What's Your Disc Golf?

There is a certain kind of life review that only happens in airports after midnight. It is not the thoughtful, journal-and-candle kind. It is the fluorescent-lighting kind, the kind that arrives when your flight is delayed, your phone is dying, your back hurts from a chair designed by someone who clearly had unresolved anger toward the human spine, and you have just discovered that the only thing open in the entire terminal is Dunkin’.

That was me at Chicago O’Hare, Terminal 3, Gate B12.

It was 1 a.m., which is not so much a time as a condition. I had been pretending to check email, but mostly I was sitting there quietly reviewing the long chain of decisions, obligations, weather patterns, and calendar invites that had conspired to put me in that exact seat at that exact hour.

At some point, I wandered over to Dunkin’ and grabbed a free donut I did not need, because “free” has a way of turning grown adults into raccoons. Then, in a moment of nutritional theater, I decided I should at least pair it with something healthy, which is how I ended up standing in an airport at 1 a.m. holding a donut and a banana, as if the banana could restore dignity to the whole operation.

On paper, my life made sense. Doctorate. Career. Leadership roles. Responsibilities. A resume that suggests I have been making reasonable decisions for a very long time. But airports after midnight have a way of loosening the bolts on certainty. Even a good life can start to feel briefly negotiable.

That is when I saw him. Standing two people ahead of me in the same line — maybe twenty years old, wearing a bright hoodie and carrying a trophy so large it looked like it should have its own boarding group. This was not a modest little plaque you tuck under your arm and forget in the overhead bin. This thing had architecture. It was taller than most toddlers and looked as if it might require its own seatbelt extender.

What caught my attention, though, was not the trophy. It was his face.

He looked happy in a way that felt almost inappropriate for the setting. Not airport happy, which usually means you found an outlet and the person next to you is not eating tuna. He looked genuinely, peacefully happy at 1 a.m., which made him the most suspiciously well-adjusted person in the building.

My curiosity and my nosiness have always traveled together, so I asked him, "Big win?"

He grinned and said, "Yeah, just wrapped up a tournament. I'm a professional disc golfer."

I smiled and asked him to tell me more. I have always been drawn to people who have figured out what they are genuinely built for — and if they have found a way to get paid doing it, even better.

We talked for a few minutes. He was humble, thoughtful, and clearly obsessed with what he did in the best possible way. There was no defensiveness in him. No need to convince me that disc golf was legitimate. No awkward explanation about the backup plan. He simply loved it, had worked hard at it, and seemed completely comfortable living inside a life most people would have told him not to take seriously.

We shook hands, he headed toward his gate, and I returned to mine. Then I did what any person with a smartphone does at 1 a.m. when confronted with an unconventional life choice.

I Googled him.

Within two minutes, I was staring at my phone like it had just rewritten the rules of adulthood. This young man was not some scrappy hobbyist with a big trophy and a good weekend behind him. He was ranked among the best in the country. Major sponsorships. A public following. Career earnings listed at more than $850,000.

Meanwhile, I was standing there with a free banana, 25 years of experience, a doctorate, and a job title that barely fits on a business card.

The irony was not subtle. It came clomping in wearing work boots.

The Part That Kept Turning Over

At first, I thought the money was what surprised me, but it really wasn’t. The money got my attention, no question. Anytime someone less than half your age is doing far better than you expected while carrying sporting hardware through an airport, your brain has to reboot for a second. But that was not the part I kept thinking about after I finally made it home.

What I kept thinking about was the way he talked about his work.

There was an alignment in him that I do not see often enough in adults. His talent, effort, identity, and joy all seemed pointed in the same direction. He did not appear to have a "work self" and a "real self" living in separate zip codes. He was not performing adulthood for some invisible committee. He was not trying to make his life sound respectable to a stranger in an airport.

He seemed integrated. Whole. Undivided. Not because his path was easy — I am sure it was not — but because he had chosen something that made sense to him before it made sense to everyone else.

That is rarer than we like to admit.

Most of us made different choices. Sensible choices. Responsible choices. Choices that paid bills, built careers, supported families, earned credentials, and helped us become the sort of people other people can comfortably describe at a banquet. Those choices are not wrong. Stability is not a character flaw. Providing for your family is not a failure of imagination. Many of us chose practical paths because life has real weight, and somebody has to pay the mortgage, carry the insurance, raise the kids, help the parents, and keep the lights on.

But practical choices are still choices, and choices come with trades.

The Question We Were All Asked

Somewhere along the way, usually when we were young enough to believe life still had unlimited exits, most of us were good at something. Maybe really good. It might have been writing, music, building things, fixing things, teaching, coaching, selling, caring for animals, starting little businesses, making people laugh, working with your hands, or noticing patterns everyone else seemed to miss.

Whatever it was, it made time disappear. You could lose an afternoon inside it and come out feeling more like yourself, not less. It was the thing you would do even if no one was paying you, partly because it never felt like work in the usual sense. It felt more like evidence. A small clue that maybe there was a version of your life that did not require quite so much explaining.

Then someone asked the great practical question: “But how are you going to make money doing that?”

That question usually does not come from a cruel place. In fact, that is what makes it so effective. It often comes from people who love us, worry about us, and want to spare us unnecessary hardship. Parents ask it. Teachers ask it. Advisors ask it. Friends ask it. Eventually, we learn to ask it ourselves, usually in the tone of someone trying to prevent a small financial barn fire before it spreads to the rest of the property.

So we make the reasonable calculation. We can follow the thing that feels most natural and risk looking foolish, failing publicly, disappointing people, or becoming the topic of concerned family conversations. Or we can choose something practical, build stability, earn respect, and give everyone around us the comfort of knowing we have become a serious person.

Most of us choose practical, and I do not think that makes us cowards. It does not mean we lacked imagination or sold out at the first decent offer. It means we were human. When you are young, respectability is incredibly persuasive. It feels like maturity. It feels like safety. It feels like proof that you have crossed over into the land of responsible adults, where people have insurance cards, retirement accounts, and opinions about interest rates.

For a while, that trade can feel exactly right. You get the degree. You get the job. You make progress. You collect titles, responsibilities, and passwords to software platforms you never wanted to understand. People introduce you with your credentials. Your resume starts looking less like potential and more like evidence.

Stability has dignity. Responsibility has weight. But the safe path still sends an invoice, and most of us do not notice the balance due until much later.

The Grief of Being Practical

Sometimes we trade possibility for stability. Sometimes we trade alignment for approval. Sometimes we trade the depth of one strange, specific gift for the flexibility of being good enough at many things.

There is dignity in being a generalist. Generalists adapt. They connect dots. They survive in complicated systems. They become useful in rooms where the problem is not clean, the people do not agree, and the spreadsheet has already started telling little lies.

But there can also be grief in it.

Because somewhere along the way, we may wonder what would have happened if we had gone deeper into one thing. Not scattered our energy across everything useful, respectable, and responsible, but committed to the thing that kept calling us back. That is not regret exactly. Regret feels too simple. It is more like curiosity with a bruise.

That is what bothered me about the disc golf kid — in the most useful way. Someone almost certainly told him to get a real job. Someone probably told him to keep his options open, have a backup plan, be realistic, and think about his future. Those people were not villains. They were probably trying to protect him from disappointment.

He heard the same script many of us heard. He just did not let it become the whole story.

While people his age were broadening their options and polishing their resumes, he was becoming unusually good at one very specific thing. Weekend after weekend. Tournament after tournament. Throw after throw. That is not childish. That is disciplined.

We love stories like his once they work. We applaud when the trophy is large, the earnings are public, and the sponsorships arrive. But we are much less comfortable with the early years, when the work looks impractical, the money is thin, and everyone at Thanksgiving is asking when you are going to get serious.

Most people do not quit because they lack talent. They quit because the results are not visible fast enough to quiet the people around them. They quit because being a beginner in public is hard. They quit because responsible people can make impractical dreams feel embarrassing.

He did not quit. That is a large part of the difference.

The Smaller Door Back

I am not arguing for recklessness. I am not saying every passion should become a business, or that every practical path is wrong. I have built a practical career, and I am grateful for much of it. My work has given me purpose, relationships, hard lessons, and opportunities I would not trade.

But the opposite of blowing up your life is not doing nothing.

There is almost always a smaller door.

What is the smallest version of your disc golf that you could begin again? Not the dramatic pivot. Not the resignation letter. The Saturday morning version. The 30-minutes-before-work version. The quiet experiment. The thing you could pick back up without asking the entire world for permission.

Maybe it never becomes a career. That is fine. Not everything meaningful needs a business plan. Some things are worth doing because they make you feel less divided. Some things are worth doing because they restore a part of you that got stored away while the rest of you attended meetings, answered emails, and became dependable.

And maybe it does become something. Maybe in five years, it compounds in a way you cannot see from here. Nobody applauds the first deposit. Nobody applauds the first lap. Nobody applauds the first awkward attempt. Then one day, people call it talent.

Gate B12

I made my flight that night, got home around 3 a.m., and went to work the next day. There were no lightning bolts, no dramatic announcement, and no sudden career pivot involving discs, sponsorships, and orthopedic regret.

But something in me refused to go back to sleep.

I keep thinking about that young man at Gate B12, not because I want to become a professional disc golfer, but because he reminded me that the script is optional. Not useless. Not foolish. Not always wrong. Just optional.

That is an important distinction. Some people follow the traditional path and build lives they genuinely love. Some chase a passion and discover it was better as a hobby. Some become generalists and find deep meaning in connecting many things instead of mastering one. There is no single correct way to build a life, and most of us are doing the best we can with the responsibilities, fears, hopes, and obligations in front of us.

But there is risk in never asking whether the life you are building still fits. There is risk in confusing respectability with alignment, and in letting responsibility become the respectable hiding place where your truest gifts go quiet. There is risk in spending decades becoming who everyone needed you to be while never returning to the question of who you were actually built to become.

The version of you that made the practical choice was doing the best they could with the information, pressure, courage, and fear they had at the time. There is no sense putting that person on trial now. They were trying to protect you. They were trying to build something stable. They were trying to survive the questions they did not yet know how to answer.

The better question is not whether you should have chosen differently back then.

The better question is what you can still choose now.

What is your disc golf, and what would it look like to pick it back up?