Blogpost, self-reliance

Ready Player One

Pete Huryk

It’s not one of my favorite movies, but Ready Player One has stuck with me—less because of the film itself and more because of how I first watched it.

In the backyard of my son’s friend, his parents had set up an outdoor movie theater. For a child of the ’80s, it hit two notes at once: nostalgia and a glimpse into a future that suddenly didn’t feel so far away. Virtual worlds, constant connection, the pull of the screen—it all feels a little closer now than it did then.

Which makes the title linger: Ready Player One.

What if that’s not a question, but a directive?

As I’ve written before, the first person in your life is you. You don’t get to step outside that perspective. You move through the world the same way a player moves through a game—eyes forward, reacting, adjusting, making choices in real time.

But here’s the difference: in a game, you’re given tools. You can see your health. You have a map. You can pause.

In real life, you don’t.

We move forward without a clear read on ourselves. No meter telling us when we’re close to burnout. No notification that we’re running low on patience, focus, or energy. And no pause button when things start speeding up.

So “ready” can’t just be a question—something we hope to answer when the moment arrives. It has to be a verb. Something we practice.

Because the world isn’t slowing down. If anything, it’s becoming more chaotic, more demanding, more immersive. And while technology gives us access to almost everything, it also tempts us to disappear into it. The “Oasis” isn’t science fiction anymore—it’s just… life.

And yet, the ending of the movie still holds up. At some point, you have to log off.

Not completely. Not forever. But intentionally.

Because no matter how advanced things become, we’re still human. Connection still matters. Friends, family, love—those don’t scale the way technology does. They take time. Presence. Attention.

And those are exactly the things that get stretched thin.

So part of “readying yourself” is knowing your limits. Knowing when to step away. Knowing how much you can carry before it starts to carry you.

Anxiety is up. The pace is relentless. It would be nice if life came with guardrails—something soft to keep us from hitting too hard. But that’s never really been the deal.

Instead, we prepare. Not perfectly, but intentionally.

Boy Scouts of America got it right in a simple way: Be prepared.

I’m a long way from merit badges and handkerchiefs, but the idea still holds.

Not “Are you ready?”

Ready yourself.

The game is already in motion.

Let’s play.

Blogpost, self-reliance

Barbers and Mechanics

Pete Huryk

When I moved to Virginia from New Jersey, one of the most upsetting things was leaving my barber behind. Mand’s Barbershop in Hackettstown was the best find the year prior to my move. The owner, Amanda Sunshine, cut my hair perfectly, is a great conversationalist, remembers exactly what I want done, plays good music, and is just all-around awesome. For the first few years, I delayed haircuts just to travel back to New Jersey — literally for a haircut. I’ve found people who’ve done a passable job since, but no one has replaced Mand’s. Finding a barber takes time because it comes down to trust.

In a few months, I’ll be moving again. The search for a barber continues, but this time I’m leaving behind a good mechanic — Ed’s Automotive in Lynchburg. That may be an even bigger trust factor. With modern cars, the possibility of being “taken for a ride” always exists. I was glad to find Ed’s. They fixed a problem another mechanic may have created. But once again, I have to leave that trust behind for a new zip code. Even with all of today’s technology, you can’t take everything with you.

The essence of trust is consistency, not perfection. No one delivers perfect results — not barbers, not mechanics, not spouses, not colleagues. Trust is built in the ordinary repetitions. Showing up. Doing the work. Owning the mistake. Doing it again tomorrow.

Most of the world measures everything in dollars. But money isn’t the only currency we trade in. Trust is harder to calculate, but far more valuable. You can’t Venmo it. You can’t download it. And when you move, you can’t pack it in a box and take it with you.

I can’t take my barber or my mechanic with me. But wherever I go, I’ll be there. And at that point, it’s on me.

It’s my job to build trust. Not just look for it.

Day by day. Moment by moment.

You have to build it again.

Maybe that’s the point.

Pete

Blogpost, self-reliance

Results Are On Layaway!

Pete Huryk

The concept is old. Not many stores do it anymore with the rise of credit cards and Buy Now, Pay Later arrangements. Still, I remember it well. My mother at Jamesway (a Walmart-like store, for those unfamiliar) putting an item on “layaway.” The store would hold the item for you while you paid it off over time. You didn’t get it until the final payment was made.

By modern standards, it may seem antiquated or even a bit strange, but it was actually a far more sensible way to make a big purchase. The incentive to finish paying was obvious—you didn’t have the thing yet.

Despite stores abandoning the system, that’s still how results work.

Results are on layaway until they’re paid for.

Life, unfortunately, is not a fully reputable vendor. Payment doesn’t guarantee the exact result you want. Sometimes it feels like a strange mix of layaway and lottery, effort and chance. It can be infuriating. It can also be exhilarating. What makes it harder is that our consumer culture of “buy now, pay later” has quietly seeped into how we think about everything else.

The idea of putting in regular—sometimes daily—effort toward a desired outcome feels foreign. People want what they want, on their terms, and as quickly as possible. Layaway feels like yesterday’s news.

I’m not always one for nostalgia, but this is one idea that deserves a comeback—not in commerce, but in mindset. In how we think about effort, patience, and reward. There are no guarantees, but recognizing that progress usually follows a reliable path matters more than ever. In far too many ways, we’ve maxed out our credit.

It’s time to put payment first again.

Put this aside for me—I’ve got to get to work.

Pete

Blogpost, self-reliance

Looking Past the Headlights

Pete Huryk

Driving at night is a pretty dicey affair when you think about it. You’re moving forward at speed with not much more than thirty yards of vision and a yellow or white line to guide you. At the same time, complete strangers are coming at you in the opposite direction with their own ton or more of metal and plastic. It’s a scenario full of real danger. And yet, we look past the oncoming headlights and fix our eyes on the destination. More often than not, we get where we meant to go. The limited sight distance and the doom three feet away don’t stop us.

Take us out of that context—away from paved roads and traffic signals—and we freeze. Paralyzed. All we see are the headlights of doom as we chart a course toward a dream. The distance feels too far. The next steps too uncertain. Our foot is surgically attached to the brake pedal. Forward motion seems reckless. Better to stay here, in the known.

The problem with standing still is that you can’t. The world is moving whether you notice it or not. Time, relationships, money—pick your metric. Opportunities are coming, and if you’re not ready to meet them, they’ll pass you by. So put your foot on the accelerator and look past the headlights in front of you. The danger you’ve built up in your head around chasing that dream is far less treacherous than driving at night.

Get in gear and go.

Pete

Blogpost, self-reliance

IOUs, Wimpy and Simplifying Money

Pete Huryk

I’m not really certain what it was written for, but I remember the big letters on a slip of paper: IOU.

Maybe I’d borrowed a few dollars from a friend. Maybe a teacher had loaned me a pencil and wanted it back. My memory is pretty good, but it’s not perfect. Clearly my spelling and grammar still needed some work too. But the idea itself was clear enough. An IOU. An I owe you.

That simple concept is the building block on which our entire monetary system is built: debt.

That idea came roaring back recently during a conversation with my son about Scott Galloway’s notion of men creating “surplus value.” I haven’t read the book, but I’ve listened to enough interviews to understand the point. Give more than you take. Produce more than you consume. Contribute something of value that didn’t exist before you showed up.

In monetary terms, creating surplus value means that someone owes you something. That “something” is what money was meant to represent in the first place.

Pulling in the opposite direction is J. Wellington Wimpy from Popeye the Sailor Man. His immortal line was that he would “gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” Wimpy isn’t interested in surplus value. He’s interested in the now. He wants the benefit immediately and pushes the obligation off into the future. That’s credit. Getting before you’ve given. Consumption untethered from contribution.

Between those two simple ideas—IOU and Wimpy—there’s a lot to be learned about what money actually is, and how far we’ve drifted from its original purpose.

Money was meant to be a systemic IOU. A marker that you had already provided goods or services to someone else. You could then pass that IOU along to another person in exchange for what you needed. If you consistently created surplus value in the world, you accumulated surplus money. If you didn’t have enough in the moment, you could borrow—paying a premium in interest for the privilege of consuming before contributing.

On a small scale, the logic is intuitive and fair. You mow a lawn. You teach a class. You fix a car. Value is created. An IOU is issued. Trust is maintained.

As the scale expands, things get murkier. Someone like Howard Schultz, for example, has created surplus value that touches millions of lives every day. Jobs, products, routines, communities. Quantifying that impact is difficult, but few would argue that it exists. The system is supposed to reward that kind of value creation proportionally.

Where the tension really shows up is at the national level.

Our government has repeatedly devalued our collective IOUs while playing Wimpy on the international stage. Promising Tuesday. Borrowing endlessly. Printing claims on value that hasn’t yet been created—and may never be. When that happens, the IOUs held by ordinary people quietly lose meaning. The surplus value they worked to create gets diluted, siphoned off, and often frittered away.

It becomes harder and harder for the average person to get ahead, not because they aren’t producing value, but because the measuring stick keeps shrinking. You can do everything “right” and still feel like you’re running uphill on loose gravel.

Money, at its core, is a story we agree to believe. An IOU that says, I have contributed, and I will be able to draw from that contribution later. When that story breaks down—when IOUs are issued faster than value is created—the trust erodes. And without trust, the paper is just paper.

Maybe that’s why that old slip with “IOU” written on it sticks with me. It wasn’t just about owing someone a pencil. It was a lesson, early and imperfect, about responsibility, reciprocity, and keeping your word.

Tuesday eventually comes. The question is whether the hamburger ever gets paid for.

Be valuable today!

Pete

Blogpost, posh, SoccerLifeBalance

How’s It Going to Be? (Post Ferguson Era)

Pete Huryk

It’s one of those places in time I can return to with absolute clarity. I was sitting on an airplane flying back from Europe in the summer of 1998. My best friend and I had spent almost a month roaming through England, Spain, Germany, and France, with the World Cup as our backdrop. We went to five matches. Traveled hundreds of miles by train and metro. Had my friend’s passport stolen. Filed a police report in Spanish. Befriended two Australian backpackers. Got nudged by one riot cop. And, for the first time in my life, popped a soccer ball. We were exhausted, sunburned, and broke—but happy to be heading home. Mostly.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, with my CD Walkman resting on my knee, I listened to “How’s It Going to Be?” by Third Eye Blind. The song framed what I already knew was coming: the beginning of the end of a years-long, on-again-off-again relationship. During that month in Europe we’d managed to speak only once, and our pattern was familiar—every six months, a breakup, followed by the realization that life felt better together than apart. But on that plane ride, something in me knew this time was different. And when I got home, I was right. No reunion. Just an ending. And the long quiet question of how things would be moving forward.

At that point in my life, I had no idea who Peterborough United were. In one pub, a fellow patron ranted to my friend and me for twenty minutes about the villainy of Millwall, but beyond that my knowledge of lower-league football was almost nonexistent.

Fast forward nearly three decades and a lot has changed, but I find myself processing another separation from an on-again-off-again figure in my life. Darren Ferguson is gone again, and this time—strictly in the managerial sense—I believe it’s the last time. As much as I wanted him to stay, it feels like, for one reason or another, it had to happen. Just as it did with that old relationship, something in the way things worked together simply stopped working.

As I’ve written before, Ferguson was more than the manager. His brand of football set the tone for who Peterborough United have become in the modern era: forward-thinking, fearless, often outscoring everyone in sight. Darragh in the owner’s box and Darren on the touchline became the intermittent winning formula. A rhythm. A cycle. Something dependable even when it wasn’t permanent.

Now that it’s over, I’m left with reverence—and sadness—because of how it ended. My gut tells me Darren will manage again and lift another club to promotion. If that happens, I’ll find myself wondering whether things could have gone differently here. It’s possible that the only road to success—for both the POSH and for Ferguson—was a diverging one.

For now, all I can do is hope that Luke Williams can pull off what no one at Manchester United has managed yet: replacing a club legend.

Up the POSH!

Pete

Blogpost, self-reliance

Believe In The Nothing

Pete Huryk

For many people, it’s a problem. Especially now. Our world is full of quick routes to small prizes. A short video gives us a hit of superiority because someone somewhere fell flat on their face. A quick drive to the coffee shop delivers our non-prescription drug of choice and a sense of handcrafted individuality (see: You’ve Got Mail). Everything is laid out in front of us like a merchant at the feelings flea market. The action and the result sit so close together that we almost forget to ask whether the juice is worth the squeeze. And since it’s all pre-squeezed, we don’t get any of the fiber anyway.

So my humble reader, I’m asking you—along with myself—to believe in the nothing.

The really important things in this world almost never show up instantly. When you go to the gym or eat a healthy meal or choose the right thing instead of the easy thing, there’s usually nothing. You’re not suddenly fitter or glowing with virtue. The city isn’t handing you a key that probably doesn’t open anything anyway. It’s like brushing your teeth: minty feeling aside, nothing looks different after one brush. The key is the consistency. Believing that if you keep walking the path of “nothing,” you eventually arrive somewhere that changes everything.

It’s a tall order, because the world is engineered to short-circuit your brain at every turn. Grubby mitts are always reaching for your time, your attention, and all the other currencies you carry—because yes, money isn’t the only one. That’s why I’m begging you to believe in the nothing. Do the things that will absolutely work if you’ll simply see them through. Trust the quiet, the unremarkable, the days where it feels like nothing is happening.

Because nothing is exactly where the good stuff begins.

There’s nothing to it.

Pete

Blogpost, self-reliance, SoccerLifeBalance

Back from the Sideline, Soccer Dads Need to Become Playmakers

Pete Huryk

In soccer, the best players don’t control every moment. They create space. They anticipate. They make the people around them better. The playmaker isn’t the loudest or always the flashiest, he’s the one who sees the whole field and moves the game forward with intention. That’s what great dads do. They watch, they guide, and when the moment is right, they can change everything.

For a while now, though, a lot of dads have been stuck on the sideline. Watching, waiting, wondering how to re-enter the game. The world has shifted under their feet. The old playbook doesn’t quite fit anymore. In the wake of cultural reckonings; from #MeToo to questions about toxic masculinity. Many men have gone quiet. Some out of guilt, others out of confusion. What does it mean to lead without dominating? To protect without controlling? To care without losing yourself?

It’s not an easy set of questions. But maybe that’s the point. This generation of dads has a chance to model a new kind of strength: one that trades authority for empathy, volume for vision, and reaction for responsibility. The game hasn’t changed as much as the way we need to play it.

Fatherhood has always been part construction site, part classroom. We build, we teach, we fix. Sometimes we do it well, sometimes clumsily. The past few years have reminded us that brute force and certainty aren’t the same as wisdom. A lot of men have been told to sit down, listen, and reassess. Honestly, in some cases that was necessary. But now it’s time to take what was learned on the bench and put it into play.

Because the world doesn’t need quieter men. It needs better communicators. Not withdrawn spectators, but intentional playmakers. Men who understand when to press, when to pass, and when to let someone else take the shot.

Soccer dads know that feeling all too well. The helplessness of watching from the sidelines as their kid struggles through a tough game. The urge to fix everything is powerful. But the real lesson isn’t about control; it’s about trust. About giving space to grow while staying close enough to catch them if they fall. That balance between patience and presence might just be what our culture is missing most.

We don’t need men who dominate. We need men who direct. Men who don’t mistake power for purpose or silence for humility. We need dads who understand that their example off the field matters far more than their commentary from the sideline.

So yes, maybe Soccer Dads can help redirect the world, not through lectures or louder voices, but through consistent, grounded leadership. Through showing up. Through making the right pass at the right time.

Because the truth is, the world doesn’t just need to be saved, it needs to be played well.
And it’s time for the dads to get back in the game.

“I love you guys so very much, on three!”

Pete

Blogpost, self-reliance, SoccerLifeBalance

The Utility Man (We’ll Miss Him)

Pete Huryk

Today I received some sad news: a former player passed away. It’s always tough to hear when these things happen. As a coach and teacher, my hope has always been to help propel young people toward better lives. It hurts deeply when one of those lives is cut short.

This young man was what we often call a “utility player.” He wasn’t a regular starter. Most of the time he filled in at center back, but he was athletic enough to step into almost any position and hold his own. Soccer wasn’t even his first sport, yet he embraced his role and carried it with pride. He was the teammate every coach needs: willing, reliable, and unselfish.

His passing has me reflecting on the idea of utility. Not just in sports, but in life, especially for young men today. In many ways, being useful runs deep in the male identity. Yet in our current culture, it sometimes feels like that desire to be of service gets overlooked, or worse, dismissed. Between the labels of “toxic masculinity” and caricatures of outdated strength, many men are left wondering where they fit. Sweeping generalizations about half the population rarely capture the truth and often cause harm. I know plenty of men who simply want to contribute: to their families, their friends, the women in their lives, and society as a whole.

That’s why this loss hits hard. The “utility man” embodies something essential. For generations, men have stepped into roles of protection, labor, and sacrifice. Often trading their own well-being for the good of others. While the world has changed and those old trades may not be demanded in the same way, the core desire to be useful has not disappeared.

Men are useful. And most of them want to be useful (of utility). The utility man isn’t just a placeholder; he’s the glue that holds a team or a community, together. My hope is that more men are seen for the value they bring before they’re gone.

Today, I’ll remember not just the utility man on the pitch, but as a reminder of the dignity and worth in being willing to step in wherever needed. We will miss him.

Be useful today!

Pete

Blogpost, posh, SoccerLifeBalance

The Top 3 Opponents for POSH This Season

Pete Huryk

The season has not gone to plan. Results define clubs, managers, and players, and right now the results simply haven’t been good enough. Huddersfield come to town this Saturday, one of the so-called “big clubs” in League One. POSH have already fallen to Cardiff and Luton—teams tipped to be near the top of the table—and the margin for error is shrinking. But beyond the fixture list and all the hoopla about who’s a heavyweight this season, Peterborough have three opponents more dangerous than any other side they’ll face.

The first opponent: TIME

Time is undefeated. Once you fall behind it, there’s no catching up. Fixtures pile up, injuries take longer to heal, and before you know it the table has moved on without you. The best you can do is stay even with it—by using it wisely, refusing to waste it, and squeezing every ounce from the moments you have. POSH don’t need to panic, but they can’t afford to drift either.

The second opponent: BELIEF

Lately, belief has been in short supply. A couple of late concessions, a missed chance here, a poor call there, and suddenly doubt creeps in. Unlike time, belief can be rebuilt—but it requires intent. A big goal, a clean sheet, even a gritty draw can flip the script. The new signings may provide a spark, but belief has to run deeper than fresh faces. It has to settle into the squad and spread through the stands until both players and fans expect results rather than hope for them.

The final opponent: FOCUS

Focus should be the easiest win, but it’s the one most under attack. Missed referee calls, restless supporters, the lure of bigger contracts elsewhere, the endless chatter online—it’s all noise. Lose focus for five minutes and a match slips away. Win the moments, though, and the matches will take care of themselves. Success will come not from chasing the grand statement but from doing the smallest things well, over and over, until they add up.

As the season wears on, I still believe Darren Ferguson is the right man to guide this side. He’s faced these invisible opponents before and knows how to rally a squad when belief wavers. His track record at POSH—multiple promotions, a knack for rebuilding squads on the fly—proves he understands the climb. With time managed wisely, belief restored, and focus sharpened, I think it’s only a matter of time before things come good.

Up the POSH!

Pete