This summer I turned 45.
Not in some grand setting, but in the middle of a 12-hour drive back from the seaside — toddler in the backseat, dog panting, car stuffed to the roof with bags and baby gear. We caught a choppy ferry, crawled through endless traffic, arrived home to our small Zagreb apartment late at night.
By all accounts, it should have been one of those days that break you. And yet, this time it didn’t.
Something shifted. Instead of despair, I felt relief. Instead of anxiety, I felt joy — not because the circumstances were easy, but because I finally saw them differently. Despite the fatigue and the stress, I was carrying something I hadn’t had before: purpose.
I have a family I love beyond words. A daughter who just had her first ice cream that day, laughing as she learned new words. A wife who carries half of the burden with me. Projects that matter — a house we’re building, work that might create something valuable, even meaningful for others. And for once, instead of being crushed by the weight of it all, I thought: I’m doing this. I’m actually doing this.
Later that night, at a roadside diner, we shared a slice of kremšnita. We joked about celebrating my birthday in the least glamorous place imaginable. And yet the thought came, clear and calm: If I died tonight, I wouldn’t regret a thing. Not because life is perfect, but because it’s mine — imperfect, demanding, yet purposeful and shared with the people I love.
The Missing Ingredient
Looking back, I see what I was missing all these years. It wasn’t talent. It wasn’t opportunity. At times I had money, I had time, I had freedom. And yet I built nothing lasting, nothing coherent.
Instead, I built a life around fear, nostalgia, and paralysis. I lived with GERD, arrhythmias, sleepless nights, and constant melancholy. For decades I stared into an abyss, waiting for it to spit me out.
The missing ingredient wasn’t persistence in the narrow sense. It was something deeper: learning to sit with difficulty.
Everything worthwhile is hard. Brutally hard. Whether you’re born into wealth or poverty, privilege or hardship, difficulty will find you. Illness, loss, uncertainty, risk — entropy is the law of the universe, and it doesn’t discriminate. The magic is that we exist at all, in this small fragile bubble of life.
The question isn’t how to avoid difficulty. You can’t. The question is whether you can endure it without letting it break you. Whether you can sit with the discomfort long enough for something new to emerge.
A Pivot Point
This summer has been a pivot for me. Not because the challenges disappeared — they multiplied.
I juggled moves between crumbling seaside apartments, a toddler who demanded every ounce of energy, a company teetering under financial strain, and the looming responsibility of building a house.
But instead of catastrophizing, instead of spinning up worst-case scenarios until I suffocated, I practiced something new: letting go. Not helplessness, but trust. Trust that I can handle what comes, step by step.
I used to believe that if I couldn’t control everything, disaster was inevitable. Now I’m learning the opposite: by trying to control everything, I created my own disasters. By accepting that life is inherently difficult — and that this is the point — I’ve found a strange kind of freedom.
Carrying It Forward
Here’s what I want to remember from the summer I turned 45:
- Hardship doesn’t vanish, but it can be carried differently.
- Purpose transforms the unbearable into the meaningful.
- Relief comes not when the world changes, but when I stop fighting myself.
- The missing ingredient is not brilliance or opportunity, but the willingness to sit with difficulty.
This is what I want to build into every project, every video, every post — maybe even a book someday. Because I know there are countless others staring at the same abyss, convinced they’re failing because they’re not smart enough, rich enough, lucky enough.
Maybe they’re just missing the same ingredient I was.
It’s not the shallow kind of persistence. Not grinding until you collapse. It’s the deeper persistence of staying put in the storm, trusting that something worthwhile might grow if you give it time.
I am not who I was last year. I don’t want to go back.
If this is the lesson I carry forward — that difficulty is not proof of failure but proof that I’m alive — then maybe, just maybe, 45 is the year I finally began.
