What Makes You Feel Alive?

new rooms!

I was on the phone with my girlfriend Angela, the kind of friend you get deep with, and it was either around her birthday or maybe it was New Year’s…I can’t remember exactly, but it was one of those naturally reflective pockets of time. A timestamp where, like clockwork, you start talking and thinking about what you want in your life, what’s next, what you’re craving more of and what you hope this next chapter feels like.

And she said something that lodged itself in my brain and took up residence.

“I want to be in new rooms.”

Two words that were so meaningful to her, new and rooms, that she not only made them a goal and shared them with me, but later considered building an entire podcast around the namesake, social handles secured and all.

What she meant by it wasn’t literally new rooms, necessarily. Not villa-in-Italy new rooms. It was more than different places, it was about different energy, different conversations and different proximity. Rooms where she doesn’t already know everyone, rooms where she isn’t the most certain or the most comfortable, rooms that ask something of her, rooms that stretch her perspective, sharpen her thinking and expand her world.

After that, it became our little code.

New rooms!

And anytime one of us is stepping into something unfamiliar, whether it’s a meeting, a dinner, a work opportunity, a trip, an introduction, or even just saying yes to something slightly outside our normal rhythm, one of us will text the other: New rooms!

Equal parts encouragement and reminder. A little nudge toward expansion, toward continuing to evolve instead of repeating and toward exploring the unknown. And maybe most importantly, toward staying awake in your own life.

Because to me, new rooms is ultimately about feeling alive. That edge of discomfort, the nerves, the butterflies, the stretch, the push and pull. The unfamiliarity, the place where growth pushes you and happens simply by being inside the unknown. It’s about the things that wake you up from autopilot and pull you out of the comfort of complacency. Something I’ve been hyper-focused on this year: what makes me feel most alive?

So I’m sharing it with you today as a little reminder to keep in your pocket. A nudge toward the thing that feels slightly unfamiliar, slightly (or majorly) expansive and maybe even scary. The things that will make 80-year-old you proud you did them.

New rooms!