Take the First Step

This isn’t my usual kind of article. It has nothing to do with cigars. This one is personal.

A couple of months ago, my good friend Phil Kohn, aka “Katman,” asked if I would add more personal vignettes to the guest reviews I send him. His thinking was simple: what I brought to the page wasn’t just cigar knowledge or critique. I had a lifetime of experiences behind my perspective, and letting readers see more of that would give them a better sense of the person doing the writing.

That floored me.

I was conflicted in a way I hadn’t experienced in a long time. On the one hand, I wanted to satisfy Phil’s request because it aligned with his style, and more importantly, I valued his friendship. On the other was the framework I had spent months deliberately building.

But I was determined to make it work without giving up the way I wanted to review cigars. Eventually, I started shooting from the hip. No outline. No transcription. Whatever came to mind went onto the page: my observations of the cigar, along with whatever memories or thoughts those observations triggered.

It worked.

More importantly, looking back through those memories made me think about the path my life had taken: the choices I made, the experiences I had, and the people I encountered along the way. All of it had brought me to where I am now.

And out of that realization came this: My life isn’t a static collection of memories. It’s a path created by action, with people and experiences altering that path along the way.

The operative word is action.

But we live in a strange world where we’ve built a ridiculous barrier between ourselves and action, and somehow convinced ourselves that action requires permission. We need to feel motivated. We need to feel confident. We need to feel ready. Sometimes we even need someone else’s validation before we make a move.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard myself say, “I’m thinking about doing X,” and never actually did it. My excuse? I never worked up the motivation to do it.

But doing is what creates the life we live.

And more to the point: doing something requires no motivation. You just need to take the first step.

I know this because I’ve lived it.

This is something I haven’t shared at all unless people actually ask me. Over the last year, I’ve lost close to 90 pounds. Yes, I had help from a GLP-1, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the decision to lose the weight came long before the medication. I had already decided that something had to change.

There wasn’t some dramatic burst of motivation. I didn’t wake up one morning suddenly feeling ready to overhaul my life.

I just took the first step.

And that first step changed my life. The lower back pain and knee problems I lived with are gone. The sciatica that was once constant has been reduced to occasional flare-ups. I move differently. I feel different. Clothes I haven’t worn in decades fit again, including the chef’s jacket in the photo above. Things that had simply become part of everyday life aren’t part of it anymore.

None of those changes existed before I acted. They came afterward.

Back in the late ’80s, Nike launched a campaign around three words: Just Do It. It was a marketing slogan, but it also happened to be a pretty good philosophy for life.

Just do it.

Take the first step.

The rest of your life happens after that.

One more thing.

I know I said this had nothing to do with cigars, but in truth, what I’ve been talking about is the driving force behind Unco B’s Stogie Diary.

When I started this blog, I used the same cookie-cutter review format everyone else seemed to use. It worked, but it always felt incomplete. Very few reviews talked about the actual experience of smoking the cigar, and that was the part I cared about most.

So I changed it.

I didn’t wait until I had the perfect framework. I just started writing the kind of review I wanted to read. And eventually, that became this publication.