Everyone else thinks you’re really brilliant. They are so impressed by your work, your experience, and your background. But deep down you know you’re being secretly lazy.

People from ancient cultures would have worshiped this kind of laziness, because it’s so artful. It is laziness wrapped in intelligent ideas, stories about your work with Tibetan masters, and the texture of a personal development seminar.

You haven’t silently given up on your dreams, or abandoned you secret desires for a deeply fulfilling life—you’ve simply ‘gotten too old’ to play that hard, learned to accept where you are in life, and are focusing on a deep sense of gratitude.

You hardly even notice that you’re living life between a 4 and an 8. Things aren’t too bad, and they aren’t that great either. Things are pretty good, and after all, who are you to complain? You’re lucky, really.

But what you’re afraid to admit is that you’ve allowed your flame to dim, your attention to disperse, your passion to wither. You’ve hidden this laziness you have toward your life and purpose and deep desire inside a temple of achievement, ambition, and impressive experiences so thick that almost no light can get in.

You’re bored. You shouldn’t be. You’re doing the work you ‘love’. You get paid well for it. You’ve got a kid, or one on the way, and now’s not the time to take risks.

And so you die everyday on your altar to stunning laziness, and no one will blame you or admonish you because you’re doing a pretty good job. Maybe even what some people would consider a magnificent job.

But secretly you know.

And if you know this, I’m calling on you. To recommit to something bigger than what you thought would satisfy you. To get back in touch with the gritty humanity and deep inquiry you felt late at night in college or you early twenties when the big ideas and dreams of light shone out to you like skyscrapers and nebulas. I call on you to get back in touch with the insane drive and vision you had to create something truly amazing that would change the world and—even more importantly—you, forever. I call on you to feel that passion like the first time you made love or saw your favorite band.

That passion isn’t dead in you. It may be dulled by the years you’ve spent living a life of quiet desperation, but it’s not gone. And you don’t have to get a divorce, leave your kids, buy a sports car, and date someone half your age to reclaim it.

You simply have to be willing to let go of your beautiful laziness, and grab the sweaty palm of your ugly mortality, your grimy humanity. You just have to admit to yourself that you still want it. You still want to feel that way, and you have to allow yourself to feel the guilt of desiring it.

Because when you do, you can change the curves of your accordion life—with one layer perfectly matching the last—and gain access to something that feels different but is actually terribly familiar. It’s the giddy feeling of possibility.

And it all starts with a simple practice:

Where you’re being lazy, choose to allow yourself to desire a deep joy from that place, and feel the guilt of wanting more than all this life has given you. Not from a place of resentment, but from a place of the immense possibility this life holds, when we dig up the treasure buried underneath our beautiful laziness.