Not Vacation Mode.

Four years ago, Matt and I had never met.

Today he’s a friend. He’s walked through Vintage. He’s led Insider calls. He’s stood out at the ranch in South Dakota with me, watching the light go long across the prairie and talking about the things you only get to when the phones are off and there’s nowhere you have to be. We’ve done some life together.

None of that was on the table the first time we spoke. Back then he was still Big Green. Twenty years into a career at John Deere that everyone envied, quietly carrying the one thing nobody around him could see. If you’d told either of us where this would go, we’d have laughed.

This is issue one of something I’ve been working on for four months: Normal.40 Magazine. I have a front-row seat to some of the best stories in the world, and it’s time that I share them.

I open this issue with Matt because I’ve watched the whole thing. Not a highlight reel. The actual arc. The first call, when he was mostly sure but couldn’t quite say it out loud. The skepticism that a single conversation could change anything. The slow turn. And the ordinary Tuesday when it finally clicked, and he stopped waiting.

I learned something building this one, and it surprised me. I thought Matt’s story was about courage. It isn’t, not really. It’s about permission. Not the controlling type, the simple type. Not the external type. The internal type.

Most of us aren’t short on nerve. We’re short on someone in our corner saying the words we can’t say to ourselves. Matt got that moment on vacation, from the person who knows him best, and it changed everything. You’ll read exactly what she said. I sat with it for a while.

Inside, you’ll also find The Inventory, the tool I keep coming back to in my own life right now, the one that separates a real answer from a wish list. And a conversation with my son Dawson that taught me more than I expected to learn from an eighteen-year-old.

Oh, and I’ll also share an update from The Stroschein Ranch in South Dakota, and The N.40 Reserve in Florida. Spoiler — these are places you will visit one day (click link below).

I’ve been carrying one of Matt’s lines around all week. You’ll know it the moment you hit it.

This one’s personal for me.

Today, meet Matt.

Lon -

I’ve had the privilege of sitting across the table from more than 1,500 people since I left my job in 2022.

People who, from the outside, had everything they’d chased. And on the inside, had arrived at a place where they’d trade all of it. They just didn’t know what they’d trade it for.

They called me because I had been there.

In the modern success system, elite performers are represented by two separate yet equally powerful forces. The image they’ve built… and the truth they can no longer ignore. One protects the life they constructed. The other calls them to the life they’re meant to live. When those two forces collide, a decision must be made. To wait, or to start.

These are their stories.

Today, meet Matt.

NOT VACATION MODE

Matt found me the way most people do. He read something I wrote, like a post or The Trade. Then he booked a ramble, waited a few days or weeks, and showed up for our call. That’s how it works.

It only took me about a minute to know this call was going to be different.

It was a Tuesday. November 1st. I know because I went back and grabbed my notes afterward, the way you do when a call won’t leave you alone. Matt’s a Jeep guy. There was a big Jeep sign on the wall behind him, and it gave him away before he said much of anything. Turns out he’d been rebuilding one for years, and for years, whenever someone asked when it would be done, he gave the same answer: by the Fourth of July. He never said which year. It was a running joke by then, the Jeep that was always almost ready. Sitting there listening to him laugh about it, I remember thinking he wasn’t really talking about the Jeep.

Matt Blaylock had spent twenty years being Big Green. The man who built John Deere’s marquee partnerships, the sponsorships, the reputation that opened doors across the industry. From the outside, a dream job. From the inside, a suit that used to fit.

He wasn’t in crisis. He wasn’t falling apart. He was just quieter than he used to be. Something that had been loud in him had gone still, and he couldn’t tell you when it happened. That’s the version of this nobody writes about. Not the collapse. The quiet.

Here’s the thing about people who’ve spent two decades being excellent at something. The competence stops being what you do and becomes who you are. You don’t just do the work. You are the work. And when the work stops fitting, when the title no longer matches the person wearing it, there’s no clean word for it. It isn’t failure. Failure would almost be easier. It’s more like reaching for the suit that was always yours and realizing, somewhere between the collar and the cuffs, that you’ve changed shape.

The turn came on a vacation. He was there with his wife, Emily, and he was not, as he put it, in vacation mode. Still running the old software. Still calculating. Still standing between the life he had and the one he kept circling.

Emily watched him do it. Then she said the thing he’d been unable to say to himself. “You know, if you leave, we’re going to be okay.”

No ultimatum. No speech. Just his wife, telling him she was already on board. “That was huge,” he said. That was the whole sentence. He didn’t add to it, and he didn’t need to. Before that moment, the decision was theoretical. After it, the rest was logistics. The permission he’d been waiting twenty years for had never been his to give himself.

So he stopped waiting. He handed in his resignation after twenty years, and he did it without calling it a failure, because it wasn’t one. He hadn’t fallen short. He’d outgrown.

What he bet on wasn’t a plan. It was a version of himself he believed was still available. The one who gets to be dad number one for a while. Who stands in the grocery store on a Tuesday without checking his phone out of obligation. Who plays golf with his kids in July because it’s July and they’re there and that’s reason enough. “Making a difference to the people around me,” he told me, “and spending my time with people I want to.” Simple sentence. Hard-won sentence.

Matt didn’t wait for the decision to become obvious, or inevitable, or blessed by everyone around him. He had a wife who saw him clearly, and he let it matter. He let himself be known. Then he moved.

There’s a version of your life where the loose ends stay loose, and next year stays next year, and the Jeep is always almost ready. That version is available. Plenty of people are living it right now, telling themselves the timing isn’t right.

Matt Blaylock decided to find out what the other one felt like.

So let me ask you what I asked him. What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Not what you should do. Not what looks right on paper. What would you actually do if the fear just wasn’t in the room — and you had the chance to do it?

Chances are, you already know. You’ve known for a while.

Imagine your life if you mustered the courage to chase it?

Welcome to the uncommon ground of N.40.

We are up to something, and

You are invited.

Lon -