Why the change? Because we’ve spent the past few years at Same Page helping companies figure out the whole “humans working together” thing, and I’ve got plenty to share.

I plan to write about the hard parts of running a company that no one warns you about—like what to do when two senior people hate each other, how to think about comp, or how to handle it when you know you need to fire someone but aren’t sure where to start. Less theory, more practical solutions to real problems.

Some of you have been here since the Matt's Monday Memo days (you're the real MVPs), while others might be wondering if they signed up for this in their sleep. If this new direction isn’t for you, no hard feelings. Hit unsubscribe and enjoy your new, less encumbered inbox.

But if you’re looking for practical advice on building teams that actually enjoy showing up, stick around.

One more thing: we’re moving off Substack. This shouldn’t affect you, but the email will now be powered by Beehiiv and might look a little different in your inbox.

First post drops this week.

Thanks for reading,

-Matt Tanner

That’s a long time! (So long, in fact, you might not remember who I am or why you signed up for this. You can easily unsubscribe at the bottom of this email if you wish.)

Why did I stop writing? Well, laziness.

But also, I’m fatigued by everything I read on the Internet. Every newsletter, article, email, LinkedIn post, and sales pitch sounds the same. An endless spigot of AI drivel that says nothing and benefits no one.

Sometimes I see stuff and I’m convinced it’s just bots talking to each other.

But even though the bar is lower than ever, there’s paradoxically more pressure to write something worthwhile. Lowering the technical barrier to writing seems to have resulted in a higher creative barrier—a subconscious pressure to prove our humanity through writing.

Those are the surface reasons for my writing drought, but there is a third, simpler reason:

I’ve been busy.

Lost in the best kind of busy—the kind where you look up and realize hours have passed. Days blurring together not from monotony, but from total absorption. Running a business, it turns out, can swallow you whole.

For the past year, I’ve been heads down alongside my co-founder and team at Same Page. It’s been the most fulfilling work I’ve ever experienced. I’ve been too focused on what we’re building to stop and give updates or (shudder) chase LinkedIn clout. I doubt I ever had much of a “personal brand”, but I definitely don’t now.

And I couldn’t care less.

Lately I’ve been reading about ego detachment—those rare moments when we stop filtering our experiences through self-image. No mental commentary running alongside. No urge to reach for the phone to document or share. No thoughts about how others would view the moment. Just total absorption in what we're doing.

I’m fortunate to have experienced this frequently over the past year. Am I a Zen master? No. Is it because I know that no one thinks an HR company is cool, freeing me from the constant urge to share every win? Possibly.

Either way, I decided to write today because I wanted to tell you how meaningless your follower count is and how important it is to get lost in something that is meaningful to you.

There's something beautiful about being so immersed in what you're doing that you forget to post about it. When you're too busy living the story to worry about telling it.

It took me a long time (I’m old) to find my own thing to get lost in. I hope you find yours too.

-Matt

P.S. Hit reply and let me know what you’re working on. I read and respond to every email.

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The first time I was passed over for a promotion, I received the news while eating lunch in my car on the side of the road in Cañon City, Colorado. Cell service was terrible west of I-25 in those days, and I could barely hear the hiring manager on the other end of the phone. I picked up just enough to gather what was happening.

Nothing you could’ve done . . . you interviewed well . . . went with someone with more experience . . . just need more time in the field.

I remember hanging up the phone and calmly putting my half-eaten turkey sandwich back in the cooler. Then I reclined the driver’s seat of my 2005 Nissan Altima, and cried.

In retrospect this is embarrassing, but at the time, that promotion was everything to me.

I was a field auditor for a commercial finance company, a fancy way of saying I drove around Colorado looking at serial numbers on manufactured homes, RVs, farming equipment, pianos, and hot tubs. I compared what I found at a client’s business to a list generated each morning by the home office, and if a unit was missing, I marked it sold and collected payment.

Or at least I tried to. Plenty of grizzled business owners gave 24-year-old me the runaround.

The farming equipment guys had the most fun with it. “Oh the combine harvester? You must’ve missed it. It’s on the back acre, just past the moldboard plow. If you get to the manure spreader you’ve gone too far.” I could hear them chuckling as I trudged back out into a field full of equipment that all looked the same to me.

The hot tub dealers were the worst—we had to use invisible ink and a blacklight to secretly mark serial numbers on the tubs before they pried off the data plates and switched them around in an elaborate shell game designed to delay payment.

I took the job without ever having stepped foot in Colorado. I packed everything I owned into a small U-Haul and drove across the country from Nashville. It was my first job in the business world, having previously only done things like substitute teach or write for a newspaper.

The job was entry-level, always presented as an opportunity to get one’s foot in the door. Every quarter, those of us in the field would converge at a company office for a big meeting. Here, higher-ups delivered presentations, outlining how, with enough hard work on the road, we might someday earn a promotion into the office.

I remember one guy telling us a version of this as he slowly waved his arm across an expanse of cubicles in Golden Valley, Minnesota, as if to say, “Behold the spoils that await ye select few who conquer the challenges of the field!”.

There were dozens of us vying for every in-office promotion, and competition was fierce. Once, when word spread that someone had been fired for fraudulently recording audits he never actually completed, we rejoiced. He had been a top performer (or so we thought), and his termination meant one less candidate to contend with.

Deeply competitive by nature, I was immediately enthralled by the promotion game. Rumor was, no one had ever been promoted with less than a year of field experience, so naturally I made this my goal. I strived to have the best numbers possible and became known for sending unsolicited reports and ideas to managers. (If this sounds like I was kissing up, it’s because that’s exactly what I was doing.)

I was paid to visit some of the most scenic landscapes in the United States, where I met interesting people and learned about the businesses they built. I had a company car, autonomy over my schedule, and a modest salary that comfortably met the needs of someone in their early twenties.

Rather than enjoy any of this, my singular focus was on winning the promotion game by landing a job in the company office located in a northern suburb of Atlanta, my hometown.

There was at least one guy in the field who steered clear of the promotion game altogether—my mentor, Kevin.

Kevin (a pseudonym, since I didn’t tell him I was writing this) was ten years my senior and had been doing the job so long that in addition to conducting audits, he flew all over the country training new hires. He lived about an hour north of me in Fort Collins and I didn’t know anyone else in the entire state, so we hung out quite a bit. He not only taught me how to do the job, he was kind enough to teach me how to fly fish and ski. He invited me on hikes and camping trips with his friends, and he didn’t make fun of me when I once expressed shock at the “weird creatures” staring at our car at a stoplight (they were prairie dogs).

I was ten months into the job when I received my crushing roadside news and the first thing I did was call Kevin. He cheered me up by taking me to dinner at a “cool new burrito place they don’t have in the South yet” called Chipotle.

He couldn’t understand why I was so upset—after all, there’s no skiing in Atlanta—but he did his best to make me feel better. Despite this, I remember feeling sorry for him as we sipped rounds of Fat Tire. “How in the world does a guy get stuck doing the same job for a decade?” I thought.

It would take years for me to understand that Kevin was playing a different game than the rest of us. He was indifferent to promotions because he found deep satisfaction in his daily work. He loved roaming around Colorado, spending time outdoors, and interacting with customers. That was his game, and he was good at it.

I don’t know that Kevin's chosen path was superior to mine. But I do know that Kevin chose the game he was playing, whereas I let myself get swept up in a game that management was telling me to play.

Playing the game wasn’t my biggest mistake, it was failing to recognize that I had a choice in the matter.

I would eventually get my promotion. It was announced, to my great pleasure, in front of everyone at a quarterly meeting. Beaming, I stood up and soaked in the jealously I felt emanating from (most of) the field auditors in the room. The game was over; I won.

Sort of.

After taxes, the whopping $5,000 raise came to about $300 a month. For this, I traded views of the snow-covered peaks of the Front Range for the eyeball-melting glow of Excel spreadsheets. But my business card now said Account Manager and I felt like I was well on my way to the top of the corporate ladder.

A few weeks later I was sitting at my desk when the face of a coworker appeared above my beige cubicle wall. Also freshly promoted from the field, she was someone I considered one of my closest office friends and fiercest rivals.

“Did you hear about Tony? He’s only been in the office six months and just got promoted to Senior Account Manager.”

I leaned back in my cheap swivel chair, staring up at the fluorescent lights.

I felt like crying.

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been enamored with the idea of a daily journaling practice. It has always struck me as one of those atomic habits—a simple daily act that compounds over time, magically unlocking creativity, increasing mindfulness, and deepening understanding of oneself.

Unfortunately, I’m inherently lazy and lack the discipline to stick with something like that for more than a week. I admire those among us who rise before the sun each day to sip their pour-over coffee while filling their Moleskine with their innermost dreams and reflections, but I’ve accepted this ain’t happening for me.

Still, I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that I should do something.

I’m not sure what prompted me to start my current process back on New Year’s Day 2021. Perhaps it was stumbling across yet another Stoicism threadboi tweeting about how Marcus Aurelius wrote in his diary each morning from a tent on the frontlines of war in Germania. More likely I was inspired by Austin Kleon. Or maybe I was simply caught up in the spirit of a new year.

Whatever the reason, I decided to try something so simple that even I could do it every day. And it worked! I’ve managed to maintain my daily log for more than 1,000 days.

What follows is how I got started and what I’ve learned along the way.

Choosing a format

I knew an analog tool would never work for me. My office is littered with fancy, half-used paper notebooks; despite my love for such items, they tend to devolve into nothing more than repositories for doodles and scratch math.

As for digital options, I once maintained a Notion “journal” for a few months, but since Notion is primarily a tool I use to run my business, I would inevitably open it and get lost in a work task. I’ve also tried journal-specific apps like Day One and while I thought it was great, it was yet another app I had to remember to open.

I landed on Google Sheets for my daily log because it’s a free, low-friction tool I can access anywhere. Plus I have been using it for personal things like budgets and weekly reviews for more than a decade so I knew it was more “sturdy” than other digital options.

The process

My daily log is intentionally simple. It has eight columns, but I only update three of them manually:

• Log Entry

• Sleep

• Daily Score

The log entry is nothing more than a few sentences about what I did the day before. Here is my very first entry:

Kid free morning with Caroline. We walked Leo and got bagels. She went to pick up kids in afternoon, leaving me with an empty house all day. Got lots of work done then watched bowl games and basketball.

The sleep column is how many hours I slept the night before. I don’t own a fancy tracker so this is just my best guess, but it’s directionally accurate.

The daily score is (obviously) subjective and I have no idea if the scale is statistically sound, but it works for me. I don’t overthink it, quickly rating based on how I’m feeling that day. (My average is 1.183 if you’re wondering.)

The additional five columns are:

• Number (1 to 365)

• Date

• Day (Monday, Tuesday, etc.)

• 10 Day Sleep Average

• 10 Day Score Average

Most of these are self-explanatory. I like numbering the days because it gives me perspective as to how far along I am into a given year and it seems to help me fight that “time flies” feeling (more on that later).

All of these cells populate via formulas or autofill and I added some basic conditional formatting that gives me a quick visual warning if I am veering into sleep debt or a stretch of poorly rated days.

Why keep a log?

Occasionally I add commentary to the daily entry about how I am feeling, but for the most part it is nothing more than a record of what happened each day. This means I capture a lot of things that seem meaningless or mundane in the moment, but over time as I review the log entries, patterns emerge and I am able to extract significance from an event or a period of my life.

When I filter the log by score, additional trends emerge. I can see at a glance which activities (or lack thereof) lead to higher or lower scores. Recently I’ve begun experimenting with AI to take this idea even further.

I dumped my entire log into ChatGPT and asked it to identify any patterns from my higher-rated days.

Here’s what it said:

On your best days, there's a clear mix of rewarding work, personal hobbies, and genuine connections with people. Activities that combine your love for writing and tech often lift your mood. Additionally, exploring spiritual and philosophical topics, combined with spending quality time with those you care about, contributes significantly to an amplification of positive sentiment.

I never told ChatGPT that I enjoyed writing or had an interest in tech—and honestly I’m not sure I’ve ever articulated the tech interest to myself before, but it’s definitely true.

Next I asked it to look for patterns in my lower-rated days.

Interruptions in routines, reduced focus, less exercise, and an increased sense of being overwhelmed, potentially stemming from deviations in expected work outcomes or external stressors were present on lower rated days. Additionally, the emotional toll of interpersonal conflicts, even if minor, seems to have a profound impact, overshadowing other positive aspects of the day.

I knew most of this already—I crave routine and I hate conflict—but it was a nice reminder. Seeking a bit more, I asked it to go deeper and look for any additional patterns that might be less obvious.

The results were impressive:

A secondary pattern is the pronounced effect of unmet expectations, whether they relate to productivity, interpersonal dynamics, or personal goals. There's a clear linkage between ambition and satisfaction; when high-set goals aren't achieved, the day's rating often declines. In essence, your momentum and sense of achievement seem to be crucial determinants of your daily contentment. While external factors like weather or minor inconveniences appear in the logs, their impact is less substantial than the internal metrics of relationship harmony and personal accomplishment.

Instead of manually poring over years of notebooks to find such a nugget, ChatGPT found it in seconds. It then recommended a shift from a focus on striving and goal setting to one of mindfulness and gratitude—something I’ve been contemplating and trying to put into practice ever since.

Of course, sometimes ChatGPT goes too far. Here it is with a thinly veiled suggestion I limit my pizza intake:

On -2 rated days, there's a common occurrence of eating both dairy and gluten, often with reduced exercise.

Slowing down time

While it helps me with pattern recognition and self-improvement, my primary motivation for maintaining a daily log is more immediate and poignant: it anchors me in the swiftly passing moments of my day-to-day life, particularly those involving my rapidly growing children.

In other words, my daily log helps me slow down time.

At the conclusion of every month, I read each of that month’s daily entries. By starting at the bottom and pressing the ‘up’ arrow on my keyboard, I can read the entire thing in about five minutes. It’s astounding how this simple act always triggers memories and highlights that I would have forgotten otherwise.

As I scan through the log I am transported back to a night where we cooked homemade pizza, a walk with my daughter where we saw a hawk swoop in front of us, or a game of catch with my son where we found a half dozen baseballs in our neighbor’s ivy patch.

It’s also fun to go back even further when I feel like it.

Do you remember what you did on May 7th, 2021? I don’t either, but I just looked it up and I now know that I read to my son’s kindergarten class, went to the gym, ordered Chinese food, and watched The Mitchell’s Versus the Machines with my family.

I believe that keeping a daily log has also helped me become more observant and present throughout the day. There are many times where something happens and I think, “that would make a great log entry.” The moment might not make it into the log, but at least it didn’t go unnoticed.

Logging my daily life has added a richness to the progression of time while also tethering me to the reality and significance of the present moment.

That’s certainly worth the three minutes a day it takes me to do it.

But then I made the mistake of going online and reading the reviews. The consensus was . . . not great. I immediately lost all interest in continuing the series, thoroughly swayed by the low-60’s score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The incident left me wondering why this happens to me so easily.

I like to believe that I have agency and free will; that I can discern for myself what I like and dislike without being unduly influenced by random people on the Internet.

But maybe I’m completely wrong about all that.

Increasingly it feels like I’m surrendering my personal judgment to the external evaluations of a disinterested, faceless crowd.

But why?

Perhaps because choosing is getting too damn hard.

In his book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz argues that the dramatic explosion in choice we have in things both mundane and profound is paradoxically making us less happy:

“Autonomy and freedom of choice are critical to our well being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy. Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don't seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.”

Last year a record 599 original scripted drama, comedy, and limited TV shows aired across the myriad streaming services. That’s too many! Once you summon the Herculean effort needed to stop scrolling and actually pick something, doubt starts to creep in. “Is this good? Am I actually enjoying this? There are 598 other options out there after all. . . ”

This isn’t just about TV shows. Products, restaurants, vacations, where to work, what hobbies to take up—any form of entertainment or experience is subject to this overwhelming sense of choice and, therefore, an over-reliance on external validation.

I'm not suggesting that all reviews are useless. They can save us time and disappointment. But I do wonder if we’ve been too eager to relinquish our critical faculties, submitting instead to a form of mental outsourcing.

One’s enjoyment of art—or a workplace, a hobby, or a meal—is an intensely personal thing, subject to countless idiosyncratic factors. It feels undignified to give something called (checks notes), the Tomatometer the power to validate or invalidate these personal tastes. It’s as if I’m letting it say to me: "You liked that? Well, you're wrong. It only scored 61% Don't you know how to tell if something's good or not? What’s wrong with you?!"

No one should know better than I do what I like or dislike; what resonates and what falls flat. That’s why I’m trying to tune out external noise and concentrate more on how I actually feel about things.

Later this week I’m going to see Oppenheimer.

Please don’t tell me if it’s any good.

With indignation you simply take a position on whatever the “current thing” is and shout about how the opposite position is a moral atrocity that, left unchecked, will destroy the fabric of society. You can probably think of (and maybe even follow) a few people taking this route. It’s a strategy rooted in fear.

The advice-focused approach to gaining followers is about entertaining readers with inspirational ideas to make their lives better. The key word being “entertaining”, since the advice is rarely acted upon—it’s merely something to be read and enjoyed in the moment. A more positive approach, but not entirely harmless.

Both paths sound horrible to me.

I meticulously cull negativity and outrage from my own media diet, and could never go the indignation route myself, despite its effectiveness. I suppose my writing is closer to the advice route, but the thought of each piece being enjoyed and immediately discarded is rather dispiriting. I understand that the vast majority of spilled digital ink is ephemeral, but I’d like to make some impact along the way.

So what to do?

I should first clarify that I don’t care in the slightest about accumulating a massive online following. Sure, seeing the newsletter grow would be cool, but only if that meant more people were benefitting from it or if it opened up exciting new opportunities for myself and readers. I see no value in growth for growth’s sake.

Back to the paths. Perhaps there is a third, less obvious option: writing as exploration.

I think the tendency when writing (or Tweeting, posting, etc.) is to try to come across as knowledgeable and authoritative; to present yourself as having already figured out some thing. And while I certainly see the value in rigorous thinking and being decisive (especially in a professional setting), this feels like a precarious way to exist as a writer.

If I only write about things where I’m an expert or have certainty, I’m going to run out of topics pretty quickly. But mostly this just sounds really boring to me. I’d much rather write about things while actively exploring them.

Paul Graham says that you can know a great deal about something without writing about it, but you can never know so much that you wouldn't learn more from trying to explain it in writing. I’ve found this to be true. Writing is a forcing mechanism that helps me crystallize incomplete ideas and thoughts in my own brain.

The path of exploration means posing questions in your writing without knowing the answers. It means leaning into uncertainty. It means doing the weirdest thing that feels right.

I relish the freedom to do all of those things, so the path of exploration makes the most sense for me. I recognize this might limit growth, but that’s a tradeoff I’m more than happy to make.

Exploration isn’t for everybody, and that’s okay. There’s plenty of advice and indignation out there if that’s your thing—seriously, no shame!

But if exploration is for you, I’m thrilled to have you.

Unfortunately, life rarely works this way.

Consider the career of Nolan Ryan, widely celebrated as one of the greatest pitchers to ever play the game of baseball. A towering, intimidating Texan, Ryan’s 5,714 career strikeouts are the most in the history of Major League Baseball. No one else is even close—Randy Johnson sits in a distant second place, with 839 fewer strikeouts.

Of course, Ryan also holds the ignominious record for giving up the most walks ever. Again, it’s not close. His 2,795 walks dwarf the 1,833 of Steve Carlton, who sits in second place.

Ryan won 324 games, good enough for 14th all time. He also lost 292, third most in the history of the sport.

Then there’s Stephen King. The Shining and The Stand are classics that continue to influence the world of literature and pop culture, but King has also written plenty of books that were panned by critics. That’s bound to happen when you publish 65 novels, 5 nonfiction books, and more than 200 short stories.

Or how about Dolly Parton? Her level of production is astonishing, having written more than 3,000 songs and released 51 solo studio albums over a career spanning more than six decades. But this means that for every Jolene or 9 to 5, there are a hundred songs you’ve never even heard of.

Parton’s success, like that of Ryan’s and King’s, is not just measured in the quality of their best work, but also in the incredible quantity of their creative output. These people aren’t just talented, they’re prolific.

To be known as prolific is to be known for producing in large quantities or with great frequency—a seemingly endearing epithet. And yet, there's a paradox whereby “prolific” come across like a backhanded compliment, an insinuation that volume comes with a dilution in quality.

Even King himself once acknowledged this in an opinion piece for the New York Times:

There are many unspoken postulates in literary criticism, one being that the more one writes, the less remarkable one’s work is apt to be . . . Mostly, it seems to be true.

All due respect to Stephen King (and admittedly he was probably being somewhat facetious), but I don’t think this is true at all. Mastery doesn't seem to come from avoiding mistakes, but rather, learning from them.

In their book, Art and Fear, authors David Bayles and Ted Orland share the case study of the "Ceramics Class Experiment". In their account, an art instructor divided his students into two distinct groups. One group was tasked with producing a high quantity of pots, regardless of quality. The other group was tasked with creating the perfect pot.

The group that produced the most pots, despite their focus on quantity, not only made more pots but better pots. They had the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, iterate on their designs, and refine their craftsmanship.

Aphorisms like “quality over quantity” lead us astray because they sound so convincing. We misinterpret them as hard facts and use them as a crutch. But if you wait for genius to strike, you’ll often end up producing nothing at all.

Quantity isn’t the enemy of quality—it’s an enabler of quality.

I have many fond memories of playing Mousetrap, but I can’t remember ever winning the game. In fact, I don’t remember anyone ever winning (and if I had lost to my younger sister, I would definitely remember). We always had too much fun building the mousetrap to bother with the actual game.

Today, I'm not playing Mousetrap (sadly!), but I do sometimes find myself building things that don’t feel too dissimilar from that intricate, over-the-top contraption.

During the pandemic I went deep down some YouTube wormholes, watching countless videos devoted to things like goal setting, note-taking systems, and productivity hacks. I was particularly drawn to August Bradley’s “Life Operating System”. I watched every minute of every video in his 30+ part series, building alongside him until I had my own version of his complex system of linked Notion databases. All told, I estimate I spent more than 50 hours watching the videos and creating the OS.

Yet once I finished building it, I never touched it again.

For awhile I felt immense guilt about this. It seemed like wasted time, and I felt like a quitter. Instead of watching all those YouTube videos and constructing a productivity system, maybe I should’ve done something more . . . productive.

While there is some validity to this criticism (I was indeed, on some level, avoiding difficult work and the harsh reality of the pandemic), I now look back on my abandoned system with a gentler perspective.

For one thing, the time spent building a Notion system I never used paid dividends when I built the Notion system my business runs on today. Moreover, the process that Bradley used to set goals based on values (rather than just outcomes) is something I think about all the time and will likely use for the rest of my life. But mostly, watching the videos and building the system was just a lot of fun.

I believe there’s a lesson here about the nature of productivity and the potential traps we set for ourselves in our pursuit of it. It's too easy to forget that being productive isn't just about the end results—it's also about the process, growth, and joy along the way.

I crave simplicity in most aspects of my life.

But I find there is also beauty in complexity and reward in the journey, and sometimes, that’s the whole point.

Perhaps that is why it was a bit of a shock this past weekend to realize we are halfway through yet another calendar year.

That’s right, we currently sit at a point roughly equidistant from the goals and resolutions of last January and those we will inevitably come up with later this year. As I review my own lists of goals, tasks, emails, and projects at this midyear point, it's painfully clear they’ve grown bigger, not smaller.

That doesn’t feel so great!

I much prefer the feeling of progress that comes from a shrinking list, but it seems the rest of the world isn’t waiting for my summer lethargy to lift, so more stuff keeps showing up on my plate.

These drastic times call for drastic measures:

I have declared productivity bankruptcy.

I started with Todoist, my to-do app of choice.

There were 47 tasks in my Someday/Maybe list. An acolyte of David Allen’s GTD method, I review this list once a month as he prescribes, but had not checked anything off in ages. Before I fully knew what was happening I found myself clicking “select all”, before deleting the entire thing.

I immediately panicked and considered undoing it, but I stayed the course.

I deleted every other incomplete task in Todoist except reminders for things like birthdays and quarterly tax payments. I keep a pretty clean inbox, but I archived every email—sorry to anyone waiting on a reply! Project lists, goals, reading, and watch lists were all deleted. I dragged everything on my computer desktop to the trash and emptied it.

Once finished I just sat staring at an impossibly clean screen.

It felt amazing.

Mostly. In addition to feeling (physically and mentally) lighter, I’ve also felt a lingering fear that I deleted something important or something I really wanted to do. But I keep coming back to the idea that anything truly worth doing I’ll simply remember and add it back to the list.

Just as a financial bankruptcy gives you the chance to clear debts and start anew, a productivity bankruptcy offers a fresh start. It allows you to clear your mental clutter, reassess priorities, and refocus on what truly matters.

But there's a catch.

When you wipe the slate clean, it's not a free pass to fall into laziness or neglect what truly matters to you. It's an opportunity to reconsider the tasks you’ve been treating as urgent or important, and really assess their value in your life. It’s not about throwing everything away, but rather, shedding the excess and retaining what is truly essential.

It’s only been a few days, but I’ve been much more judicious when adding things back to my lists. Turns out it’s a lot easier to keep things off a clean, sparse list than an already overflowing one. Of course I know this discipline will wane and that eventually I’ll find myself with too many nonessential things on my plate again, but that’s okay. I can always reset.

This summer, give yourself permission to stop and reflect on the tasks that have been overwhelming you. Consider their true worth. How much of your “busyness” is actual productivity, and how much is mere motion? Is it bringing you closer to your goals, or driving you further away from peace?

Depending on your answers, it might be time to nuke your lists.

They’ve since begun creating stacks of their own comic strips, which has led to a question:

Dad, how can I become a cartoonist when I grow up?

When I was their age, the answer was something like:

Create a bunch of comic strips until you have a portfolio, then submit your best ones to magazines and newspapers or use them to apply for a job and then, if you’re incredibly, exceedingly lucky, you might get a job as a cartoonist.

Today the answer is much simpler:

Create some comic strips.

Randall Munroe started drawing the XKCD comic in his spare time while working at NASA as a roboticist. He posted the comic on his personal website and it eventually became so popular, he quit his job to work on the comic full time. Last month the site had more than 5 million visitors.

There are countless other webcomics with devoted followings like Sarah’s Scribbles, Nathan Pyles’ Strange Planet, and Nick Seluk’s Awkward Yeti, to name a few.

These people weren’t given the title of a “cartoonist” from a publishing company or major newspaper (remember those?), and they certainly didn't ask for permission to draw. They simply created, posted, and found their audience. They bypassed the gatekeepers and made their way directly to the reader—their success determined not by the approval of an executive in a corner office, but by the people who visited their websites and shared their work.

This shift from needing external permission, this freedom, spans far beyond comics. We see it in musicians recording in their basements, in authors self-publishing, in filmmakers creating and releasing their own short films, in individuals teaching niche subjects from their living room, in restaurant critics gaining notoriety by posting Google reviews, and in day traders buying and selling stocks on their own.

These people aren’t waiting for anyone to give them access. They don't need a film studio, a publishing house, or a record label to put their work into the world. They need an idea, work ethic, and an Internet connection.

This isn't to say that the path is easy—far from it—but it is open to pretty much everyone.

This is a wild and wonderful shift from when I was my kids’ age. A shift toward opportunities not being confined by traditional boundaries but rather defined by one's ability to create and contribute in a meaningful way.

Of course, within this exhilarating transition there lies a sobering realization:

The gatekeepers are gone, but so too are the excuses.

In the old world, the struggling artist had an easy out. Rejection letters could be romanticized, framed as badges of honor in a personal narrative of tenacity and grit. If the novel was never published, or the album never made it to the radio, the culprit was clear: the unappreciative, narrow-minded gatekeepers who couldn’t see the genius within.

Today there is no one to reject you, but also no one to hide behind.

That’s pretty scary!

But, isn’t it also liberating?

When I told my daughter that she could publish a book whenever she wanted to, her eyes lit up. (“You mean like right now?” she asked, thirty minutes past her bedtime.)

It's less about getting discovered than it is creating something worth discovering.

The only permission you need is your own.

These mornings were hectic, to say the least.

Imagine a bunch of twenty-somethings running in and out of walk-in freezers, jostling for space in a crowded warehouse. Once packed you had to run up the street and find your assigned truck before backing it into the tiny loading dock. The whole thing had the frenetic energy of a kitchen in a busy restaurant.

I would spend an inordinate portion of my Fridays writing out a detailed plan for the next day on a massive whiteboard, and curious employees would always stop by to take a peek.

“How’s it looking?”, someone would ask with trepidation.

My answer was always some sort of sarcastic, self-deprecating response about how hungover and late everyone would probably be or how chaotic it was going to get.

And it was always chaotic (albeit a fun sort of chaos, most of the time).

Then one day our management team attended a workshop run by Ari Weinzweig, the co-founder of Zingerman’s Delicatessen, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was there that Ari introduced us to something called the “the belief action cycle”.

The belief action cycle works like this: Whenever you hold a belief, it will inform some associated action you take. This action is observed by others who then generate their own beliefs, which informs their actions. Their action then reinforces your original belief and the cycle continues.

Here is the image Ari used when explaining it:

I didn’t believe that young people could make it to work by 6 am on a Saturday, so I took actions like making snide comments or artificially moving up their start time on the schedule to build in a buffer. Employees witnessed these actions and formulated their own beliefs: “My boss doesn’t think I can do this. He seems smart, so that’s probably true.” That belief informed their actions—staying out too late the night before or rolling in 30 minutes late. Which of course reinforced my original belief that they couldn’t do the job.

We managed to break this vicious cycle when I started changing my tune at the whiteboard on Fridays. Instead of lamenting about how hard the day was going to be, I kept things positive. “It’s going to suck” turned into, “Y’all are going to crush it”.

(Yes, sometimes you have to force the belief before you totally believe it.)

Did this solve all of our problems? Of course not, but it helped immensely.

I recently read Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography of Steve Jobs. By the time I finished it I was convinced Jobs was a deeply flawed man who no one should ever fully emulate, but I was also in awe of his ability to motivate others through the power of belief.

My favorite story in the book is about the launch of the original Macintosh. One week before it was due to ship, Apple engineers realized they weren’t going to make the deadline. A software manager, chosen to relay the news to Jobs via a conference call, carefully explained the situation and asked for two more weeks.

Job remained silent for a moment while the the engineering team held their breath on the other end of the phone. Here is Isaacson describing what happened next:

He told them they were great. So great, in fact, that he knew they could get this done. “There’s no way we’re slipping!” he declared. “You guys have been working on on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks isn’t going to make that much of a difference. You may as well get it done. I’m going to ship the code a week from Monday with your names on it.”

They now knew Jobs believed they could complete the Macintosh on time, so they did it. The book is full of examples of Jobs using his “reality distortion field” as employees called it, to push people to do what they had previously thought impossible.

Actions (and therefore results) are the product of beliefs.

What are yours?

She also holds the record for the Big Dog Backyard Ultra, a race without a finish line, just an endless 4.167-mile loop where the winner is the last runner standing. In 2020, she completed the loop a mind-boggling 68 times over 3 days for a total of 283 miles.

Dauwalter is the world’s greatest ultrarunner—an athlete who competes in races longer than the standard marathon distance of 26.2 miles. During these grueling events she sometimes struggles to keep food down, vomiting every few miles. She endures bloody gashes from tripping and falling on rocks, dehydration, unimaginable blisters, and even hallucinations. 

When things get hard (and they always do in these events), Dauwalter starts visualizing “the pain cave”, an imaginary place she has mentally constructed in elaborate detail. Once inside the cave, she gets to work. She imagines herself chiseling away at new tunnels as she goes deeper into the recesses of the cave—and her own mind. 

Eventually, she emerges from the cave and crosses the finish line. 

The pain cave is a brilliant way to deal with the challenge of an ultramarathon, but what’s most fascinating about Dauwalter is that she doesn’t just use the cave as a last resort—she seeks it out, relishing her time inside.

Here she is talking about it on the Running On Om podcast:

Lately, my main strategy has been to stay in it and fully embrace how much it hurts and how painful that experience is because, in doing that I think it just reminds me that I’m doing something by choice, and to get to that physical state where it hurts that bad means I’ve worked really hard to get to that point and to celebrate kinda being in the pain cave.

Learning that discomfort is inevitable helps us anticipate it. Anticipating discomfort helps us navigate it, and the more we navigate it, the better we get at doing so.

But learning to actually enjoy discomfort is life-changing.

In his book Freedom, Sebastian Junger chronicles the year he spent walking with three friends from Washington DC to Pittsburgh on railroad lines. During their trek the men hid from railroad cops, slept under bridges, scraped together meager meals, and drank from rivers and lakes. They frequently encountered other “off the grid” travelers—some friendly, others not so much. On multiple occasions they dodged gunfire from unseen assailants.

To most people this probably sounds horrible, but Junger writes about the experience as if it were one of the best of his life:

We’d each dug our own beds out of the slope so we could sleep without rolling into the river and we were strung along the bank like linked sausages. The fire embers still pulsed, and the night air was soft and benevolent, and it felt like summer waited for us a few days upriver. My dog lay on my ankles, and the three other men shifted and muttered next to me in their sleep. There may be better things than that, but not many.

Any undertaking worth doing is going to involve moments of discomfort. That’s just how life works. This applies to running ultramarathons and walking across multiple states—but also raising children, building a business, writing a grant proposal, or meeting a quarterly sales quota.

It’s going to be hard and you’re going to want to quit. This might sound depressing, but it’s the opposite.

Here’s Junger again, describing discomfort on The Tim Ferriss Podcast:

That’s what life is. That’s the good stuff. And we live in a wealthy society where the good stuff isn’t imposed on us. And we think we’re getting away with something. We’re actually not. We’re actually losing something by not being part of that.

We spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to avoid discomfort, falsely assuming that comfort and happiness are the same thing. Better to avoid this trap by grabbing our tools and getting in the pain cave every now and then.

That’s where the good stuff is.

Ostensibly the talk was meant to stress the importance of the program and to motivate participants to give it their full attention and effort. In reality it was about whatever Dan wanted to talk about that day. (I was fine with this—when the company you started is worth $12 billion this is how it works.)

The talks were always great—Dan is soft spoken and prone to meandering—but he speaks from the heart and knows how to captivate an audience. And yet, I don’t recall much of what he had to say in those sessions as I was usually nervously focused on the training I was about to deliver.

One day though, he shared a piece of advice that stuck with me:

Always delegate without apology.

For awhile I misinterpreted this. I thought he meant that once you reach a certain stature (like say, a middle manager at a hip tech company), your time is more valuable than mere mortals and you shouldn’t feel bad about finding someone else to do your low-value, menial tasks.

“I’m more important than you—sorry not sorry!”

Kinda harsh, but okay Dan, if you say so.

Not long after this talk though, the real meaning of his point was driven home when I accidentally did precisely what he said not to do.

During a routine one-on-one with a direct report, I began rattling off a few things I needed her to do. At some point I said something like, “I’m sorry to dump this crap work on you, but I’m slammed right now. I know it sucks, but I really appreciate the help.”

As I stammered on apologetically she interrupted me:

“I’d appreciate it if you’d stop apologizing when you give me work like this. I was excited about doing it until you called it crap.”

She’d never done this work before and was looking forward to the opportunity to add value while trying something new. That is, until I convinced her it was worthless.

The idea of delegating without apology is not for your benefit. It’s not meant to make you feel better; it’s meant to empower the person you are delegating to.

Apologizing while delegating signals that you’re doing something wrong. It says, "I'm sorry to burden you with this thing I don’t want to do."

Effective delegation says, "I trust you to handle this because I believe in your capabilities."

When you delegate without apology, you’re not just passing on tasks.

You're passing on trust.

I recently found myself in a productivity rut of sorts. Working for yourself means you (mostly) get to choose what you work on each day, and while liberating, this can also be paralyzing. Faced with a variety of compelling projects, I was unable to choose just one to work on. Instead, I avoided all of my projects by getting lost in YouTube wormholes or my email inbox.

As each unproductive day wound down, I would inevitably panic about the lack of progress made and begin frantically working, usually continuing late into the night. This slapdash approach produced predictably subpar results. To complete the vicious cycle, I would then lie awake worrying about how poorly things were going.

My “solution” to this problem was to order three new self help-ish books, enroll in an online course, and download a new to-do list app. None of that helped in the slightest of course.

What did eventually help was forcing myself to go to bed at a decent hour. Waking up refreshed after a full night’s sleep helped me stay disciplined and on task for long stretches of the day and I started to make progress on some of my most important projects.

It’s not sexy, but “get 8 hours of sleep” continues to be the answer to 90% of my problems.

This tendency in decision making and judgment where we prefer complex and detailed solutions over simpler, straightforward ones is what’s known as “complexity bias”. We are drawn to the mystery and intrigue of these elaborate solutions, falsely thinking they offer a depth and richness that simpler solutions lack.

Boring solutions are less seductive because they are missing the allure of novelty and, crucially, the promise of instant gratification. Instead, they demand consistency, discipline, and time.

Put another way: just because a boring solution is effective doesn’t mean it will be easy.

I've always been a fan of Dave Ramsey, the renowned personal finance guru, and his radio show. Each episode consists of distressed callers outlining their precarious financial situations, seeking Ramsey's guidance on debt elimination and wealth accumulation.

The interaction almost always unfolds in the same manner.

Guests pour out their financial woes while Ramsey listens and probes further with pointed questions. Eventually he gives his advice which, invariably, is to initiate a simple lifestyle change: start spending less than you earn. Most listeners protest, frantically exploring other more convoluted strategies for their financial dilemma.

Ramsey always stands his ground, repeating his fundamental mantra of financial prudence until the guest agrees (or hangs up). Despite the monotony and banality of his advice, it's the consistency and simplicity that makes it work.

So many things are like this.

Want to lose weight? Burn more calories than you consume. Want to write a book? Write 500 words every morning before work. Want to learn a new language? Practice for an hour every day. Want to grow your business? Make 100 sales calls a week.

Simple. Boring. Effective.

During the most recent NFL Draft, many pundits questioned why the Philadelphia Eagles selected Georgia’s Jalen Carter, a defensive lineman, with their first pick. Fresh off a narrow loss in last year’s Super Bowl, the Eagles already have the best defensive line in the league—a position that every analyst will tell you is key to winning football games.

Journalist Kevin Clark was not one of the pundits questioning this move. Immediately after the pick was made he shared this story via Twitter:

Shortly after the [2018 Super Bowl] I was talking to an Eagles person about their innovations—use of analytics, [going for it on] 4th down, offensive schemes, etc. Guy interrupts me and said, ‘we won because of our lines. Everything else comes after.’

When we see success we are quick to look for the cutting-edge strategy, the innovation, the secret sauce, the shortcut. But dig a little deeper and you realize there are no shortcuts to genuine, lasting success.

If a solution seems too boring or obvious, chances are that just means you’re on the right track.

History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” —Mark Twain

I had just finished lunch with the founder of a fledgling software company that would subsequently grow into a $3 billion valuation. This was my third such meeting with him, the final step in an exhaustive interview process for a dream job.

I had already met with the COO, the leadership team, a handful of frontline employees, and the six-person support team—a memorable panel interview during which they pulled up support tickets I had submitted in the past as a user of the product to "make sure I wasn't a jerk".

Between bites of hamburger we began planning, in great detail, all the work we would do together. It felt like I had already started the job.

Then I found out this lunch was not the final step.

As he paid for our meal he casually dropped that he wanted me to take a video call with a company advisor based in Silicon Valley.

“Of course,” I said. “Happy to.”

This step felt perfunctory. It was not.

The call went fine. The advisor was knowledgeable and likable enough. I remember struggling a bit with my audio (this was early Zoom days after all), but I thought I did a good job.

Then he dropped the hammer on me.

“Sorry, but this isn’t a fit,” he said. “You don’t have the pattern recognition to do this job. Reach back out once you’ve seen this movie a few times.”

It was a gut punch. Pattern recognition? What the hell does that even mean?

I fumed for a while, but as time went on I realized he was probably right.

Could I have figured it out? I’d like to think so, but there was no question it would’ve been a struggle. The company was about to go through insane growth at a scale I had never experienced from any seat—much less from a leadership position.

(And who really needs millions of dollars worth of stock options anyway?)

Over time I would learn to use pattern recognition to my advantage.

Long before that fateful Zoom interview, my career path had already taken a challenging turn when the company I was working for shut down during the global financial crisis of 2007.

It was terrifying for a few days, but I soon felt a sense of overwhelming calm. The entire world felt like it was imploding, so why should I stress about losing a job that I didn't love anyway?

I still look back on that period of unemployment with nostalgia. I got in shape. I spent more time with my wife. I took long walks with my dog and met friends for drinks in the middle of the afternoon.

Most importantly, I felt free (and brave) enough to take a chance on a risky job opportunity that would become one of my greatest career moves.

Fast-forward to the pandemic-induced recession of 2020.

I had seen the movie before (well, a similar one anyway) and knew what to expect. Things would feel bleak, but eventually normalcy would return. This put me in a position to remain calm and seize on the opportunity to start my own business.

Pattern recognition is the cognitive process of matching what you are seeing and experiencing with memories of similar experiences. When you recognize a pattern, you can better predict what’s coming next.

Pattern recognition is why managing employees gets easier the more you do it and why sales reps get better at overcoming objections the more they pitch. It's how smart investors remain calm when the stock market crashes—and disciplined when it takes off again. It's why raising a second child feels less scary than the first.

Whatever movie you are watching right now will play again someday.

Better pay attention.

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I didn’t know a soul in the entire state of Kansas, so there were many nights where I would come home from work late, make myself dinner, and watch whatever sporting event was on TV that night. (It wasn’t quite as depressing as it sounds.)

One night, a college basketball game was playing in the background while I cooked and one player kept drawing my attention to the television.

Incredibly tall and impossibly skinny, this player was singlehandedly dominating the game. The opposing team kept sending waves of defenders at him, but it didn’t matter. He was simply shooting over people with his astonishing wingspan or going around them with his explosive speed.

He looked like an alien sent to earth to take over the the game of basketball.

That player was an 18-year-old freshman named Kevin Durant. He would finish the game with 37 points and 23 rebounds, leading Texas to a win over rival Texas Tech.

Durant has since established himself as one of the greatest basketball players to ever live. He has scored the 14th most points ever in the NBA, won the 2014 MVP award, and won back-to-back championships with the Golden State Warriors in 2017 and 2018.

I have been a fan ever since I was fortunate enough to witness him jump off my television screen that January night more than 15 years ago.

My appreciation of Durant goes beyond his basketball ability. He is also that rare professional athlete who is unafraid to speak his mind and engage with fans, the media, and his critics.

And despite his incredible accomplishments, Durant has plenty of critics.

When Durant joined the Warriors they were already the best team in basketball, so some viewed the move as a questionable way to add championships to his resume. He has since switched teams twice, most recently to another already-great team, the Phoenix Suns.

But while other people debate the validity of Durant’s championships and argue over his “legacy”, he seems to be focused on . . . playing basketball.

Consider the response Durant gave the writer Logan Murdock recently when asked about chasing more championships (emphasis mine):

Us winning a title, that would be amazing. But that’s not the only reason why I play basketball. I want to develop every day and I truly like this activity, you know what I’m saying? I like getting up knowing that I’m going to go play, and that’s really it for me. . . I just simply like the activity.

I have no idea whether or not Durant is familiar with the work of Frederick Herzberg— an American psychologist who became one of the most influential names in business management and a pioneer in motivation theory—but he certainly sounds like someone with a deep understanding of Herzberg’s central thesis.

In the 1950’s, Herzberg interviewed groups of employees to better understand what drove job satisfaction. He asked them two simple sets of questions:

1. Think of a time when you felt especially good about your job. Why did you feel that way?

2. Think of a time when you felt especially bad about your job. Why did you feel that way?

From these interviews Herzberg developed a theory that there are two dimensions to job satisfaction: motivation and hygiene.

Hygiene factors cannot motivate, they can only minimize dissatisfaction. They include things like status, relationships with coworkers, working conditions, and salary. (You read that right, salary is not a motivator for most people—it only demotivates when we feel we aren’t being paid enough.)

True motivators, on the other hand, create real job satisfaction by fulfilling our need for meaning and personal growth. Herzberg identified a handful of these motivators such as: recognition, achievement, responsibility, advancement, and—you guessed it—the work itself.

Most of us can’t choose to play basketball for a living, but we can choose to seek out work we value and actually like doing. This sounds obvious, but most of us don’t do it, gravitating instead to fancy titles, salaries, or shiny offices.

I accepted the job that sent me to Kansas solely for the increased salary and the status I thought the new title would convey. I never once stopped to consider if I would like doing the actual work.

It turns out I didn’t, and I was pretty miserable for the year I spent there.

Most of us can’t play professional basketball, but we do have agency over the work we choose to do. And whatever that thing is you choose to do—do it for the work itself.

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Escape velocity is the minimum speed needed for an object to overcome the gravitational pull of a celestial body like a planet or moon. If the object fails to reach this speed, it will eventually fall back to the surface, unless further propulsion is applied.

Think about throwing a baseball up in the air. The ball will quickly reach a peak and start falling back down to Earth—unless you somehow threw it at a speed of about 25,000 miles per hour, in which case it would overcome earth’s gravity and continue on into space forever.

Careers have their own gravitational pull.

Time and money spent on a degree in a field you no longer enjoy.

A lifestyle built around your current salary.

Expectations of parents and loved ones.

These forces keep us tethered to a specific path, even when we dream of pursuing something else entirely.

In our pining to break free, most of us focus on dramatic acts to quickly reach escape velocity. Things like quitting a job, moving across the country, or starting a business from scratch.

This approach can work, but miscalculations will lead to disaster. Often we are so focused on escaping we don’t pause to consider whether or not we will truly enjoy the path we’re escaping to.

Reaching escape velocity is also really hard. The bigger and heavier something is (and lets face it, careers are heavy), the stronger its gravitational pull and the more difficult it becomes to reach escape velocity.

Thankfully, breaking free doesn’t always have to be about brute force or recklessly abandoning everything we've built.

In fact, rockets often use something called continuous propulsion to overcome Earth's gravity and other forces like air resistance. As the rocket travels farther from Earth, the gravitational pull becomes weaker, and less energy is needed to continue moving away. If the rocket maintains its propulsion, it can eventually escape Earth's gravity—without ever reaching escape velocity.

Start a small business on the side to see if you even like it.

Take one online course instead of going back to school.

Write 200 words a day for a month before declaring to the world to you’re writing a book.

Dramatic leaps into the unknown get a lot of attention, but more often it’s the continuous, calculated propulsion of small steps that lead to escape from the gravitational pull of a life that no longer resonates.

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You’ve been a model employee, so you’re given a choice: keep your job and take a 15% pay cut, or pack your things and leave with a one-month severance package.

Which would you choose?

One perfectly reasonable option would be to accept the pay cut, while resolving to immediately start looking for a new job.

You don’t love this job, but the idea of being unemployed is terrifying and the 15% pay cut won’t hurt that much. This path, while not ideal, buys you time without upending your life.

There’s just one problem—odds are you’ll never seriously look for a new job until you lose the one you have.

The reason has to do with something Harvard social psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls the region-beta paradox.

In a paper titled The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad (it seems he’s way better at naming papers than paradoxes), Gilbert and his fellow researchers suggest that we bounce back more quickly from highly distressing situations than from less distressing ones.

This happens because our minds have a built-in safety system that springs into action when we face intense emotions or events, deploying a range of psychological defense mechanisms to shield us from potential harm. These defenses, such as cognitive reappraisal and dissociation can mitigate our distress and facilitate more efficient processing of the experience. They can also increase our energy and mental capacity to act in ways that will remedy the stressful situation.

In contrast, our minds don't trigger these defense processes as strongly when facing less intense situations, making our recovery slower—or not at all.

This is why nagging injuries are often more troublesome than those that require surgery and why a lengthy daily commute can weigh on us more than a car accident.

Unfortunately, we are mostly unaware of our psychological powers, so we tend to overestimate the duration and impact of intense emotional states compared to mild ones. This overestimation leads to extreme avoidance of situations we think will be highly stressful.

This paradox stems from our uniquely human capacity to mentally project ourselves into the future.

Unlike animals, humans can envision different futures, contemplate their psychological impacts, and take steps to enact the one we predict will be most desirable. We are the only species that can imagine the consequences of an event without experiencing it.

But we aren’t highly skilled at this.

Research consistently reveals that people often overestimate how bad they will feel about future negative events, like going through a breakup, facing a serious illness, or losing a job.

For a very long time this was a feature, not a bug.

During the millions of years that we humans developed our unprecedented cognitive abilities, it made sense for our brains to “trick” us into avoiding distressing situations. Overestimating the stress of a sabertooth tiger attack will keep you out of sabertooth tiger attacks.

Today this system is far less useful.

We falsely assume there's a direct line between the intensity of a situation and the time it takes to bounce back from it. This illusion leads us to choose options that are initially less distressing, but ultimately less satisfying.

As with most paradoxes though, once you are aware of its ubiquity it can be an invitation, rather than a limitation.

This isn't to say you need to relentlessly pursue the most daunting and stressful options out there. Instead, it's about finding comfort and courage in the fact that the seemingly tougher road is often smoother than our minds make it out to be.

And as you increasingly confront these challenging experiences head-on, you not only cultivate resilience, but also uncover the most captivating and gratifying experiences that life has to offer.

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It was glorious.

Here’s how it happened and why I’ve been trying to repeat the experience ever since.

I went to said massive medical facility to get an X-ray for a minor injury I’m dealing with. When I arrived, a friendly receptionist explained that I couldn’t be seen because she didn’t have an X-ray order from my doctor. Without an order, my insurance wouldn’t cover any portion of the visit, making the X-ray insanely expensive instead of just annoyingly expensive.

It was just my luck that I arrived right at noon when my own doctor’s office closed for lunch.

“I’ll call them back when they open in an hour if you want to wait,” the receptionist said.

I did not want to wait, but what choice did I have?

Slumped in a waiting room chair, I habitually reached for my phone when, to my horror, I realized the battery was dead. I had vacuumed my car earlier that day and forgot to put my charger back in when I was finished.

I checked my watch. 12:04.

Fifty-six minutes to go.

As I sat there in the waiting room trying my best to tune out the television blaring HGTV (why is it always HGTV?), a creeping unease set in. The thought of doing nothing for an hour was unbearable. There were people I needed to get back to, tasks I needed to complete, things I needed to buy.

But as I confronted the chasm of time and space before me, I began to notice a shift in my perspective.

Faced with no other option, I started to pay closer attention to my surroundings, observing the comings and goings of patients and staff. I had a pleasant, non-Zoom conversation with another human. I read a longform magazine article. I took a walk across the facility grounds and stumbled upon a lake brimming with ducks that was shockingly more picturesque than any office park lake ought to be.

Gradually, my anxiety gave way to a sense of calm curiosity. Thoughts and ideas bubbled to the surface of my awareness, unencumbered by the usual barrage of stimuli.

When it was finally time to get my X-ray I was disappointed, not relieved.

This is not a critique of the smartphone. Although not having one undoubtedly facilitated a quicker transition into a relaxed state, what I was truly benefiting from was a forced period of complete non-action. In this instance it was by chance, but the experience made me realize it's something worth seeking out.

Intentional non-action, known as wu wei in Taoist philosophy, is the art of doing nothing on purpose. The concept emphasizes the significance of letting things follow their natural course and refraining from unnecessary interference. Crucially, wu wei should not be mistaken for laziness, which implies disinterest or lack of motivation.

The benefits of embracing intentional non-action have been well documented. Studies have shown that regular periods of quiet reflection can reduce stress, increase creativity, improve decision making, and even boost overall well-being. And it doesn't have to be complicated—simply taking a few minutes each day to sit quietly, without an agenda, can yield remarkable results.

In the weeks that followed my unexpected hour of inaction, I’ve begun to experiment with different ways of incorporating wu wei into my life. I’ve found that even small acts—opting for silence on a walk instead of the usual podcast or going a day without my to-do list—can create pockets of stillness that leave me feeling refreshed and recharged.

In a world where constant action and productivity are prized above all else, it's worth recognizing that sometimes, the most valuable thing we can do is nothing at all.

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Or is luck is something that happens to you?

Your answer will reveal a lot about your “locus of control”, a term coined by psychologist Julian Rotter in 1954 that describes the degree to which people believe they have control over their lives.

If you have an internal locus of control, you believe that you are in charge. You take the credit when things go well and you blame yourself when things go poorly. If you get a promotion, it’s because you earned it. If you get overlooked for a promotion, you believe you should have worked harder.

If you have an external locus of control, you believe that other factors like your environment or a higher power decide what happens to you. You got the promotion because someone was looking out for you. Or you didn’t get it because of political factors outside of your control.

This difference in mindset can even have life-or-death consequences.

In a 1972 study, psychologists used Rotter’s Theory to explain why tornado death rates were strikingly higher in Alabama than Illinois. The study analyzed responses to tornado warnings in both states and found that Alabama residents were more likely to take an external view of events in their lives, whereas Illinois residents held a more internal view.

As a result of their predominantly external locus of control, Alabama residents took fewer precautions to protect themselves from tornadoes. They figured there was little point in trying to change the inevitable. Illinois residents on the other hand, believed they had control over the outcome of the storm and so they took more proactive measures such as building storm shelters and securing their homes.

The repercussions were tragic—Alabama averaged five times more tornado deaths than Illinois, even though the storms were equally severe and frequent.

Your locus of control is more than a personality trait. It’s a lens through which you see the world and make decisions. It affects how you cope with uncertainty, adversity, and opportunity. It shapes your expectations, motivations, and actions.

But here’s the dilemma: neither an internal nor an external locus of control is always right or wrong.

Having an internal locus of control can be a powerful motivator, but it can also lead to excessive self-blame when things go wrong. You might struggle to accept what you can’t control or change. You could ignore valuable advice from others. These are all traps that can limit your potential and happiness.

Sometimes you are in charge of your own fate. Sometimes you are at the mercy of forces beyond your control. Sometimes you can influence those forces with your actions. Sometimes you can’t.

The challenge is to recognize what type of situation you are in and adjust accordingly.

One way to do this is to cultivate what psychologists call a “flexible locus of control”. To be humble when things go well and resilient when things go poorly. To be proactive when you can make a difference and accepting when you can’t.

If this sounds hard, it’s because it is.

A flexible locus of control requires self-awareness, resilience, and balance. It also requires courage to face reality and take responsibility for your choices. If you’re anything like me you will want to do the exact opposite—I much prefer taking credit for my successes and blaming fate for my failures.

In the end, it's a combination of both luck and effort that shape the course of our lives.

And while we may not have complete control over the twists and turns of fate, we can always choose how we react to it.

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