Two Steps Ahead by Jonathan Anthony Burkett is coming soon. Here is the first chapter, free.
Nobody claps for the person who took one step today.
There is no crowd on the sidewalk when you get out of bed after a night you thought would never end. Nobody hands you a trophy for making one phone call you were afraid to make, or for paying one bill, or for keeping your mouth shut when everything in you wanted to explode. The world celebrates finish lines. It almost never notices footsteps.
But I have learned that footsteps are where a life is actually made.
I called the song Two Steps. It sits on my EP Life As I Know It, which came out in 2024, and I made it with Michael Pashalian. It is not the loudest song I have ever put out, and it is not the one with the biggest message on the surface. But if you asked me which song carries the way I really live, I would point you to that one. The idea underneath it is simple. Progress is progress, no matter how small. Keep moving forward, one step at a time.
That is what this book is about. Not giant leaps. Not overnight success. Steps. And the kind of thinking that keeps you a little bit ahead of what is trying to pull you down.
I did not learn to walk forward in a straight line. Most of us don’t.
I was born in Florida on February 1, 1987. When I was small, I lived with my grandparents in Jamaica, and those were happy years. I want to say that clearly before I say anything else, because a lot of my story is heavy, and I never want the heavy parts to erase the good ones. My grandparents had hopes for me. I can still feel those hopes. They are part of the reason I keep putting one foot in front of the other today.
Around the age of six, I moved back to the United States to live with my mother and a man I called my father. The path changed under my feet. My mother neglected me and abused me, with her hands and with her words, for years. I grew up feeling unloved and unwanted. I was told I had no future. When you hear that enough times as a child, it stops sounding like an opinion and starts sounding like a map. It tells you where you are allowed to go and where you are not.
I had a mental breakdown in elementary school. At fourteen I had my first major seizure. Around that same age I was sleeping on the streets, in cars and in parks. I lived with seizures and hallucinations from a brain disorder that was tied to stress and anxiety. On Monday, January 30, 2006, I went into brain surgery feeling defeated, not even sure I wanted to come out the other side.
I am telling you all of this in the first chapter for one reason. When I say small steps matter, I am not saying it from a comfortable chair. I am saying it as someone who, for long stretches of his life, could not see more than one step ahead. Sometimes I could not even see that far. I just knew I had to move my feet.
But I did come out the other side. A hospital worker named Marise supported me through that time, and I have never forgotten what it meant to have someone stand with me when I could barely stand with myself. The surgery succeeded. Afterward, I made a decision not to give up. That decision did not fix my life overnight. What it did was turn me around so that I was facing forward. From there, the only thing left to do was walk.
That is where Two Steps comes from. Not from a theory. From a life.
When I think about what Two Steps means, I think about the difference between running and walking.
Running is what we want to do. We want to sprint out of our pain, sprint into our dreams, sprint past everyone who doubted us. And sometimes life does give us a burst of speed. But most of the time, the road is too long for running. If you try to sprint a road that long, you collapse halfway and decide you were never built for the trip.
Walking is different. Walking is humble. Walking says, I may not get there today, but I am not standing still. Walking is what you do when you have decided to arrive no matter how long it takes.
The song is about that decision. It is about looking at the small thing you did today and refusing to call it nothing. It is about understanding that two steps forward is still forward, even when you wanted twenty. It is about the quiet dignity of a person who keeps going when nobody is watching.
There is another layer to it for me, and it is the reason this book is called Two Steps Ahead. A child who grows up the way I grew up learns to watch. You learn to read a room before you walk into it. You learn to hear the tone in a voice before the words land. You learn to think about what is coming next, because what is coming next might hurt. That kind of alertness was born out of fear. But over the years, I have been learning to turn it into something better. Not fear, but foresight. Not looking over my shoulder, but looking down the road.
So the song holds two lessons at once. Keep stepping, even when the steps are small. And think ahead, so that your steps are taking you somewhere instead of just keeping you busy.
Here is something I want you to hold onto. Small does not mean unimportant.
We live in a time where everything is a highlight. People post the finished house, not the years of saving. They post the wedding, not the arguments they worked through. They post the book launch, not the nights of staring at a blank page. If you compare your daily steps to other people’s highlights, your steps will always look tiny. And you will start to believe tiny means worthless.
It doesn’t.
Think about what a footstep actually is. It is a small movement that shifts your whole weight forward. You cannot take a step halfway. Your body commits. Every real step, no matter how short, carries all of you a little closer to somewhere new.
That is what small progress is. It is you, committing your whole weight to something better, even if only a few inches at a time.
There is one more thing about steps that I want you to see. A step is not the same as motion. You can be busy all day and never take a single step. You can run in place, scroll for hours, argue with the same person about the same thing, and worry until you are exhausted, and at the end of it you are standing exactly where you started. A real step moves you. It changes your position, even a little. When I talk about small progress, I am not talking about staying busy. I am talking about the small, honest moves that actually shift where you stand.
Think of a young woman I’ll call Aisha. She is twenty-three, working a job she does not love, and she wants to go to nursing school. Every time she looks at the whole path, the applications, the prerequisites, the cost, the years, she freezes. It feels like standing at the bottom of a mountain in flip-flops. So she does nothing, and every month that she does nothing, she feels a little worse about herself.
Then one Sunday night, instead of looking at the whole mountain, she asks herself a smaller question. What is one thing I can do this week? She decides to look up the prerequisite classes at her local community college. That is all. Just look them up. The next week she calls and asks one question about enrollment. The week after, she fills out one form.
None of those steps would impress anyone on the internet. But six months later, Aisha is sitting in her first class. Nobody saw the steps. Everybody sees the result. The steps are what made it real.
I am not telling you Aisha’s story because her path will be your path. I am telling it because the shape is the same for all of us. The big change you want is made of small moves you are probably tempted to dismiss.
People sometimes think songs are just entertainment. For me, music has always been a way of telling the truth when talking was not enough.
I founded Upstormed Records and started releasing music, including One Life with the reggae artist Ambelique back in 2014. Over the years, I kept coming back to the same message in different forms. Change is hard but necessary. Keep moving forward. Never give up on your dreams. My music is hip hop and soul, and those genres have always been about real life. They make room for struggle and hope in the same breath.
By the time Two Steps came around, that message had become less of a theme and more of a practice. I was not just singing about moving forward. I was trying to live it in the most practical ways.
Look at the rest of my life and you will see the same pattern. I do not have a high school diploma or a GED. I have wanted to go back to school, and I have felt overwhelmed by it. I tried to build stability through steady work and saving, and then mistakes cost me a job. That was a hard fall. After it, I made a choice to write, partly to build a better future and partly to honor the hopes my grandparents had for me.
I did not write a whole library in one night. I wrote one page, then another. Eventually that became my memoir, Neglected But Undefeated, published through Upstormed. There are also the Friends 2 Lovers novels, The Unthinkable, Closed Doors Open, and Unexpected Consequences, and Fighting To Become Champions. Since then, more Friends 2 Lovers books, and One Life, and Abuse and Betrayal. I also run Upstormed LLC, with online stores and blogs. Today I call myself an author, an entrepreneur, a poet and a music artist.
I do not list those things to impress you. I list them because every one of them started as a small step that did not look like much at the time. A paragraph. A rough idea for a hook. A first product page. A first post.
Writing did something else for me too, something I did not expect. Writing about my mother helped me forgive her and come to terms with my past. That did not happen in one afternoon either. It happened sentence by sentence. Every time I put a memory on the page, I was taking a step away from the pain controlling me and a step toward understanding it. Forgiveness, for me, was not a door I walked through once. It was a path I walked a little further down every time I sat down to write.
I want you to know that, because some of the most important progress you will ever make will not show up on any résumé. Nobody will see it. It will happen inside you, one honest step at a time.
That is how a song became a way of living for me. It is not a slogan I sing once and forget. It is the rhythm I try to walk to every day.
I want to say more about the “ahead” part, because it matters, and because it can go wrong.
When you grow up in a house where you never knew what was coming, your mind learns to stay on alert. You scan. You predict. You prepare for the worst. In some ways that skill kept me alive. But if you never learn to put it down, it can turn into a life of constant anxiety. You end up so busy watching for danger that you never actually walk anywhere.
There is a difference between being alert and being afraid. Afraid looks back over your shoulder at everything that hurt you. Alert looks forward down the road at what you are building and asks, what do I need to be ready for?
Think of a man I’ll call Kofi. He grew up with very little, and he has carried a fear of losing everything for most of his adult life. He works hard, but he cannot enjoy anything, because he is always waiting for the floor to drop out. When a coworker gets a little more attention, Kofi assumes he is about to be let go. When his car makes a new noise, he assumes it will cost more than he has. He is always thinking ahead, but it is the wrong kind of thinking. It is fear dressed up as planning.
One day Kofi sits down and does something different. Instead of imagining every disaster, he picks one real concern, his car, and asks a practical question. What is one step I can take this month so that if the car needs work, I am not caught off guard? He decides to set aside a small amount from each paycheck into a separate account just for repairs. He also asks a friend who knows cars to listen to the noise with him.
That is the healthy version of two steps ahead. Kofi is still alert. He is still thinking about what could go wrong. But now his foresight is producing a step, not just a knot in his stomach.
Part of how I learned that difference was by getting help. Over the years I worked with a psychiatrist, a psychologist, therapists and counselors, and I took anger management classes. I did not walk into any of those rooms with everything figured out. I walked in hurting and confused. But every appointment was a step. Every honest conversation was a step. Some days the only progress I made was showing up and telling the truth about how I felt. Looking back, those were not small days at all. They were the days that taught me I could aim my alertness at the future instead of letting it chain me to the past.
If you have been thinking about talking to a counselor, a doctor or a pastor, and you keep putting it off, I want to tell you that making that appointment counts. It is not weakness. It is one of the wisest steps a person can take.
I am still learning this myself. The alertness that kept me safe as a kid is a gift if I aim it in the right direction. Pointed backward, it keeps me trapped. Pointed forward, it helps me plan. Throughout this book, we will keep coming back to that difference.
I am a Christian, and I want my story to show the mercy of God. When I look back over the path I have walked, I do not see a man who pulled himself up by his own strength. I see a man who was carried more times than he can count, and who was given strength for one more step when he had nothing left.
The Bible says, “The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way.” I love that verse because it talks about steps, not leaps. God is not only in the big moments. He is in the ordinary footsteps, the ones nobody sees. He orders them. He delights in them.
There is another verse I come back to: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” Notice it says a lamp unto my feet. Not a floodlight over the whole road. A lamp gives you enough light to see the next step. Sometimes that is all we get. And sometimes that is all we need.
If you have been waiting to see the whole road before you start walking, I want to gently tell you that you may never see it. Most of us don’t. Most of us get just enough light for the next step, and then the next one, and then the next. Faith is walking anyway.
Think of an older woman I’ll call Quiana. Her husband passed away after many years of marriage, and for months she could barely leave the house. Her church friends kept inviting her to things, and she kept saying no. She did not have a plan to feel better. She did not even believe she could. But one morning, she decided she would walk to the end of her street and back. That was all she prayed for strength to do.
The next day she did it again. A week later she walked to the corner store. A month later she sat in the back row at church for the first time since the funeral. She still cried. She still missed him. But she was moving again. Looking back, she would tell you that God did not give her the whole healing at once. He gave her enough light for the end of the street.
I think about people like Quiana when I am tempted to look down on my own progress. If God can be in a walk to the end of the street, He can be in whatever small step you are facing today. You do not need to earn His help by taking big steps first. You can bring Him the small ones. You can bring Him the shaky ones. You can even bring Him the days you could not take a step at all, and ask for strength to try again tomorrow. His mercy is not measured by the length of your stride.
I do not want this chapter to stay on the page. I want it to walk out into your week with you. So here are a few practical things you can do in the next seven days.
Name the road. Write down one area of your life where you want to move forward. Not ten areas. One. It could be your health, your money, a relationship, your faith, your education, your work, or a dream you set down years ago. Name it plainly.
Shrink the step. Now ask yourself, what is the smallest real step I could take on this road this week? Make it so small it almost feels silly. Look something up. Make one call. Write one paragraph. Walk for ten minutes. Pray for five. If you can’t imagine doing it, it is too big. Shrink it again.
Do it, then write it down. When you take the step, write it down somewhere you can see it. A notebook, a note on your phone, a piece of paper on the fridge. Write the date and what you did. You are building a record of footprints, and later on, when you feel like you are going nowhere, that record will tell you the truth.
Look one step ahead. After you take your step, ask one forward-looking question. What might get in my way next week? Maybe it is a busy schedule, a person who discourages you, or your own habit of quitting when things get boring. You do not need to solve it yet. Just see it coming. That is what it means to start thinking two steps ahead.
Tell one person. Find one person you trust and tell them the step you took. Not to brag. Just to make it real outside your own head. If you don’t have that person right now, tell God. Say it out loud. A step spoken is harder to forget.
Expect a stumble. Somewhere in this week, or the next, you will probably miss a step. You will forget, get tired, or get pulled away by something urgent. Decide right now what you will do when that happens. I suggest something simple: no shame, no quitting, just the next step as soon as you can take it. A missed day is not the end of a road. It is just a pause in the walking.
Refuse to call it nothing. At the end of the week, when the little voice in your head says what you did was too small to matter, answer it. Say, that was progress. Progress is progress. Then plan the next step.
If you have been carrying heavy things, the kind of heaviness that makes you wonder if any of this is worth it, please hear me. Reach out to someone today. A doctor, a counselor, a pastor, a friend. If you are in the United States and you are thinking about not wanting to live, call or text 988 right now. That call is a step too. It may be the most important one you ever take.
Here is how we will walk together through these pages.
In the first part, we will stay close to the ground. We will talk about surviving the hardest seasons when all you can do is the next thing. We will talk about measuring how far you have come, about setbacks that knock you back a step, about fear and procrastination, and about what recovery asks of us, including after my brain surgery.
In the second part, we will talk about thinking ahead. Staying alert without living afraid. Seeing what is coming. Knowing your own patterns. Protecting your name. Being wise with your money and your health. Staying ahead of anger before it gets ahead of you.
In the third part, we will talk about strategy, the practical side of building a life. Real goals. Backup plans. Learning faster than life changes. Choosing your moves. Thinking like a builder, and staying humble while you stay sharp.
And in the last part, we will talk about walking it out. Walking with God. Walking with other people. Teaching the next generation. Catching up when you fall behind. Playing the long game, and looking back so you can look forward.
I will not pretend to have every answer. I am still walking too. But I have learned some things the hard way, and I would rather you learn them a little easier.
When I think back to that kid who was told he had no future, who slept in cars and parks, who went into surgery not sure he wanted to wake up, I wish I could reach him. I would not give him a speech. I would just tell him this. You don’t have to see the whole road. You just have to take the next step. And then the one after that.
That is the song. That is the book. That is the life.
So lace up whatever shoes you have, even if they are worn out. Look down at your feet. Pick one direction. And take one step. Then, when you are ready, take two.
To be continued in Two Steps Ahead, coming soon.
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