Larry both, this thing has saved me in ways I can't fully explain. I think it's because the lean has somewhere to go again.
Ask yourself the same. What have you been drifting toward for decades that you've been calling a distraction, or a phase, or a hobby you should probably outgrow? What still pulls you when the day gets quiet?
Don't override it this time. Track it. Follow it. The costume might not match what you imagined. The signal is the same one it's always been. It knows where the light is. It's the reason you can still recognize yourself after all this time.
Still here, leaning where the light is. Same peel, following the pull. Let's build from here. 🧅
Want to write through these same layers and make them your own?
The "Being Coached" Layer: The Glasses That Change the Story
When I was in drug camp, my biological father passed away. A man I hadn't seen or spoken to in years. The way his wife reached me was incredible. She found a torn-out Yellow Pages ad for the center tucked inside his personal phone directory. When she called, she brought a message from his deathbed. "Larry, not a day went by that he didn't think of you. Not a day went by that he wasn't proud of you. Not a day went by that he didn't try to muster the courage to pick up the phone and call you." It reminds me of the new Michael Jackson movie. The whole struggle between Michael and his father Joe, Joe trying to keep control, trying to make sure Michael kept feeding the family, until Michael finally found his own independence.
The point is this. Everything in your life is choreographed. Divinely inspired. But you don't always know what the story is supposed to be while you're living it, because your inner critic keeps stepping in to say, "No, it's not that. That's just a coincidence. That doesn't mean anything." The real epiphany happens when your awareness shifts. You realize the thing you dismissed as random chance was actually divinely aligned all along. Put on those glasses, look back, and it changes everything.
The Takeaway for You: Stop dismissing the twists and old wounds as random noise. When you shift the lens, you see every step was choreographed to shape who you are today. Nothing was wasted. It was all pulling you here.
Bookshelf Peeled - Physics of the Personal Legend
In The Alchemist, Santiago spends years traveling, working in a crystal shop, and learning the desert, all to find a treasure he thought was buried thousands of miles away at the Pyramids. In the end, he discovers the treasure was buried right back where he started under the sycamore tree. The journey wasn't a waste of time, nor was the crystal shop a distraction. Every step, every pivot, and every quiet pull was the "Language of the World" guiding him forward. Coelho’s core premise is that when you are aligned with your Personal Legend, the entire universe conspires to help you achieve it—even when the route doesn't look like what you pictured.
This is the exact mechanic of tropism. You might think you took a decade-long detour into a different career, a new skill set, or a side project that felt like a distraction, but the signal was never lost. Just like Santiago learning the language of the desert, the skills you built along the way were simply the lean changing costumes. You don't need to reinvent your inner pull or beat yourself up for the years that seemed off-track. The light was working on you the whole time, preparing you to recognize the treasure when you finally look right where you're standing.
The Takeaway for You: Stop calling your past chapters detours or dead ends. Every skill you picked up and every quiet interest you followed was training you for where you are right now. Trust the pull, drop the regret, and recognize that your signal has been guiding you home all along.
The Alchemist: A Modern Classic Fable of Spiritual Healing, Self-Discovery, and the Power of Dreams - by Paulo Coelho
Design Rebel: The Audience You Never Knew You Had
This week's inspiration came from a real moment at a family BBQ at my dad's house when I realized he knew all my lyrics by heart. Matching the dialogue voice seamlessly to the actual studio track was no easy feat, but I wanted to capture the true emotional essence of that memory without letting the AI drift into slop.
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 Got Me Thinking:
I loved this and looked for it and found it. Very relevant for 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 Conduit Layer: You Were Never the Source
Fridays with Goodman: A striving artist, a Good-man and the Universal Principles at Play. by Martin Casado
