I Show Up Every Single Day Regardless of How I Feel
Cadence: the most underrated superpower on earth. Nobody puts consistency on a poster. It doesn’t trend and it rarely goes viral — which is exactly why it’s still undervalued and exactly why it works. The entire method is two steps: identify the handful of things that actually help, then do them on a fixed cadence […]
Most People Have No Idea What They Actually Want
I know exactly what I want — because I did the work to find out. Here’s my deep conviction after 30 years of coaching: most people, regardless of what they tell you, have no idea what they actually want. Ask what they DON’T want and they’ll talk for an hour — the job, the weight, […]
Connection Will Never Be Convenient Again. Fight for It Anyway.
I fight for deep connection — because it will never happen by accident again. For all of human history, connection was automatic: the tribe, the village, the parish, the pub, the front porch. You didn’t schedule belonging — it happened to you. That world is gone. We’ve engineered a life where you can work, eat, […]
The World Is Professionally Engineered to Reward Your Worst Self
I manage my state like my life depends on it — because it does. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the modern world is professionally engineered to reward your worst self. Eating, scrolling, sitting — three of the most profitable industries on earth exist to keep you fed, distracted and stationary, because nobody profits from your peak […]
I Will Not Let Emotional Discomfort Stop Me — Say It With Me
I will not let short-term emotional discomfort stop me from doing the thing that matters. Say it with me — because I spent years believing the exact opposite: that if I didn’t feel like doing something, that was the signal to stop. In this episode: why we evolved to flee discomfort and why that wiring […]
Whatever Time You Give It, It Will Take All of It
IWork expands to fill the time available. Give it a month, it takes the month. The fix isn’t more time — it’s smaller containers and harder edges.n 1955, C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a long essay of which the world remembers exactly one line: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. […]
You Think You’re the Finished Product. The Data Says You’re Wrong.
Quoidbach and Gilbert surveyed 19,000 people and found the same glitch at every age: we look back and see massive change, then predict we’ll barely change going forward. The 25-year-old knows the 15-year-old was a different person — and is certain the 35-year-old will be basically him. Everyone treats right now as the end of […]
It’s Not the Work That’s Exhausting You — It’s the Unfinished Work
If you woke up today wishing someone would finally explain the Zeigarnik effect — you’re in exactly the right place. In the 1920s, Bluma Zeigarnik studied waiters who could hold enormous unpaid orders in their heads effortlessly — and forgot them completely the second the bill was settled. Unfinished tasks occupy the mind with roughly […]
You Keep Trying to Fix Your Life by Adding to It
Today: subtraction blindness. Leidy Klotz’s research published in Nature found that when people are asked to improve anything, almost everyone adds — new parts, new rules, new steps, new commitments — and virtually nobody subtracts, even when taking something away is the cheaper, faster, better fix. Now look at your calendar, your routines, your business. […]
In the Prison Camps, the Optimists Died First
That was a dark opening, wasn’t it? Admiral James Stockdale spent seven years as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton — and when asked who didn’t survive, his answer was immediate: the optimists. “Out by Christmas” broke them. What Stockdale practised instead is the paradox now named for him: confront the most brutal facts of […]