The boat we never bought

I found an old goal journal last week. One of those things you buy with real intentions and then bury in a drawer under the intentions that came after it. I was looking for something else entirely. I sat down on the floor and read the whole thing instead.

Near the front, in handwriting from a version of me I can almost still feel, was one of our very first goals. Buy a boat.

We were living in Vancouver then. Not married yet, no kids yet, both of us with regular jobs and a small apartment and a very big idea of what our life was going to be. Colin was in IT. I was teaching. And when we did the homework our real estate education group gave us, the part where you sit down and figure out your "why," a boat is one of the things that fell out of us. Nothing extravagant. Just the picture of getting down to the water on a Saturday, pushing off into the inlet, and being the kind of people whose weekend could look like that.

The other early goals were all cut from the same cloth. To fly home to the East Coast to see family without it costing a fortune or eating both weeks of vacation we got in a year. To own our place instead of renting it. Little dreams, really. We were young people in an expensive city, pulling ideas out of the air, and almost every one of them was just a quiet wish for a bit more ease.

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Here's what happened to those dreams, and I think you'll recognize the shape of it even if the details are different.

They grew. We grew. You read the books, Think and Grow Rich, Everything is Figureoutable, you sit in enough rooms with people who talk about vision and capacity, and the dreams stop being little. Ours got bigger and braver. A place in Vancouver we could come back to, because we'd fallen in love with it and then left it. A spot down near family in the States. A summer cottage out east. The same wish underneath all of it, ease, room, the freedom to book the flight and go, but a bigger version now.

And then there was a long stretch where every one of those dreams felt like a joke.

I'll be honest with you, because that's the deal I want to have here. There were years in the middle of this where the weight of what we were actually carrying got so heavy that thinking about the boat, the cottage, the easy flight home, felt almost insulting. Like reading a postcard from a life that belonged to someone else. The gap between the journal and the Tuesday I was actually living was so wide that opening that drawer would have felt like a taunt.

And there is a thought that lives in that stretch, the hardest one, and I'm going to say it out loud because I suspect you've had it too. The thought is: if we had never started this at all, we might be closer to those dreams than we are now.

That one is hard to write down. It feels like admitting failure. For Colin especially, that thought sits heavier than it does for me. He's the one who carried the operations, so he's the one who feels the distance most personally, as though it's a verdict on him.

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Here's the part I hold onto, and the part I want to hand to you.

I have this stubborn, unshakeable belief that we are in a hard place with something genuinely worth it on the other side. I know we have gone backwards a few steps to get here. I know that from the outside, and on the worst days from the inside too, it can look like standing still or losing ground. But I don't believe we went backwards because we failed. I believe we went backwards to make space. You cannot build the bigger thing on the footprint of the smaller one. Sometimes you have to tear up more than you'd like before you can pour something that holds.

And I know, the way I know few things, that the version of us on the other side of this is further ahead than the one who never left the teacher's salary and the IT job and the small safe apartment. Not richer, necessarily. Further. Closer to the boat, and to everything the boat was ever standing in for.

But belief on its own is thin. It doesn't hold you up on a Wednesday. So here is the actual thing I do, the practical one, on the weeks the distance gets too loud.

I get us all out of the house.

Sometimes it's something we've genuinely never done before, novel enough that our brains have to be fully in it. Sometimes it's physical, a long hike, a long bike ride, the kind of thing where your body is too busy for your worries to get a word in. And when we can manage it, we go away. A weekend. A few days. It doesn't have to be far.

Because that little pocket of time, away from the grind, is a window. For a day or two we get to stand inside a small, real version of the dream life. We remember what it's for. And that window, it turns out, is enough. Enough to pull us both back out of the what-ifs and the running tally of everything that's gone sideways, and point us at the thing again.

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So has the freedom picture changed, all these years and doors later? Not really. We still want the ease. We still want to book the flight and see the people we love without it costing us the year. The picture in the journal and the picture in my head today are almost the same picture.

What's changed is that I can finally see the steps.

For a long time the dream was just a feeling, a someday, a warm blur with no road to it. And a blurry dream can't pull you anywhere, because you can't see where to put your feet. What's different now is that we can see the specific, concrete, sometimes unglamorous steps between here and there. And I know that sounds like the dream got harder, more work, more distance laid out in plain view. It's actually the opposite. The moment the end result and the steps to it both become real in your mind, the dream gets closer, not further. Because now you can move toward it on purpose.

That's the whole reason the doors were ever there. Nobody's real dream was "own more doors." The doors were always just the how. When the how gets heavy, the move was never to add more of it. The move is to look back up at the what, the boat, the flight home, the ordinary Tuesday that feels like enough, and let it pull you forward.

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The Install

One small thing you can put into your business this week.

Here's the reframe I want to hand you, because it's the one that finally moved things for me: your dream probably isn't too big. It's too blurry. And a blurry dream can't do its one job, which is to pull you forward on the hard weeks. So this week, let's put it back in focus, and let AI find you the first real step toward it.

Step 1: Write the scene, not the goal. Don't write "time freedom" or "financial freedom." Those are fog. Write one specific ordinary day from the life you're building. Where are you standing. What time is it. Who's with you. What is your phone doing, or not doing. What did not happen that day: no phone buzzing at 9:47 pm, no scramble, no thing you had to go handle. Make it a Tuesday, not a highlight reel. Three or four sentences of the realest version you can picture.

Step 2: Write one honest line about now. Where you actually are today. Not a complaint, just the truth. "Right now the business only runs when I'm touching it, and I haven't gone a full day without checking something in months."

Step 3: Let AI find the distance, and the first step. Open any free AI tool, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whichever you've already got, and paste this in above your two paragraphs:

I'm a Canadian real estate investor with a full-time job and a small, self-managed portfolio, and my time is the scarcest thing I have. Below is a specific scene of the life I'm building toward, and one honest line about where my business actually is right now. Read both. Then do three things: (1) name the two or three things in my current operations or back office that most stand between me and that scene being true on an ordinary week, (2) rank them from easiest to hardest to remove, and (3) for the single easiest one, give me one small first step I could take this week. Keep it plain and specific to what I told you. No generic advice, no pep talk.

The scene: [paste] Where I actually am: [paste]

What comes back does the thing I spent years learning to do by hand. It takes the warm blur and turns it into two or three named things you can actually see. The ache of "I'm so far from it" becomes a short, ranked list with a first step at the top. That's the window, made into a map. You don't just get to visit the dream for a weekend. You get to see the next place to put your foot.

I'll be straight with you about where this stops, because that's the deal I want with you. The Freedom Picture is one brick, and a real one, do it this week and the fog will lift by the time you close the laptop. But you still have to walk the steps by hand, and you'll have to run this again every time the fog rolls back in, because it will. The thing we've actually been building is the layer underneath, where the steps between you and that Tuesday don't just get named, they quietly get handled, where the back office standing between you and the dream stops being a wall you re-measure every few months and starts coming down on its own. That's not a brick you install from a newsletter. That's the house. And you already know who we're building it for.

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So that's the story this week, and it started with a drawer I wasn't even meaning to open.

We still haven't bought the boat. But I don't read that journal as a list of things we failed to get anymore. I read it as proof that we knew, even back then, what all of this was actually for. Not the doors. The ease. The water on a Saturday. The people we love, one easy flight away.

I'd love to know yours. Hit reply and tell me one line of your freedom picture, the real one, the ordinary day you're building toward. Or tell me about a dream you once wrote in a journal of your own. I read every reply, and there's no better way for me to keep writing you something that's actually for you.

Next Sunday, I'll be back.

I'm glad you're here.

— Nicole