Run Your Race at Your Own Pace
Why success feels like collapse, and why the timing doesn’t matter anyway.
It’s happened again.
I’m sitting in my car, recording a voice note, because my brain has hit that weird threshold where life is objectively good, but my chest still feels like the walls are falling inward. And instead of ignoring it, I’m turning this voice note into an article, because maybe someone else needs to hear this too.
The last week has been chaos… in a good way. Because of course it has. I don’t know when to stop. I push myself to the brink out of habit, out of ambition, out of something that sits between passion and self-destruction.
In the same week, I went to conferences I loved, saw Metallica live, got buried in work again (the good kind), met someone really sweet, and had people at events recognise me:
“Oh, you’re the guy from that pitch night,”
“I love your website,”
“I love your content”
It’s beautiful. It’s validating. It means what I’m doing is working.
And yet, I still feel like garbage.
Not constantly, but in those quiet moments between the noise. The car after the event. The drive home. The breath between tasks. It’s like my brain refuses to let me feel the joy I logically know I should be feeling.
I know part of it comes from my history: schizophrenia, OCD, probably depression. I’m not naïve enough to pretend those things don’t shape the way I process life. But the part that gets me is this:
You can be surrounded by good things and still feel the weight of everything collapsing.
And it makes absolutely no logical sense.
I find joy, and then I lose it in the gaps between the moments. I’ll be standing in an art gallery admiring Ken Done’s work, thinking about how this man didn’t even do his first solo exhibition until forty. How he spent half his life doing other things before deciding to take the leap.
Same with the founders I heard speak at BondX. We only ever see the “Y Combinator” moment; the lightning strike. We don’t see the ten years prior, when they were mucking around with ideas, failing quietly, and iterating in the dark.
Everyone celebrates the chapter title.
Nobody reads the pages before it.
And every time I hear stories like that, I’m reminded of something I keep forgetting:
I am not behind.
I am not slow.
I am not late.
I’m exactly on the path I’m meant to be on; the one God keeps pulling me through, slowing me down when I need it and pushing me forward when it’s time.
But in my own head? I invent deadlines that don’t exist. Timelines that nobody is holding me to. Races that no one is running but me. And then I treat them like gospel.
It makes me rush. It makes me panic. It makes me feel like I’m not enough, fast enough, big enough, doing enough.
This week, though, somewhere on the highway, I remembered something painfully simple:
There is no time limit.
There is no universal pace.
There is no finish line everyone is sprinting toward.
Life isn’t a race.
Life is a journey; one where every strange, hard, beautiful, frustrating detour actually matters.
And I constantly forget that.
Because I move the goalposts. I change the dream. I shift the target. I never stop long enough to realise I’m already living the life I once begged for.
Five years ago, one of my biggest dreams was “one day I want to travel for work; imagine flying to Sydney for a meeting and coming back to the Gold Coast like it’s normal.”
Last year I did that.
I achieved the dream.
And then I promptly forgot it was ever a dream in the first place.
Because that’s what we do.
We achieve things our past selves could only fantasise about, and instead of sitting in that gratitude, we sprint to the next milestone and then wonder why we always feel empty.
The Human Condition (Or Maybe Just My Condition)
Maybe this whole concept is just a “me” thing…
But I don’t think it is.
I think we all shift our dreams forward.
We all forget our progress.
We all panic at our own imaginary clocks.
The only real solution, if you can call it that, is becoming comfortable with your pace. All of it. The speed, the slowness, the pauses, the spirals, the leaps forward that feel too quick, and the setbacks that feel too heavy.
Because genuinely, nobody cares if you “make it” at 20 or 40 or 60 or 80.
Success at 21 is cool.
Success at 41 is cool.
Success at 71 is cool.
Everyone is running entirely different paths.
So run your race at your own pace.
And stop letting other people’s timelines convince you you’re losing a race that doesn’t even exist.
People’s opinions don’t matter. They don’t know what you’re carrying. They don’t live inside your head. They don’t sit with you in the car on the days everything feels too heavy for no reason.
I’ve made huge mistakes. I’ve lived through things that should’ve broken me. And I know this for a fact:
Other people’s opinions of your life don’t mean anything.
Your journey is still yours.
If you’re tired, slow down.
If you’re burnt out, rest.
If you need to cry in a car park, cry in a car park.
If you need to change your goals, do it without shame.
Just don’t stop running the race you were meant to run.
At your pace.
Not someone else’s.
Words of wisdom by Tom.