There are two paths before you.

Most people don’t choose. They stand still. In never stepping into their power, they become the tools of those that do.

In choosing between the two paths before you, in embarking beyond this fork in the road, you become a sovereign being. You stop being only effected and start affecting your environment.

The first of these two paths is glittering with gold. It promises to give you everything you can imagine: fame, wealth, success, and a never-ending line of adoration. The price of this path is pretty straight forward: your soul. What? You don’t want it badly enough? Don’t you know that success requires sacrifice?

I have a confession to make: I have walked this path of darkness. Driven by a desire for power and the security it promised to provide, I worked for a man who was anything but trustworthy, but who demanded absolute trust from anyone who had the honor of working with him.

The process of grooming me for this manipulation took him over a year. He attended my publicly hosted meetups and positioned himself as an intelligent, business-savy mentor—someone willing to provide guidance to me along my uncertain path as an ambitious 19-year-old without direction.

After one of my first meetups he attended, he pulled me aside, said that he believed in me, and that he wanted to invest thousands of dollars in helping me start a design business.

After a few more conversations, he dropped off the face of the earth. I didn’t hear from him for six months. When he eventually re-surfaced, he asked me, “Did you learn your lesson?”

I went to a psychic a while ago. Simply guided by curiosity, I didn’t have any specific concerns, but I left with a bad taste in my mouth.

She didn’t say anything explicitly bad, but I walked in expecting a discussion and reflection on life, while what I got were some shallow predictions about general improvements to my life that did not impress me.

We have a tendency to view the future as static, fixed, and mostly removed from our control. There’s a tendency to view reality with the cold detachment of a scientific researcher: as if everything can be reduced to the goofy meaningless randomness of colliding atoms that is, again, outside of the control of us mere mortals.

This is such a powerless world-view to have. It makes us wrought with worry and anxiety; as if we are wandering through a thick fog, and anything we stumble upon, be it a million dollars, or a deadly fall off a cliff, would be a total accident.

Luckily, this powerless worldview is entirely optional.