"If you don't ask the question, the answer is always no." Glenn Rieker

Twenty years ago I put three words on a license plate and drove away. I wasn't launching a movement or building a brand. I just knew that the question "what if" was the one I kept asking myself every time I was about to do something uncomfortable, something new, something that scared me just enough to be worth doing. So I bolted it to the front and back of my truck where I'd see it in parking lots and other drivers would see it in traffic, and I figured if it meant something to me, maybe it would mean something to somebody else.

It does.

Eventually it moved off the plate and onto the front of my work shirts. That's when things got interesting. I can't get through a grocery store checkout without the person behind the register reading it out loud — not asking about it, just saying it, like they're trying it on for size. What If U. Same thing at Home Depot. A trailhead parking lot. A gas station in the middle of nowhere. They read it, they pause, and then they tell me something. A guy tells me it's what he says to himself before every race. A woman in the cereal aisle tells me it's what she asked herself before leaving a job she'd had for twenty years. A kid at the register just nods slowly and says yeah.

That's the conversation I was hoping to start. Still having it.