Dear future-ready friend,

Last Saturday, something rare happened at Santa Woodz.

The noise of the week, the headlines, the notifications, the to-do lists that never quite end, went quiet. Friends arrived with their kids. Tables were cleared and set not with food but with ink, water, and paper. And in the middle of our home, a man named Gerow Reece picked up a brush.

Gerow has practiced calligraphy for over fifty years, learning from a master in Japan and returning to the cushion every single day since. I had brought my kids to Jikoji Zen Center more than once to watch him work. But hosting him at Santa Woodz, surrounded by friends I love, felt like a dream finally arriving in a room.

What happened over the full day that followed surprised everyone, including me.

The moment I keep returning to happened right at our kitchen table. Without ceremony, Gerow dipped his brush and painted three characters onto the wood: 火馬家. Fire. Horse. House.

This is the Year of the Fire Horse. And our family name, Pferdt, is old German for horse. He knew this. He was naming something already true about us: that our house is a fire horse house, full of energy and motion and spirit. It stopped the room. It was not decoration. It was a mirror.

Later, on a large wooden panel that now hangs in our home, Gerow painted one more word. This one in three characters: curiosity. He explained that in Japanese, curiosity is made of three parts — mother and child, surprise, and love. Take any one of those away, and curiosity ceases to exist. As a parent, a creator, and someone who has spent a career trying to understand what makes people open to what comes next, I don't think I have ever seen a single word explained more completely.

What if the future isn't something you figure out, but something you write, one patient stroke at a time? And what if finding your own brush is how you begin?

1️⃣  The stroke is not the problem. The mind is.

We started simply. Paint the number one. A single vertical line. How hard could it be?

Incredibly hard, as it turned out. Not because of the stroke, but because of everything happening above the neck.

Seasoned leaders who run organizations, parents who have navigated more complexity than any strategy session could prepare them for, brought to a standstill by a single line on paper. The kids were different. They pressed the brush down without ceremony. Bold, sometimes wobbly, always honest. They didn't yet know they were supposed to do it a certain way.

Gerow watched. When he spoke, it wasn't to correct technique. It was to remind us: the brush follows the mind. Calm the mind first.

Then came the final piece.

After a full day moving between Jikoji Zen Center lessons at Santa Woodz, practicing strokes, sitting in stillness, I handed everyone a single clean sheet of paper. One sheet each. This was it.

The room shifted instantly.

Some laughed nervously. A few went very quiet. Several said they didn't feel ready. A couple started over when the first mark didn't land the way they'd imagined. Nobody had asked for another sheet while practicing. Only when it mattered.

I have seen this exact moment in boardrooms, in creative studios, in conversations about careers and relationships and big decisions. The blank page is not the problem. The problem is what we tell ourselves it means. That this stroke will define us. That we need just a little more time before we're finally ready to begin.

When it was my turn, I felt my heartbeat actually rise. I made the first stroke and immediately felt it: this will not be great. But then something shifted. I softened. And instead of trying to rescue the composition, I just followed my brush. Not leading it. Following it. The brush already knows. You just have to get out of the way.

Patience is not passive. The pause before the stroke is not wasted time. It is the work.

2️⃣ Steve Jobs and the calligraphy class that changed everything.

In 1972, Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College but stayed on campus eighteen months longer, dropping in on classes that called to him. One was calligraphy, taught by Robert Palladino, a former Trappist monk.

None of it had any practical application in his life. Until ten years later, designing the first Macintosh, when all of it came back. As Jobs reflected, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward. Only looking backward did it become clear.

One afternoon with a brush. Decades of consequence.

He was not optimizing. He was following genuine curiosity, picking up a brush without knowing where it would lead. He found his brush before he found his future. And the brush led him there.

This is what Gerow's three characters kept whispering to me all day. Mother and child. Surprise. Love. Curiosity is not a strategy. It is a relationship with the unknown, with whatever is waiting on the other side of the page.

Shunryu Suzuki, whose Zen tradition lives on at Jikoji just down the road, wrote something I have now read a dozen times: "The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing."

We are living in a time that feels like too many strokes at once. Climate. Politics. AI. Markets. War. The temptation is to freeze, to wait for clarity before acting. But clarity rarely arrives before motion. It arrives because of motion. The future opens up to the people who make the next mark anyway and keep going.

Finding your brush is not a metaphor for finding the right tool. It is a metaphor for finding your way.

Think of one thing you have been waiting to feel ready for. Not someday ready. This week ready.

Here is your one sheet of paper.

Sit for sixty seconds. No phone, no preparation. Just let the sediment settle. Then take the single smallest action that moves it forward. Send the message. Write the first paragraph. Make the call. Whatever your brush is pointing toward right now, follow it there.

When the first stroke feels terrible, soften. Notice what happens when you stop leading and start following.

What is the next stroke toward the future I most want to create?

Not the whole plan. Just the next mark.

There is a wooden panel in our home now with three characters painted on it. Mother and child. Surprise. Love.

Curiosity is what the future is made of.

The page is not waiting for perfection.

It is waiting for you.

Until next time, keep crafting.

With love
Frederik

P.S.: If you’d like to see how the wonderful Gerow painted the table for us, take a look here.

You might have noticed something while reading this.

None of this requires a recommendation for where to go next.
It asks a different question.

How do you want to feel in your future?

That question is at the heart of my Future Being Coaching. Not about making big life moves, but about shifting your inner posture toward what’s ahead. So your future feels more spacious, more intentional, more like yours, no matter where you are standing.

The same is true for the 8-Day Future Mindstate Training. It doesn’t ask you to go anywhere. It meets you where you are. At home. On a train. Between meetings. One small daily practice at a time. The journey comes to you.

And then there are my books. They’ve traveled to many places I couldn’t. Different countries. Different climates. Different lives. You can take them anywhere you want to feel differently. Sometimes that’s the most portable future tool we have.