For years I searched for Truth, not one answer but the truth underneath the truth. Every time I landed on something, I kept asking what sat beneath it, pushing for the origin and the depths of whatever I’d found. I went through a long list of practices trying to get there, everything from meditation to asceticism, and I did most of it before there was any real wealth in the picture. Not poor. Not wealthy either.
Go to the mountain first
When people asked me about direction in life, I used to tell them the order matters more than they think. Go to the mountain and find yourself first. Come down after and gain the wealth, and get on with your life’s purpose from there. Doing it the other way around, chasing the wealth first and going looking for yourself once you already have it, is exceptionally difficult. I’ve watched people try it backwards. It rarely goes well, and when it does, it takes a lot longer than they expected.
The man who did it backwards
Dicky Weed is what happens when someone tries to do it in the wrong order. He already has the wealth. What he’s missing is everything that’s supposed to come first, and the novella is built around a man trying to buy his way into an experience that was only ever available the slow way. That premise came from two places landing on top of each other: my own years of doing the search the hard way, before money was ever part of it, and a real story I came across online about a wealthy man who set aside what he had to go looking for himself, the same story behind “The Man Who Gave It Away.”
Dicky Weed is out now in Kindle and paperback. The real story that helped shape this one is in The Man Who Gave It Away.