How Did You Get Here?

If manhood really does work better as a map than a destination, then the most important skill isn’t reinvention. It’s recognition.

Author’s Note:
This is the fourth in a short series that reframes how we can use manhood as a map to guide our inner growth, instead of a destination we’re supposed to arrive at. The goal is to help us ask better questions about how we’re finding our way—so manhood can serve as a map rather than a measuring stick.

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A lot of conversations between men start with the same question:

How did you get here?

Sometimes the question comes from genuine curiosity about another man’s route. Sometimes it carries the edge of judgment—did this guy really know the best way to get here? Sometimes it’s simply a non-threatening way for two men who don’t know each other to start a conversation before they find something in common.

It can also be a casual way—over a beer, on a drive, or even in an interview—to invite a man to reflect on the people and events that shaped his life. I didn’t realize until recently that it’s really a question about a man’s map: an attempt to understand the route he took, the landmarks that mattered, and the turns that didn’t.

Maybe the question underneath how did you get here is actually something else: How did you stay oriented long enough to end up where you are? We may not use the language of maps, but that’s what we’re reaching for. We’re trying to borrow a sense of direction—especially in moments when our own path feels unclear.

If manhood really does work better as a map than a destination, then the most important skill for us to learn isn’t reinvention. It’s recognition—learning to notice when something shows up in our lives that helps us stay oriented, and knowing how to read it when it does.

That realization came into focus for me during an interview with a man named Johnny. He’s in his forties and runs a landscaping business that’s endured. But when he talks about his life, he doesn’t start there. He starts with responsibility—specifically, how early it arrived.

Johnny’s father started the business, but he was a heavy alcoholic. By late morning most days, he couldn’t really work. When Johnny was thirteen, he found himself mowing lawns on his own, pushing his equipment home at night with a headlamp strapped to his forehead. By sixteen, he was running heavy equipment and taking on contracting jobs himself.

Later in the interview, I asked Johnny to tell me how he defined success in his business. He didn’t hesitate.

“I had a vision at a young age of a fleet of white trucks. And that was the goal—to see a fleet of white trucks, you know, in my hand and not just in my head.

It was just pushing. I had buddies in high school who couldn’t have jobs because they played sports and different things, so they worked for me. We expanded that way.

Just honesty and hard work with clients, and it became word of mouth and referrals. And we still maintain a facility here that we’ve had since I was fourteen years old.

It just became a desire to follow that dream of a white fleet of trucks.”

When he finished telling me this story, I said:

“I mean this in the kindest possible way, but that’s such a boy’s dream. White trucks everywhere. How cool would that be? Are they all still white?”

He laughed.

“Mostly,” he said. “Our big Kenworth is green. We call it Holt.”

What struck me wasn’t the dream itself. It was that Johnny recognized it as something worth orienting his life around. He didn’t outgrow it. He didn’t replace it with something more impressive or sophisticated. He trusted it, kept it close, and built his life in alignment with it.

Listening to Johnny, I was struck by how different his story is from the way we often hear people talking about successful men today.

Break things. Be uncompromising. Refuse to settle. But when I listen closely to the men I talk to, that version of achieving success often shows up less as clarity and more as restlessness.

Less as forward motion and more as constant motion.

Disruption can feel powerful in the moment. But it can also become a way of avoiding the harder work of staying oriented—of deciding what still matters and committing to build from there.

In nearly thirty years of doing insight work to help brands answer questions about how they should move forward, I’ve seen how alluring the disruption mindset can be. Tearing things down is fast. It creates the feeling of clarity and control. Building is slower. Messier. It requires starting with what’s already working and trusting that it can evolve into what comes next.

My own orientation—both professionally and personally—has always leaned toward building. When I’ve helped clients move their brands forward, I’ve been far less interested in what’s broken than in what’s still working. Because whatever is still working is usually the most solid ground we have.

My dad gave me a piece of that solid ground when I was very young. He asked me one question, over and over again (as dads do) when I came home with a report card or from a game…

Did you try your best?

To this day, that question is something I return to. Not as a judgment, but as a way to re-orient. In moments of difficulty or transition—when the path hasn’t been clear—it reminds me where to stand and what to build from.

There’s a name for the kinds of things Johnny’s white trucks and my dad’s question represent.

I’ve heard psychologists call them transitional objects—things we carry through periods of difficulty that help us stay oriented when everything else is shifting. They’re not always physical. Sometimes they’re images, questions, habits, or practices.

When it comes to how we — as men—navigate through our lives, what matters isn’t the transitional object itself, it’s recognizing that we have something to read when the way forward feels uncertain.

I saw this in a conversation with a man named Jess.

He and I happened to be talking on his 36th birthday. Instead of making a resolution or setting a big goal for the year ahead, he’d done something quieter.

He’d written a list.

Thirty-six things he wanted to stop doing. Not abstractions. Concrete things he started to tell me: stop self-pity. Stop complaining. Stop avoiding. Stop being weak with my word. Stop poisoning my body.

When I asked him what he planned to do with the list, he didn’t talk about motivation or discipline. He talked about proximity.

“It’s ten feet away,” he said. “I’ll go get it. I’m going to keep it on me and do a regular check on whether I’m holding myself accountable to these things.”

Later, when I asked why he focused on all the stopping instead of starting, he paused.

“If you asked my closest friends what was great about Jess, you’d hear a few things. But if you asked how to make Jess better, there’d be an exhaustive list. Hundreds of things. I see this list as a line in the sand I need to keep with me.”

At the end, he’d added one final line:

Start living.

Jess wasn’t trying to reinvent himself. He was trying to stay oriented. He has learned something important about himself: left unattended, he drifts. With something concrete to return to, he steadies.

I think of Jess, Johnny, and other men like them as builders. They’re not men with better answers. They’re men who’ve learned to recognize what keeps them oriented. They ask a question of themselves, notice what steadies them, keep it close, and return to it when they feel pulled off course.

When men get stuck, some respond by charging forward—faster, harder—down a path of disruption without realizing they already have a map, or without stopping long enough to learn how to read it.

The men who keep moving forward face a challenge or a difficult bump in the road with this question: What in my life helps me stay oriented—and am I building from it?

If manhood is a map, transitional objects can be the landmarks that teach us how to read it. They don’t tell us where we have to end up. They help us recognize when we’re still moving in the right direction.

And maybe that’s where manhood is headed.

Not toward louder disruption—but toward steadier, more intentional building. Men who know what they’re carrying forward. Men who understand that real progress rarely comes from burning everything down.

It comes from learning how to read the map when it shows up—and having the courage to build our lives in alignment with it.

How did you get here? Take a look at your map. It may already hold the answer.

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Note: If you’re interested in the previous posts in this series you can find them here: