9-WANNA BE ASSASSINS
I. THE FALL REVEALS THE FACES
I’ve been betrayed before.
Anyone who spends enough years building things eventually collects those stories. Deals that turn sideways. Partners who change their tune once the pressure rises. Friends who quietly resent the direction your life takes once it stops matching the version of you they were comfortable with. None of that surprised me anymore.
The shock came with the Big Ass Fall.
The kind where everything you thought was stable collapses at once. Projects stall out. Alliances dissolve. The noise that used to surround your name fades away and suddenly you’re standing in the quiet looking at the actual structure of your life without all the decoration around it.
That kind of fall rearranges your vision.
You start noticing who is still there when the room empties. Who stays steady when the momentum disappears. Who quietly disappears when there is nothing left to gain from standing next to you. And it was in that silence that I began to notice them clearly.
The assassins.
They weren’t hiding in dark corners like villains in a movie. Most of them had been standing in plain sight the whole time. Family members. Friends. Collaborators. People who had shared meals with me, shared ideas, shared victories. And sometimes the face staring back from the mirror.
I started calling them Wanna Be Assassins because most of them never strike clean. They rarely show up with open hostility. They smile. They encourage. They stall. They delay. They ask for one more conversation, one more meeting, one more compromise that seems harmless in the moment. And if you let that process run long enough something inside your life begins to bleed out. Not dramatically.
Slowly.
The edge that once pushed your work forward dulls a little. The standards you once protected start bending. The momentum you fought so hard to build starts leaking through cracks you didn’t even know you had.
By the time you realize what’s happening the structure you were building feels heavier than it should. And the strange part is most of the time they’re not even conscious of it. Almost like they were programmed. Their job isn’t to strike once.
Their job is to keep testing until they find you slipping.
II. HOW THEY OPERATE
The external ones become easier to recognize the longer you live.
The family member who refuses to let the old version of you die because your growth disrupts the role they assigned you years ago. The friend who laughs at your ambition because it quietly exposes how long they’ve been standing still. The collaborator who agrees with every plan until the pressure arrives and then slowly shifts the weight of responsibility back onto you.
Sometimes you even make good money with these people.That’s where the confusion begins.
Money has a way of disguising misalignment. If revenue becomes the only scoreboard you’re watching you can tolerate a surprising amount of quiet corrosion before you admit something is wrong. You tell yourself the friction is strategic. You call compromise maturity. You convince yourself that the discomfort will disappear once the next milestone arrives.
But time has a way of revealing the real cost of those arrangements. Eventually you notice that every step forward seems to require a small sacrifice of something you once considered non-negotiable. Then there is the other assassin.
The internal one.
That voice tends to arrive with much better timing because it sounds exactly like you. It knows your fears. It knows your blind spots. It knows the arguments that make compromise feel reasonable.
The version of you that ignored your gut because the check cleared. The version that called compromise strategy. The version that stayed quiet when a clean cut would have saved months of slow decay. That version of you can do more damage than any outside enemy.
Because until you admit you’ve been letting it run the room, nothing changes.
III. DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THEM
People like to laugh this subject away.
They call them haters. They treat it like background noise. They pretend that rising above it all is the same thing as understanding it.That’s a mistake.Bullies stop swinging when someone finally stands up to them. But if no one ever stands up they keep testing the boundary until they find exactly how far they can go.
Assassins operate the same way.
They test fatigue. They test ego. They test greed. They test loneliness. They test the quiet corruption that creeps into a person who begins believing their own exceptions. And they are patient.They don’t need one perfect shot.
They just need the moment where you lower your guard long enough to let them inside the perimeter.
The strange part about climbing is that altitude attracts pressure. The higher your work rises the more eyes begin to watch it. Old distortions don’t simply disappear when you evolve beyond them. They linger nearby waiting for the moment you forget the lesson that once exposed them.
If your house isn’t clean they will find the open door.
IV. THE LESSON
There’s a word I started using for the state that replaces paranoia once you’ve lived through enough of these moments.
Preparanoia.
It’s not fear. It’s awareness sharpened by experience.
When you’re aligned you notice the shift earlier. Something subtle in the tone of a conversation changes and you feel it before the words fully land. A collaboration begins to drift away from shared values and you see the fracture before the structure collapses.
You don’t explode emotionally. You don’t dramatize the break. You adjust the structure. Cleanly. But the hardest lesson sits closer to home than most people like to admit.
The biggest assassin you will ever face is the version of yourself that tolerates misalignment. The one that tells you a convenient story about why the warning signs aren’t serious yet.
Once I owned that truth things changed quickly.
I stopped romanticizing people’s potential. I stopped excusing value gaps. I stopped pretending common ground existed when it didn’t. The filter sharpened. And when the filter sharpens the number of people who can stand close to your work becomes much smaller.
V. THE BUILDER’S RESPONSE
Inside The Sacred Garage we don’t spend much time complaining about assassins.
Builders outgrow them.
Standards tighten. Discernment sharpens. Alignment becomes something you test before you build anything meaningful with another person. And if the signal feels wrong you don’t waste six months negotiating with your own instincts.
You adjust. Because anyone building something that matters will eventually be tested. Not once. Repeatedly. The question is never whether assassins exist. The real question is whether you’re still moving through the world like an easy target.
Out here slipping costs years.
And sometimes the years are the only currency you had left to spend.