At The Altar.

Sacrifice is an interesting word. The etymological meaning of the word is this “to make sacred”. This definition can help us to understand exactly what we hold to be most valuable in our life. Most of the time when we here the word sacrifice we think of heroes, soldiers or martyrs. We imagine someone giving up something valuable for something they believe to be greater than themselves. But sacrifice is not only for heroes and extraordinary people. We all sacrifice to a degree. Every decision we make requires leaving another decision behind.

Every person hopes that their sacrifice will not be in vain. We want to believe that if we give, sacrifice, suffer enough, that something great will come from it. But there is no certainty in sacrifice. If there was the world would transcend at an astronomical pace. There is always a risk that your sacrifice will not be the result of what you originally hoped for.

If the return were guaranteed it would not be much of a sacrifice.

Sacrifice is the willful surrender of something you hold valuable.

The Stoic would say to not become a slave to what destiny can take away.

The Christian would remind you that everything you possess belongs to God and always will. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

That does not mean to suffer for the sake of suffering. There is nothing noble or grandiose about pointless pain. The correct question to ask yourself is whether the thing you are sacrificing for is worthy of what you are putting on the line.

Sacrifice is putting everything you have on the altar, knowing it might burn to ash, and making the decision of whether it is worthy of the purpose it might bring.

The Safe Decision

I learned this while living in upstate New York near the Adirondack Mountains. It is one of the most beautiful places i have ever lived and the fall season is breathtaking. My Job there was becoming a nightmare. What had started as a good job and career that I thought could grow, became an increasingly hostile environment and I do not mean verbally. My contract was coming to an end and the company i was working for wanted to move me to Missouri. I would be doing the same exact work for the same exact pay. They would pay for the move and I wouldn’t miss a paycheck.

It made sense, and It was safe. Almost everyone told me to take it.

Around that time I called my brother because I wanted advice about buying some rental properties. I had been saving for years and thought real estate might be my next move to grow financially. He ignored the question entirely and instead he told me to quit my job, move to Texas and start doing the same work he was doing. It pissed me off. I wasn’t looking for someone to turn my life upside down. I wanted advice on buying property.

But the conversation opened my eyes to a new opportunity. Do I stay with the company, keep my paycheck, let them pay for me to move, and protect everything that I have been building? Or do i walk away, move to Texas, and attempt to build something that could drain all my savings and leave me empty handed? The overwhelming majority of people told me to choose security but something in me kept telling me to choose Texas. So i went.

Sometimes you have to kill the life that makes logical sense before it kills the life you were capable of living.

The Price

We moved to Texas. I shoved everything we had into a storage unit and started working the next day. We stayed with family to keep expenses down and we borrowed my brother’s car because my truck died right before we had left. I was already down a vehicle and did not have money to buy a new one. I used whatever I had to make it happen because the decision had already been made. There was no point looking back.

Within about eight months, I knew I had made a good decision. Somewhere around five to six months in I was down to the last five grand in my account but I started making the kind of money that I thought impossible to make in that span of time. The money was not the greatest return it was the way that i saw the world and how it works. The experience of this sacrifice changed how I look at security and certainty.

For years I thought I had security and valued it enormously. But security has a price tag. Sometimes you buy security with opportunity. You protect what you have so fiercely that you never discover what you could have built. My sacrifice worked but not every sacrifice does. Sacrifice is not a vending machine that when you put suffering in success comes out. As we all know sometimes the item gets stuck between the glass and we can see it but cannot touch it. This is when you get angry and shake the vending machine real hard until that machine drops what you suffered for. I did not have to do this but some of us have to get fierce.

Some men have laid down their lives for their children to inherit something better and never got to see whether their sacrifice worked. Some people walk away from the vending machine not ever receiving what they suffered for. Others have sacrificed wealth, health, careers, family, comfort, and reputation and even their lives for something they believed was greater than themselves. Some people never get to enjoy the shade of the tree they planted.

A sacrifice is not worthless because you never get to see the reward. Some things are worth suffering for even when someone else gets to receive the shade.

It Was Worth Burning

Eventually, we will be given the decision to hold onto or sacrifice something we do not want to give up. Comfort, money, security, pride, time, plans, and maybe a wonderful life. Maybe even the life we have spent years building. I am not saying to sacrifice all those things just because another road looks harder. Difficulty and suffering does not automatically create meaning and success. There is plenty of pointless suffering in this world.

Sacrifice without purpose is waste. Purpose is what makes the suffering worth carrying. That’s how I have learned to look at stress. Stress tells two stories, either you stress for something that is not worth suffering over or you stress over the things that bring purpose into your life. Learn the difference and learn it fast.

If the suffering serves nothing, change what you can quickly. But if the weight of what you are carrying has a purpose, stop being surprised that it is heavy and brings complications.

Get uncomfortable. Let the stress come. Carry the weight and know why you carry it.

Looking back, I sacrificed a secure life for an uncertain one. Thankfully, I got to see that decision pay off. But the lesson I learned was not that taking risks makes you successful. I could never grab hold of something greater without releasing what i already had. You cannot keep everything.

Eventually something has to go into the fire. So when that moment comes, make damn sure what you are sacrificing is worth the cost. Then quit looking at the sacrifice and move forward.

A man can sacrifice, and the gain from that sacrifice can be seen for thousands of years. A man can sacrifice and die never knowing what his sacrifice created. You may never live long enough to see what your suffering built, who it changed, or how far its impact reached. Make sure your sacrifice has purpose.

Don’t Sacrifice because you hate what you are leaving behind. Sacrifice for the cause of something worth potentially more than what you are giving up.

A life filled with greater purpose will always require a greater sacrifice.

I’m going to create a new word: shortcutmaxing.

Shortcutmaxing is the process of using technology, medication, money, or other people to remove as much friction from your life as possible.

Technology has made it easier than ever to do this. So have medical advancements, subscription services, delivery apps, artificial intelligence, and the seemingly endless number of things we can buy to make our lives more convenient.

Most of this is good. Making life easier is part of advancing as a society.

Still, I wonder what happens when we remove so much friction that we also remove the experiences that help us develop.

Think about something as simple as making coffee in the morning.

When we are short on time, going through the drive-through makes sense. You place the order, pick it up, and keep moving. There is nothing wrong with that.

But how often are we actually short on time, and how often do we simply not want to make the coffee ourselves?

Most of us own coffee makers. We have everything we need at home, yet we consistently choose to drive to Starbucks and have someone else make it for us. It probably tastes better than what we would make ourselves, at least at first.

But what if we spent the time learning?

We could try different beans, adjust the measurements, experiment with flavors, and eventually make a cup of coffee exactly how we like it. There is something satisfying about learning how to make something that only you can make to your exact taste.

That is a small example, but I think it points to something much larger.

We pay for DoorDash so we don’t have to cook dinner. Again, sometimes that makes perfect sense. You may have had a long day. You may genuinely not have the time.

Other times, we are paying to avoid the effort.

We miss the process of finding a recipe, choosing fresh ingredients, trying different combinations, tasting the food, and learning how to make something better the next time. We receive the meal, but we lose the opportunity to become a slightly more capable person.

The shortcut gives us the result.

It may also cost us the development hidden inside the process.

GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic have become another popular shortcut, or at least that is how some people choose to use them. These medications can be genuinely helpful, and for some people, they may be medically necessary or life-changing.

The medication can help someone lose weight, but it cannot build strength for them. It cannot spend an hour in the gym for them. It cannot create the discipline, confidence, and consistency that can come from repeatedly doing something difficult.

People can and should exercise while taking these medications. The problem begins when the medicine becomes a replacement for every other part of the process.

Taking a shot may be easier than spending an hour in the gym and watching what you eat.

Is that shortcut worth it?

For some people, yes.

For others, probably not.

The answer depends on the person, the situation, and what they are actually trying to accomplish. Losing weight may be the immediate goal, but becoming stronger, more disciplined, and more confident may be part of the opportunity.

If we only care about the number on the scale, we may miss everything else the process could have given us.

Artificial intelligence presents a similar problem.

AI can help us ask better questions, organize our thoughts, receive feedback, and work through ideas. It can remove tedious work and give people access to capabilities they may not have had before.

That is incredible.

It can also allow us to shortcut the thinking process entirely.

People can generate an entire blog post in seconds and publish it without adding much of themselves. When you read it, you can usually feel the absence. The words may be grammatically correct. The paragraphs may be organized. The point may even make sense.

Still, something feels inauthentic.

What did that shortcut cost the person who published it?

They received the finished blog post, but they missed the creative work required to produce it. They did not have to wrestle with the idea, decide what they believed, find the right words, or sit with the discomfort of not knowing where the piece was going.

Those frustrating parts of writing are often where the actual thinking happens.

The same thing can happen when we use AI to make personal decisions or respond to every uncomfortable situation.

How should I handle this?

What should I say?

Am I right to feel this way?

What should I do next?

There is nothing wrong with asking for another perspective. The danger is allowing that perspective to replace your own judgment.

Eventually, you may stop trusting yourself. You begin to feel as though every decision needs to be confirmed before you can act. Instead of asking yourself what you believe or what you want to do, you immediately reach for the machine.

The tool that was supposed to make you more capable can slowly make you dependent.

Smartphones have created another version of this.

We are more connected to one another than ever, yet many of us struggle to walk up and start a conversation. Sending a message is easier than meeting someone for coffee. A quick text is easier than a phone call. A birthday notification is easier than remembering someone’s birthday on your own.

We remain in contact, but contact is not always connection.

Again, none of these tools are inherently bad.

DoorDash is not bad. Starbucks is not bad. Medication is not bad. AI is not bad. Smartphones are not bad.

The question is whether we are using these things intentionally or using them to avoid every form of discomfort.

Are you ordering food because you genuinely do not have time to cook, or because you do not want to make the effort?

Are you using AI to sharpen your thinking, or to avoid thinking?

Are you texting because it is the best way to reach someone, or because an actual conversation feels uncomfortable?

Are you paying for convenience so you can direct your time toward something more important, or are you simply trying to remove every challenge from your day?

We get to choose which parts of our lives should be easier.

Some friction is pointless. It wastes our time and keeps us from doing work that matters. Removing it gives us more room to focus on our families, our health, our relationships, and the things we care about.

Other forms of friction are valuable.

They teach us patience. They make us creative. They force us to solve problems, trust our judgment, and become more capable. They may be inconvenient, but they are not meaningless.

There is a difference between removing an obstacle and removing an opportunity to grow.

That is why I think we should audit our lives.

Look at the conveniences you pay for. Look at the tools you rely on. Look at the tasks you have automated, outsourced, or removed altogether.

Then ask yourself:

What is this shortcut giving me, and what might it be taking away?

You do not need to cancel every subscription, delete every app, stop using AI, or refuse medical help. That would miss the point.

The goal is not to make life unnecessarily difficult.

The goal is to recognize that some difficult things are worth doing.

When we divert the effort it would have taken to do something, we sometimes rob ourselves of the development hidden inside that effort. We get the meal, the answer, the finished article, or the lower number on the scale.

We get what we wanted.

We just need to make sure we are not shortcutting the person we could have become along the way.

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“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” - Marcus Aurelius

A couple of years ago, I read Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. One section about finding yourself stood out to me. He talked about how maybe the way to find yourself isn’t by adding more things to do, more experiences, or even more identities. Maybe it’s about getting rid of what no longer serves you.

Before reading that book, I had already become fascinated with minimalism. Minimalism is the idea that cutting unnecessary things out of your life creates clarity and helps you focus. You don’t need a ton of stuff to survive or to live a full life. More possessions do not equal more happiness.

McConaughey’s idea clicked with me because maybe our focus shouldn’t always be on what else we can do. What other book can I read? What new habit can I adopt? What else can I pursue that might give me clarity?

Maybe clarity comes from taking inventory of ourselves. It comes from understanding where we are, where we want to be, and what is no longer helping us move forward.

We gradually take on a lot of responsibilities in life. We become parents, friends, spouses, and coworkers. We say yes to people, accept more responsibilities, and add more things to our plates. Eventually, it can all become so burdensome that we lose track of who we are and what we really want from life.

We enter a sort of identity crisis and start trying to discover ourselves again. In reality, what we may need is to say no to more things. We need to become comfortable removing tasks, responsibilities, and habits from our lives so we can see more clearly what we actually want.

I find this especially helpful when I’m trying to declutter my mind.

I have a habit of taking on too many projects. Eventually, my attention becomes divided in so many directions that I lose track of what is important and where my mind needs to be. Instead of being present, my mind is in ten different places. It becomes overwhelming, and it stresses me out.

The solution is usually admitting, “That is helpful. That could be valuable to my life. But right now, I have to say no.”

Sometimes I have to pump the brakes on something and push it further down the road. Maybe it’s something I will pursue later, but right now, I need to focus on what is already in front of me.

It means cutting ten different areas of focus down to three, four, or five. It means being a little ruthless and saying, “No, that isn’t for me,” or, “Yes, that is for me, but not yet.”

One of the most helpful things I’ve learned to do is write everything down. When I have too many things going on in my head, the best thing I can do is sit down, put them on paper, and think through them. Sometimes I talk out loud or go on a walk and ask myself, “Is this really for me?”

Sometimes the answer is no, and I need to let it go.

Giving ourselves space to get everything out of our heads provides the clarity many of us need when we reach the point of mental bloat. Without that space, our responsibilities become a laundry list we can no longer manage, and we begin descending toward burnout.

I think it is good to be responsible for a lot of things. It is good to be someone other people can depend on. But if we aren’t careful, we can take on things that aren’t important or urgent. We pursue opportunities that aren’t necessary right now, or we accept tasks that don’t require our immediate attention.

Some people can become laser-focused on an idea and pursue it until the goal is achieved. Nothing else distracts them from it. Others enjoy helping people, exploring different interests, and trying new things. We can easily find ourselves pulled in too many directions because so many things genuinely interest us.

For people like us, one of the most important things we can learn is how to say no.

We have to become comfortable cutting out things that don’t serve us right now, even when they are good things. Saying no does not necessarily mean saying never.

Sometimes it simply means, “Not yet.”

I loved the vibe, the designs, the merch, the messaging. It just connected with me.

The brand is called Die Tired Company.

The more I looked into their mission and went through their content, the more I liked the idea behind it: living your life and not being afraid to be a little tired in pursuit of your goals.

Some days require us to be a little tired the next day because we put in the work required to move ourselves a little closer to something we care about.

When I got the gift in the mail, though, I sat with the idea a little longer than I had when I was just looking at it on Instagram.

I held the material in my hands. I looked at the messaging on the clothes themselves. I wore them around for a few days.

And I kept thinking about it.

Eventually, I realized there was something else about the message that resonated with me.

I think what a lot of us need, myself included, is permission.

Because I think sometimes we have an idea, a side project we want to pursue, or simply something we want to do differently, and we hesitate because it isn’t how everyone else does it.

Maybe you want to write a book, but the way you want to go about writing it isn’t conventional.

Maybe you want a different job and you come up with some outside-the-box way of presenting yourself to a hiring manager.

Whatever it is, there’s this feeling that you’re doing something you’re not supposed to do.

And maybe what we need sometimes is simply to give ourselves permission to do something unconventional.

That’s what the hoodie and T-shirts made me realize.

Last week I had a conversation with a client of mine. He told me he had just pulled an all-nighter working on content for his business, building things, and interacting with his community.

He said something along the lines of, “I’m 40 years old, and this is just part of the grind for me. I love this stuff.”

Obviously, pulling all-nighters isn’t exactly healthy advice.

But my immediate reaction was:

Yeah. Why don’t I do that?

Not necessarily pull an all-nighter.

It was more the realization that he had given himself permission to operate differently because he cared about what he was building.

And it made me wonder:

How much of what we do, or don’t do, in life is because we’re afraid it isn’t the right way to do it?

Because it isn’t how it’s done.

You have an idea for a project at work, but it’s unconventional. Maybe it gets shot down because that’s not how things have historically been done.

And at some point, I think you have to be willing to do things differently without asking for permission first.

Because that’s how change happens.

Look at brands that have come into established industries and managed to shake them up. Look at some of the newer energy drink or clothing brands that have managed to break through.

The ones that stand out tend to be a little different, and they don’t try to perfectly fit the mold.

And I think that’s the main idea I’ve been trying to get at:

You don’t have to fit the mold.

To grow, you have to become comfortable with occasionally being unconventional. You have to become comfortable with the possibility that this isn’t how things have been done, but you’re going to try doing it this way anyway.

That’s uncomfortable.

Because when you do something differently, there’s always the possibility that it won’t work.

And if it doesn’t work, you might look ridiculous. But if it does?

The payoff can be massive.

Maybe that’s the price of doing something differently.

You have to be willing to look a little ridiculous before you know whether you were right.

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I have been married for seven years now.

For newlyweds, that may seem like a long time. For veterans married twenty plus years, it may look like we’re just getting started.

But seven years is significant. It means you’ve moved out of the “honeymoon stage” and into the building and maintaining part of your relationship.

A couple of years ago, I was listening to a podcast where Matthew McConaughey said the problem with relationships is that we put our partners on a pedestal. We think of them as superhuman, perfect in every way. It’s a hard standard to live up to and it has a negative effect on our relationships.

For some reason, that stuck with me. And it backs up a realization I had the other day.

I was home from work. My wife had just gotten home too. I gave her a hug, and the thought that went through my mind was, She’s perfect.

Then I caught myself.

No. She’s not perfect. But I’m not either.

Neither of us are. We are two people making it through life together, working to make this relationship work, to pursue our goals, and to live a fulfilled life.

I’m am writing this because I think it’s an important mindset to have. Your partner should be the most important person in your life. You should love them and do everything you can for them. But they will have bad days. You will have bad days. Both of you are still working through things and trying to be better.

It’s a trap a lot of people fall into. They think they’ve met the perfect man or the perfect woman. Then, after a while, they realize that the “perfect” person they are with is not perfect, and they struggle.

That is okay. We’re all human here.

When we view our partners as perfect, we make it so they cannot be imperfect. They cannot have a bad day. They cannot be human.

By putting them on a pedestal, we don’t allow them to fall, to have flaws, to fail.

But if they can be imperfect, so can you. And then you’re not loving an idea of what they should be. You’re loving them as a person. As a human.

When people recite the marriage vows, for better or for worse, it really means this: the person standing in front of you may be perfect in your eyes. Maybe even perfect for you. But they are also human.

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A handful of meetings. A work event where I’d be in a room full of people, most of whom I don’t know too well. And I could already feel it, that low hum of dread that shows up before I have to put myself out there.

Because here’s something I don’t talk about much: I’m shy.

Not in an obvious way anymore. I’ve gotten better at overcoming that tendency, better at managing it. But at my core, that default is still there. I’m naturally introverted. I like people, I do, but my default is to stay quiet. To hang back. To let someone else start the conversation while I find a comfortable spot near the edge of the room.

Where It Comes From

One of my parents is the same way, and I spent a lot of my early years close to them. You absorb the people you grow up around. Their patterns become your patterns before you ever think to question them. By the time I was old enough to notice it in myself, it already felt like who I was.

I’m not trying to stop being introverted. I love my alone time. I need it. The quiet is where I think, where I write, where I come back to myself.

The problem isn’t the introversion.

The problem is the fear underneath it. The part of me that doesn’t want to be told no. That doesn’t want to be rejected. That spends too much energy worrying about what people think before I’ve even said a word. That’s the part I don’t want running my life. Because left unchecked, it doesn’t just make me quiet. It makes me small. It keeps me on the sidelines of my own life.

And I decided a long time ago I wouldn’t let it hold me back.

The Realization

So that night, lying there, I told myself something I’ve had to tell myself more than once:

The only way out is through.

There’s no version of this where I read enough, or think enough, or wait until I feel ready, and the fear just dissolves on its own. That’s not how it works. I’ve waited. It doesn’t leave.

The only thing that has ever moved the needle is doing the thing I’m afraid of. Putting myself out there. Getting uncomfortable on purpose. Being rejected enough times that rejection stops carrying the weight my mind insists it has.

I realized, somewhere along the way, that I’d been running my own quiet version of exposure therapy without ever calling it that. And the days I lean into it, I get better. The days I retreat, I slide back.

So I made a decision about the day ahead. Say hi to almost everyone. Initiate the conversations. Walk up to the groups instead of around them. Ignore the running commentary in my head about how it might land.

What It Actually Looked Like

The work event was exactly the kind of room I usually shrink in. Clusters of people already mid-conversation. That invisible barrier you feel when a group is standing in a circle and you have to decide whether to break into it or keep walking toward the safety of the wall.

For most of my life, I’d have picked the wall.

This time I made myself walk up to the groups.

It was not smooth. The first few times, my hands were shaky and I was painfully aware of it. That self-consciousness where you’re so focused on how you’re coming across that you can barely hear what the other person is saying. I felt all of it. Standing at the edge of a group, waiting for a half-second opening, my heart going faster than the moment called for.

But I pressed through anyway.

And here’s the part that still surprises me every time, even though I’ve experienced it before: each one got a little easier. The second group was less daunting than the first. By the middle of the event I was just walking up to people, still not totally calm, but no longer frozen at the edge of the room. Initiating instead of waiting. Talking instead of nodding along from three feet outside the circle.

Still shaky. But firm in the belief that this is the only thing that works.

What I Keep Having to Relearn

I’ve been doing more of this over the last few years. And here’s the honest truth about the realization I had that night:

It wasn’t new.

I’ve had it before. More than once. I’ve written about it here on Substack before. It’s not the kind of thing you learn one time and keep forever. It fades. The fear creeps back in, the sidelines start looking comfortable again, and I have to come back to the same decision I thought I’d already made.

That’s the part nobody tells you about growth. The breakthrough isn’t permanent. You don’t arrive somewhere and stay there. You have to keep reframing your own mind, grounding yourself in the same truth again and again, so you don’t quietly lapse back into the version of you that hangs back.

The realization is free. Living it is the work. And the work doesn’t end, it just gets a little more familiar.

If you’re someone who has to keep relearning your own lessons, who has had the same breakthrough five times and wondered why it didn’t stick the first time, I want you to know that’s not failure. That’s just how it works. The people who change aren’t the ones who learn it once. They’re the ones who are willing to relearn it as many times as it takes.

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How to Push Yourself the Right Way

Here’s something I didn’t expect when I started digging into how this actually works.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to push yourself through fear, and for most of my life I was doing the wrong one. Grit my teeth, get through the conversation, exhale when it’s over. It worked, barely, but it never compounded the way I wanted it to.

What I’ve learned since has changed how I walk into every uncomfortable room. These are the six shifts that made the difference, drawn from what the research on exposure is finding and what I’ve tested on myself in real rooms with real people.

One quick note before I get into it. I’m not a therapist and this isn’t medical advice. If your anxiety is severe enough that it’s genuinely disrupting your life, please talk to a professional. What follows is simply how I think about it and what’s worked for me.

1. The goal isn’t to feel calm. It’s to prove yourself wrong.

This is the one that flipped everything for me. For years I thought the objective was to wait out the fear, to stay in the situation until I felt relaxed. But that’s backwards. The point of putting yourself out there isn’t to feel better in the moment. It’s to collect evidence that the thing you’re afraid of doesn’t actually happen.

So now I go in with a prediction. They’ll think I’m weird. I’ll get shut down. I’ll run out of things to say. And then I let reality disprove it. The conversation goes fine. They smile. Nothing collapses. That gap between what I predicted and what actually happened is where the real change lives. The bigger the gap, the more your brain has to update.

You’re not trying to relax. You’re trying to be wrong about the worst-case scenario, over and over, until your mind stops believing it.

2. Lean in instead of gritting through.

There’s a difference between enduring discomfort and inviting it. Enduring is bracing yourself, surviving the moment, counting down until you can leave. Inviting is actively choosing the harder version. Walking up to the bigger group instead of the safe one. Asking the follow-up question instead of letting the conversation die.

When I lean in, when I treat the discomfort as the actual goal rather than an obstacle, it does something different. It tells my brain that I’m not afraid of being afraid. And that’s the thing that compounds.

3. Drop your crutches.

We all have them. The phone you pull out so you look busy instead of available. The drink you hold so your hands have something to do. The friend you let carry every conversation. The way you rehearse a sentence ten times before you say it.

These feel like they help. They don’t. Here’s why: when the situation goes fine and you had your crutch, your brain credits the crutch, not you. I survived because I had my phone. Because my coworker was there. Because I planned what to say. You never learn that you can handle it on your own.

So I’ve been deliberately putting the crutches down. Phone in pocket. No rehearsing. Walking into the room alone sometimes. It’s harder. That’s the point. The discomfort is what teaches you that you didn’t need the crutch in the first place.

4. Name what you’re feeling.

This sounds too simple to work, but it does. When I’m standing there shaky and self-conscious, I name it to myself. Okay, my hands are shaking. My chest is tight. I’m nervous right now. Just plainly, without trying to fix it or make it go away.

Something about putting the feeling into words takes the edge off. It moves you from being swept up in the anxiety to observing it. You stop being the fear and start being the person watching the fear. And from that small distance, it’s a lot easier to take the next step.

5. Mix it up and do it everywhere.

I used to think I needed a perfect ladder. Start with the easiest possible interaction, master it, then move up one rung at a time. But that’s not how it sticks best. If you only ever practice in one safe, familiar setting, the courage stays trapped in that setting. You get brave at one specific coffee shop and nowhere else.

So now I vary it on purpose. Different people, different rooms, different stakes. The cashier, the stranger at the event, the person whose work I admire. Mixing the intensity and the context teaches the courage to travel. It becomes something you carry into any room instead of something that only works in the one where you trained it.

6. Anchor it to who you’re becoming, not to beating anxiety.

This is the one that holds all the others together.

If the only reason I push myself is to defeat my anxiety, the anxiety stays the main character. The whole thing is still about fear. But when I anchor it to something bigger, the version of myself I’m trying to build, the conversations I want to be able to have, the rooms I want to belong in, the life I’m reaching for, the fear stops being the point. It becomes just a toll I pay on the way to somewhere I actually want to go.

I don’t walk up to people because I want to stop being shy. I walk up to them because the person I’m becoming is someone who doesn’t shrink. The discomfort is just the price of admission. And every time I pay it, I get a little more of the life I’m building.

Start with one. You don’t need all six tomorrow. Pick the shift that hit hardest and bring it into the next uncomfortable room you walk into.

The fear doesn’t disappear. I want to be honest about that. Even now, even after a year of this, my hands still shake sometimes. The voice still shows up.

But courage was never the absence of that voice. It’s hearing it clearly and stepping forward anyway.

The only way out is through.

So go through.

If this resonated, restack it so it reaches someone else who needs to step forward today. And in the comments, tell me: what’s one thing you’ve been avoiding that you know you need to walk straight into?

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I’ve been heads down building a social media training for our company and launching some ad campaigns alongside it. I had to dial in and let a few things sit, and unfortunately this was one of them.

The good news is those projects are starting to close out, and I’m back.

But enough about me, what have you been up to lately?

Leave it in the comments, I’d like to hear about it!

- Isaac W.

A message goes unanswered. A pitch gets ignored. A number comes back lower than you hoped. The event itself is small. The story you build on top of it is not. And before you’ve even finished living it, you’ve already decided what it means.

That’s the part most of us miss. We equate the hard day to our whole life. It often isn’t. It’s the running commentary we lay over the top of it. The verdict we reach before the facts are even in.

Years ago I tried to build a business online. I launched product after product, more than ten of them, and watched almost all of them fail. I’d build an ad, send it out into the world, watch people click, and watch nobody buy. I tried a clothing brand that sold mostly to friends who believed in me more than they believed in the product. Each attempt cost money I didn’t really have.

The thought that kept sneaking up on me was “Maybe I can’t do this.”

That was the estimate. Not the data, the estimate. The numbers themselves were neutral. They were just numbers on a screen. The pain came from the meaning I stacked on top of them. Every flop became evidence in a case I was quietly building against myself.

I look at those same months now and I see something completely different. I wasn’t failing. I was learning how advertising worked, how attention moved, what made a person stop scrolling. The skills that pay my bills today were built inside those exact failures. Same events. Same numbers. A completely different estimate.

The events never changed. My judgment of them did.

Marcus Aurelius wrote something almost two thousand years ago and I believe it.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8

You have the power… to revoke it… at any moment.

The thing is, most of us already know this. We’ve all had the experience of dreading something for weeks, then living through it in an afternoon and realizing the dread was heavier than the event ever was. The fear did more damage than the thing we feared.

But knowing it and using it are two different things. Because the estimate doesn’t feel like an estimate. It feels like the truth. When you decide a setback means you’re not enough, it doesn’t arrive as an opinion. It arrives as a fact. That’s the trap. The story wears the costume of reality.

I think this is what silently guards the bigger life most people want and never reach for.

It’s rarely the actual risk that stops them. It’s the verdict they’ve already written about what failure would mean. They’re not afraid of starting the thing. They’re afraid of the story they’d have to tell themselves if it didn’t work. So they stay where they are, protected by a catastrophe that hasn’t happened and probably never will.

But that story was never fixed. It was an estimate. And the estimate was always theirs to write.

You can’t control most of what happens to you. You’ll lose things. Plans will fall apart. Relationships will become distant. That part isn’t up for negotiation.

What you can do, in the middle of all of it, is catch the moment you slide from what happened into what you’ve decided it means. Slow down right there. Ask whether the verdict is actually true, or just familiar.

Because the event was never the thing that hurt you. The estimate was. And the estimate has always been yours to revoke.

I sat with it for a second. And then I decided to try something similar, but instead of asking about building a personal brand, I made it personal. I opened up Claude and typed this:

The response came back exactly how I expected it to, at first. It told me I wasn’t lazy. That I was comfortable. That every day I don’t move toward what I want is still a choice, just not the one I’d want to own. True stuff. Hard stuff. The kind of thing you already know but need someone to say out loud.

But then, at the end, it gave me two sentences I wasn’t ready for.

I had to set my phone down.

Unrealized Purpose is my project. My outlet. The place I put the lessons I’m still learning and the observations I’m still making. I’m not an expert writing from the top of a mountain. I’m someone figuring it out and choosing to write it down. That’s always been the point.

But sitting at my desk that afternoon, I realized the name I chose for this publication had been quietly judging me. And it had a point.

I’ve been having a lot of internal conversations lately about what I want my life to actually look like. I’m 25, about to turn 26. Lord willing, there are fifty plus years ahead of me. But that’s not guaranteed, and I’ve started treating it less like a runway and more like a question I have to answer now.

Work has been consuming a lot of time and energy. I’ve been growing there. Learning. Trying to be genuinely valuable. That matters to me. But in the middle of all of it, I started wondering if maybe I should scale back on this project. Redirect that energy. Focus.

And then I heard this interview. The owner of the Miami Dolphins, was asked what gets him out of bed every morning. What drives him.

He said: impact.

Not wealth. Not legacy in the traditional sense. Impact.

And something in me exhaled. Because that’s it. That’s the thing I keep circling back to no matter how many times I try to talk myself out of it. At my core, what I want is to leave something behind that meant something. Writing that helped someone. A life my family looks back on and says he showed up for us. Work that did more than fill a bank account.

I don’t think chasing money for the sake of money gets you there. Not because money is wrong, but because it’s incomplete. If I get to the end of my life rich and my relationships are hollow, what did I actually build? Who did that serve?

Money isn’t the destination. It’s the fuel.

If you want impact beyond your immediate circle, you need resources. You need reach. You need the ability to do more than goodwill allows. The pursuit of money isn’t the problem. The problem is when money becomes the point instead of the vehicle.

Impact first. Money follows impact. And with more money, more impact becomes possible. That’s the equation I’m working with now.

I’m not walking away from this project or slowing down.

If anything, I’m doubling down. At my job and here. Because both things matter, and the version of me that abandons what he believes in to stay comfortable is not someone I want to become.

The AI was right. Every day I don’t show up to this, I’m writing a different kind of story. And I’ve seen enough of life to know that the story you don’t write doesn’t just disappear. It becomes the thing you regret.

I don’t want that.

So I keep going. Not because it’s easy. Not because I have it figured out. But because unrealized purpose is not the headline I want on my life.

A few years ago I was borderline obese and tired of it. Not the kind of tired where you just want to complain. The kind of tired where you finally make a decision and mean it. I hired a coach, he built a plan, and I started showing up. A year later I was sixty pounds lighter with the six-pack I had set as the goal. Not because I had unlimited willpower. Because I eventually understood what discipline actually is, and I stopped trying to run it on motivation alone.

This piece is what I learned, what the research says, and what the Stoics figured out long before the science caught up.

The Biggest Lie About Willpower

Here’s what most people believe: discipline is about gritting your teeth and muscling through. That willpower is a fuel tank you either fill up or run dry. That if you run out, you’ve failed.

This belief has a name. It’s called Ego Depletion theory, and for two decades it was the dominant model in psychology. The idea was simple: self-control draws on a limited resource, and once that resource is spent, you cave.

There’s one problem. It wasn’t real.

In the late 2010s, researchers tried to replicate the foundational studies behind Ego Depletion across massive participant pools. They couldn’t. The effect didn’t hold up. The original studies had been manipulated to force statistical significance. The field had published success after success while quietly burying the failures.

The most liberating thing to come out of that collapse is this: you don’t actually run out of willpower.

What happens instead is a calculation.

Your brain is constantly running a cost-benefit analysis. As a task drags on, the cost of continuing rises and the reward of finishing seems to shrink. Other things start to look more valuable. You don’t deplete. You reallocate.

But here’s where it gets interesting. If discipline is a calculation, you can change the inputs.

What Your Brain Is Actually Doing

Discipline lives in the prefrontal cortex. Impulse lives in the limbic system. These two parts of the brain are in a constant, quiet negotiation, and the limbic system processes faster.

When you’re staring at a task you don’t want to do, your amygdala is processing it like a threat. Not a metaphorical threat. A biological one. The same circuit that would fire if you felt physical danger fires when you’re avoiding a hard conversation, a difficult workout, or a project you’ve been putting off.

Procrastination isn’t laziness. It’s anxiety relief. When you close the laptop or scroll instead of starting, your brain immediately relaxes. That relief feels good. So your brain learns to repeat the behavior. Over time, the avoidance pathway gets stronger and the discipline pathway gets weaker.

I felt this in the early weeks of losing weight. Every morning that I didn’t want to go to the gym, every night I didn’t want to log my food, there was a version of me that just wanted the discomfort to stop. The easiest way to stop it was to quit. The problem was I had already decided I wasn’t going to quit. So I sat with it instead. That gap, between the discomfort and the decision to move anyway, is where discipline actually lives.

This is why motivation rarely fixes a procrastination problem. You’re not dealing with a motivation issue. You’re dealing with a threat response. And that requires a different approach.

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What the Stoics Already Knew

The Stoics built an entire operating system around this problem, and they didn’t have fMRI machines. They had philosophy, daily practice, and consequences.

Epictetus divided everything in life into two categories: what is within your control, and what is not. Your judgment, your effort, your response. That’s yours. Everything else, outcomes included, is not. This sounds simple. It isn’t. Most people spend most of their discipline budget on things they can’t control, which means they’re burning energy on anxiety instead of effort.

Marcus Aurelius practiced Premeditatio Malorum, the premeditation of adversity. Every morning, he anticipated difficulty. Not to catastrophize, but to defuse the threat response before it fired. If your brain has already processed the hard thing as a possibility, it doesn’t register as a surprise attack when it arrives. The amygdala quiets. The prefrontal cortex has room to function.

Seneca practiced voluntary discomfort. Specific days each month where he ate plainly, wore rough clothes, removed comfort deliberately. Not as punishment. As proof. He wanted to know that if everything went wrong, he could still function. He asked himself one question during those periods: “Is this the condition I feared?” Almost always, the answer was no.

There is a direct line between what Seneca was doing and what I was doing when I let hunger sit without answering it. A slice of pizza was 180 calories. I knew exactly what it would cost me. Not in some vague future sense. In that night’s numbers, that week’s progress, that month’s result.

Understanding the consequence clearly enough changed how much I wanted the pizza. The prefrontal cortex doesn’t fight temptation by brute force. It changes how attractive the temptation looks. Consequence clarity is how you do that manually.

The Problem With Goal-Setting (And What to Do Instead)

Most people approach discipline through goals. Lose sixty pounds. Change careers. Build something. And goals are fine. But goals are destinations, not engines.

A goal creates a binary trap. Until you hit it, you’re in a state of not having hit it. Which means you’re in a state of low-grade failure for the entire duration. That’s a terrible environment for sustained effort.

A system works differently. A system redefines success at the level of the behavior, not the outcome. You succeed every time you run, not only when you hit your target weight. You succeed every time you sit down to write, not only when the book is done. The outcome becomes a byproduct of something you’ve already made reliable.

The shift happened for me somewhere around month three. I stopped thinking about the number on the scale every morning and started thinking about whether I showed up that day. The alarm going off at five or six and me getting up anyway stopped being a negotiation. It became just the thing that happens. Not because it stopped being hard. Because I stopped giving myself the option for it not to happen.

James Clear’s framing is worth holding onto: identity precedes behavior. You don’t act your way to an identity. You build an identity that naturally produces the action. There’s a version of discipline that runs on wanting. And there’s a version that runs on having already decided. The second one is stronger. And it only comes from showing up long enough that the behavior stops feeling like a choice.

The question isn’t what do you want. It’s who are you becoming.

The Stoic Disciplines, Made Practical

The Stoics organized discipline into three lived practices. The Discipline of Desire, the Discipline of Action, and the Discipline of Assent. These aren’t abstract concepts. They’re a daily protocol.

The Discipline of Desire is about accepting what you cannot control while directing full energy at what you can. Before anything difficult, you clarify the line between your effort and the outcome. You own everything up to the result. The result belongs to circumstances. This is not defeatism. It frees you to act without the weight of anxiety about whether it will work.

The Discipline of Action is about doing what needs to be done in service of something beyond yourself. The discipline you need to show up for something real is almost always stronger than the discipline you can manufacture for a vague aspiration. Find something your effort connects to. It doesn’t have to be grand. It just has to matter.

The Discipline of Assent is the most difficult. It’s about catching your own thoughts before they become reactions. When something difficult arrives, there is a moment between the event and your response. The Stoics trained to make that moment larger. In that space, you get to choose whether to accept the thought that says “this is too hard” or question it. Most people don’t know that thought is optional.

Four Tactics That Work

These aren’t hacks. They’re implementations of everything above.

1. Shrink the start. Your brain fires the threat response before the task, not during it. So the goal is to get past the start without triggering the alarm. Make the entry point so small it doesn’t feel like a commitment. Not “I’ll work out for an hour” but “I’ll get in the car.” Not “I’ll write for an hour” but “I’ll open the document.” Once you’re in motion, the threat response drops. The work tends to happen from there.

2. Make the consequence visible. Vague goals produce vague discipline. When I understood that one slice of pizza was 180 calories and what that actually meant for the day’s intake and the week’s progress, I stopped needing to fight the craving. I just needed to know the math. Whatever you’re working toward, get specific enough about the cost of quitting that the cost becomes real. Clarity about consequences is not pressure. It’s information. And information changes decisions.

3. Pre-decide with If-Then plans. Every time you have to decide whether to do the thing, you’re spending energy you could have preserved. Eliminate the decision in advance. “If it’s morning, I go before I negotiate with myself.” “If the gym is packed, I wait.” The if-then structure bypasses in-the-moment bargaining entirely. You’re not deciding. You’re executing a plan you already made. The version of you who makes the plan is more clear-headed than the version standing in the gym parking lot after a long day.

4. Do Seneca’s audit at night. At the end of each day, ask three questions. What did I follow through on today? Where did I drift? What do I correct tomorrow? Not as a guilt exercise. As a calibration. Seneca believed the most powerful remedy for lost discipline was delay and review. You can’t fix what you don’t examine. And the act of reviewing your own behavior closes the gap between who you were today and who you’re trying to become.

The Real Thing

Discipline is not the ability to force yourself. It’s the ability to build conditions where the right action is also the easiest one.

That’s what the research points to. That’s what the Stoics practiced. That’s what I found out the hard way over a year of early mornings, packed gyms, and pizza I understood too well to eat carelessly.

You reduce friction for the behavior you want. You raise it for the behavior you don’t. You stop relying on motivation to carry what structure should. And you stay in it long enough for the behavior to stop being a decision and start being just what you do.

Sixty pounds didn’t come from willpower. They came from systems, clarity, and enough consecutive days of showing up that I became someone for whom showing up was no longer the hard part.

You already know what you want to build. The question is whether you’re going to design your life around building it, or keep waiting to feel ready.

Feeling ready is not how it starts. Starting is.

If you’re building your own system right now, let me know what’s working for you in the comments.

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More of Unrealized Purpose

Not because the room is unfriendly. Not because I am. I genuinely enjoy people. I like conversation. I like the way a good exchange can turn an ordinary moment into something you carry home with you.

But the thought still shows up.

“They don’t want to be bothered. They’d rather do their own thing. Don’t interrupt.”

For a long time, I just believed it. I moved through social situations with that thought running in the background like a program I never opened and never questioned. It shaped how I showed up. It kept me smaller than I needed to be. And it was unfair, not just to me, but to the people I was already writing off before I ever said hello.

What changed wasn’t the thought. The thought still comes. What changed was that I started asking a different question.

Not what am I thinking? But why do I think this way?

There is a name for what happens when you turn that kind of attention on yourself. Researchers call it metacognition. It was formally introduced into psychology in the late 1970s by a man named John Flavell, who described it simply as the knowledge one has of their own cognitive processes and the ability to monitor and adjust them in real time.

Thinking about thinking.

It sounds simple. It isn’t. And if you’ve never heard the term, that’s not a character flaw. It’s just that no one sat most of us down and explained that our thoughts have a source, that the source can be found, and that finding it is one of the more useful things a person can do.

The research on this is clear and a little humbling: while roughly 95% of people consider themselves highly self-aware, objective measurement suggests that somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of the population actually are. Most of us believe we know why we feel and act the way we do. Most of us are operating on patterns we’ve never examined.

That’s not an insult. That’s just what happens when no one teaches you to look.

Someone I was close to growing up moved through the world quietly. They didn’t start conversations. They didn’t push into rooms or reach for people. I watched that, absorbed it, and slowly became someone who reads a room before entering it. Someone who notices body language, measures the temperature of a space, tries to calculate in advance whether the approach is welcome.

Add to that years spent doing ministry work, door knocking, outreach. Situations where reading a stranger’s reaction before you said a word was the difference between a real exchange and a door closing in your face. My instinct to hang back got reinforced over and over until it stopped feeling like a habit and started feeling like just the way I am.

But it isn’t just the way I am. It’s a pattern I inherited, reinforced, and never stopped to question.

When I finally did, when I sat with the thought long enough to ask where it came from, I didn’t find a flaw. I found a history. An explanation that made sense of something I’d been carrying without knowing I was carrying it.

That is metacognition in practice. Not a theory. Not a framework. A moment where you catch yourself mid-thought and decide to follow it back to its root instead of letting it run.

The research breaks this down into something it calls knowledge of cognition. Specifically, your understanding of yourself as a thinker. What patterns do you carry? Where did they come from? Under what conditions do they show up and take over?

Most people never ask. Not because they can’t, but because the default setting for the human brain is to move fast and trust the first answer it produces.

Psychologists describe this as System 1 thinking. The automatic, intuitive mode that handles most of daily life. It’s fast. It’s efficient. And it’s often wrong in ways you won’t catch unless you slow down and look.

Metacognition is what slows you down. It’s the function that steps in and says: wait, is this thought actually true, or is it just familiar?

That question is not comfortable. Familiar thoughts have been with us long enough to feel like facts. Asking whether they’re real requires something most people aren’t in the habit of doing. Sitting with uncertainty long enough to let an honest answer come back.

But the people who do this consistently, who build the habit of checking their thinking before acting on it, show up differently. In problem solving, in relationships, in how they handle conflict and confusion. Not because they’re smarter, but because they’ve stopped blindly trusting the first version of a story their mind tells them.

I want to be careful here about something.

I don’t practice this because I’ve figured something out. I practice it because I keep catching myself not doing it. The thought still comes when I walk into a room. The assumption still fires. What I’ve built, slowly and imperfectly, is a pause between the thought and the action.

Is this real? Is this fair? Where is this actually coming from?

Sometimes I find the answer quickly. Sometimes I don’t find it at all. But the asking matters. The pause matters. Because the alternative is letting a thought that was formed in a completely different context run your life in a context where it no longer belongs.

That’s what most unexamined patterns do. They were adaptive once. They made sense in the room where they were born. But they follow you into every room after that, and without metacognition, you have no way to tell the difference between a genuine instinct and an inherited reflex.

So here is what I’d invite you to try.

The next time you react to something, a conversation that left you irritated, a situation you avoided, a decision you made on instinct, don’t just move on. Sit with it for a moment. Not to judge yourself. Not to perform self-awareness. Just to ask an honest question.

Why did I think that way?

Follow it. Not aggressively, not with the goal of finding something broken. Just with curiosity. You might find an event. A person. A room you were in a long time ago that quietly shaped how you move through rooms today.

You won’t always find a clean answer. But you’ll find something. And finding something is almost always better than not looking.

Most people know their thoughts. Very few people know their thinking.

Unrealized Purpose is a newsletter about the distance between who you are and who you could be. If this piece found you, subscribe below.

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My most recent tattoo is of Icarus. The Italian artist who gave it to me paused after we talked through the concept and said one word: “beautiful.” Not the design. The story. And I understood exactly what he meant. There is something beautiful about a boy who flew.

Most people hear the name Icarus and think: cautionary tale. Don’t fly too high. Don’t get too close to the sun. Stay in your lane. When I look at Icarus, I see someone who actually flew. Someone who had the courage to leave the ground at all. The fall is part of the story, yes. But so is the flight.

I didn’t plan my sleeve. I built it as life gave me reasons to. But when I look at all three pieces together now, I realize they were never random. They were a conversation I was having with myself, one chapter at a time.

The first piece I got was Amor Fati. A Latin phrase that translates to “love of fate,” rooted in Stoic philosophy and later carried forward by Nietzsche. The idea is simple in principle and genuinely hard in practice: don’t just accept what happens to you. Love it. Find a way to see everything, even the painful things, as part of something necessary. It doesn’t mean pretending nothing hurts. It means refusing to let what you can’t control become the thing that controls you.

I got that tattoo about a year after one of the more significant transitions of my life. I had been running my own business and at a certain point I walked away from it to take a job. That was a complicated season. There was grief in it. There was also relief. And there was a version of me that needed a reminder that the story wasn’t over just because that chapter was.

The second piece was Memento Mori. Remember death. I know how that sounds, but it was never meant to be dark. It was meant to be honest. The Stoics carried this phrase as a daily practice because they understood something most of us spend our whole lives avoiding: time is the only resource you can’t get back. When you remember that the clock is running, trivial things stop mattering so much. The comparison. The pettiness. The time you waste waiting to feel ready. Memento Mori sits on my arm as a reminder to stay intentional. Not to create anxiety, but to create urgency. The kind of urgency that makes you stop tolerating things that don’t deserve your time.

So when I sat down to get Icarus, I already had two pieces that were really about the same thing: accepting reality and not wasting the life you have inside of it. What I didn’t have was the piece about what to actually do with that.

Here’s where I want to push back on how most people read the myth.

Icarus didn’t fail because he was ambitious. He failed because he stopped listening. His father Daedalus, the craftsman who built the wings, gave him clear instructions: don’t fly too low, the sea will weigh the feathers down. Don’t fly too high, the sun will melt the wax. Stay in the middle. Trust the craft. Icarus didn’t crash because he wanted to fly. He crashed because he forgot what made the flight possible in the first place.

I lived a version of this, and I think most people who have built something from nothing have too.

When my business was at its peak, money was coming in at a level I hadn’t experienced before. Things were clicking. I had clients, income, momentum. And for a period of time, I let that success quietly start to change something in me. I was carrying a pride I wasn’t fully aware of. A quiet sense that I had figured something out that others hadn’t. That I was above the ground in a way that made the ground feel like it was for other people.

I didn’t catch it right away. That’s the thing about ego. It doesn’t announce itself. It just slowly starts making decisions for you. Looking back, I can see exactly where the wax started to soften. It didn’t feel like arrogance at the time. It felt like confidence. It felt like I had earned the altitude.

And in some ways, I had. The flight was real. The work was real. The results were real. But the moment you start believing the wings will hold no matter what you do, no matter how you behave, no matter how far you push it, you’ve already started to fall. Not because ambition is dangerous. Because ego makes you forget the mechanics that got you off the ground.

That’s what Icarus means to me. Not a warning against reaching. A reminder to respect the craft that makes reaching possible. The discipline, the self-awareness, the willingness to stay honest about where you actually are. Those are the wings. Ego is the heat.

When I look at my arm now, the three pieces tell one story.

Amor Fati says: love what is, including the hard parts, including the parts you didn’t choose.

Memento Mori says: you don’t have unlimited time, so stop spending it on things that don’t matter.

And Icarus says: when you get the chance to fly, and you will get the chance, make sure it’s the craft keeping you in the air and not just the feeling of being high up.

I didn’t design a philosophy and then illustrate it. I lived through things, felt them, learned from them, and slowly found the words for what they taught me. The tattoos came after. They were my way of putting ink to lessons I didn’t want to forget.

The Italian artist called it beautiful. I think I understand that more now than I did sitting in the chair. The story of Icarus is beautiful not because he fell. It’s beautiful because he flew at all. Because somewhere, a boy who had never left the ground looked up at the sky and decided the attempt was worth the risk.

That’s what I want to carry with me. Not a fear of flying too high. Just enough wisdom to know what’s holding me up, and enough humility to protect it.

The flight is always worth it. The only question is whether you’re maintaining the wings.

If this one landed for you, restack it and help it find someone who needs it.

And I’ll leave you with this: where in your life right now are you flying, and where is the wax starting to soften?

PS — If you're a founder or coach who wants a Substack presence that actually reflects how you think, I help with that. Reply if you're curious.

I. The Thought That Broke My Self-Perception

This is not a normal talk today. This is something real I have struggled with over the last two years of my life. I want to be clear on the title of this post. I am not talking about a clinical issue here. I am talking about a mental and spiritual one.

There is a song I heard by Stephen Stanley that helped me begin overcoming this. It is called No Hopeless Soul. The very first line grabbed me immediately:

“Do you feel paralyzed by the things you try to hide that take place inside your mind and won’t let you go?”

That line explained something I had been carrying but could not properly articulate. Some of the heaviest wars a person will ever fight are completely invisible to everyone around them. People can see you laughing, working, joking, and functioning while internally your thoughts are dragging you through concrete.

For me, it started with a thought I had. I am not going to tell you exactly what the thought was, but I will say this: it was disgusting, sinful, and completely opposite of the type of man I believed myself to be. I remember feeling disturbed that my mind was even capable of producing something like it. What made it even worse was that the thought came true within a couple of weeks of thinking it.

That moment stained me deeply. I felt sick to the depths of my soul. It made me question my own character and everything I had built up to that point. I felt fraudulent, almost like my mind had exposed something rotten underneath everything good people believed about me. The terrifying part about dark thoughts is not always the thought itself. Sometimes it is realizing you are capable of having it at all.

The thought had jealousy attached to it, which bothered me deeply because I never considered myself a jealous person. I do not think most people who know me would describe me that way either. But the experience forced me to confront something uncomfortable: human beings are capable of more darkness than they often believe.

I have said for years that anyone is capable of almost any level of evil given enough time, compromise, bitterness, and decay. Evil rarely appears overnight. It grows slowly, often beginning with tolerated thoughts left unchecked.

That realization humbled me in a way I was not prepared for.

II. Mental Paralysis and the Weight of Guilt

Marcus Aurelius once wrote:

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

I understood that quote differently after this experience. I could not control what had happened, and I could not erase the thought from my memory. But I could decide whether I would chain myself to it forever.

For a long time afterward, I felt mentally paralyzed. I continued with everyday life, but internally I had lost a sense of self-worth. I kept asking myself the same question repeatedly:

“How do I overcome this?”

What made the situation difficult was knowing that although I did not cause what happened, there was a moment where I had wished for it. Seeing a dark thought come to life after it once passed through your mind can make you feel horrifyingly responsible, especially if you already carry a strong conscience.

But over time I had to learn something important:

A thought is not sovereign power. Your mind does not control reality. Temptation is not the same thing as devotion.

In fact, the very reason I was disturbed by the thought should have told me something important from the beginning. My conscience hated it immediately. I was resisting it, not celebrating it. The guilt I carried was evidence that something within me still recognized the difference between darkness and truth.

But mental paralysis has a way of twisting even that. It convinced me that because evil once passed through my mind, I no longer had the right to speak truth or call out evil in the world around me. I felt disqualified by my own thoughts.

And that is exactly what shame does when it is left alone too long. It does not simply make you feel guilty. It convinces you to become silent.

III. Taking Thoughts Captive

The problem with that mindset is that truth was never dependent upon my perfection to begin with.

We are commanded to speak truth and call out evil, not because we are flawless, but because truth itself comes from God. That responsibility and authority is given by Him, not earned through sinless performance. If mercy only belonged to spotless people, mercy would not exist at all.

This was the second time in my life I felt such a deep need for mercy.

One of the most dangerous lies people believe is that every thought entering their mind defines who they are. But thoughts are often invitations, temptations, fears, impulses, wounds, and reflections of the brokenness we carry as human beings. A passing thought is one thing. Feeding it, nurturing it, protecting it, and allowing it to rule your life is another.

That is why Scripture speaks about taking thoughts captive.

Keeping a thought captive means refusing to let every thought freely roam your mind unchecked. It means slowing down long enough to examine it before allowing it to shape your identity, actions, or worldview.

Not every thought deserves trust. Not every emotion deserves agreement. Some thoughts deserve resistance. Some deserve interrogation. Some deserve starvation.

The mind is a dangerous place when every thought is treated as truth. Some thoughts arrive to test you, not define you.

IV. Mercy Stronger Than Paralysis

Marcus Aurelius also wrote:

“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”

That quote used to terrify me. Now it motivates me. Because if thoughts can stain a man over time, disciplined thoughts can rebuild one too.

The reality is that there are people reading this right now who are mentally chained to one thought, one failure, one desire, one moment, or one secret they cannot escape. Physically they are alive, but mentally they are frozen in place by shame.

I understand that feeling more than I wish I did.

But hear me clearly: you are not every thought that enters your mind. You are what you repeatedly choose to entertain, nurture, and become.

Mercy is not pretending darkness never existed. Mercy is God refusing to let darkness have the final word.

The war in your mind is real.

But so is mercy.

And mercy is stronger than paralysis.

There’s a version of your life you had mapped out.

Maybe it was a business. Maybe it was a relationship. Maybe it was just a general sense of how things were supposed to go. And at some point, life looked at that map and went a different direction entirely.

Most people spend years resenting that. Quietly carrying around a version of themselves that didn’t get to exist. Comparing what is to what should have been.

This post is about a different way to move through that.

It’s called amor fati. It’s Latin. It translates to “love of fate.” And before you dismiss it as something a philosophy professor puts on a coffee mug, let me tell you what it actually means in practice. Because it has nothing to do with being okay with everything that happens to you.

It has everything to do with what you decide to do next.

The Phrase Nobody Gets Right

When most people hear “love your fate,” they picture someone sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, completely at peace with the universe. Passive. Zen. Unbothered.

That’s not it.

The Stoics weren’t passive people. Marcus Aurelius ran an empire. Epictetus was a former slave who built a school of thought that outlasted his captors. These weren’t people who sat still and accepted whatever came.

They were people who understood something most of us are still learning: that the energy you spend fighting what already happened is energy you can’t spend on what comes next.

Amor fati isn’t about liking the bad thing. It’s about refusing to let the bad thing own you.

It’s the difference between being stuck and being in motion.

What Failure Actually Teaches You

I’ve started a lot of businesses.

An Etsy shop that quietly faded. A clothing brand called HERO that got some traction, real sales, real excitement, and then slowly ran out of momentum. A shoe brand that got close and didn’t quite make it.

Each one felt like the one. Each one didn’t work out the way I thought it would.

At the time, it was easy to frame those as failures. And they were, in the traditional sense. But here’s what I didn’t fully understand while I was inside them: every single one of those attempts was teaching me something I couldn’t have learned any other way.

The Etsy shop taught me design. HERO taught me what it felt like to build something from scratch, the product development, the branding, the customer. The shoe brand taught me about manufacturing, about timing, about the gap between almost and actually.

None of it felt like a lesson while I was living it. It felt like falling short.

But those failed attempts, all of them stacked together, are a direct line to me eventually running an agency that brought in over $200,000 in business. You don’t get there without everything that came before it. Not because failure is magic. But because repetition builds competence, and competence builds confidence, and confidence eventually builds results.

The thing is, most of us already know this. We just don’t believe it when we’re in the middle of it.

Every time I started something new after something didn’t work, I was practicing amor fati without realizing it. Not loving the failure. Moving through it anyway. Using it.

The Difference Between Acceptance and Surrender

I want to be careful here, because this is where people misread the concept.

There are things that happen in life that you will never be fully okay with. Loss that doesn’t resolve into a lesson. Grief that doesn’t tie itself up neatly at the end. Pain that just sits there, heavy, with no clear purpose attached to it.

I lost my younger brother Daniel.

That’s not something I can frame as a stepping stone. I won’t try to. Some things just cost more than the philosophy can account for, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t actually lost anything yet.

But I will say this. In the middle of that, in the logistics and the coordination and the weight of holding things together for people who needed someone to hold things together, I found something I didn’t know I had.

Jordan Peterson has a line that’s stayed with me. He said:

It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life. It is for this reason that I tell my students: aim to be the person at your father’s funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. There’s a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity.

It wasn’t my father. But I understood what he meant.

My parents leaned on me through all of it. To coordinate. To make sure things happened the way they needed to happen. And in being the person they needed, something in me solidified. Not because the loss was worth it. Nothing is worth that. But because I learned what I was made of when it was required of me.

That’s amor fati in its most honest form. Not gratitude for the hard thing. But the decision to become someone on the other side of it.

Fighting Your Circumstances vs. Fighting for Your Life

There’s a version of fighting your circumstances that drains you. That keeps you locked in resentment, in comparison, in the feeling that the deck was stacked against you and someone owes you something for it. That kind of fighting is exhausting because it has no real target. You’re swinging at the situation instead of building toward something.

And then there’s the other kind of fighting. The kind that costs you something but actually moves you forward.

You accept what is, and then you act anyway. Not because the outcome is guaranteed, but because the effort is yours. That distinction matters more than most people realize.

You can’t control what happens. You can control your inputs.

And if you can be better, if there’s a version of you on the other side of this that is sharper, more capable, more equipped, then you owe it to yourself to try. Not because you’re guaranteed to get there. But because the trying itself is the only thing that was ever fully in your hands.

The Ancient Formula for a Modern Problem

Nietzsche wrote about amor fati in 1882. He called it his “formula for greatness in a human being.” The idea that you could look at your life, every part of it, the good and the ugly and the confusing and the painful, and say yes to all of it. Not reluctantly. Completely.

He wasn’t soft about it. He’d spent most of his adult life in physical agony. Debilitating migraines. Near-blindness. A body that was consistently failing him. His conclusion was that the pain wasn’t a mistake. It was the source.

Viktor Frankl arrived at something similar from a completely different direction. He survived Nazi concentration camps and observed that the people who held on weren’t necessarily the strongest physically. They were the ones who had a reason to survive. Who could find meaning even inside the worst imaginable circumstances.

He wrote that suffering stops being suffering the moment it finds a meaning.

The principle scales. “Why is this happening to me” is a starting point, not a destination. The people who stay stuck are the ones who never leave it. The question that actually moves you is: what am I going to do about it?

One inch forward. That’s all it takes to start.

How to Actually Do This

I’m not going to give you a five-step framework.

But I will tell you the one sentence that functions as the whole practice for me, every time something goes sideways:

It is what it is. Now what are you going to do about it?

Just acknowledge the reality of what is, and then redirect your energy toward what you actually control.

The first half of the sentence is acceptance. The second half is agency. You need both. Acceptance without agency is resignation. Agency without acceptance is the kind of frantic, resentful effort that burns you out before you get anywhere.

Together, they move you.

When a business attempt fails, you don’t sit in it. You extract what it taught you and apply it to what comes next. You treat it as tuition, not punishment.

When a loss happens, real loss, the kind that doesn’t resolve, you let yourself feel the weight of it. In the hours after I heard about Daniel, I walked. Alone, for a while. No destination. Just moving through it, letting my mind do what it needed to do. Like a tornado had torn through a room and I was slowly, quietly putting things back in order.

But I didn’t do that alone. Not fully. My best friend flew in from New York just to be there. Not to fix anything. Just to be present. My wife was at my side through all of it. A friend of my brother’s sat with me and told me stories about who Daniel was to the people around him, how he loved people, how he showed up for them. That mattered more than I can explain.

Sometimes the “Now what?” isn’t a solo act. Sometimes it’s knowing who to call. Sometimes it’s letting someone sit with you in it. Amor fati doesn’t demand that you carry everything alone. It just asks that you keep moving, and sometimes the people around you are exactly what makes that possible.

Then, when you’re ready, you decide what kind of person you’re going to be because of it. Not despite it. Because of it.

When your circumstances aren’t what you planned, ask yourself honestly: am I fighting this because it’s wrong for me, or am I fighting this because I’m afraid? One of those fights is worth having. The other is just noise.

The One Thing Worth Remembering

Amor fati doesn’t promise you a good outcome.

It doesn’t guarantee that the business will work, or that the grief will lift, or that the circumstances will change. It isn’t magic and it isn’t naive.

What it offers is a way to move through anything without being destroyed by it. A way to stay in motion when the ground shifts. A way to be useful, to yourself and to the people around you, when things don’t go the way they were supposed to.

You are going to face things you didn’t plan for. You already have.

The question was never whether it would happen. It will. It always does.

The question is what you build while it does.

My photos app has been stopping me lately.

Not with anything urgent. Just memories. The kind that surface as a notification on my phone. A photo from three years ago, a face I haven’t seen in a while, a home I used to live in, an event I’d almost forgotten. The app just finds them and puts them in front of me whether I’m ready or not.

Most of them I swipe away without thinking.

But some of them I sit with.

The ones I stop for are usually the same kind. People or pets that are no longer in my life. Old homes. Moments from seasons that are long gone. Those ones don’t get swiped. They get a moment. Sometimes just a breath. Sometimes more.

And lately those pauses have been making me ask a question I haven’t asked in a while:

How do I actually see the past?

I took my dog out one morning recently. It was early and quiet the way Kansas mornings get, breezy and a little overcast, the sky the color of something that might become rain. I was standing in the grass, feeling the wind on my face and looking up at the sky, and the question surfaced in my mind.

How do I actually see the past?

Seven years have passed since I left home.

Seven years of moving more times than I can count. Swapping careers, building a large social following from scratch, going through a significant weight loss, building a house. Losing some of the closest people in my life. Building a marriage through all of it, my wife and I growing up together in real time, figuring it out as we went.

People tell us we seem older than we are. That the way we talk, the way we carry our stories, feels like more than our age should hold. I understand why they say that. It feels like we’ve lived a full life inside of seven years.

And the strange thing is, I haven’t really sat with any of it.

Life moved so fast and I moved with it. There was always a next thing. A next goal, a next project, a next meeting, a next version of something I was building. You often don’t pause when you’re in motion like that. You just keep going.

But standing in the grass that morning, the breeze moving around me, I realized something had shifted. Things have slowed down a little. And in that quiet, the past was finally asking for some attention.

When I was younger, I lived in the past. I couldn't stop replaying conversations, revisiting moments, turning them over looking for where things went wrong. What I should have said differently?

I spent a lot of time in that space.

I won’t say it was entirely wasted. Somewhere in all that analysis I developed an ability to read people, to notice posture, to catch what someone wasn’t saying, to understand a room. It wasn’t the most efficient way to learn that skill. But it’s where I learned it.

Still, there’s a cost to living in the past that way. You’re constantly trying to will a different outcome from something that’s already finished. And no matter how long you sit with it, you cannot change it.

I know that now in a way I didn’t then.

However, the past looks different to me these days.

The period of life that forced me to continuously be moving and building forced me out of my head and pushed me to take action rather than overthink.

After seven years of momentum, it’s become more like a logbook - something I pull from, reference, learn from, and then set back down.

When a photo surfaces and it’s someone I’ve lost, I don’t swipe it away. I let myself feel it. The past is a place to feel. A place to remember the people who shaped you, who loved you, who left before you were ready. You’re allowed to go there for that. You’re supposed to.

But when I’m dealing with something in the present, a mindset problem, a pattern I keep repeating, a reaction I don’t fully understand, I use the past differently. I go back not to find someone to blame, but to find the source. To understand it. Because understanding something gives you options. Blame just gives you somewhere to point.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Carl Jung

That distinction matters more than most people realize.

Here’s the thing about blaming the past, especially blaming the people in it:

We don’t zoom out far enough.

It’s easy to look back at how you were raised and find the things that were wrong. The gaps. The moments that left a mark. And some of those things are real and worth examining.

As a child you start out completely incapable of taking care of yourself. Entirely dependent on someone else to feed you, hold you, keep you alive. And the people who do that for you, they’re just figuring it out too. Making the best decisions they can with what they have, in the circumstances they’re in, shaped by their own pasts they never fully sat with either.

And then one day, if you’re paying attention, you realize the circle closes. The people who once took care of you start to need you to take care of them.

It all comes back around.

That perspective doesn’t erase the hard things. It doesn’t mean everything was fine or excusable. But it makes it harder to stay in resentment when you understand that everyone in the story was just a person trying to navigate their own.

I don’t want to live in the past. I can’t change it and I’ve made peace with that in a way that took longer than I’d like to admit.

But I don’t want to run from it either.

The past is where my progress lives. It’s the only place I can go to see how far I’ve actually come. Not in a self-congratulatory way, but in an honest one. A look at what you’ve survived kind of way. A look at what you’ve built kind of way.

The photos app will keep surfacing memories. Some of them I’ll swipe away.

But some of them I’ll sit with.

And I’m learning that the ones worth sitting with aren’t always the ones that sting the most. Sometimes they’re just the ones that remind you how much of a life you’ve actually lived. How many people you’ve loved. How many versions of yourself you’ve already been.

The past is a reference point, not a residence.

Use it. Learn from it. Feel what it has to offer.

And then come back to today.

Because today is the only place anything can actually be built.

Somewhere along the way, gratitude became a ceiling.

A reason to stop reaching. A guilt that shows up every time you want something more than what you already have.

As if thankfulness and ambition can’t exist in the same person.

They can.

What Gratitude Actually Looks Like

I’m not consciously grateful every single day. I get frustrated. I get impatient. I’m human.

But there are moments where I catch myself looking around at my home, my wife, the life we’ve built, and something in me just goes still, and I just say thank you. Not out loud always. Just a quiet, internal thank you, God, for this.

I’m grateful for my career. For the wins and the losses equally, because both shaped me. For the family that shows up. For the experiences that cost me something, because those tend to give the most back.

That gratitude is real.

The Guilt of Wanting More

There’s a version of this conversation that makes ambition the enemy of gratitude. That says wanting more means you don’t appreciate what you have. That striving is somehow a sign of ingratitude and that if you were truly thankful, you’d be content to stay where you are.

I’ve felt that guilt and still do at times.

The voice that says: who are you to want more when you already have so much?

But here’s what I’ve come to believe:

Gratitude is about how you see what you have. Ambition is about what you’re willing to build next. They operate in completely different directions. One looks at the present and one looks at the future. There’s no rule that says you can only have one at a time.

The most grounded, purposeful people I know carry both. They’re deeply thankful for where they are. And they’re quietly, persistently hungry for where they’re going.

That’s not a contradiction. That’s wholeness.

Permission

Maybe what you actually need right now isn’t more motivation or a better strategy.

Maybe it’s just permission.

Permission to say: I am grateful for everything I have. And in the same breath: I want more, and that’s okay.

You don’t have to earn the right to want a bigger life by first proving you’re satisfied with the one you have. You don’t have to pretend you’ve arrived somewhere you haven’t. And you don’t have to feel guilty for having a vision that extends beyond your current circumstances.

Gratitude keeps you grounded. Ambition keeps you moving. You need both to build anything that lasts.

“Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” - Melody Beattie

That’s the version of gratitude worth practicing. Not the kind that caps you. The kind that centers you - so that everything you reach for, you reach for from a place of enough rather than a place of lack.

You can be thankful and still want more.

What’s one thing you’re genuinely grateful for right now - and one thing you’re still reaching for? Comment and let me know. I read every one.

What I touch, I change.

This last year, I caught myself thinking something dangerous. Not loud, not dramatic, just a quiet belief that settled in. That what I say, what I do, even what I think… doesn’t really matter that much. Like I’m replaceable. Like if I disappeared from the room, the job, the conversation, nothing would really shift. And if I’m being honest, that thought carries more weight than most people admit.

Then I came across a phrase. Quod tango muto. What I touch, I change. I don’t even remember who said it, just some guy on social media. But it stuck, because it directly challenged what I had started to believe.

There is a quiet weight to this phrase. Not loud, not dramatic, just true. Quod tango muto. What I touch, I change. The fact of the matter is, most people live like this isn’t real, like their words disappear, like their actions dissolve, like their presence leaves no imprint. But everything you touch carries your fingerprint. Every room. Every conversation. Every person.

You don’t get to opt out of influence, you only get to choose what kind.

Then the next thought came. Is it really that important? And that question didn’t come from curiosity, it came from doubt. So I started mapping it out. If what I touch changes, then how far does that change go? A conversation affects a person, that person carries it into their next decision, and that decision affects someone else. And just like that, something small moves further than you can track.

Most of what we do, we never see the full result of. That doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. It just means we weren’t around long enough to see the ripple.

The truth is, you were never neutral.

The Myth of Neutral Living

We like to believe we can move through life without consequence—keep our heads down, stay out of the way, do no harm. But there is no such thing as neutral. Silence shapes outcomes, inaction reinforces direction, and absence leaves space for something else to fill it. Even neglect is a form of influence.

You didn’t say anything—that changed something. You didn’t show up—that changed something. You didn’t care—that changed something.

Neutral isn’t harmless. It’s still a direction.

The world is not waiting for your permission to be affected by you. It already is.

The Responsibility Most People Avoid

If everything you touch changes, then you are responsible for more than you’d like to admit—not just for what you do, but for how you do it. The tone in your voice, the patience you lack, the encouragement you withhold… or the opposite. The extra minute you give someone, the honesty you choose instead of comfort, the standard you refuse to lower.

You are always leaving something behind.

The question is what.

The Weight of Small Things

Most change doesn’t come from grand gestures. It comes from the unnoticed—a word that sticks with someone for years, a moment of belief when someone was ready to quit, a careless comment that echoes longer than you intended. You don’t get to decide how far your impact travels, only what you release into the world.

A man can build something in ten years and tear something down in ten seconds.

The reverse is also true.

The Discipline of Awareness

Living with this mindset sharpens you. It forces you to slow down, to think before you speak, to act with intention instead of impulse—not out of fear, but out of respect for the weight you carry. Because influence is not a gift; it’s a responsibility. And whether you acknowledge it or not, you’re exercising it every day.

Final Thought

You will leave marks—on people, on places, on moments that don’t look important at the time. The only real choice you have is this: will what you touch be better, or just different?

Quod tango muto.

Most people won’t choose. They’ll drift—and still leave a mark.

So choose carefully what your hands reach for.

Not as experts. Not as people with a blueprint. Just as two people who wanted to invite a conversation and see what happened.

Our very first guest was a mindset coach - now a TEDx speaker - and we asked him about purpose. Not because we had it figured out. Because we didn’t.

I say this because maybe the way this publication has grown lately, the subscriber count, the momentum, it could make us look like people who have figured something out. I want to reset that.

We haven’t.

We’re here to share what we’re learning as we go - and to make space for you to do the same. If you have thoughts, if something resonates or doesn’t, leave a comment. Send a message. That’s the whole point.

Lately, I’ve been pulled in a few directions.

One of them is a book.

I’ve always wanted to write one. And I know what you might be thinking - you’re 25. I get it. I’m not a gray-haired man sitting in a leather chair reflecting on decades of wisdom. I’m just someone who’s had a crazy last six years of life full of growth, heartache, and lessons learned.

But I’m not writing it as a guru. I’m writing it as someone reflecting. Honestly. On where I was, where I am, and how I got here.

And here’s the thing - I’m not going to wait 30 years to do something I’ve always wanted to do.

Neither should you.

If you want to write a book about your life and you’re not yet 40 or 50 yet, write it. If you want to start a publication about something you’re not an expert in, start it. Just be clear about where you’re starting from. That clarity isn’t weakness. That’s what makes people trust you.

Something else has been on my mind lately.

I’m a social media strategist by trade. My job is literally to be plugged in - to find ideas, trends, content worth sharing. Scrolling is part of the work.

But on a walk recently - just me and the dogs - a lesson I had forgotton came back to mind.

Inspiration doesn’t always come from the feed. Sometimes it comes from the quiet.

I’ve been reaching for my phone when I should be sitting still. Searching for creativity when I should be letting it surface. There’s a difference between looking for ideas and having them come to you.

Silence is underrated. Especially when your whole career lives on a screen.

I’m still working on this. But I think it starts with recognizing the problem.

Not every moment of silence needs to filled. Most of the time the best thing you can do is simply sit with the silence.

That walk reminded me of something bigger, too.

This publication isn’t here to teach you anything. It’s here to reflect. To share what we’re seeing, what we’re learning, what we’re still figuring out - and to ask if any of it lands for you.

If a realization I have resonates with you, I’m glad. That’s all I’m after.

We’re not the experts.

We’re still building on what we started 4 years ago.

- Isaac

I’ve been sitting with a thought lately, one that snuck up on me after a long day of moving boxes and setting up our new home.

My wife and I recently left the house we built in a small town and moved to a bigger city, closer to work. I won’t get into all the reasons why because that’s its own long story. But something about this new place is different. It’s peaceful here. There’s a stillness I didn’t realize I was missing. Less noise pulling at my focus, fewer outside influences creeping into my headspace.

And sitting on the couch one evening, tired from the day, it hit me:

This is it. This is life.

I have goals. I have things I want to accomplish. But somewhere along the way, I started treating those goals like a starting gun - like life would officially begin once I crossed some finish line. Once I got the right job, lived in the right place, became the right version of myself.

Here’s the thing, though. I’ve actually hit a lot of those goals.

Seven years ago, if I could’ve seen where I am today - doing work I genuinely love, after years of grinding through jobs I disliked - I would’ve said: that’s when my life starts. That’s the moment. But that moment came and went, and I kept moving the finish line. Life kept waiting on me to notice it.

It never stopped happening. I just stopped paying attention.

Your life isn’t on hold. It’s not sitting in a waiting room until you achieve something worthy of it. It’s been here the whole time, quietly compounding - in the daily effort, in the small decisions, in the ordinary Tuesday evenings you barely remember. Those stack up. That is the life.

The only scenario where achievement actually feels like a lightning bolt? Maybe winning the lottery. Going from broke to millionaire overnight. And even then, the research isn’t kind to that story. For the rest of us, the big milestone arrives and the world keeps spinning. You wake up the next morning and it’s still just a morning.

So don’t wait for your life to start.

It already has. It’s happening right now, in front of you.

Start living it today.

I wrote a note on Substack recently that sparked the idea for this post. The highlight of the note is that everyone’s perspective and knowledge can help you grow and get better - even if you are succeeding already.

There’s a stigma out there that asking questions makes you look unqualified. Like admitting you don’t know something somehow proves you’re not capable.

So people pretend they know what they’re doing.

They stay quiet in meetings.
They struggle through projects alone.
They wait until the very end before letting anyone see their work.

I used to do the same thing.

The Fear of Looking Incompetent

Early in my marketing career, I was hesitant to ask questions.

If I didn’t know something, I’d try to figure it out quietly. I didn’t want to signal that I was unsure or inexperienced. I didn’t want people to think I didn’t belong in the room.

So I’d grind away on projects, convinced they looked great.

Then I’d submit the work.

And suddenly the feedback would pour in.

“This could be clearer.”
“The structure needs work.”
“Have you considered approaching it this way?”

If you’ve ever been there, you know how it feels. You spend hours, sometimes days, building something, only to have it picked apart.

If your mindset isn’t right, that kind of feedback can feel crushing.

The Power of Early Feedback

When you’re knee-deep in a project, you lose perspective.

You’ve stared at the same document, design, or strategy for so long that you start to assume it’s solid. Everything feels logical in your head because you built it step by step.

But someone seeing it for the first time can spot issues instantly.

They see the blind spots you’re too close to notice.

Psychologists call this the “curse of knowledge.” Once you understand something deeply, it becomes difficult to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Your brain fills in gaps automatically - gaps that other people immediately notice.

That’s why asking for feedback early is so valuable.

Instead of waiting until the end of a project, you invite perspective while there’s still room to improve it.

And if you can learn to receive feedback - even harsh feedback - without taking it personally, your growth accelerates dramatically.

If you can learn to detach your ego from your output and allow feedback to be about the project, rather than a reflection of yourself, it becomes easier to hear.

Every Great Builder Had Mentors

The truth is, almost no one becomes excellent in isolation.

Behind nearly every successful person is a long line of teachers, mentors, editors, critics, and advisors.

Take Warren Buffett, for example. One of the most successful investors in history openly credits his mentor Benjamin Graham for shaping his entire philosophy on investing. Buffett has said many times that Graham’s influence changed the trajectory of his life.

Or consider Steve Jobs. Early in Apple’s history, Jobs sought guidance from Mike Markkula, an experienced executive who helped shape Apple’s early business strategy and marketing approach. Without that mentorship, Apple may never have become what it did.

Even Albert Einstein relied heavily on discussion and feedback from colleagues while developing his ideas. Many of his breakthroughs came through collaborative dialogue, not isolated genius.

In other words, the myth of the lone genius is mostly fiction.

Philosophers Understood This Long Ago

The idea that we grow through the perspective of others isn’t new.

Thousands of years ago, Socrates built an entire teaching method around questioning and dialogue. He believed truth was discovered through conversation, not solitary thinking.

As he famously said:

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

Acknowledging what we don’t know is the beginning of learning.

The Roman Stoic Seneca echoed a similar idea:

“We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden.”

Human beings grow through shared experience. We sharpen one another.

Even the psychologist Carl Jung understood that much of what we can’t see in ourselves becomes visible through others. Our blind spots often reveal themselves through relationships, conversations, and criticism.

The Feedback That Changed My Work

Looking back at my own career, many of the biggest improvements I’ve made came from feedback.

When I compare the things I created a year ago to the things I create today, the difference is obvious. Not because I suddenly became smarter or more talented - but because I asked for input.

I showed drafts earlier.

I asked questions.

I invited critique.

And sometimes the feedback was blunt.

But every time I listened and adjusted, the work got better.

That’s the real secret: feedback compresses the learning curve.

Instead of making the same mistake ten times, you make it once and move forward.

This Applies to Life Too

This process isn’t limited to work.

It applies to relationships, friendships, and personal growth just as much as it does to careers.

Think about how rarely people ask their partner a simple question:

“What could I be doing better in this relationship?”

Most people avoid that conversation because they’re afraid of the answer. We’d rather live in the comfort of our own assumptions than the clarity of someone else’s truth.

But the truth is, that kind of honesty is what strengthens relationships.

The same is true with friendships, leadership, parenting, and self-development. Growth almost always requires another perspective.

As the writer C.S. Lewis once observed:

“Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.”

Everyone Knows Something You Don’t

Here’s the quiet truth that changes how you approach life:

Everyone knows something you don’t.

Everyone has experiences you haven’t had.
Everyone sees certain problems more clearly than you do.

Even when you’re the expert in a room, someone else may bring insight that changes the outcome of what you’re building.

And if you’re willing to ask for it - really ask for it - the results compound.

Your work improves.

Your thinking sharpens.

Your progress accelerates.

The Real Risk Isn’t Asking

Most people think asking for help makes them look incompetent.

In reality, the opposite is true.

The people who grow the fastest are usually the ones who ask the most questions.

They’re curious. They’re open. They’re willing to expose gaps in their knowledge.

Because they understand something important:

The real risk isn’t asking for help.

The real risk is pretending you don’t need it.

I’ve been catching myself saying it is what it is a lot lately.

I know how that sounds. Like a cop-out. Like someone who’s given up and wrapped their surrender in a tidy little phrase. But that’s not what’s happening when I say it.

Lately, life has thrown a string of circumstances and unexpected events my way, situations I genuinely cannot fix, cannot control, and cannot will into a different outcome. And so the phrase keeps coming out.

But here’s the thing. Every single time I say it is what it is, my mind immediately follows up with a question: okay, so what can we do right now?

Not tomorrow.

Not once things calm down.

Right now, in this moment - what actions can I take that are going to move my life in a better direction? Because while I can’t always control what happens to me, I can always control what I do next. And that distinction is everything.

I’m not saying this from a place of theory. I’m saying it from experience.

Seven years ago, I left high school, did a year of college, got married, and entered the workforce full time. I started out driving trucks - hauling materials between warehouses and a production plant, running machines in between routes. That was my starting point.

Today, I work at a soon-to-be billion-dollar company and recently received a job offer from one of the top creative marketing agencies in the world.

No degree. No fancy qualifications on paper. What I do have is a stack of proof - built day by day - that I showed up and did the best I could in the present moment. That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.

I’m a Christian, and I’m genuinely grateful for what God has placed in my life. But it wouldn’t be honest to suggest I’d be where I am if I’d just sat back and waited for it to be handed to me. Faith and effort aren’t opposites. For me, they’ve always moved together.

Here’s what I want you to take from all of this, especially if you’re sitting in the middle of something hard right now.

Time will pass no matter what you do. That’s not a threat - it’s actually the most freeing thing I know. You can spend that time consumed by the circumstances you can’t change, or you can keep moving, one day at a time, doing the best you can with what’s in front of you. Eventually, those problems will either resolve themselves or you’ll grow strong enough that they no longer have the same weight.

What I’ve realized is that the seasons of life where I’ve had the least control have given me the most clarity. I’ve thought deeper, connected more genuinely with people, and found myself sharing stories I wouldn’t have had otherwise. There’s something about pressure that sharpens you, if you let it.

Someone commented on a Substack note I shared recently, asking how to find peace when dealing with things outside of one’s control. My answer was simple: focus on the present. Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. Let the rest go - not because it doesn’t matter, but because holding onto it isn’t helping you solve it. Those things will still be there when you’re ready to address them. But in the meantime, you don’t have to carry them every hour of every day.

What you’ll find, when you start living that way, is that you actually do control your peace. Not your circumstances - but your peace. And that turns out to be the thing that matters most.

It is what it is. And then - what are you going to do about it?