Candid Conversations Newsletter: Reset: CTRL ALT, Delete

With authorship, you’re never starting from zero.

When people hear about Jamaica, a few things tend to surface immediately. The music, the food, the people, the culture, Bob Marley. And then there is sprinting. Track and field, to be exact. The 100, 200, 400, and the 4x100m. Speed is stitched into our global identity.

I grew up as a track and field athlete. Naturally talented, but lacking the discipline required to go beyond potential. Part of the reason was simple. I didn’t love running. I didn’t love the training. I loved winning.

Winning was joyful. I would show up to meets, run the rounds, and win every heat, semifinal, and final. The reward came easily enough to keep me engaged, but not deeply enough to anchor me when things got hard. I wasn’t committed to the craft. I was committed to the outcome.

Years later, I realized I never stopped competing.

I just found myself in races with no clear rules. Games where the conditions weren’t explained, the finish line kept moving, and yet participation was assumed. Still, we play.

We play hoping to win.

We play for status.

We play for dominance.

We play to be accepted, validated, to be seen as equal.

The Game We’re Playing 🎮

Learning about game theory changed how I show up in certain spaces. Not because it gave me formulas or strategies, but because it helped me recognize the game I was actually in.

I didn’t succeed in track and field partly because my heart belonged elsewhere. Football. Soccer, depending on who you ask. I loved playing the sport. The movement, the rhythm, the improvisation. But imagine showing up to a football match wearing track spikes and a singlet. Not only would I be disallowed from playing, I would be looked at sideways at best.

Different game. Different rules.

Game theory, at its simplest, asks a quiet but important question. What kind of game am I playing, and what does winning even mean here?

Some games are short. There is a clear start, a clear finish, and a scoreboard everyone agrees on. Win or lose, the game ends. Other games never really end. The goal is not to win, but to stay in the game. To adapt. To endure. To remain relevant without losing yourself in the process.

What complicates things is that many of us enter these games without consent. We inherit them. Workplaces. Family roles. Cultural expectations. Survival environments where the cost of opting out feels too high.

So we optimize. We perform. We chase outcomes that look like ambition but are often just fear in better clothing. Fear of being left behind. Fear of being invisible. Fear of not mattering. Fear of losing status.

In those moments, identity becomes strategy. Ambition becomes armor. And survival becomes indistinguishable from success.

The danger is not losing the game.

The danger is winning a game that slowly erodes who you are.

I learned this late. Not on a track, but in rooms where the rules were unspoken and the rewards were conditional. Where showing up as myself felt risky, and playing along felt necessary.

Game theory didn’t tell me how to win.

It taught me when not to play.

And sometimes, the most radical move is not a better strategy, but a reset. A willingness to step back, assess the game in front of you, and decide whether it deserves your time, your energy, and your identity at all.

CTRL.

ALT.

Delete.

Task Manager 💻

The caveat of playing games, and winning them, is that you become good at them. Very good. But what happens when you have played a game you no longer want to play?

What happens when you realize the passion is gone, that you are older than when you first started, and the enthusiasm that once carried you has quietly faded? When the effort remains, but the meaning does not?

For some, this moment gives way to despair. A hollowing out. When the only thing left to hold onto feels like nothing at all. Nihilism can begin to look like an option. Not because it is chosen, but because it feels honest in its emptiness.

But what if we step out of that frame, even briefly, and look again?

What if there is something else I could be doing?

What if there are parts of myself I have not yet explored?

What if the exhaustion is not failure, but information?

Holding down the CTRL, ALT, and Delete keys brings up the task manager. An  inventory of what is running in the background. You can see what is consuming processing power. What stalled. What is no longer responding. And sometimes, you choose to end a task.

And other times, you restart the system entirely.

Choosing the Game⛹🏾‍♂️

Starting over is dreaded by most people. Not because it is unfamiliar, but because it forces an honest reckoning with time. With what has passed. With what no longer fits. With the realization that effort alone does not guarantee meaning.  

As we age, the cost of playing the wrong game increases. Not in visible ways at first, but internally. Energy drains faster. Recovery takes longer. The gap between who we are and who we are pretending to be becomes harder to ignore.

Reinvention is often framed as a dramatic act. A leap. A rupture. But more often, it is subtle. It begins with a refusal. A moment of clarity where ambition is no longer measured by accumulation, but by alignment. Where survival no longer means enduring everything placed in front of you.

Self authorship emerges here. Not as reinvention for applause, but as authorship for coherence. Choosing which stories you continue to tell about yourself. Choosing which roles you retire. Choosing which games you no longer lend your body, your mind, or your name to.

A reset is not starting from zero.

It is starting from truth.

It is recognizing that you are allowed to outgrow the games that once sustained you. That winning is only meaningful if the cost does not include yourself. That staying in the game is not the same as staying alive.

Authorship✍🏾

At a certain point, maturity is not about endurance.

It is about discernment.

I think back to Jamaica. To sprinting. To a culture that celebrates speed, victory, and arrival. To younger versions of myself who could win races without ever asking why they were running. Back then, winning was enough. The body was fast, the future was long, and the cost of misalignment was invisible.

But time changes the math.

What once rewarded raw talent now demands intention. What once tolerated borrowed ambition now asks for authorship. And what once felt like survival now insists on choice.

So this reset is not a rejection of where I come from.

It is an evolution of it.

I no longer measure myself by how fast I arrive, but by whether I recognize the race at all. Whether the lane is mine. Whether the finish line leads somewhere I am willing to inhabit.

CTRL.

ALT.

Delete.

Knowing there are more games than we were ever taught to see.

Choosing which one to play is authorship.