Are you Trojan Horsing Yourself?
There’s a pattern I’ve been noticing, not just in the men I coach but in myself. Most people don’t run from their purpose. They don’t hide from their calling. They don’t outright reject the thing they quietly know they are meant to do. What they do instead is more subtle. They Trojan Horse it.
They build the safe version. The acceptable version. The version that won’t get them judged or questioned or exposed. They build something adjacent to their truth and then convince themselves it is close enough.
I know this move intimately. For months I built Evergreen Performance with a quiet, almost admirable logic. If I package this the right way, if I talk about performance and fitness and frameworks, then maybe I can slip the deeper work inside without saying it too loudly. I wanted to help men reclaim themselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually, but I didn’t want to stand in that truth directly. Saying it plainly felt like too much. It felt vulnerable in a way I wasn’t ready for. So I created a Trojan Horse, a beautifully built and well-intentioned container that held almost the work I am meant to do, but not quite.
It worked in the way pretending always works for a little while. It created enough traction to keep me busy. Enough alignment that I didn’t feel totally out of integrity. Enough forward motion to convince myself I was on the right track. But something was off. At first it was a faint sense of dissonance I kept trying to outrun. Eventually, after five or six weeks, it hit me with a heaviness I could no longer ignore: this is not the track.
Not because Evergreen was wrong, but because it wasn’t fully mine. I was using it as a shield, a costume, a way to inch toward my truth without ever having to actually stand in it.
Boyd Varty writes in The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, “The path of not here is part of the path of here.” That line has been sitting in me like a stone because it captures exactly what Trojan Horsing is. You build the wrong thing long enough to feel the truth of the right thing. You follow the false track until the contrast becomes undeniable. It is not failure. It is orientation. It is the moment you finally stop pretending you don’t know what you know.
When that moment comes, it carries a mix of emotions that reveals the truth. There is a spark of excitement. There is a sense of flow, like something inside is finally moving the way it wants to move. And there is fear, the sharp and electric kind, because stepping into the real work requires stepping out from behind the walls. That combination of excitement, flow, and fear is the signature of a path that is actually yours.
I do not know exactly where this new direction takes me, at least not yet. What I do know is that I am on the real track now, and once you feel that, you cannot unfeel it.
If you are reading this and something in you whispers, “I think I might be Trojan Horsing my life too,” then pay attention to that. It might be the first step toward stepping into the thing you were always meant to do.