Major Z Isn’t Set-and-Forget — Neither Am I

It’s been a few months since I’ve written here. If you’ve been following along, you noticed. I did too. Every single day I didn’t write, I felt it.

Here’s the thing I want to say plainly, before anything else: not writing didn’t mean I stopped living Major Z. It just meant I stopped narrating it.

Nobody learns an instrument once.

If you’ve ever picked up piano, or drums, or any skill you actually wanted to get good at, you know the deal. You don’t sit down one time, learn it, and move on with your life. The better you want to get, the more you have to keep coming back, whether that’s to the bench, to the practice, to the boring repetition that doesn’t feel like progress in the moment but is the only thing that produces it.

Major Z is no different. It was never meant to be something you set once and forget. It’s a practice. You come back to it, or you don’t, and the difference shows up in your days.

Life doesn’t pause for the framework. It is the framework.

The last few months put a lot in front of me. Big life changes. Logistics that had to get handled whether I felt like handling them or not. The kind of stretch where showing up for yourself takes more than it usually does.

If you know Major Z, you know this stretch has a name: the B-Y zone. It’s lived life. The part where we’re thriving, struggling, or somewhere in the middle, most of it a mix of what you can control and what you can’t. I didn’t get to skip it. Nobody does. That’s the point. B-Y isn’t the exception to the framework; it’s where we actually spend almost all of our time.

What changed the outcome wasn’t the circumstances. It was whether leadership showed up.

Here’s what I noticed, living through it in real time: leadership is the engine underneath Major Z. It’s what keeps you in motion toward where you actually want to end up, instead of just wherever the current pushes you. And the days looked completely different depending on whether that engine was running.

On the days it was running, I did the things that didn’t feel urgent but mattered, i.e. the dishes I didn’t feel like doing, the planning I didn’t feel like sitting down for, the intentional structuring of my time so nothing important got quietly dropped. On the days it wasn’t running, my mind slipped somewhere else. Ruminating, avoiding things I needed to face, staying still when I needed to move… Same season. Same hard stretch. Different engine status. Different result.

Point A is how you get the engine back on.

This is the part of the framework I lean on most, and the part I want to leave you with. Point A is the productive mindset. It is the one you switch back on for planning, for reflecting, for dreaming again about where you’re headed. Not fantasy. Direction. It’s the mental on-ramp back to intentional Major Z thinking, whenever you’ve drifted out of it.

I didn’t have to write to be in Point A these past few months. I had to choose it, over and over, on the days it would’ve been easier not to. Writing about it now — this post — is just the visible part of a mindset that’s been running quietly underneath the whole time.

Part of moving forward means going backward.

Here’s something I wrote down for myself a while back: we can’t go back in time, but our minds can. And sometimes that’s exactly what moving forward requires.

When I sat down to start writing again, I didn’t just start fresh like the last few months hadn’t happened. I went back first… back to my last post, back to where my head was when I wrote it, back to what I was actually working through at the time. Not to relive it. Just to pick the thread back up where I’d set it down.

Don’t be afraid to do that. Going back to your original plans, your old notes, the version of the idea you had before life interrupted. That’s how you actually pick up where you left off instead of starting over from nothing.

That’s really the whole point of Major Z.

Time is going to pass no matter what you do. You’re going to end up somewhere no matter what. Major Z doesn’t change that. It just changes whether you get there on purpose. Whether you’re dreaming about the life you want and actually leading yourself toward it, or just letting the current decide for you.

I stopped writing for a while. I didn’t stop leading. I’m back to doing both.