Aligning With What Pulls You
In the early Countach, it’s easy to get distracted by the downstream story. People see a symbol of wealth and assume that’s the point. But the first, truer story is simpler: someone pictured a shape that wasn’t in the world yet, then kept walking toward it until the world had to deal with it. That kind of nerve is what we’re really looking at. The car is just the evidence.
A lot of what gets labeled “opulence” is simply the final stage of a long private commitment. When the work is hidden, the finished thing looks like it arrived fully formed. We forget the parts that don’t photograph well: the doubt, the revisions, the failures that teach you what the next version needs, the slow accumulation of skill, and the stubborn decision to keep going once the excitement wears off. By the time it becomes iconic, it feels inevitable. Up close, at the beginning, it never feels that way.
That matters because most people who underestimate themselves are using the wrong yardstick. They judge their ability by outcomes they can show other people. They treat recognition as proof of function. Taoism pushes back on that. It reminds you that the most powerful forces in the world often do their work quietly. Water doesn’t make speeches about carving stone. It simply keeps moving, and time does the rest. In the same way, the creative current in a person doesn’t always show up as public art or a business or an object anyone would call impressive. It often shows up as persistence, as the ability to shape a mess into something workable, as the courage to revise your own life when it’s easier to stay stuck.
If you look at it through that lens, the Countach becomes a useful mirror. It isn’t telling you to chase luxury. It’s pointing to the upstream posture that made the luxury possible: attention, imagination, and follow-through. The distance between an idea and a real object is bridged by ordinary days stacked on top of each other. That is the part people rarely praise, even though it is the only part that actually creates anything.
Taoism also keeps the ego out of it. It doesn’t ask you to hype yourself into action; it asks you to get honest about where the current is trying to take you. Most of us can feel it when something is calling for our effort. We feel it as restlessness, or as a recurring thought we keep returning to, or as irritation with the gap between who we are and who we know we could become. The problem is that we often meet that feeling with avoidance. We wait until it feels safe. We wait until the plan is perfect. We wait until we can guarantee we won’t be embarrassed. Meanwhile the current keeps pressing, and the pressure turns into fatigue, cynicism, or that dull sense that life is happening elsewhere.
So the practical move here is plain, almost unimpressive. Pick the idea you keep circling, the one that keeps returning even when you try to ignore it. Reduce it to a first step that can be done today without fanfare. Write the first paragraph. Make the first sketch. Clear the bench. Send the message. Do one small piece of real work that commits you to motion. Taoism would call that alignment: meeting the direction your life is already leaning toward instead of fighting it.
Over time, people will see the finished thing and attach whatever story they want to it. They’ll call it luck, or genius, or privilege, or glamour. That’s fine. You’ll know what actually happened. You listened for what was true, and you moved with it long enough for it to take shape.