I’ve wanted to do this ever since I learned Christopher Nolan doesn’t use a cell phone or check email. He lives as much of an analog existence as one can in 2026, the reason being he seeks to minimize distractions, which get in the way of creativity. It’s hard to argue with the results for anyone who has seen The Odyssey or any of his other work.

I don’t work in a creative industry, unless you consider nicely formatted excel spreadsheets as art, You should, but there is considerable research indicating the mere presence of your mobile device can impair your attention span and going three days without your phone changes the way your brain works (See this great article from , no relation to the Gotham crime family).

I was hoping to spend a full week analog earlier this summer while in Montenegro but it wasn’t possible with my work, therefore I decided to take advantage of the waning days of summer, while my wife was out of town to see what this experience would be like. My job cannot be done without a device so I took Friday and Monday off. Nobody could contact me, unless by way of smoke signal, carrier pigeon or IRL.

The only fixed plans I made in advance were two golf rounds, otherwise I had a clean slate; I just needed to make sure my dog was walked and attended to. I could have scheduled other activities with friends but with no way of contacting me, they would have to show up at the precise scheduled time. My friends are way too flaky for that.

I chose to leave my schedule open, which in hindsight was smart. Without my phone, alarm clock or anything to disturb me, I woke up late Friday morning. My dog eventually came to politely remind me she needed to be taken out. The clock on the kitchen stove showed it was 10:30AM. I don’t wear a watch so this would be the last time I knew the time for the rest of the day.

It was a beautiful day out, after I finished walking the dog, I went for a run. I left the house with nothing but $50 cash in my pocket. It was a nice feeling. I’m accustomed to running or working out without music, but I occasionally use Strava to track my distance and pace. Without my phone, watch or anything I couldn’t really focus on that. I could approximate that I ran somewhere between 10-15 KM but I have no idea if it took me 45 or 90 minutes. I finished at a popular brunch spot, managing to avoid the hour long wait because they had an individual spot at the bar.

The server told me the pancakes I ordered would take about twenty minutes. With nobody to talk to, no book or phone to distract me, time moved at a snail pace (I explained why in You Aren’t Imagining it, Summer Does Fly By). The only reference point I could use to figure out the pace time was elapsing were people at other tables leaving and sitting down. This reminded me of when I used to take canoe trips as a kid. Only the councillors had watches, the campers would try to guess what time it was based on the position of the sun in the sky. The winner would get an extra handful of dry granola or something; it doesn’t sound like much but when you’re away in the wilderness for a week at a time, your standards drop immeasurably.

I couldn’t see the sun from where I was sitting so the pancakes could have taken an hour for all I know. Eventually they arrived and they were worth the wait. As I was getting up to leave I saw a few people I knew. How did they have time to grab brunch on a weekday? Does anybody work anymore? Considering I was also there, I couldn’t pass too much judgement. I walked some more, stopped at some cafes then eventually went home, unsure of how long I had been away, took the dog out to be safe.

I grabbed Capital Returns and proceeded to read on my balcony in the sun until it started to set. Prior to starting the detox, I posited in a Substack note whether I should attempt to read all 10 books I had in my reading queue before the end of August, approximately 10 days. I didn’t mean it seriously but once people said it would be stupid or impossible, I felt I couldn't back down. The books from that list represented more than 3,000 pages. I agree 300 pages per day would be a lot. I’ve read fiction books of more than 200 pages in a day without retention suffering but some books are not meant to be digested that quickly. Part of the fun comes in speculating what’s going to come next. Other books are also slower reads. A hundred pages of Simulacra and Simulation is not the same as a hundred pages of The Alchemist.

Despite understanding this, I still read the entirety of Capital Returns that day. The sun was starting to set when I finished, I made myself dinner which I had to do without the benefit of the timer app. This was harder than I expected; I’m more chemist than artist in the kitchen. Needless to say some items were not cooked well. I finally looked at the clock on the stove by the time I was finished and it was around 8:30PM. The past 10 hours felt like 30, and this was only day one.

Day two started earlier than the previous day, from the stove I saw it was around 8AM. My golf round was at noon, so after walking the dog, I went to the gym, I got there the same time as my friend, we could socialize between sets. Normally I leave my phone in my locker as I train and keep my phone in my bag when I golf, so that day wasn’t dissimilar to other weekend days I’ve had. Yet the cumulative effect of not using a phone, laptop or TV for almost two days was already noticeable.

You might be wondering what is the difference between a digital detox and a dopamine fast. A dopamine fast would have required motionlessly staring at a blank wall. A friend of mine in the Canadian army during training finished each day that way. It wasn’t even mandatory, he just saw one too many Jocko Willink videos.

Although this was not a dopamine fast, I felt the absence of cheap synthetic dopamine. Most of the modern internet/software design is based on what casinos do to keep people gambling. The bright colours, bells & notifications are meant to be addictive. Getting away from that for even a couple days makes it more evident.

(How your phone looks at you while you’re trying to focus)

Besides exercising, playing golf, reading, walking the dog or eating I had limited distractions. The lack of interruptions allows your brain to follow its train of thoughts longer. The distractions don’t need to be digital, any time you switch tasks or stop and start, it takes between 15-30 minutes to return to your state of focus. Considering the average person looks at their phone more than five hours per day, and picks it up over a hundred times, there is very little focus or concentration going on. This is unfortunate, because if you don’t pay full attention to what’s happening you are depriving yourself.

Your ability to think is heavily reliant on information retrieval, things you’ve stored in your memory. By not concentrating on what you’re doing, you’re making it difficult to remember. The less you can remember the more limited your archives will be.

It’s fitting the book I read on day two was Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami. On sharing his views on what it takes to be a full time professional fiction writer, he highlights the importance of being able to pull from your memory. This can only come by focusing while you’re writing but also as you are experiencing things so you can draw upon the memories later.

The deeper I got into the digital detox, the more I would experience floods of memories from years ago coming back unprompted. Nothing particularly noteworthy or traumatic. Walking past a store I haven’t been to in a long time brought me back to high school when somebody got busted shoplifting there. Re-arranging my book shelf brought me back to when I bought some of these titles, reminding me there was a time I thought Scott Galloway was worth paying attention to. I normally wouldn’t notice these kinds of things and have these recollections if I was on my phone.

On the third day I read The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. The book was published 60 years ago, well before personal computers or mobile phones but the lessons are just as relevant today. Reading about history helps give you perspective, our increasingly shorter attention spans make us forget lessons from the recent past as much as from centuries prior. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". This is why you should always read old books.

By day 3 you get accustomed to the lower volume of inputs. The internet gives you access to more information than you could possibly process, making it harder to focus and go deep on any particular topic. Without information technology, you have far less to process, which actually lets you think and extract greater insights from what you are consuming. Reading a book is naturally slower than scrolling TikTok or Substack notes, which limits your intake.

Even without digital distractions, I acknowledge my doubters might be correct that consistently reading 200 pages every day is too much. Perhaps you can recall most of what you read within a few days of finishing it, but fast forward a few months and I’m sure if you got questioned on it you would sound like a politician trying to explain AI.

I noticed my brain works in a different way when it’s not constantly interrupted. Normally, a thought has to compete with the possibility of something more stimulating appearing every few seconds. During those four days there was nowhere else for my mind to go. One thought could lead to another, then to something I had read years ago, then to a memory, then back to whatever I was originally thinking about. I didn’t have more thoughts, I actually got to finish the ones I started.

Nolan and Murakami are definitely on to something. This isn’t limited to creative fields either. Cal Newport in his books Digital Minimalism and Deep Work advocates for the same thing and he’s a computer science professor. If you’ve followed his work, he’s been pretty consistent in his view that to succeed at anything you need to take a craftsman mindset, which requires deep focus and sticking with things for extended stretches. As most physical work increasingly gets automated and even repetitive shallow knowledge work, what will set people apart, is the ability to reflect deeply and come up with solutions to problems that can’t be easily solved by LLMs.

The problem is the modern workplace has been set up to distract us constantly. Between non-stop meetings, emails, Slack/Teams notifications, Peggy coming to your desk to whine about whatever or needing to take your phone out for stupid 2 factor authentication every time you need to login to an app, how can you enter a flow state?

I typically try to batch my meetings together to create more uninterrupted stretches throughout the day but I have a difficult time not checking Slack or my emails every few minutes. When I started my career my first boss said they never expected to wait more than 5 minutes for a reply, regardless of when they contacted me. That has unfortunately not gone away.

Even in my personal life I have a difficult time not responding immediately when a text or email comes in. I would rather resolve it right away than have it hanging around in the back of my mind. I also find it rude to leave people on read. This feeling is not widely shared as we covered in The Death of Social Credit.

Responding right away gets things dealt with quickly but it comes at the expense of my ability to focus. This is also clearly a me problem, nobody would take it badly if they had to wait a little bit for a reply. This is part of why the digital detox was nice. Knowing I couldn’t see any messages until Tuesday morning, relieved me of the mental burden of having to respond.

The final book I read during the four day digital detox was The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway which felt fitting. The story chronicles a bunch of expats living in Paris during the 1920s, as they meander about out in the French capital and travel to Spain. Not much actually happens but typical with Hemingway, the beauty is in the descriptions of what they see. Very much what I was living through. This was before cell phones or TV, you had to go outside for entertainment. They went fishing, watched bullfighting, drank a lot, which makes sense for people with excess leisure time in those days they had to work to find distractions. Nowadays we have the opposite problem. We have too many distractions resulting in a society that can’t sit alone with their own thoughts. This explains many problems.

Even in Hemingway’s time I’m sure people were complaining about the constant interruptions arising from telegrams or cholera outbreaks.

We’ll take any excuse we can find to distract ourselves, whether technology is actively trying to do it for us or not. We’ve become so habituated to constant interruption that we’ve accepted it as a permanent state, as if we have no control over it. For those four days, I had no digital distractions and it felt incredible.

That’s not to say I was focused all the time. My dog frequently let me know she was bored and wanted me to stop what I was doing to play with her. My neighbors redoing their driveways made plenty of noise. Even if they didn’t, I’m sure I would have decided it was suddenly essential to do laundry, reorganize my pantry or find some other chore to create some sort of break in the action (or lack thereof).

When I finally turned my phone on Tuesday morning, there were no disasters. No historic news I regretted missing. A couple of work items had been delayed and a few messages from friends went unanswered, but otherwise I had missed almost nothing. By late morning, I was already caught up.

That was probably the biggest takeaway from the four days. We treat constant connectivity as though everything happening deserves our immediate attention. Most of it doesn’t. By removing the option to check, I stopped thinking about what I might be missing and paid more attention to what was actually in front of me. Days felt longer. Old memories resurfaced. Most importantly, I could finish thoughts without something interrupting them.

This experience has not made me anti-technology. I wrote this article on a laptop, published it on Substack and distributed it over the internet. I have no desire to go back to churning butter on some farm. I make a living hitting combinations of keys in a climate-controlled room and no longer need to worry about dying from a minor infection. Progress is good. In the days following the detox I am still using my phone & computer and watching TV, but I’m trying to avoid it when they aren’t necessary.

The is because everything comes at a cost. The internet gives us access to more information than any person could possibly consume. The trade-off is that if we’re constantly connected to it, we leave no room to reflect on what we are exposed to.

I originally wanted to go analog for a week. After four days, I wish I had. My own undisturbed thoughts turned out to be more entertaining than most of the nonsense I see online. I’m kind of fascinating. Not only did I not miss anything, I gained by reducing distractions and input allowing for better and more clear living.

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After a long winter and an increasingly short spring, the start of summer is marked by full golf courses and tennis courts, lakes filled with boats, and 45-minute lineups for terrasses. You make all these exciting plans. The places you’re going to travel, the friends you’re going to see, all the late nights and lazy days at the cottage. Then, seemingly about a week later, people are already talking about Labor Day.

It doesn’t matter if you spent the summer island hopping around Greece, discovering hidden gems in the Balkans, or chained to your desk churning out PowerPoint decks for your MD while they are busy doing business development in Saint-Tropez. This is a surprisingly universal experience.

You aren’t getting gaslit. At least not about this. There are physics and psychological explanations for why three months can feel dramatically shorter.

First the way we think about time is wrong. Most imagine something resembling a giant grandfather clock in the center of the universe ticking at a perfect Patek Philippe cadence capturing the passing of time. That’s not how time works.

There isn’t a universal clock, time passes at different rates based on a variety of factors such as gravity, velocity or location. A second elapses at a different speed for somebody underground compared to somebody aboard an airplane, on top of a mountain or trying to hold a plank position. The difference isn’t massive so digging a hole and living like groundhog won’t help you outlive Bryan Johnson.

There is not a universal time that everyone subscribes to. Even without Daylight Savings Time or time zones, humanity still would not be on the same time. This is still not an excuse for your friends to be consistently late for everything. The only way to end this, comes from a suggestion from FT. Invoice people when they show up late. People will become punctual very fast or stop returning your calls.

We’ve established that there is not a universal time and it doesn’t move at the same pace for everyone, but our understanding of time is still backwards. Our mental model usually grasps time as the independent variable which causes everything else to happen. Time moves forward which causes ice to melt, grass to grow, the arm of a clock to tick etc. This is also wrong.

We aren’t observing time, but rather how an entity changes. We see grass growing which captures the passing of time. The arm of a clock moving depicts a change which we interpret as time moving forward.

If you were locked somewhere without clocks, sunlight or any other reliable indication of the time, estimating how long you had been there would be surprisingly difficult. French researcher Michel Siffre tested this in 1962 by living alone in a cave without a clock, calendar or sunlight. When September 14 arrived, he thought it was August 20. He lost track of almost a month.

Tldr: Change is what gives time meaning.

(If you find this topic interesting, check out The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli)

There’s a common belief that the way you experience time changes as you get older. This traces back to a theory from by Paul Janet in 1877. Janet proposed that we experience a period of time relative to how much life we have already lived. The logic is that for a ten-year-old, a year represents 10% of their existence. For a 50-year-old, it represents 2%. Each additional year therefore represents an increasingly smaller proportion of your life.

Additionally since you have more experiences your brain to save space, batches information together it doesn’t think is useful. That’s why you can’t remember every single day you’ve gone to the office, only the days something out of the ordinary happened. Your brain is designed to notice contrast. If every day is virtually the same, it’s as if you are stuck in a groundhog day loop. If every day is completely different, your brain won’t be able to batch things as easily.

This is the disadvantage of a routine. It makes each day more similar because it’s efficient, and reduces decision fatigue. The downside is each day blends together so time feels like it’s passing together and when you look back, you don’t notice how quickly time passes. That’s why when you travel and you are constantly shifting environments, beach, mountains, forest, city etc. Your mind has to process and distinguish the environments creating the contrast. This explains why it’s possible for the paradox of feeling like you’ve been on vacation for a long time while the trip is going by quickly.

This is also why time flies when you are having fun and it can feel like time has stopped when you aren’t doing anything. You have no distraction or any change to observe. If every day felt the same, then your brain will batch them all together.

Which is why whether you had a busy summer or not, it likely flew by.

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It didn’t matter which sport but inevitably anyone who played with me would have witnessed a tantrum at some point.

After a loss, I would throw my hockey stick across the locker room upon entering. Probably blaming the refs or some external factor for the outcome.

A backgammon game could end with the board and pieces scattered across the room.

After a bad shot, I would throw my tennis racket on the ground. I saw Andy Roddick and other Pros do it and thought it was normal. I didn’t realize they got paid to use those rackets whereas my parents had to buy mine.

These types of freak-outs were regular occurrences, then I turned ten years old and realized it was just a game.

This profound realization didn’t come from meditation, a therapy session or even a find myself trip to India. I realized these outbursts weren’t helping me, so I stopped.

At ten years old I understood I was allocating energy in a way that didn’t help me or make my life better. I was not a kid genius, but considering most adults could never figure out this basic lesson, I must have been less stupid than I thought.

People have a difficult time stopping behaviour that makes their life worse. Many won’t even accept or acknowledge they have an issue. Among those that do, many will decide it’s too difficult to change or even impossible based on their circumstances.

This thinking is common but not rational; it’s the ego whispering sweet nothings instead of facing harsh reality. If you are serious about improving without coming off as one of those annoying influencer types. Keep reading.

Book I’m Currently Reading:

1. Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win? by Stalk, Lachennaur & Butman

Book I most recently received as a gift:

1. The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End by Neil Howe

In case you missed them, here are some other recent articles to check out:

Falling into a groove limits your growth

At some point, most people decide to settle.

Even if they aren’t satisfied with their career, fitness abilities, dating options or daily routine, they aren’t willing to do anything about it. Then that’s who they become.

Sometimes this happens consciously, but usually it comes from a handful of early experiences that harden into identity. You are the shy one. The funny one. The bad student. The lazy one. The person who isn’t athletic. The person who doesn’t read. The person who has a temper. The person who is simply “not good” at certain things.

Once that image settles in, life becomes easier in one sense. You can protect yourself from potential disappointment and have a convenient excuse for when things don’t go your way. It’s like a script you can use to dismiss opportunities when they appear.

“I’m just not that kind of person.” or “I do not have that type of canine in me!”

These sentences do more to limit human potential than any lack of talent. Many of these identities are formed when we are too young or inexperienced to know anything. This is dumb because with a few exceptions, your talent at a certain activity when you are 10 years old has little bearing on your long term potential.

If you regularly play youth sports, you can develop enough athleticism to play in most adult intramural leagues. If you eschew sports or fitness your entire childhood and only decide to get in shape in your forties, you are going to have a much tougher time. Deciding you aren’t sporty or athletic becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The longer you avoid exercise, the harder it will be to get in shape.

If you want to be competent, avoid these kinds of limiting beliefs. Too many people decide they aren’t math people because they struggle with high school math. In reality, your mental horsepower only becomes a limiting factor once you reach Master or Doctorate level mathematics. Virtually anyone able to get into University has the intellectual capacity to get through bachelor level mathematics. The reason they don’t has more to do with their mindset. They fail before showing up to the class.

These stories you tell yourself do more damage than good. Just because you are told things by others as a child doesn’t mean you need to be shackeled by these labels for the rest of your life. Once you realize this, you are free to do anything.

Free will only exists for people who exercise it

If you believe the Universe is preordained there is no reason to do anything. The cards will fall as they do and you couldn't change the outcome if you wanted.

Nobody who achieved anything great accepted the universe as this immutable entity, they decided they wanted to do something and they were going to make it happen regardless of what obstacle got in their way.

Whether or not free will exists in some grand philosophical sense is irrelevant. Your life feels predetermined if you act like a passive observer. You become a slave to the whims of the free market, the government or other people around you. Fortune favours the bold, if bold is another way of saying people who try to change the universe in the way they want.

The universe doesn’t bend easily. Just wanting something doesn’t guarantee an outcome. The bigger the ask you make, the greater the input. Talent, timing and luck all matter. Unfortunately most people surrender long before reality has the chance to reject them. People fail to understand that the difference between a 0% chance and a small chance is massive.

A big reason for this is the fear of being judged. People worry that if they suddenly take something seriously, others will notice. If the unserious person starts writing, the out-of-shape person starts training, the quiet person starts speaking up, it might look forced. Someone might find it cringe.

The only people who care about something being cringe, are cringe people. Cool or successful people don’t care about that sort of thing. They are busy doing cool/successful person stuff to judge.

People are cringe until they aren’t. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger. He went from Austrian immigrant with a thick accent, to the biggest bodybuilder in the world. Then he became a movie star, governor of California and then he married a Kennedy. He didn’t care about making a fool of himself. He worked out or improved his craft almost constantly. Willing to look foolish in the near term to look brilliant in the long term.

Nobody cares about what you are doing as much as you. People going around calling things cringe, is an inevitable reaction to their own discomfort when they see something that doesn’t conform with their mental model. If you study any highly successful person, you will find plenty of cringe. Things that don’t align with how the average person lives, or how most people think they should.

They will over allocate time and attention to things others won’t. They will put in more hours and obsess about things, in pursuit of their goal. They don’t care if other people think it’s excessive or not.

You don’t need permission from the people who knew an older version of you. You don’t need to preserve their comfort by remaining familiar. Put your will on the universe. Make the change. Let everyone else adjust. You just need to decide it’s important to become the best version of yourself, and you’re willing to ruin the mental image you’ve built for yourself.

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Was I about to lose to an inanimate object?

There I was, in the gym staring at a 100 pound dumbbell. I had just failed on a chin-up with that thing strapped to my waist. Normally, I would be doing anywhere from 3-5 reps with relative ease but today it wasn’t happening.

I had just gotten back from a 3 week vacation, where I didn’t exercise. The weights were feeling heavier than usual. As I stood there, I contemplated whether to reduce the weight or try again.

Science based lifters would have said I needed to ramp back up to my usual pre-vacation loads, so I should have taken 70-80% of my normal weight. This wasn’t a competition and nobody was watching, these reps had no particular consequence. Yet in a way, they meant everything.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, it was just me in the frame. It was too late now. If I didn’t complete the set as intended, I would be giving up. If I gave up, I would have allowed the weight to snatch my soul.

This dumbbell had no feelings, and wasn’t trying to actively resist me. My competition, was my own mindset. There are two kinds of people. One group believes that their fate is preordained, and life is something that just happens to them. Others believe their will shapes the universe into what they want it to be. What kind of person did I want to be in that moment?

I strapped the weight back on the belt, and banged out 3 ugly reps.

Anybody who has ever achieved success had moments like these. Faced with an obstacle they could have advanced or retreated. If we know their names, it’s because they chose to advance.

Success largely comes from sticking with your mission until the right opportunity presents itself. Even critics that dismiss success as a function of luck or randomness, must also accept the longer a participants stays in the game, the greater their chances of receiving good fortune. That’s why if you want to succeed, it largely comes down to how long you’re willing to pursue your ambition. This longevity is dictated by two things: morale & pain tolerance. Both are functions of mindset.

Today’s article explains why the greats manage their mindset to spend their life chasing their personal legends and quests.

In case you missed them, here are some other recent articles to check out:

Longevity Matters

Who was the better military commander Napoleon Bonaparte or Joan of Arc?

Nobody would consider this a serious question. How can you compare a military career lasting under two years, against the track record of arguably the most famous military leaders in history? Napoleon went from infantry soldier to Emperor in under 20 years. If he had died two years into his military career, nobody would know his name, and the history of France and Europe would have been very different.

It takes time to do great things, often years or decades of persistent work before the break through arrives. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they laid bricks every hour for decades and centuries. That’s why it lasted 500 years, 1,500 if you count Constantinople. Centuries later, we still think Rome daily.

Why shouldn’t we? Rome is responsible for many of the underpinnings of Western Civilization. There are still many relevant lessons for us today, such as expansion. How far do you keep pushing after you’ve already experienced success? What do you do once you’re out of Beginner’s Luck and each incremental gain takes pain and sacrifice?

Pain Tolerance

Can you name somebody that reached the top of their domain without pain?

Some make it appear effortless, but don’t be fooled. In any competitive endeavor, nobody that’s ever won consistently did so without countless hours of discomfort. Before he was tennis great or a fashion icon, Andre Agassi, hit thousands of shots each day in his backyard, while his father yelled at him. Andre hated it, but nobody could argue with the end result. Even Federer, who was noted for how smooth and effortless his game looked, couldn’t reach the pinnacle of the sport until he took his training more seriously.

They had to. They were going against other professionals, that wanted to win as much as they did. Differences in natural ability net out, as competition improves. All pro athletes are born with natural athleticism; in some sports that alone is sufficient for a top amateur career. Once you reach the pro ranks, everybody is going to be athletic, and skill increasingly dominates.

This isn’t limited to sports. It’s possible to be a top high school student without studying endless hours if you have high intellectual horse power. Once you reach an elite university, all your classmates will have been top students (besides a few legacy and suspicious scholarship admits). To be a top student at an elite university, the gap in raw intelligence won’t be as pronounced, you will need to work as hard as everyone else.

Elon Musk isn’t the smartest man to have ever lived, but he’s one of the most successful. SpaceX didn’t come to be because he knew more about propulsion. Tesla didn’t become the leader in electric vehicles because Musk had superior insight into the auto industry. Musk was successful because of his ability to tolerate pain. To this day, he works longer hours with more intensity than almost anybody else. If you think this is overblown, I invite you to read Walter Isaacson’s biography, or listen to anyone who has worked with him.

Many of the companies Musk competed against were bloated and led by empty suits/pant suits, not built to handle pain or pressure. In their defense, it’s hard to rally employees. Most big companies aren’t built that way, bureaucracy designed to insulate pain, makes them weak.

You can’t expect even the most motivated employees, to tolerate pain for the same duration as a founder/CEO, it’s not their life mission. A leader’s job is to help their followers tolerate pain. They do this, my maintaining good morale.

Morale

Alexander was defeated without having lost a battle. Despite all the success, his men’s faltering morale is what ultimately ended his campaign. Sure, the copious amounts of wine, poisoned or not, didn’t help but if the booze didn’t get him, his men’s refusal to continue his conquest would have.

Alexander’s pain tolerance was legendary. His track record, unquestionable. Toughness aside, when it comes down to it, as a leader, he needed his men to follow him. He asked a lot, and he got a lot out of them. If they mutinied early in the campaign, Alexander wouldn’t have been remembered. He couldn’t have inspired Napoleon, Charles de Gaulle and countless other military geniuses, that would eventually learn the war ends once their side loses the will to keep fighting.

Some people can maintain good spirits in any conditions but most can’t. Coaches and leaders are valuable if they can motivate people to tolerate pain for extended stretches. Agassi hated tennis for most of his life, his career would have ended early if not for the team around him that kept him from quitting.

I worked with many gifted athletes that never panned out as professionals. Some would blame injuries or bad luck. The honest and introspective amongst them would admit, it’s because they fell out of love with their sport. With the right motivation, you can bounce back from tough breaks, you just need to be willing to keep going in the face of adversity. This doesn’t guarantee success, but quitting guarantees failure.

Great leaders know how to keep their followers motivated. Successful CEOs need their teams to tolerate more pain than their competition. Coaches need their athletes to keep pushing, even when they don’t want to. All political leaders experience setbacks, but they still need to energize their supporters to achieve their agenda.

The best way to do this is to deliver on promises. If you promise your troops glory, you better win great battles. Great employees will always have options, if you want them to stay, you need to give them confidence you can deliver. Nothing kills motivation faster than overpromising and underdelivering. A leader only has so many chances, before their followers decide they can’t trust their assurances.

For individual activities, the follower you need to convince, is yourself. I could have skipped that set of chin ups or took a lower weight, but then I would have been disappointed in myself. The more this happens, the less trust and confidence I’ll have in my abilities, and the worse I’ll be. If your goal is to pursue your life mission for a long time, you need to avoid this line of thinking; it’s a death spiral.

The successful people you see avoided giving up. They were able to keep a long term view, while tolerating pain and maintaining proper morale during their life’s mission.

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The few Japanese people I knew were great, beyond that, outside of restaurants and anime my other exposure to the fine folks of Japan was minimal. Mostly being stuck behind crowds of them on vacation as they took thousands of photos; an activity they certainly don’t have a monopoly on.

As I’ve travelled across Japan these past few weeks, I have come to realize that the Japanese as a group are superior. The criteria being how they treat guests in their country.

For a country that receives more than 40 million tourists per year, Japanese residents know how to make you feel like you are their first. Whether you are in a big city or a tiny town, shop keepers/restaurant owners will walk you to the door, morning commuters will go out of their way to bring you to the correct train platform. These are just a few examples of gestures that are engrained in the culture.

The contrast between how kind and thoughtful Japanese are versus tourists are stark. Enter any train station, there can be 50,000 Japanese and you won’t hear a thing. The only noise will be from the 10-20 tourists, running around looking for directions and dragging their rolling suitcases along the pavement.

If you haven’t been to Japan yet, here is a short primer on what you should know and why during the waning days of the golden era of travel, it is still one of the best countries to visit, in spite of the waves of tourists.

Japan is not just cleaner, quieter, and more orderly than the West. It has a deep food culture, a vintage luxury market so good it makes shopping feel like value investing. Even Richard Gere is rumoured to be running around the country these days. Keep reading to learn what makes the country exceptional.

If this week’s article does not interest you, please check out some other recent ones:

The Role of Zen Buddhism in Japanese Culture

An explanation for why the Japanese are so kind to tourists is because they are Zen.

If you are unfamiliar with Zen, it’s a branch of Buddhism that instead of focusing on an abstract doctrine, emphasizes direct experience, discipline, simplicity, and the presence of mind. I experienced this personally.

It was exactly a week into my trip to Japan when I was overcome with an overwhelming sense of calm. Nothing could bother me.

This happened as my wife whisked me from one matcha and ceramic shop after another, an activity that would try any mere mortals patience. Yet I remained unperturbed.

Although I didn’t care for tea or overpriced bowls, I was neither happy, sad, upset, bored or rushed. I simply was.

As I fought boredom and waves of slow moving tourists, I realized I had ascended to a level of Zen I had never previously encountered. My travels throughout Japan had brought me here. How was this possible?

In Japan, Zen Buddhism’s influence runs beyond the religion. It has shaped the country’s taste for minimalism, quiet beauty, ritual, self-control, and respect for practice. You can see this in things like tea ceremonies, gardens, martial arts, calligraphy, architecture, and everyday etiquette.

There is a strong emphasis on process over outcome. The Japanese are deeply conscious of how things are done, not just whether they get done. You see it in the tea ceremony, where every motion matters, in stone gardens where emptiness is part of the composition, in the meticulous wrapping of ordinary purchases, and in the quiet order of train platforms and public spaces.

Beneath all of it is a heightened awareness of the space one occupies, and of the burden one’s noise, movement, or disorder can place on others. Attention is paid not only to function, but to form, rhythm, restraint, and consideration. Even small things are treated as worthy of care.

Tourists not trained in the ways of Zen stick out like a sore thumb. They are focused on achieving their outcome without considering the space, noise or smell they are giving off. This makes the non Zen masters among us, appreciate the locals even more.

The Food Scene: More Than Just Sushi

When Westerners think of Japanese food, they generally focus on Sushi and high quality cuts of beef. Both are exceptional but you can go a full week eating neither and consistently come away impressed. There are plenty of tourist traps, especially in the bigger cities, but when you stumble on legit places, they aren’t just good, they’re memorable. This can come at any price point too. You can drop hundreds of thousands of yen (hundreds of US dollars) at Kobe Beef or high end Omakase restaurants but be as impressed by hole in the wall ramen, donburi or okonomiyak places.

I’ve had friends go who hate fish/seafood, vegetarians, meat heads, picky eaters and everything in between but they all found something they enjoyed. If you don’t like the food in Japan, you are the problem.

Something you’ll commonly see are tiny bars/restaurants with seating for up to 6 people, and only one or two staff working there. It’s an intimate setting, where before you know it you’ll be chatting with the other patrons whether they are Japanese or from other countries all over the world. This might just be a me thing. Apparently I bear a resemblance to Richard Gere, even if he’s more than 40 years older than me.

Part of this can be explained by the limited space in big cities, but also the comfort Japanese have in smaller settings. They don’t need a large foot print, or even a big staff. It’s pretty normal for the chef to also serve you and ring up your bill. It’s not uncommon to see a small dude crammed into a metallic structure barely large enough for him to stand in serving up takoyaki. Of course he will have a line out the door and the octopus balls are going to be incredible.

Something you should know, Japan is still a very cash oriented culture. Outside of big cities, a lot of places don’t accept credit cards, especially if you are going to temples and other sight seeing attractions. Those certainly cost money.

You can always withdraw from ATMs in the 7-Eleven, which are not at all like the ones you see in the US. I hate to say it, but the food quality there is on par with mid-tier American restaurants. Of course these are usually things you can eat on the go, like sushi, onigiri, maybe a Bento box. I would never otherwise eat food from a convenience store but the Japanese 7-Eleven is on a different level.

The Vintage is Better Than Buying New

During the late 1980s, Japan’s economy was ripping. It was the world’s great manufacturing powerhouse, producing everything from cars to consumer electronics, while a population known for high savings also had money to spend. Chanel bags, Rolex watches, and high-end European fashion became fixtures of Japanese consumption.

Then the bubble burst in the early 1990s, and Japan never fully recovered its old economic momentum. The country endured decades of weak growth, recurring deflation, and near-zero interest rates, yet wage gains remained stubbornly limited. The result is striking: many Japanese workers still earn roughly what they did 30 years ago.

One consequence of that era is visible all over the country today. Vintage shops are overflowing with luxury goods. There are plenty of modern pieces too, but it’s not a coincidence that so much of the supply dates back to the 1980s and early 1990s. The Japanese are known for taking excellent care of their belongings, and there is far less stigma around buying second-hand goods than in many Western countries. As a result, locals and tourists alike participate in a lively resale market for designer items, creating an unusually deep supply of high-quality used luxury.

You can walk into a vintage store and find piles of Louis Vuitton bags stacked the way corner stores used to toss bad DVDs into a bargain bin by the door. Japan has strict anti-counterfeit enforcement, shoppers have more confidence that what they are looking at is authentic. That does not mean everything is cheap. In many cases the prices are no better than what you would find online or even buying new. You still need to hunt. Normally I don’t like to spend much time shopping but the value investor in me does appreciate trying to find arbitrage opportunities.

Concluding Thoughts

What makes Japan special is not just the food, the cleanliness, or the shopping. It’s the social ethic beneath all of it.

The Japanese have built a culture that places unusual weight on restraint, order, and consideration for others. You see it in the silence of train stations, the care given to ordinary purchases, and the constant awareness of the burden one’s noise or disorder can place on everyone else.

That is what makes Japan so refreshing, and also slightly humiliating for the average tourist. In a country receiving more than 40 million visitors a year, the locals still manage to treat guests with patience and generosity, while many visitors repay them by being loud, messy, and oblivious.

Japan is worth visiting for many reasons, but the most valuable thing it offers may be the reminder that civilization is built out of small daily acts of discipline and respect.

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Roger Federer in his Dartmouth commencement speech pointed out he only won 54% of points during his tennis career, yet that slight advantage resulted in him winning 80% of his matches. Maintaining this over a 20+ year career that includes 20 Grand Slams, is why he’s one of the greatest ever.

Pretty much every moment of his life until he retired was dedicated to the sport. This is the case for any professional or almost made it athletes. Yet from this group, only a sub-group will be remembered after they retire, and even a smaller group will continue to garner respect generations later.

What separates these groups isn’t athleticism, skills or even hard work. It’s passion. Unbridled willingness to dedicate yourself fully to being the best at your craft for decades. Many will earnestly believe they have it, but few are willing to make the sacrifices that are necessary to reach the very top. Even with this, it only matters if they win. Nobody cares about your pain and sacrifice unless it amounts to something.

If you want to be great, you need to win more than anyone else. To do this you will be propelled by two emotions: Fear and Love. Both are necessary, but the formula is delicate. The absence of one or the surplus of another will be a hindrance. You need to find the right formula, and get lucky if you hope to be great.

Nobody personifies this better than another tennis great, Andre Agassi. His autobiography Open gave incredible insights into the psychology of being a winner.

Fear gets you to the arena but love is what keeps you there.

Keep reading if you want to learn how to be great.

If this week’s article does not interest you, please check out some other recent ones:

The Role of Fear

Andre Agassi is one of the best tennis players ever but for most of his life he hated tennis. He became the number ranked player in the world and won Grand Slams despite not even enjoying the activity he dedicated every waking moment to. This was only possible because of fear. Fear is also a proxy for insecurity.

As early as 6 years old, his father made him hit over 2,000 shots every day. Not softies either, he had to return shots fired at him from a souped up ball gun. Agassi didn’t want to do it, but he was afraid of his father, Emmanuel. The senior Agassi decided Andre was going to be a professional tennis player from the moment he was born. Emmanuel was a tough man who never knew love, and he took out the shortcomings from his own life on his son. This is a consistent theme among many greats.

His rational was that if Andre trained harder, played more tennis than anybody else and had the right coaching over time he would become the best player in the world. He beat the idea of perfection into him. Andre had to win every point and every set or his dad would yell at him.

Whether Andre was on board with his plan was irrelevant. He pushed Andre very hard and served as his coach until Emmanuel sent Andre to a tennis academy noted for its strenuous training regiment. This academy produced many professionals, but Andre was the star pupil to emerge.

He didn’t want to move across the country to a tennis academy or be isolated from his friends and family which were his only oasis from the sport. It didn’t matter, his father decided he was going to do this, so he went. The training Andre did put him ahead of everyone else, who were among the best young tennis players in the country.

This dominance carried over to tournaments, where he was beating professionals as a teenage amateur. He turned professional at 15 and never looked back. Within a few years he was among the top ranked players and regularly competing for Grand Slams. Despite the success, he never felt at peace or enjoyed tennis. His entire life he played tennis because he had to, not because he wanted to. His father decided for him he would be a tennis player and once he turned pro, he had no other career opportunities as a high school dropout.

Fear of his father and failure were enough to carry him to an elite level because of the work he put in. However, he didn’t become great until he discovered love.

(The only love he had was for his hair, which was unfortunately balding. Can you blame him?)

The Role of Love

Andre had a tight circle of friends that filled the void left from his father. If not for them, Agassi likely would have flamed out early on. His older brother, childhood best friend, a former Pasteur and his trainer Gil all played critical roles in his professional and mental wellbeing. They took care of everything outside the tennis court.

As his profile grew, Agassi to deal with the pressures of the sport, needed more love that his entourage could bear. He sought romantic relationships. He briefly thought he found it with Brooke Shields, who he would eventually marry, but he quickly realized he was wrong. She didn’t understand him, nor could she help him. If anything, her celebrity profile and lack of interest in tennis made it more difficult for Agassi. Shields was trying to revive her own acting career, and was looking for a similar level of support from Agassi, who wasn't in a position to provide it. What brought them together was their mutual fear of their overbearing parents and failure. They were both lacking love and couldn’t find it in each other. This is why both became depressed and their careers suffered. Agassi persevered though.

(They look happy)

Shortly after splitting from Shields, Agassi found a new objection of his affection. The tennis star Steffi Graf. She had previously ignored his romantic advances and was in a long term relationship, but Andre with encouragement from his team pursued her any way. His pursuit was eventually rewarded and once they started dating, they immediately realized how aligned they were. Steffi was near the end of her career at this point and had nothing left to prove. Graf had been the number one ranked player, won many Grand Slams and knew she would retire as one of the best woman’s players ever, yet one of her greatest contribution to tennis was the counsel she gave Agassi.

When Andre told her how he hated tennis, her response surprised him. She said of course he hated tennis. Nobody enjoyed spending every waking second training, practicing or worrying about what they can/can’t eat, dealing with the media etc. This was a common feeling amongst the professionals. Yet she said he wasn’t acknowledging the parts he loved about tennis.

His entire career he looked at tennis as something he was forced to do and he did it. Perfectionism made him hate tennis. He hated losing points and felt little satisfaction when he won them, since he expected to (sounds like prospect theory).

His approach brought him success without joy, since it felt like an obligation. Their relationship, reinvigorated him at a time when he should have been contemplating retirement. Instead he got a second wind and in his early thirties won a few more Grand Slams and recaptured the number one ranking, ultimately played until he was 35, well past his contemporaries. By this time he had two children and a loving relationship with Graf. He finally had something to play for.

With the shift in mindset of treating his profession as an obligation, rather than a craft he has the privilege of honing, he finally had the right balance between fear and love. It was during those final years, where the fans and sports writers who long wrote him off as a punk and an underachiever, changed their tune and in turn loved Andre too. This further motivated Agassi.

Although near the end his body was barely holding together, he couldn’t let go from the sport he spent such a long time hating. Fear got him to his knees, but love got him to his feet.

Many people start with love for their craft but quickly replace this with fear. This fear can help for a time but once they reach the top of their profession, the difference between the very best and the excellent is so thin, only those that love what they do can ascend. Being able to wake up and find joy in what you do is the not so secret to success.

If you want to be better than everyone else, you need to put in more time, work harder and get very lucky. The more time and hard work you put into your craft, the more luck will be able to find you. You have to remain persistent long enough to give luck a chance. If you don’t love what you do, you will give up too early, eliminating the possibility of luck breaking your way and giving you the outcome that will make you great.

Federer and eventually Agassi both learnt they didn’t need to win every point, perfection wasn’t necessary. Just systemically showing up, giving their best effort and loving the process. This is why they are among the few we will always remember.

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Business books focus on product, strategy, sales yet none can succeed without money. If the CEO bankrupts the company because they spend all the funds on parties, pet llamas or other unproductive items, none of those other departments matter.

Individuals hire financial planners to serve a similar function. One could question their utility since most just charge 1% of AUM to tell them to spend less money and put their investments into ETFs. I’m sure some are probably fine, just not the ones advising Nick Cage or Wesley Snipes.

Hard transition + trigger warning*

Readers might be shocked to learn there is something more valuable and important than money. Time.

Not everyone agrees but let’s compromise and say they are at least equivalent. This begs the question. Why is everyone so obsessed with watching their finances but afraid to audit how they spend their time?

If time is money, why are there armies of bean counters but no clock watchers?

There is endless content on managing finances but very little on how to effectively audit how you spend your time.

A companies financial health is depicted in the 3 financial statements: The Profit & Loss Statement, The Balance Sheet and The Cashflow statement.

What if we were to apply this framework to time management?

Do you have a busted time balance sheet? Are you incurring crazy losses? Are you bleeding cash?

Keep reading to find out!

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The Time P&L Statement

How did you spend your time between X-Y Date

The P&L statement shows what happened between certain dates. Usually shown quarterly or annually, but it can be any frequency. Monthly, weekly, daily whatever.

In a financial sense you’ll normally see what revenue has been generated, expenses incurred during that time, the taxes paid, if you believe in that sort of thing and what’s left after you net these out. The profits and/or the losses.

From a time standpoint, you can allocate every second to see how it’s used. People generally spend around a third of their time sleeping, another third working and activities around work such as commuting or going to your companies awkward picnic. That remaining 6-9 hours during the week is where we are supposed to squeeze in everything else. Important things like getting dressed, exercising, personal hygiene, reading Serviceable Insights, crying to The Ride of The Rhohirrim.

People will whine that there isn’t enough time in a day but spend 5 hours a day on their phone. Mostly doom scrolling Instagram. Not to mention wasting time watching crappy Reality TV or other bad shows. Except for Succession, Succession is great (if you are a fan check this and this out).

The way you spend your time will determine your mood and general satisfaction with your life. I am not Sigmund Freud but if you aren’t happy, you should spend more time on things that will make you happy.

To be happy you need some combination of safety, security, companionship and the sense of a great mission/purpose. For some that’s religion, worshiping the God or sports team of their choice. Others will fill that void by going into politics, starting a company or dedicating their life to research. Some research such as the cure for cancer benefits society, other research only exists so people don’t need to admit they are unemployed. Whatever floats your boat, I’m not one to judge.

If on balance you find yourself waking each up morning happy, energized and excited for what’s to come, you are spending your time well. You’re running a profitable life.

This doesn’t mean you need to love every second of your life. Sometimes like an early stage startup, you need to run losses in the short term to be very profitable in the long term. In fact, if you never find yourself doing something you aren’t naturally inclined to do, you will never achieve anything of consequence let alone your life purpose.

The more you can learn to take pleasure in the activities you don’t naturally want to do, the easier it will be to achieve your great purpose. Sisyphus was condemned to roll a stone uphill each day only to watch it fall back down each night. With no way to escape this fate, the only way for Sisyphus to defeat the Gods who condemned him, was to enjoy their punishment.

Kobe Bryant was cursed with the desire to be the greatest basketball player ever. Better than Michael Jordan. Kobe Bryant didn’t enjoy waking up at 4AM and training four times per day, but he loved the separation he was creating between him and his competitors. These were long term investments in his future, creating assets that paid him dividends for decades. These are the things you would see on the balance sheet.

The Time Balance Sheet

A Snapshot of Your Assets and Liabilities At A Point In Time

Unlike the P&L and Cashflow statement, the Balance Sheet only shows an exact moment in time. It shows the assets, liabilities and shareholders equity of an organization or individual. Assets will generate positive cash flow in the future, whereas liabilities will eventually reduce cash.

It’s an oversimplification, but all things equal you want more assets than liabilities. If you care about the future, you want to see more money or time flowing your way. Not all assets are created equal. Some are short term, others are longer term. The only way to create long term assets is through investing time and money. For companies this is machinery, GPUs, intellectual property etc. For people these are skills and experience.

Since assets have finite lifespans, companies and individuals need to constantly invest or their balance sheets will eventually shrink. One good workout won’t make you fit but if you’ve invested thousands of hours exercising across your life, it takes a much longer period of inactivity before you would be weak and frail (we discussed this in Biohacking That Works (and Doesn’t).

To get good at something, you need to invest your time with dedicated practice. The more time you invest, the better you will be and the more separation you will get from everybody else. If you are building this advantage in areas that are economically valuable, you can feel secure financially, as long as you can sustain this edge. You don’t need to exclusively build skills that are financially motivated. If you get really good at activities and hobbies that you enjoy, you can satisfy other necessary conditions of happiness. Making close friends are great assets that will make you happy for years to come. Accomplishments that boost your self esteem and confidence are assets. Spending a high portion of your time doing something you love might be an intagible but there are worse things.

Beyond investing to give yourself economic and spiritual assets, another type of investment you can make is to give yourself more time. Some measures are short term others create more time for yourself indefinitely. If you spent a Sunday meal prepping for the week, that would create a time asset but it would only last until the end of the week. If you trained your dog or built a robotic chef that could prepare and clean your meals for you, that would be a longer term asset.

The more time you can create for yourself to go after your life mission/purpose, or on activities that will give you fulfilment (security, safety, companionship) the better your life will be.

Creating time assets are good but the way you spend your time matters more. Spending all of your time automating tasks just to create more free time for yourself is pointless if that free time doesn’t translate to something that will improve your life.

Imagine an 18 year old with Billions of dollars and no responsibilities but chooses to spend their next 70 years watching trashy reality TV and eating hot pockets instead of doing anything worthwhile. Would they have a better life or be happier than somebody with many friends, a loving family and plenty of fulfilling life experiences?

Money matters, but only if it’s used to help you accomplish your goals. Create long term assets that let you live a good life.

Time Cashflow Statement

It costs money to live. Seemingly every time we step outside (or not) we have expenses flying at us. There are no shortages of ways to spend our money. We’ve previously explored the merits of going into debt to buy a Rolex.

Not all spending creates assets. Nothing wrong splurging on a nice meal or a fancy outfit from time to time if you can afford it, but if this where most of your money is going, your balance sheet is going to look bad and your P&L will eventually suffer.

Just like in a corporate setting, some spending and investments offer a higher return on investment. A $60 Uber Eats order to give your Burrito a private car ride, saves you 20 minutes once. Spending an equal amount on a house keeper or gardener, can save you hours. Spending a bit more money for something that saves you hours on a recurring basis can be a great investment but only if you use this time productively.

Taking on debt only makes sense if it helps finance assets that will at least eventually pay for the debt and associated interest. In the context of time, it only makes sense to take on liabilities if these savings will offset the future commitment. Skipping the gym saves you time in the short term, but the longer you push it off, the harder it will be to get back on track. Not sleeping works the same way. Pulling an all nighter hurts your health and performance, so if you are doing it, you better be getting something worthwhile in exchange. Staying up all night watching re-runs doesn't qualify.

If you are spending money, it better be investments that create long term, high quality assets that will save you time and/or bring in more money. This allows you to make bigger and better re-investments in your time, happiness and financial wellbeing.

Spending money on hobbies is fine, if you get real enjoyment out of these hobbies and it brings you long term happiness. If you’re chasing a new activity every week, and you have equipment gathering dust, these are impaired investments.

You need to strike the right balance between having enough cash saved so you feel financially secure, but be able to invest in things that help you achieve your objectives so you feel fulfilled. Hoarding cash just for the sake of hoarding won’t make you happy. Having no cash is also problematic.

A good time cashflow statement, shows positive cashflows that turns into cash and investments that will get you closer to your goals of feeling safe, secure, with adequate companionship and your great mission/purpose.

When was the last time you properly audited the way you spend your time?

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When I was a fitness coach I would often hear the same question. Eventually I noticed something interesting. Professional athletes and successful business executives would ask the question one way, while the general population asked it differently.

When I would give them an exercise, the general population would ask what would be considered good or respectable? The pros and executives would ask “What’s the gym record?”.

One group is trying to not be the worst, the other is trying to be the best. Is it a surprise why one group is more successful?

Achieving greatness isn’t meant to be easy, otherwise everyone would do it. Few will ever do anything noteworthy, no matter how hard they try but most kill their chances before they start.

Very few people fail because they lack ability. Most fail because they quietly accept a ceiling long before they ever reach it. They aim for respectable instead of exceptional. They benchmark instead of compete.

Limiting beliefs work like gravity. They pull your ambition downward before you even begin. Nobody becomes world class by accident or by aiming for average.

The question is not whether you are capable, the question is what standard you are using.

Keep reading to find out why!

If this week’s article does not interest you, please check out some other recent ones:

The Best Don’t Benchmark

Sticking with the gym analogy, I have two friends that personify limiting beliefs.

Karl always stops short of what he can do. If you tell him to do 10 reps with a certain weigh, he will do exactly 10 reps. Even if he could easily do 20+. Most people would adjust to a heavier weight or do more reps; he would never do that. Without someone to keep him accountable, he would probably be doing the same weight and reps from the first time he stepped into a gym.

In response we regularly deceive him. We might throw a 10 lbs plate on the bar when he isn’t looking, or tell him it’s only been 60 seconds when it’s really been 120. You shouldn’t do this because it’s dangerous and somebody can get hurt. In Karl’s case, he always manages to do the number of reps he was planning to do. He’s much stronger than he thinks, but he doesn’t believe it. His limiting belief is making him weak.

I have another friend Kyle, who if anything needs to rein it in. Kyle believes he’s the strongest person at the gym, despite all evidence to the contrary. Kyle is less athletic and in worse shape than Karl, but he regularly out-lifts him or beats him in cardio drills. This shouldn’t happen but Kyle goes all out 100% of the time on every set, pushing weight or attempting a pace beyond his capabilities. Although he occasionally gets injured, he improves at a much faster rate.

Karl looks at what other people at the gym are doing, to decide what’s a respectable weight for him to be lifting. Kyle simply notes what he did last time, and adds more weight or reps. Are you surprised to learn which one performs better?

I’ve previously covered why Benchmarking is Lazy, but in the context of greatness, it isn’t just lazy. It’s stupid. If you’re trying to be the best in the world at something, you shouldn’t be concerned with other people’s performances. That is unless you need to dethrone the current champion or surpass the current record.

In most endeavours, you rarely see your competitions process, just their results. Sometimes you can see daily results, other times annually or less. In a dynamic environment where everybody is trying to improve, this benchmark data gets stale very quickly. Time spent looking at others detracts from time spent looking internally.

That’s why when you are setting your target ask yourself if your goal is to reach a certain objective or to be the best?

Few people understand this distinction, but it’s what separates the good from the great. A lot of people state objectives such as wanting their startup to reach unicorn status ($1B valuation), run a marathon in under 4 hours or date Sydney Sweeney. These are all good and noble goals, but thinking this way will never make you world class.

The goal of reaching unicorn status is aiming too low for most venture capitalists. If a VC were to invest in you at a $1B valuation, they need to believe they can get some multiple return on their money. If you limit your ambition at this level, you’ll never be able to raise above a few hundred million. VCs want to back founders that can create and scale category defining companies. Assuming the end market is large enough, if a company is the best in its category, it should certainly be worth billions of dollars.

Few people run marathons, most that do aim for a time of ~4 hours. Considering the world record is 2 hours, they’re selling themselves short. If you consider yourself a runner, and you’re going to invest hours and years of your life to doing marathons, shoot higher. You can run because you enjoy it, but if you’re putting yourself through the trouble of registering for an official marathon, don’t limit yourself.

Sydney Sweeney is never going to date a dude whose entire mission in life is to date Sydney Sweeney. I don’t know her, but I would expect she would be drawn to somebody who’s confident and secure in their abilities, whatever their domain.

The way you approach your goal matters. Setting impressive sounding objectives, is usually just an artificial limitation you’re placing on yourself.

Winners Win Before Showing Up

Most people when faced with a consequential decision, spend most of their time worrying about why something can’t work. This often leads to inaction, because when you dealing with unknowns, people would prefer discomfort over uncertainty. This is a form of conservatism bias.

People who accomplish great things, focus more on why it can work, and what they need to do to make it happen.

The great companies in business rarely win by following the herd. They become the best by trying something new and potentially risky. If you are a business executive trying to maximize job security, you would probably just copy what everyone else is doing. You have strength in numbers, which diffuses responsibility. This is where benchmarking helps, you can say your performance was in line with your peers.

If your goal is to get your company to the top, you won’t get there by copying others. The person you are trying to emulate is better at the skill, so you’re better finding your own advantage.

If your ambition is to build the best company in your category, you cannot get there by imitating someone who is already better than you. You need to find your own edge.

Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Economists call them factor endowments. Some people can focus deeply for hours and block out all distractions. That is a superpower in research or software development. It is less helpful if your job requires constant situational awareness. Probably why I got fired from my busboy job.

If your goal is to be the very best at something, you should pick competitions where you are better suited at winning. Some athletes tolerate intense pain for short bursts but struggle with prolonged discomfort. They are likely better suited for sprinting than marathon running. Others thrive in long, steady efforts and would never survive a 100 meter final.

At a world class level, every small advantage in the margin matters, and becomes magnified. That’s why Olympic skiers are doing weird things to their junk, not because of olympic village festivities, but because they even the slightest advantage can be the difference for a medal.

If your goal isn’t to be the absolute best at something, you don’t need to resort to these type of measures. By focusing on improvement and refinement instead of setting arbitrary goals, you can often achieve well more than you ever thought you could.

Carles Reina, Go to market leader at Eleven Labs recently appeared on Harry Stebbings 20VC podcast and explained his sales team philosophy which bucks most conventions in the SaaS sales playbook. For one thing he sets a sales person quota at 20 times their base salary. This is well above the typical 6-8X you see at other software companies. “At ElevenLabs, the rule is simple: you must bring in 20 times your base salary in revenue. If your base is $100k, your quota is $2M. It sounds aggressive, but it sets a high-performance bar where over 80% of the team hits their targets.” In most SaaS companies only 50-60% of the team reaches a much lower quota than this.

In addition, he requires hew hires to sign a customer within their first two weeks. Some have even closed enterprise deals within 72 hours of joining. Most would consider closing a deal within a new salespersons first 90 days to be a feat.

By setting very high standards, Reina can make sales people accomplish what most sales leaders and account executives to be impossible. Carles doesn’t care about what the benchmarks say, he decides what the company needs to do to become one of the fastest growing companies in the world.

Antoine Le Nel, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Revolut follows a similar approach. Instead of allocating marketing spend based on what comparable companies do, his team analyzes returns at a granular level. He determines the maximum cost of acquiring a user that still produces attractive economics, then scale aggressively within those parameters. (Great interview with him here)

Neither leader spends much time worrying about whether their targets look conventional. They design systems around what winning requires, not around what is typical.

You can become competent by copying best practices. You can become respectable by matching industry averages, but you will not become exceptional by aiming for the middle of the distribution.

If you want to win, you need to understand your advantages, pick the right arena, and set standards that stretch beyond what feels comfortable.

The real gravity holding most people back is not competition. It is the quiet belief that they are not capable of more.

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Have you ever shown interest in a person or cat only for them to shun you, but when you pay attention elsewhere, they suddenly fawn all over you?

This sounds counterintuitive but it’s everywhere.

Venture Capitalists try to invest in founders that don’t need them.

Socially, we’re drawn to people who don’t need our approval.

Diners would rather fight for a table at an overcrowded restaurant than walk into an empty but perfectly decent one. There are people still trying to get a table at Dorsia.

There’s something magnetic about people and institutions that don’t seem to need you, and something off-putting about desperation. When something is thriving, they won’t seek your approval. They’ll make you feel like you couldn’t impact their trajectory if you tried.

This is the power of indifference.

Regardless of who wins the election, where markets move, if conditions worsen or improve, they’ll be fine. They aren’t anxious about what the world might do to them. If anything, the world is more concerned with what they might do.

A lot of people will try to convince the world that they are indifferent or they don’t care ‘bout nothing, but you can see through this act. You can’t fake indifference. You either care, or you don’t. Those that don’t, have the power. Let me explain why.

If this week’s article does not interest you, please check out some other recent ones:

Indifference is Cool: Pop Culture’s Favorite Illusion

Every generation of filmmakers have understood that to audiences, the person who cares the least is perceived as the most powerful.

An obvious example is Rebel Without a Cause. It’s in the title. James Dean isn’t cool because he’s articulate, successful, or even particularly competent. On paper, he’s a loser, yet he’s remembered as one of the coolest characters in cinematic history.

This is largely because he’s emotionally unavailable to authority, to expectations, even to himself. He doesn’t chase approval but he still absorbs it passively. Society is one big status game but he’s won by opting out. The audience instead of seeing him as a burnout, perceive a Holden Caufield level genius who has identified the game and decided it’s not worth playing. Indifference gets associated with depth.

Most of my readers are probably too young to have seen Rebel, so a more recent example is Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Durden, played by Brad Pitt during a generational run, is meant to represent the ideal image of masculinity. He’s supposed to be what men aspired to in the 90s: a handsome nihilist unconstrained and unafraid of anything modern society can threaten him with. Virtually every man born between 1975-1995 at one point aspired to achieve the same physique as Pitt in that movie, and Tyler Durden very likely inspired Luigi Mangione.

Indifference does not equal dispassionate. Durden may be nihilistic, but he’s not apathetic. He cares deeply about re-making society through Project Mayhem and willing to go to extreme lengths to see his vision through.

His indifference to norms, consequences, and even his own survival allows him to recruit a legion of dispossessed, interchangeable men willing to carry out his vision. He doesn’t need them. He doesn’t protect them. He doesn’t even acknowledge them individually, until their death, and that’s precisely why they follow him.

Durden can do this because he doesn’t care what happens to him. Once someone genuinely reaches that point, they become impossible to threaten and easy to mythologize. This superpower isn’t exclusive to fiction.

In Business: Chris Voss Won’t Save You

You can read as many negotiation books as you want, but if you are desperate you will lose.

The person least willing to walk away from the table won’t win. This is why the early part of any discussion is sizing the other person up. Both parties are trying to see who will blink first, revealing who is more desperate to make the deal.

There are structural advantages but desperation is a matter of perspective. Highly anxious and impatient people won’t win many negotiations because they can’t handle uncertainty, or they’re too emotionally invested in the outcome. The moment someone can’t walk away from the table, is the moment they’ve lost.

There are plenty of instances where the outcome of the negotiation can be highly consequential. If your opponent knows this, they will have the advantage. Your goal is to convince them you could walk away and be fine. You have other options. In other words you don’t need them, in fact, they need you!

I recently found myself in a negotiation with an electrician, Tony. He wanted more than $400 for a 15 minute house charge, which is absurd. Tony thought he had leverage because of an email saying this was their minimum charge.

Tony had misplaced confidence, because his email wasn’t enough to convince my wife it was worth paying that much for a visit involving zero electrician work. He had to somehow collected on that invoice. I might be a useless millennial incapable of replacing a space heater, but I’ve been in higher stakes situations than this.

What Tony missed was we could simply not pay his bill. I calmly explained he could send us to collections, bring us to small claims court or cut the bill in half. He got loud but at the end of the day, he cut the bill in half. I might not be Tyler Durden but you need to threaten me with something worse than that.

This is a fairly low stakes example, but it exhibits how when you don’t fear consequences, you become powerful. Don’t be scared, be indifferent.

Don’t believe me? It’s the same dynamic in hiring. If you operate in a budget constrained environment and you’re interviewing someone you know will accept less than your posted range, do you think they will get above that range? Of course not. Even if the hiring manager wants to offer it, HR or Finance will shut them down, unless they believe this is a can’t miss candidate, that they need more than the candidate needs them.

Desperation leaks and people can sense it. Desperate people don’t have control. You want control.

You Can’t Fake Indifference

Jay Gatsby is one of the most iconic figures in American fiction, and he’s introduced as mysterious, aloof, and untouchable. Through the eyes of Nick Carraway, we see Gatsby as the mimetic ideal of his era: young, rich, handsome, high status and surrounded by myth. To the outside world, he appears effortlessly above it all.

This persona worked well, but only at a distance. As soon as Carraway starts to spend time with him, he realizes Gatsby isn’t as cool and impenetrable as his reputation would assume. He built his entire life around simping for Daisy.

Gatsby understands that overt longing would come off as desperate. Since Daisy is married, he can’t simply ask her out. So he tries to recreate the same dynamic that worked on everyone else. Drawing her into his orbit, hoping proximity and the spectacle would do the work for him.

He almost gets his way, but his insecurity and desperation eventually seeps through just long enough for Daisy to get the ick. That’s because you can’t fake indifference. He wasn’t, he absolutely needed Daisy, in an obsessive way.

The harder someone tries to appear cool, detached, or self-sufficient, the more obvious it becomes they aren’t. People who have nothing to prove don’t need to signal it. They don’t live or die on approval. This causes others to instinctively work harder for their attention. This asymmetry creates control.

It’s why indifference wins in dating, in business, in politics, and in negotiations. The person unbothered by the outcome, dictates the terms of. The obsessed person, has no control.

The only way you can be indifferent, is to find inner peace. With this, you’ll have nothing to fear and nobody to impress, which will make you unstoppable.

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Most people already know who those people are.

They’re the ones who drain your energy. Relationships that feel heavy. Conversations that leave you worse off than when you started. Yet, most people stay. Not because they’re confused, but because ending things feels harder than tolerating them. They choose discomfort over uncertainty.

You can try to run away from your problems, become a hermit living off the land in seclusion, but that didn’t work out so well for Emile Hirsch in Into the Wild. Avoiding uncomfortable situations won’t get you far in life.

Once you accept this, you can actually do something about it. Reducing exposure to these people is uncomfortable at first, but in the end, you are better for it.

Brendan Gleeson arrives at this conclusion in The Banshees of Inisherin. Colin Farrell doesn’t like it, but Gleeson decides it needs to be done so he can spend time learning the violin or pursuing other interests. Anything besides listening to Farrell.

Gleeson is right. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you surround yourself with mopey losers long enough, you eventually become one yourself. This was covered in The Most Obvious Secret to Success.

You need to cut people out who make your life worse. This article will identify the exact types of people you should remove from your circle if you want to be happier and more successful in 2026.

If this week’s article does not interest you, please check out some other recent ones:

People to Avoid

Some awful people are obvious. You can spot their toxicity from a mile away.

Their Moncler vest and Balenciaga sandals don’t help. Fortunately, most people have learned to mask their worst behavior. Walking around dressed like a Bond villain also puts others on guard, so the most dangerous blend in.

In reality, it’s not the openly vile people you need to worry about. They’re easy to avoid. It’s the slightly toxic ones that do the real damage. Death by a thousand paper cuts. The frog slowly boiling without realizing it.

Without further ado, stop spending time with the following people:

1. Tardy Tim/Tina

   This is the person constantly late to everything. We aren’t talking about arriving fashionably late to a party, this is the person consistently keeping you waiting. They are the person who say they are on their way 10 minutes after your reservation. Their version of “On their way!” means they just left and will only be there in 20. In a work context, this is the person who consistently joins meetings 5-10 minutes late, without a heads up, keeping everyone else at bay. Occasional lateness is fine, if it’s every time, they don’t value your time.

   

   The solution is very simple. For every minute they keep you waiting, send them an invoice for your time. Feel free to add a 4-6% admin fee like they do for law or audit firms. It’s a win-win situation. You get compensated for your time, they have no reason to apologize for the tardiness since they paid for it. If they don’t want to pay the bill, they will quickly start coming on time. Collecting on these bills can prove to be difficult though. So instead, stop accommodating their lateness. Don’t let their tardiness impact your schedule. Your time is your most valuable asset, don’t let people waste it in 2026.

2. Victim Victor/Victoria

   Nothing is ever their fault.

   Circumstances happen and nothing could have been done. They didn’t miss the deadline because they spent 8 hours on TikTok, it was because their boss sabotaged them by asking them to do something completely in line with their job description. Even if their boss didn’t do anything, they would claim the system is rigged, timing was unfair, luck never breaks their way, yada yada yada.

   

   This applies to every aspect of their life. They’ll whine about not winning the lottery, even if they’ve never bought a ticket. Never has it occurred to them to take some sort of accountability. They need you to believe their story, so they can believe it themselves. They hate people that take accountability for their own actions, and make things happen through discipline or smart systems.

   Spending time with them quietly trains your brain to see the world the same way. This is the easiest way to ensure you will never achieve your own objectives. You can join Victor & Victoria in misery, complaining the world is against you.

3. Thoughtless Theodore/Theodora

   This is the person who does whatever feels good in the moment.

   They change plans without notice. They break commitments casually. They don’t see why it’s a big deal. Their word means very little, and somehow it’s always justified after the fact.

   They’ll convince you get concert tickets for an artist you don’t even like, then bail the day of. You never wanted to see the show in the first place!

   

   They ghost. They flake. They reappear as if nothing happened.

   They often explain this away by saying it happens to everyone or that it’s just how things. They might gaslight you a bit, and claim it was really you that cancelled the last time. It wasn’t.

   Unlike Tim & Tina this can’t be blamed on clock management, they just don’t care. The former have too much going on, Theo’s have nothing. There’s an inverse proportion between how busy this person is and how willing they are to waste your time. Your perpetually unemployed friends often fail to grasp adults might have other time commitments and can’t base our lives around how they feel at a particular moment in time. Flakey people just aren’t worth your time.

4. Social Climbing Samuel/Samantha

   This person is only around when you’re useful.

   You won’t hear from them for months/years. Then suddenly they’re eager to reconnect, enthusiastic, complimentary, and very interested in your availability. There’s always an ask hiding just beneath the surface. You can usually identify these kinds of people because they still message you on Linkedin, even if they’ve had your phone number for 10+ years. These were the people trying to get you to sign up for a multi-level marketing/Ponzi schemes back in college.

   

   At best, the relationship is transactional. You do them a favor and maybe they return one later. That’s fine, as long as you don’t confuse it with friendship.

   Be honest about what this is. Keep expectations low. As soon as they feel you’ve outlived your usefulness, they’ll send you to the glue factory like Boxer.

5. Negative Nate/Nancy

   Everything is a problem.

   Their ability to complain about anything is their superpower. It’s normal for people to occasionally complain about their job or their boss, but these kinds of folks have endless gripes with their city. Their relationship. The weather. The economy. Their favorite sports team.

   Spending time with them feels like getting stung by a thousand bees in the face.

   Occasional venting or problem solving is human. Constant negativity sucks. They aren’t looking for solutions for their problems either, they just want somebody to listen to them whine. Unlike Victor/Victoria, Nate and Nancy are capable of doing things, it will just involve a lot winging before and after.

   The respectful thing to do would be for them to save it for their therapist but instead they saddle you with their problems. Don’t do it. This endless negativity might help them get some things off their chest but it comes at your expense. Holding onto their issues, on top of your own won’t help you get after it in 2026.

   None of these people will.

There are many more of these quiet villains but the common thread isn’t that these people are evil. It’s that they tax your time, energy, and attention. Over weeks and years, that cost compounds.

In most cases, you don’t need dramatic confrontations or grand exits. Cutting a finger off makes for good drama but it can usually be avoided by setting clear expectations and boundaries. Give people a chance to change their behavior, and if they can’t do it, prioritize people that don’t require as much energy on your part.

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, therefore your future is shaped less by who you add and more by who you stop giving access to.

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As we waited in line at my favorite café, one of the few places open, I realized I had a problem. I had left my wallet at home. No cash. Apple and Google Pay disabled on my phone (thank you Edward Snowden). I was empty handed. My dog was just getting comfortable, and it was my turn to order.

So I did something that felt illegal. I asked the barista, someone I see several times a week, if I could have an espresso now but pay for it tomorrow. My own version of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), but without interest. I could feel the judgment from the people in line. I was violating an unspoken rule. Hobbes would have been spinning in his grave. To his chagrin, I imagine, the barista said “sure” and made my coffee.

Sitting there, quietly enjoying it, I noted how rare that kind of exchange has become. A business had handed over a good without collateral, without a credit check, without verifying my identity or my ability to pay.

They did it based on trust. Not faith in an algorithm or a payment processor, trust in my character. A belief that I was the kind of person who would come back and make good on my word. Which I did.

Before credit cards and globalization, this kind of arrangement was commonplace. Banks lent to people they knew. Shopkeepers extended credit to regulars. Trust was not abstract. It was local, personal, and built over time.

Since then, trust has experienced Weimar Republic levels of inflation. Financial intermediaries and oceans of data have rendered trust optional. Transactions no longer require character, only credentials. As society has expanded, it has shifted from high-trust relationships to low-trust systems, relying less on who someone is and more on their collateral, capital, and capacity to pay.

This is why a person’s word no longer buys what it once did. Social credit has been replaced by formal credit. Reputation matters less when every interaction is mediated by platforms and scores. The benefits are obvious: more customers. more commerce. Less friction. However, when people believe there are endless opportunities, relationships become transactional. People are interchangeable. Burning bridges feels inconsequential when it seems like there are unlimited crossings.

The modern economy doesn’t care about character, their systems don’t need it. The apathy towards character extended to social interactions as well.

This article will explain how the modern economy, built on the four Cs of Credit Capital, Capacity, Collateral and Character, no longer cares about the latter, and the downstream effects on society.

Keep Reading To Learn Why Nobody Values Social Credit!

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What is Credit?

Credit 101 — The Driver of The Financial System

Credit is the ability to receive something today based on the expectation that you will make good on it later. It is a claim on the future, granted in the present. Exactly like the coffee I received on Christmas Day, that was paid later.

When finance people think about credit, their minds usually go to a company’s balance sheet. How much of a company’s operations are funded through liabilities, obligations that will eventually need to be repaid? Taking on more commitments than you can reasonably fulfill puts you at risk of defaulting on those promises.

Even when a borrower fully intends to repay a loan, many things can happen between the day the loan is made and the day repayment is due. Anyone extending credit understands that non-repayment is a possibility. That’s why, according to finance textbooks, lenders determine creditworthiness with a framework built around four Cs.

Collateral, Capital, Capacity and Character.

The logic is simple, a lender will extend more credit to somebody they believe is more likely to repay them. If a borrower has collateral, the lender can claim it if they default on the loan. This is why when you miss a mortgage payment the bank can kick you out of your house then sell it to somebody else to get their money back.

Banks and lenders don’t have endless time to kick people out of their homes, so they would rather avoid this. Therefore, in addition to securing their loan with a claim on the house, they will do an income verification check, expect the home buyer to own meaningful equity, via a down payment and ensure they don’t have other outstanding loans or a history of defaulting on loan payments.

Lenders can require additional covenants (restrictions) the borrower needs to abide by, but for the most part this is the logic that powers the mortgage market but also the $145 trillion global fixed income market. (We discussed this in How Private Equity Ruins Great Companies)

If a lender has less confidence in a borrowers’ 4 Cs, if the covenants are weak and other claims have priority, they will perceive a higher risk of not being repaid. In turn they ask for a higher interest rate. As the financial system has gotten more developed and interconnected, lenders have increasingly relied on this framework, and other quantitative measures instead of their personal feelings or trust in the lender.

It’s still a factor but financial actors are heavily scrutinized for lending practices by regulators and shareholders. As a result they reduce exposure to creditors with weakness in the other Cs. It creates an uncomfortable dynamic between regulators. Some want to reduce risk in the financial system, others want to reduce income inequality. These two goals can often run contrary to each other; it’s harder for people with limited financial resources to generate wealth if nobody is willing to lend to them. This exacerbates inequality and creates K shape economies.

Unfortunately, character is difficult to measure, audit, and defend at scale. Capital, Capacity and Collateral is not. Modern finance didn’t decide character was unimportant, just inefficient.

Outsourcing Trust

That same logic escaped finance and spread everywhere. In many cases, businesses know little about their customers. Nor do they need to care. Any person can enter a store or restaurant and pay cash. Money is the same to the business. When somebody pays by credit card, the business isn’t paid by the customer. Visa pays the business then it’s their problem to settle the balance with their customers.

Stores don’t need to decide if a customer is worth extending credit to because they’ve outsourced this to the credit card companies. For the cost of 2-3% of this transaction volume, they can get paid immediately. Businesses want to maintain a relationship with their customers, but since it’s credit card companies paying the bills, they don’t need to worry about creditworthiness anymore. Just their purchasing habits and preferences. Whether they have mountains of credit card debt or not, isn’t their concern so long as one of their cards doesn’t get declined.

Some will argue this is a feature, not a bug. Businesses don’t need to stand up entire underwriting departments, make gut decisions or worry about unpaid debts. They can focus on offering their product to customers and that’s it.

Yet without a deep relationship with clients, the exchange is purely transactional. They are a series of numbers in a database, hopefully spending more money over time. This is unfortunately not limited to business relationships, people are increasingly less concerned about who they engage with, since relationships are shorter term.

From Commerce to (Anti) Social Behavior

Behavior follows incentives.

People in big cities have deeper dating pools and can play the field longer before committing. If they are meeting people outside their normal dating circles, such as through dating apps or at a bar, they don’t feel like there are consequences if they break things off in an abrupt or rude manner. Such as ghosting.

Ghosting is when somebody unprompted stops responding to your messages. This mostly happens in a dating context but can also happen in other settings. Such as when you try to talk with your boss about a pay raise or promotion.

Ghosting has become so common in the dating world, almost everyone has been on the receiving or delivery end. Although it’s rude and cowardice, it has become par for the course.

Since you can easily avoid the confrontation by hiding behind technology, most choose to evade an awkward or uncomfortable conversation. Instead of being honest about why they no longer want to pursue their entanglement further, its easier to let the other person jump to their own conclusion. There are rarely consequences for this. While there are apps such as Tea or Are We Dating The Same Guy this hasn’t made ghosting or infidelity any less common.

This is because behavior is driven by attitude which is shaped by beliefs. If somebody doesn’t believe there is anything wrong with being rude or unethical, they will behave accordingly. The only thing that can keep them in line is consequences.

As we increasingly live in a consequence free society, it stands to reason there isn’t much keeping people in line. They don’t feel like their word has much value since in a transactional world, you can get by with Capital, Capacity and Collateral. In the dating world, singles might have a slightly different underwriting criteria than banks but nonetheless, character or being considered a good member of their community is often deprioritized (we discussed this in Is pretty (male privilege) a thing?)

The Death of Character: What Comes Next?

In the TV Show Black Mirror, a popular episode Nosedive depicts a world where society runs on a social credit system, each citizen gets a rating between 1-5 stars, with each interaction rated like a Uber ride. People with higher ratings get access and privileges, the others do not.

You don’t need to know if somebody is a good citizen or not, you can just look at their rating. Your Character has become quantified into metrics, like Capital, Collateral and Capacity. You don’t need to trust people anymore, since trustworthiness can be demonstrated through a higher score.

Naturally this will prompt people to focus on optimizing their reputation, instead of consistently doing the right thing. Choosing to spend hours perfecting their Linkedin or Instagram profile to look high status instead of just being a respectful and interesting individual.

Unfortunately, these kinds of people get rewarded. Cringe Instagram influencers get plenty of sponsorships, not to mention exclusive invites. People posting awful engagement bait on Linkedin get their profile viewed more, heightening their status and affording them more opportunities.

You keep seeing this type of engagement hacking because it’s incentivized. If it was punished or ineffective it would go away quickly. That’s why the only way to save social credit is to bring back scrutiny and consequences. Who would be against demerit points every time an influencer posts a selfie, or somebody posts a photo of their passport on their lap trying to “discreetly” show they are in business class/flying private? That will get people to fall in line quickly.

Although, the social credit system idea brings promise, human rights advocates worldwide have been unhappy with China since they implemented something similar in 2018. Even if in China people are more supportive (apparently).

The Death of Character

The value of character quietly disappeared because it was priced out. New systems which are helpful to outsiders hurt familiar people.

People don’t feel like they can rely on character alone, so it doesn’t offer them much value. Should we be surprised when people stop cultivating it? We’ve been rewarding signaling over substance, optionality over commitment, performance over consistency.

The coffee shop exchange felt weird not because it was generous, but rather it relied on something we’ve engineered out of business. Trust without verification now feels reckless. Yet, it’s the only thing that made social credit meaningful in the first place.

It’s more important than Capital, Capacity or Collateral. What good is lending to somebody with plenty of money, if they have no intention of ever repaying you? If they think ghosting is an appropriate mechanism, good luck collecting on your outstanding obligations. We’ve ironically taught people to focus the least on the aspect that matters the most, creating a society that increasingly trusts each other less because they don’t feel like they need to.

Will interactions like the one I had at the cafe go completely extinct or is will there be a resurgence of the value of character? Would you accept trust as a currency?

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As the music built, the leader shouted, asking for a final seance. She counted down from ten, the room erupted, and then everything dropped into silence. Some people let out a primal roar. Others collapsed onto the floor.

I just finished my first Barry’s Bootcamp class. I missed the memo about the matching sports bra and shorts uniform, but otherwise I did fine. For such a simple format, treadmill intervals plus weighted floor work, it delivered a solid workout to the 40 or so participants that Sunday morning. Not everyone staggered out gasping, but the structure lets anyone dial with the intensity, from first timers to elite athletes.

What really stood out was the culture. The waiting room walls were lined with photos of members who have completed 100, 500, even 1,000 classes. They remembered birthdays. They wrote handwritten notes for newcomers. It is all part of the Barry’s formula. Build a community that feels supportive, slightly obsessive, and just cult-like enough to make it hard for people to quit once they start.

Now, I’m in a pretty good place in my life and not feeling like I’m missing something, so I’m not a prime candidate to join a cult or organized movement. It was a decent workout but not revolutionary, so their siren song was ineffective on me.

Which begs a few questions. How did a simple workout class become a global fitness phenomenon? Surely, there business model can’t be entirely reliant on preying on impressionable fitness enthusiasts looking to fill a void (or can it?). What propelled Barry’s from a small studio to one of the leading brands in the boutique fitness industry? Is the workout actually good, or is it just hype?

Keep reading to learn the story behind Barry’s and if it’s worth checking out!

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Origins of Barry’s Bootcamp

Barry’s began in 1998 in West Hollywood, long before boutique fitness chains were a thing. There were large chain gyms and some individual studios but beyond bodybuilders and powerlifters, people definitely didn’t make workouts a part of their personality the way they would for fine dining, clothing styles or travel destinations.

The founder, Barry Jay, was a fitness instructor in Los Angeles that saw an opportunity. Gym classes were missing something. They were either all cardio or all weights, which would get predictably stale for even ardent fitness enthusiasts. When you would find a class with both, the atmosphere was lacking. This prompted high turnover, making it difficult to cultivate a community feel.

Jay believed there was room for something more intense, and communal. Something blending the best of personal training with the motivation of the group fitness environment. He partnered with John and Rachel Mumford, and the three of them launched what would become the first Barry’s Bootcamp.

The original studio looked nothing like the polished Barry’s locations you see today. It was grungy and leaned into the military bootcamp theme. Camo wallpaper, netting on the ceiling, and participants were given dog tags after classes. Joining the actual army is hard, but for an hour you can get some of the fitness benefits. It’s not all fun in games, the lightning sucked back then, making it difficult for good Instagram posts.

Beside the gritty aesthetic, the workout format itself was novel. Barry’s combined treadmill intervals with floor strength work in rapid rotation, using high-energy music, red lights and a drill-sergeant-style instructor. The idea was simple: hit every major muscle group, spike your heart rate, demand total focus and give people a feeling that they had survived something meaningful together.

The timing was perfect. Barry’s was part of the wave in the late 90s and early 2000s that saw many concepts take off and form what would eventually become the boutique fitness boom. Whether it was SoulCycle, Crossfit or CorePower Yoga, people were looking for specialized classes rather than generic gym memberships. Group classes were getting more creative, and fitness brands were starting to embrace personality, identity and community. Barry’s was one of the first to understand how powerful that combination could be. Instead of selling access to a room with equipment, they were selling an experience. Barry’s was closer to Soho House than 24 Hour Fitness.

Barry’s was exclusively an LA and eventually a California thing until they expanded to New York in 2011. The NYC studio helped transform Barry’s into a national trend. It proved the model could work even in markets saturated with gyms and fitness concepts. From there, Barry’s expanded to Europe, starting in Norway, before opening in other major cities. The brand gradually shed its military decor in favor of a more premium, early 2000s Enrique Iglesias music video nightclub-style design. They kept the original red-room but made things more contemporary and Instagram pic friendly.

By the early 2010s, Barry’s had become a blueprint for modern boutique fitness. It validated there was a large market for people willing to pay premium prices for high-intensity classes in exchange for results and a community. The format didn’t change much from the original studio, but the audience became global. It turned out, it’s not only West Hollywood types that loved the combination of intensity and social connection it created. Barry’s became a culture, a ritual and for many people a defining part of their identity. In a pretty annoying way.

Is It a Good Workout?

Short answer, yes. If your goal is fat loss, conditioning or general fitness, doing Barry’s consistently will get your heart rate up, burn a lot of calories and build a decent amount of muscular endurance. The combination of lifting and treadmill intervals is effective. Because you alternate between the two, you can push harder during the running segments than you would if you were only running for a full hour. It is a form of HIIT whether they describe it that way or not.

The strength portion is high rep with relatively light weights. It will not make you explosive and it will not make you huge, but it does help with muscular endurance and basic strength. People who use Barry’s as their primary workout are usually not very muscular, but they tend to be fairly lean with good conditioning. That is exactly what the format trains you for.

Ignoring the economics, depending on your goals, Barry’s is best used as a 1-2 day per week supplement to an existing strength training and cardio program. There’s declining benefits to exclusively HIIT style workouts every day, especially if it comes at the expense of strength or other types of training (like Pilates, which is definitely not just a girl exercise). The problem, which is not specific to Barry’s, is that these boutique fitness concepts are cost prohibitive on a per class basis (anywhere from $30-60), so people opt for the monthly memberships (closer to $150-400). To justify spending this much, need to go almost every day but then they aren’t exposing themselves to other kinds of training formats. Ideally you should be doing a combination of different workouts, to have a well rounded fitness regiment.

That said, compared to many group fitness classes or the average workout most people do at a big box gym, Barry’s is a major upgrade. You get a full hour that includes both full body strength and real cardio. It’s effective enough that tens of thousands of people use it as their primary fitness routine, which has helped turn a local Los Angeles experiment into a global business.

Business Takeaways

Running a Barry’s Bootcamp location is actually pretty simple. Most in North America are corporate owned but there are franchise locations in other markets. Whether these locations are corporate or franchise owned, setting one up carries meaningful setup costs (renovations, equipment etc.), which easily runs into the high hundreds of thousands to low millions of dollars. Otherwise, expenses are predictable once the location is open.

The major item is going to be rent; Barry’s Bootcamp locations are generally in downtown cores or luxury areas within major cities, which carry high costs. This is a fixed expense, which can run anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands per month. This along with the setup costs are going to be one of the primary variables that will decide if a location will be profitable or not. If setup costs run out of control and the location costs millions of dollars each year in rent, the location needs to be overbooked almost immediately to justify the investment.

The other major expense is staffing. Barry’s needs at least one instructor per course and a few other support staff to check participants in, make smoothies and clean up between courses. Besides that, equipment needs to be replaced every now and then but unlike big box gyms, Barry’s only has treadmills, dumbbells, step boxes and bands. With the exception of the treadmills, these don’t cost very much and don’t require maintenance until they break, which can be years.

The treadmills they use are Woodway, which are the best. Although they are expensive, they can handle a lot of wear and tear, and have long guarantees. The assumed depreciation is closer to 5-7 years instead of the usual 2-5 for standard treadmills getting such heavy usage in a commercial setting. This difference in useful life doesn’t save money from a capital expenditures standpoint, at best it will be approximately the same. The reason they make this investment, isn’t even to justify a premium price point, it’s because they lose potentially thousands of dollars for every day a treadmill isn’t operational.

A single drop in class typically costs between $30-40 USD (the sports bra is sold separately), monthly memberships can range from $200-500 depending on the location and frequency. There are between 30-50 places in each class and 5-7 classes per day, capping participation at max 2,450 per week. Assuming each class is full and everybody does drop in classes, which is unrealistic, their maximum revenue from classes is ~$100,000 per week. Since half the participants start on the treadmill and the other half on the floor before switching places, if a treadmill is out of order for even one day, that’s 14 lost class positions.

Not only would they miss out on drop ins, but also other spending on smoothies, apparel etc. If members can’t find enough available slots, they downgrade their membership and/or look elsewhere. This is not what the Lord Barry wants. If people are to get fit and find sense of community, it better be at Barry’s or nowhere else!

In all seriousness, it’s important for them maximize capacity because each additional person they can fit in a class flows directly to their contribution margin, getting them closer to profitability. A successful location can generate in the millions of dollars per year, but that’s predicated on them keeping their classes full; this isn’t like Planet Fitness where people keep their membership even if they never go.

Barry’s is now majority private equity owned, so you know they are going to want to maximize profits, even if it means diluting the brand. In the investment’s press release, they announced aggressive expansion plans, confirming these concerns and that Private Equity Ruin’s Great Companies.

It would be a shame, since there are no shortage of boutique fitness studios trying desperately to replicate the devotion and financial success of Barry’s. New fitness concepts pop up all the time, but most come and go faster than a hyped Netflix series. Barry’s has not only helped built the category, but they are still among the leaders nearly 30 years later.

For now at least, the cult lives on and you be certain if you pop into a Barry’s studio anywhere in the world, you can be greeted with flashing lights, loud music, screaming, matching outfits, a good workout and great community.

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Cheating is commonplace. You’ve done it, and you’ve probably seen or suspected someone else doing it too. People cheat regardless of the stakes. Some do it for fame, fortune, or a faster route to success. Others cheat because they believe the game itself is unfair, that they have to bend the rules just to compete. Some don’t even see their actions as cheating at all. For others, it’s simply not wrong. Which category a cheater falls into is something only they can know.

Last week, I watched a grown man claim to have parred a golf hole after hitting his ball out of bounds twice. Everyone in the group knew he was lying, but he confidently told us to “put him down for a four.” No money was on the line, just pride. His ego, I suspect, couldn’t bear to admit it took nine strokes to finish the hole.

Some will argue what’s the harm? If nothing is at stake, why not let someone protect the story they tell themselves? It’s a victimless crime, right?

The obvious answer is that cheating is wrong, but that answer is far too simple for how often it happens. People rationalize, justify, and moralize their behavior in countless ways, all of which ultimately orbit the same idea: the ends justify the means. Philosopher kings and queens can shop around until they find the right moral justification which eventually boils down to “the ends justifies the means.” Philosophers have debated that premise for centuries. This has kept many tenured academics employed and able to afford expensive vacations for decades.

We don’t have that much time for today’s article but will investigate motivates people to cheat and determine if it’s always bad. Is cheating ever victimless?

Keep reading if you want to understand the benefits and drawbacks of cheating!

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What is Cheating?

Cheating is when you explicitly break a stated rule without suffering the consequences. Moving a golf ball, crossing on a red light or forging numbers on a tax return are all unquestionably against the rules whether you agree or not. Failure to comply is illegal and carries penalties if caught. If you break a rule and accept the punishment, then you didn’t cheat but few people volunteer themselves for consequences when they aren’t caught.

Therefore we can define cheating as intentional rule breaking with the intent to avoid consequences.

Yet most of us break rules every day, sometimes without realizing it. There are countless laws and regulations, many of them outdated or obscure. Countries are littered with some that are centuries old. There are entire websites and Twitter accounts dedicated to this. People don’t necessarily break laws because they are dishonest. Sometimes it’s ignorance, but often it’s because there’s no deterrence. If there’s no consequence to breaking a rule, people won’t try too hard to follow it.

Therefore if there are no consequences to breaking a law, is it really cheating? It’s the responsibility of the governing body to define both rules and punishments that preserve the integrity of the system. If no consequence is attached, then deterrence clearly isn’t a priority. If there were no penalty for speeding, how many people would still follow the speed limit?

Some groups are more naturally compliant than others (see Germany) but rules only matter if noncompliance carries a cost. Penalties can come from two places:

1. The governing body (police, legal system, referees, home owners association etc.)

2. Other participants (Other citizens, members, players, home owners etc.)

If the governing body has made the rules clear and enforces them fairly, participants can’t claim ignorance. The rules must not only exist but also be enforced. When people feel it’s impossible to get caught, or that the consequences are mild, people won’t follow the rules.

Sometimes, adherence falls on other participants. This is why fighting is part of hockey. When players feel an opposing player did something that can’t be rectified by a penalty from the referees, they take matters into their own hands. They will expect the player to answer the bell by fighting, which serves as a pressure release valve, before players can move on with the rest of the match.

Private member clubs keep members aligned in similar ways. They may not break into a fist fight or challenge each other to a duel, but the threat of being blackballed or socially ostracized is a far greater deterrent than anything the club will punish them with.

The intent to avoid consequences is crucial. If someone voluntarily admits they broke a rule, they aren’t necessarily cheating. In golf, players often take penalty strokes to move their ball out of an unplayable position. In business, companies sometimes decide to pay fines rather than comply with a costly regulation. Neither is cheating unless they’re hiding the infraction to avoid the penalty.

Therefore, cheating is when somebody tries to break the rules without suffering the appropriate consequences but sometimes rules aren’t so cut and dry.

Grey Areas, Ambiguity & Gaining an Edge

If you ever speak to a lawyer, tax advisor or religious leader, you quickly learn there are few laws that are black and white; most operate in a grey zone that are highly context depend. This is why McKinsey consultants rarely give a straight answer. They usually first respond with “It depends”. Then charge for 1,000 hours of work to verify that trash cans are the best way to dispose of garbage.

As such, even our earlier maxim “Cheating is when you break the rules” doesn’t actually prevent that much.

In my youth, I played a bit of backgammon. I wasn’t great but I would wreck beginners. One of my regular opponents, was a friend that was new to the game. He considered himself to be far intellectually superior to me and everybody else. This wasn’t completely unfounded; he was very smart. Still is.

Unfortunately for him, this intellect wasn’t enough to avoid the beatdowns he would suffer from my hand. However, I noticed anytime he was falling behind, he would start loudly tapping on the table. He would do this intermittingly but increase the frequency during my turn. He was clearly trying to disrupt my concentration, hoping this might make me slip up.

Now there isn’t an explicit rule saying you can’t loudly tap the table during somebody’s turn. It’s poor etiquette but you wouldn’t be disqualified for doing it. Instead your opponent might have choice words for you or possibly hurt you physically (it doesn’t take much in heated matches). This is why other participants might feel the need to dish out penalties when they feel governing body missed something.

Of course, not everyone agrees on what qualifies as cheating, and not everyone wants to play the role of moral arbiter. As a result, many of these small transgressions go unpunished.

This leads to the real question: Where is the line between cheating and exploiting the rules?

Most people stop short of breaking a rule that carries real consequences or they make sure to do it when no one’s looking. Large corporations hire armies of lawyers and tax advisors to hunt for ambiguity, pushing every boundary they can find. They know only a small percentage of rule-breakers ever get caught, but those who do and lack plausible deniability are made examples of.

While most people agree that cheating is wrong, fewer will condemn taking advantage of vague or unspoken rules. In competitive environments, when the stakes are high, people will grasp at anything that offers even the slightest edge.

A philosopher or a game theory specialist might say you need to assume that everybody else will try to take advantage of ambiguous rules, so by not attempting this you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. Lance Armstrong and other Tour de France participants will argue this is why they needed to take performance enhancer drugs.

They would argue if the governing body hasn’t clearly defined what counts as a rule violation and actively deter it, they must consider this behavior permissible and acceptable.

Following this logic, it’s not illegal to cheat on your spouse (in most countries), but try explaining to them after you’re caught that they never clearly stated the punishment or didn’t do enough to prevent it. Let me know how that conversation goes.

Only the Weak, Deceitful & Insecure cheat

People cheat because they don’t trust themselves. When you are secure in your abilities, in your craft, your preparation, or your sense of self, you do not feel the need to manipulate the outcome. You can live with whatever happens because you know it reflects reality, not your worth.

Cheating is always an act of insecurity. It is the quiet confession that you do not believe you can reach your objectives within the rules. That insecurity is not limited to the underdog. Even the greats fall into it. Barry Bonds did not start taking steroids because he was bad at baseball. He did it because he feared being outshined. Lance Armstrong did not cheat because he was weak, but because he could not stand the idea that someone else might win La Tour de France. Cheating is an admission that you can’t handle the truth.

A secure person does not fear truth. They accept it as feedback. Losing does not humiliate them because it does not redefine them. Their value is not bound to results. It is bound to effort, growth, and integrity. That is why the most confident people are often the calmest under pressure. They have already made peace with the possibility of failure. Many great warriors of the past didn’t fear death on the battle field but they embraced it. The Vikings dreamt of a death worthy of Valhalla. The Spartans believed death on the battle field was the most noble way to perish. They were not shamed if they encountered a greater foe or lost because it was simply their time to die.

The insecure, by contrast, are terrified of facing reality. They need to control perception because their identity depends on it. Cheating gives them the illusion of mastery, but it is hollow. Pride in a victory you did not earn is fleeting. Even if they do achieve their goal, they will forever need to live with the sense of doubt if they could have won without cheating, further fueling their insecurity.

You see this dynamic everywhere. In sports. In business. In politics. The need to cheat does not come from hunger; it comes from fear. Fear of being seen as ordinary. Fear of being left behind. Fear of realizing you might not be as exceptional as you hoped.

This is why somebody that needs to resort to cheating is simply weak, deceitful or insecure. In other words: fragile.

This idea runs through the show Succession. Kendall Roy, can never be king because he’s not a killer. He lacks confidence. Beneath his polished exterior, he’s consumed by doubt. Everyone around him sees it, which is why they don’t believe in him either. Kendall ties his entire identity to becoming CEO of Waystar Royco, and when he can’t reach that goal on merit, he turns to manipulation and underhanded tactics hoping to compensate for what he lacks. His tragedy is ironic: If he were capable and secure, he wouldn’t have to resort to cheating and playing around in ambiguous grey areas. He would have achieved his goal, negating the need for the entire series.

Kendall Roy is a fictitious character but you see plenty of similar tragedies with people such as Elisabeth Holmes, Barry Bonds, Charlie Javice and half the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Their obsession with protecting the image they created pushes them to cheat and destroy their reputations. Instead of being content with being very good, they need to be the best. If they actually believed they were, they would not have needed to lie or commit fraud to prove it. The paradox is that they are both certain they are exceptional and terrified they cannot prove it without breaking the rules.

These might seem like extreme cases, but the same psychology plays out in smaller arenas. On any golf course, you will find players lying about their scores even when nothing is at stake. No money, no fame, no real consequence, only ego. They cannot bear to admit their handicap is higher than they claim. For the time, money, and effort they have invested, they should be better, or at least suck less than their rival Fred.

People cheat because they cannot accept the truth that they are not yet the person they believe, or wish, they could be. The culprit is pride.

Even Alexander The Great was not immune to this. He could not accept defeat to the Gordian knot, as it would have signaled he was not the future conqueror of Asia. As he had decided he would conquer Asia, he could not be defeated by the knot, therefore he simply cut it. He knew this was against the tradition but he also refused to let a barrier stand in his way. Cutting the Gordian knot, permitted him to fulfill his legacy, but by doing so, he acknowledged he lacked the ability to untie the knot in line with the tradition.

Did this action ultimately ruin his legacy? Certainly not. It showed Alexander was a human, with a large sense of pride and the need to achieve ambitious goals he set for himself. He didn’t suffer any consequences, indicating that any person was free to destroy this knot at any time. They would just need to be able to live with themselves afterwards.

Perhaps Alexander was at peace with that choice when he died. Only he could know. For everyone else, those not conquering Asia but instead inflating retention numbers to sell B2B software or shaving strokes off a golf card, the lesson is simple. Stop cheating, stop lying to yourself, and focus on being the best version of who you actually are. That is the only victory worth claiming.

Holmes, Armstrong, my annoying friend and the cheating golfer were all trying to protect a version of themselves they could not live up to. The real punishment for cheating is not the fine, the suspension, or the scandal. It is the quiet knowledge that you were not honest enough to face yourself. The world can forgive a loser. What it never forgets is a fraud.

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Van Gogh’s words aren’t just about art, they are a philosophy for life. Passion is the fuel behind every great achievement. Yet, in contrast to Van Gogh’s belief, most people sleepwalk through life. Whether it’s our career, relationships or even leisure activities, the truth is we spend too much time going through the motions instead of giving it our all. You can blame it on laziness, competing priorities or a society that discourages exceptionalism, the net result is displays of passion are rare.

Can you think of anyone who did anything truly great dispassionately? Vincent van Gogh, Kobe Bryant and Steve Jobs were obsessed with their craft; this is why they accomplished incredible things. It came with a lot of discomfort and sacrifice but that’s why people who know nothing about art, basketball and technology know these names. We are drawn to people that go after their goals with every fiber of their being.

Nowhere was this more evident than in hockey’s 4 Nation Faceoff tournament. Players proud to represent their countries played their absolute hearts out. Their effort along with the political tensions culminated in the Canada - US finale drawing among the highest ratings for a non-Olympic hockey game ever. Many of the 16 million viewers were not regular hockey fans but they were fascinated to see 40 of the best players play like their lives were on the line.

This stands in contrast to what we normally see in pro sports and our daily lives. We encounter too many “quiet quitters”, people not invested in their craft or willing to put in above the minimum effort required. People will claim to be ambitious yet won’t do anything outside the strict confines of their job description (or go into an office when required). Seeing somebody passionate should be motivating but most people would rather dismiss this person as a workaholic or label them obsessed like it’s a bad thing.

This is the wrong reaction. This article is going to explain why simply caring will give you a massive advantage over most people, but why the very best are obsessed.

Apologies for the profanity but it’s unfortunately effective at driving open rates and page views. This is why every self help book these days seems to contain the word F*ck in the title. I’m chasing my own goal of hitting 1,000 Subscribers within a year. If you believe in striving for greatness, hit the subscribe button and be part of the journey.

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Why people loved the Canada vs USA game

A short Intro to Hockey

As a Canadian I need to dedicate at least a few hundred words to how great this game was. Although this still relates to the topic of the article, if you really couldn’t care less about Sportsball, you can continue with the rest of the article below.

Hockey is a fast, physical game. NHL players can skate above 30KM per hour, and shoot pucks >100MPH. With people and pucks whizzing around at high speeds, players can’t afford to coast. If they don’t give their utmost effort on each shift, they can get seriously hurt or worse—cost their team a goal. This is a key aspect of the sport; hockey is very much a team game.

Don’t get me wrong, there are individual accolades but the culture of hockey is focused on winning and you can’t win without a great team performance. This is why it’s rare to see NHL players request trades from contending clubs whereas it happens fairly often in the NBA1. There is a lot of parity in the NHL, which means to make the playoffs, every game matters so players can’t have off nights. Once you get to the playoffs, goals are hard to come by, making every shift even more crucial.

Hockey players must play hard in a regular game but once the stakes get raised in a playoff or international hockey atmosphere, it takes things to a whole other level. Experienced hockey fans were not surprised the players were amped up for the matchup between Canada and the US. Even if this was effectively an exhibition tournament without any money or meaningful implications, there was something greater on the line: Pride.

It’s been over a decade since NHL players participated in the Winter Olympics, meaning a whole generation of players have never represented their country in a best on best tournament. This was the greatest team the US has ever assembled, and they were hungry to beat Canada to avenge previous Olympic losses. Meanwhile hockey is ingrained into the Canadian identity; losing is unacceptable. Players from both squads were grateful to be there and showed it with authentic raw emotion each shift. The fans fed off this energy, making the Bell Center and TD Garden loud and exciting atmospheres, and can’t miss entertainment for viewers at home.

As incredible as the game was, the political tensions clearly contributed to the event. President Trump referring to Canada as the 51st state has not been well received north of the border. While hockey players rarely involve themselves in geopolitical matters, you can tell the attendance of Prime Minister Trudeau and President Trump speaking to team USA before the final heightened the stakes. Logically everyone knew it was an exhibition game, but there was a sense the game represented something much more. The American players were trying to prove they had caught up to Canada as a hockey nation. The Canadian players were not only trying to validate their status as the best hockey playing country, but no matter the rhetoric, Canada would never be part of the United States of America. This game was a battle for the soul of a nation. It was bigger than hockey, therefore the players cared like their life depended on it, which is why spectators were as equally invested.

This is because only the obsessed are worthy of our admiration.

The Obsessed Eat The Apathetic

"If you really want to be great at something, you have to truly care about it. If you want to be great in a particular area, you have to obsess over it." — Kobe Bryant

Most people operate at 40% capacity. Navy SEALs call it The 40% Rule. When you think you’re spent, you actually have more in the tank. Realistically, 40% is probably low; if somebody is giving up that early I doubt this article or any motivational video will ever get them up to snuff. When I was a trainer, if I saw a client was about to hit a wall, I would start counting down an extra X seconds or Y reps, which would easily give them an extra 10-30% every time (seriously!).

Whether you agree with the SEALs ratio or not, people can push themselves much further than they think. They just need the proper motivation to go beyond their comfort zone. The problem is, most don’t. Instead of trying to reach the summit of greatness, they prefer to stay in the valley of mediocrity. The longer you stay in the valley of mediocrity, the harder it is to climb out of it. If you are serious about being ambitious, you need to be willing to pay the price: That cost is obsession.

If you want to see what obsession looks like, here are the final 3 minutes of Kobe Bryant’s career. In a meaningless game, Kobe scored 60 points and willed the Lakers to a victory, they had no business winning. He could barely stand by the end yet losing was not an option. You don’t need to understand basketball to understand the weight of the moment. Just look at the Staples center crowd. They love Kobe because he gave it his all, his whole career.

I hate to burst your bubble: You are not Will Hunting, or any other Matt Damon character (sorry!). Talent alone won’t get you near the top in a competitive field. Staying in your comfort zone will not create the needed separation from the pack. This is why you rarely see the most naturally gifted person rise to the top unless they have an elite work ethic or dedication. Know many part-time World Champions?

Most people reading this don’t want to be the best in the world, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you lack ambition. To reach the very top of ultra competitive endeavors, you’ll need to make certain sacrifices, that might not be worth it in the end. You don’t need to be the best, but you should aim for greatness. Contrary to the great Ricky Bobby, if you’re not first, you are NOT last.

You can easily be 3 sigma greater than the average person, just by being emotionally invested. You don’t need to be a workaholic or dedicate every waking moment to your mission, but you need to care. You need to be invested in the outcome. You need to be able to look yourself in the mirror and say you gave it your best shot. This means when you are on, you are completely focused on your task. Not just going through the motions but elevating your performance— going beyond what everyone else is doing. This might mean putting in longer hours, pushing yourself harder when needed. This should sound very obvious but you would be surprised by the number of people that simply don’t care.

Have you ever felt subdued or sabotaged by a colleague, customer or service provider unwilling to meet your effort halfway? If you are an ambitious, motivated person with agency, this probably happens all the time—or you’re not pushing hard enough. Hard working people who care, let’s call them the obsessed, make good things happen but a byproduct is it creates more work for the people around them. The obsessed push their organizations forward. Others either step up or try to drag them down. I previously explained how bureaucratic institutions are designed to stifle these kinds of people, eventually the obsessed all leave, leaving only people who are not invested. This is an example of the apathetic successfully stifling the obsessed.

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These bureaucratic organizations and apathetic employees might have successfully upended the obsessed, but in doing so they are only hastening their own demise. Jeff Bezos famously categorized companies into two categories: Day 1 and Day 2. What separates the two is the mindset that permits some innovative companies to endure versus those doomed to decline. A Day 1 company operates with the urgency, agility, and customer obsession of a startup, constantly adapting to change, embracing new trends, and making high-velocity decisions. In contrast, a Day 2 company becomes stagnant, bureaucratic, and overly focused on internal processes, leading to irrelevance and eventual failure.

Day 1 companies will naturally be filled with obsessed employees through the organization. The high sense of urgency, volatility and limited bureaucracy make it difficult for lazy or uninvested employees to want to stick around. Once they see they can’t slow everybody else down, they will need to decide whether get on board or get off. If leadership is good at their job, they will know how to properly motivate people with the mission, important responsibilities, agency and compensation that makes people believe this hard work and obsession are worthwhile. When a company finds an obsessed employee, they should do everything possible not to stifle or lose them. If you’re one of these workers and your environment is filled with many other obsessed individuals, you should not take this for granted; not all companies are like this.

Do you want to be one of these obsessed employees at a Day 1 company? If so the bar is incredibly low. Most people are coasting, hoping to blend in. If you simply give a sh!t and consistently execute, you will dominate 90% of the competition.

If you want to stand out, you don’t need to be the smartest or most talented person in the room. You just need to care more. To push past discomfort when others stop. To be the one who gives a damn when everyone else is sleepwalking through life.

So, ask yourself: Are you coasting, or are you committed? Are you comfortable, or are you chasing something bigger? If you want to be exceptional, there’s only one choice—care more than anyone else is willing to. If you don’t wake up most mornings ready to run through a wall, you might need to look for something that does it for you.

The obsessed don’t just succeed. They define the game.

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According to a Gallup study, 85% of employees worldwide are disengaged at work. People feel drained, exhausted, and resent their jobs. Is this because their work is genuinely hard, or are they just over saddled with mind-numbingly tedious assignments? The natural tendency is to equate working hard with long hours or having to complete many tasks, but is this actually the case?

Being in the trenches used to imply getting shot at, now it means rattling off emails and adjusting PowerPoint slides from a climate controlled office. Just because you feel drained by the end of your work day, does not mean you actually worked hard or created any value (for the shareholders or yourself). While employers often judge hard work by how occupied, stressed or burnt out their little worker bees are, you should avoid falling into this trap.

If your goal is to be effective, and one day rise to the top of your craft, one of the most important things you can do is discern what activities will make you most indispensable to your employer, clients and other stakeholders. This will help you earn a comfortable living but if you want satisfaction, you need to figure out which activities give you energy and spend less time on tasks that are a drain.

This article will help you figure out if your job is pushing you to your max potential or just making you waste away. What you can do to make sure you are pursuing difficult but meaningful labor you can look back and be proud of.

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Bad Work is Shallow

How often do you face a problem at work that takes longer than 15 seconds to solve? If this doesn’t happen daily—or at least weekly—your job isn’t mentally stimulating enough. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s boring or easy, but if you can go eight hours without pushing your brain near its limits, there’s a mismatch between your abilities and your responsibilities.

Think of talent like a swimming pool: if you spend all your time in the shallow end, you’re not getting the full workout. And the longer you stay there, the harder it becomes to swim in the deep end. If your job keeps you in the shallow end, it will eventually feel predictable and mundane. Some people actively seek that out. But the uncomfortable truth is that most workers don’t lack motivation because their job is too hard, they lack motivation because they aren’t challenged. They’re busy chasing mice, not antelope.

The idea of shallow vs. deep work was popularized by Cal Newport in Deep Work (2016). Newport argues that people should eliminate distractions and spend more time in a state of deep focus. The kind that demands full engagement, creativity, and expertise. Shallow work, on the other hand, consists of low-value tasks that make you feel productive but actually prevent you from achieving meaningful outcomes. Organizing your to-do lists, responding to emails, and most meetings fall into this category. People don’t even enjoy these tasks, yet they consume most of their time.

Want to know if someone is truly engaged in their job? Look at their calendar and inbox. If they’re buried in recurring touchpoints, status updates, and meetings with no clear purpose, they may look busy but they aren’t getting much real work done. Unless you’re a court stenographer, sitting in meetings and taking notes isn’t why you were hired. And while you’re stuck in that meeting, neither you nor your colleagues can focus on the work that actually drives results.

Not all meetings are bad, but there are far too many of them. That’s why motivated employees try to skip meetings that don’t serve a clear purpose. As you become more senior in an organization, meetings will naturally take up more of your time but that makes it even more important to filter them carefully. Meetings should be necessary, well run, and outcome-driven. It’s no coincidence that three of Elon Musk’s top productivity rules focus on reducing meetings. You may not agree with his politics, but you can’t deny that he gets a lot of hard work done.

If your day is filled bouncing from meeting to meeting, frantically responding to emails providing information you know from the top of your head then your job is not hard. It is simply overloaded with bad, shallow work. Whether you acknowledge it or not, it’s tedious. The solution is to be focused on doing good or great work.

What is Great Work?

“There are no returns to doing “average” work (outside of make-work jobs and physical labor). All the returns come from doing *great* work, and scaling it up.” — Naval

When you closely examine “exciting” careers, you’ll see they can also be tedious due to many shallow tasks and time commitments. Professional athletes are fortunate to earn large fortunes while doing something they love, but it doesn’t mean that they enjoy every second of it. Between the time spent practicing, training, media obligations and other requirements, they end up spending a very small percentage of their time actually “playing” their sport.

For some sports performance doesn’t even matter, since their salaries are guaranteed. Basketball players can earn tens of millions of dollars per year, while barely playing. Ben Simmons has earned ~$150 million the past 4 seasons, despite playing well below 50% of his eligible games. When he did play, it was certainly nowhere near where it should be relative to his contract, even for NBA standards. If Simmons was a golfer1 or an Olympian, he would not have made any money these past years. Luckily for him, he was fully paid. Simmons might seem like an extreme example but he’s indicative of a new generation of players, that don’t care about winning or loving basketball.

Former players and old heads alike will attribute this to players being more focused on building their personal brands instead of their performance on the court. They aren’t fully to blame, the NBA and other professional sports leagues are increasingly encouraging their athletes to be more involved on social media and promotion to help league revenues. This is why the Super Bowl has changed from a sporting event into a Taylor Swift infomercial.

Outside of sports, look at other exciting careers such as law enforcement, medicine or hostage negotiation. Hollywood will let us believe these jobs are filled with non-stop action or hooking up with colleagues, but they don’t show the countless hours of idle time or administrative paper work. A cop might patrol an area for dozens of shifts without having to do anything resembling police work. Somebody in these careers might have difficult moments but their work can also tedious. It really depends on where they work and how their organization is run.

If your goal is to do good work, eliminate or avoid busy work. Busy work is the older cousin to shallow work. Busy work are tasks that look impressive to other people but aren’t actually that valuable to the organization. An example of busy work, is when your manager asks you to prepare a whole Powerpoint presentation for information that can fit in a calendar invite. Showing up to the meeting with this done makes you and your manager look good to the other meeting participants, but in reality you probably didn’t help the meeting run any better and you could have used that time on more important things. Nothing makes people hate their jobs more than working late into the night on something that doesn’t get used. Current and former investment bankers are nodding to this.

A better use of your time could be to actually work on solutions to the problem that triggered the meeting in the first place. If your manager called a meeting to discuss a new feature a competitor is promoting, wouldn’t it be better for you to show up to the meeting with a draft of what feature you think your firm should offer instead? Wouldn’t it be stronger if you built a quick beta version you can exhibit to other stakeholders, and get their signoff for you to prepare it for production? If you just work on solving problems, instead of doing work that surrounds the actual work, you will have many more tangible accomplishments. Many problems disappear when you think deeply about what the problem really is and you focus all your efforts on fixing it right away. This is the essence of great work. Taking on difficult problems that you actually care about, and spending most of your time working on a potential solution. Shallow work won’t eliminate it, so the solution is to reduce the amount of time spent on tasks that don’t help you find a potential solution.

A popular framework to follow is The Eisenhower Matrix. Named after President Eisenhower, it helps you prioritize tasks based on how urgent and important they are. If something is Urgent and Important, you do it right away. If it’s neither urgent nor important, don’t waste time working on the task. The Eisenhower Matrix works great in theory but few people can create real value from it because they suck at distinguishing the important from the non-important. Bad managers don’t help either, especially when they treat everything as urgent.

This is why you need to take matters into your own hands. Whether you have a good manager or not, you always need to manage up. If you feel that you are overloaded with unimportant and tedious work and can’t get to the important stuff, bring this up often. Managers will rarely accept the blame if their team misses a key milestone because they were busy with side quests. If your manager is the one thrusting unimportant work on your plate, make them own it by explicitly stating you need to stop working on important task X, to accomplish non-important task Y. This distraction will likely lead to you missing the deadline you agreed on. If they say “Yes, it’s fine to postpone the original deadline because I need you to do Y” assuming they aren’t a completely unserious person, it’s harder for them to use it against you after. You are better off under promising and overdelivering, as a way to build goodwill for when you delegate and eliminate tasks you don’t see as worthy of your time.

Assuming you can consistently deliver on the important work, your manager should eventually trust that you have a good grasp of what constitutes important & urgent. This will eventually lead to more autonomy and credibility when you want to skip out on meetings and other shallow work. This isn’t easy, in some organizations and industries, especially those that are very hierarchical, your manager might not appreciate any signs that you are questioning their authority. You need to be careful about how you pushback and question work assignments, otherwise you will just come off as difficult or lazy. To earn their trust, you might need to do a lot of tedious work, especially at the beginning to show that you are a team player, willing to listen. However don’t be fooled, the goal is to eliminate work you don’t feel brings value as quickly as you reasonable can otherwise like an overgrown weed, it might be there forever. I still don’t know much about gardening, but dealing with weeds seems pretty tedious to me.

The next time you think of complaining about your job being hard, stop and ask yourself whether it’s actually difficult or are you just drowning in tedious work? Better yet, are there things you can do to make your job less tedious, so you can go back to solving real problems? Ironically if you do this exercise well, you will save yourself from a tedious role but gift yourself a hard job, but that is what you should be trying to do. Otherwise you won’t be challenging yourself or living up to your potential, making you intrinsically unmotivated in your career.

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It’s approaching a century since Dale Carnegie published “How to Make Friends and Influence People”. Lauded as the roadmap to being a likeable human being, HMFIP was well received by critics and has sold more than 30 millions of copies. Despite being one of the of the most successful self-help books all of time, few people have internalized Carnegie’s advice.

Loneliness is an epidemic; a 2020 report from Harvard University revealed that 36% of Americans experience "serious loneliness," with higher rates among young adults (61%). Even before the Pandemic, loneliness was a growing problem, that has been blamed on everything from social media, video games, dating apps to even capitalism. Perhaps they are to blame, but if you are having a difficult time making friends/connecting with people, it likely has more to do with your actions.

Instead of trying to decide what gift to buy your work wife/husband for secret Santa, here are a few maxims to include in your social interactions to ensure you are likable or at least not the most detestable person in 2025.

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Advice to Not Suck in 2025

1. Don’t be tardy

Showing up consistently late to things is an easy way to alienate people. Whether it’s a work meeting, job interview, golf round, date or even a routine oil change, it reflects poorly to keep people waiting. Your lateness is signaling that you have poor time management or you believe your time is more valuable than other peoples.

People have different definitions on what they constitute as being late There is late and there is late. There is also a cultural component to this as well. Being late in Germany might mean 30 seconds after the start time, in Spain, it could be half an hour. Naturally, you should adjust your arrival time based on the audience you are meeting with but as a safe rule, for social gatherings, you have a 10% grace period for which you can show up without your lateness being considered rude.

The longer the meeting/engagement, the longer the grace period. If you are meeting for a 30 minute coffee chat, you should not be more than 3 minutes late, for an hour long meeting, this climbs to 6 minutes. If you are meeting a group that cannot start without you (restaurant, golf round or arm wrestling tournament), you should cap this at around 10 minutes1. If you are meeting somebody at their place, or there is nothing preventing them from having a good time without you, the grace period can be extended.

In professional settings you should generally not be late for meetings. If this is going to happen, you have 2 minutes after the meeting start time, to send an alert to the other meeting participants that you will be delayed. If you do not send such an alert, if nobody hears from you after 5 minutes, it is fair for the other person to assume the meeting is cancelled. If you do send a notification, you have until 10 minutes from the original start time of the meeting, until the other participants can count you out.

On the other side, don’t show up ridiculously early to things. It’s weird to be hanging out in the Zoom waiting room 10 minutes before the meeting. If somebody is having a party, do not show up 30 minutes before the start time, unless they ask for your assistance. Do not pull a Michael Scott.

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2. Ask open ended questions.

Look, most conversations aren’t going to feel like a TED Talk. That’s life. But if every chat you have leaves you yearning for the sweet release of silence, maybe the problem isn’t them. Sure, some people are human Wikipedia pages—brimming with fun facts, anecdotes, and unsolicited trivia about octopus mating habits. In those cases, all you have to do is let them cook. Sit back, sprinkle in a few “No way!”s, and enjoy the show. But not everyone is preloaded with conversation gold. Sometimes, you’ve got to dig a little deeper, play Medici and discover their inner Da Vinci.

Instead of defaulting to zombie questions like, “So, how’s it going?” (to which the answer is inevitably “Fine”), ask something that snaps them out of autopilot. Try something like, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was that rule?” Is it a bit weird? Sure. But it gets results. Before you know it, you are deciding their fate based on a coin toss. Now that’s a conversation worth remembering.

Pro tip: be genuinely curious. People can smell fake interest and it’s unpleasant. So, laugh at their jokes (even if they aren’t funny), and find out what lights them up. The secret sauce of great conversations isn’t about dazzling them with your wit; it’s about making them feel like the most fascinating person in the room. And who knows? By asking good questions, you might actually find them interesting, or at least, they’ll think you are. While engaged in a conversation, make sure not to interrupt people; it’s off-putting. Even if you have ADHD and think you know what the person is going to say, allow them to finish speaking before jumping in.

3. Do not sleep with your employees spouse

Carnegie did not cover this in HTFIP, but if your goal is to be liked or respected, it is generally best practice to avoid sleeping with somebodies spouse. Most agree you should not do this to a friend or close acquaintance, but even if somebody works for you, it is still not okay to do this. If you missed the memo, prima nocta (also known as Droit du seigneur) has been largely phased out these past few centuries.

One would think that this lesson would be self evident, but a Linkedin influencer caused a stir earlier this year when he revealed that a CEO he worked for, slept with his wife as payback for contradicting them. While I can acknowledge that it’s infuriating when a colleague or subordinate does not immediately follow your directives, this does not feel like the appropriate reaction. If you want people to listen to you, invest the appropriate amount of time creating alignment behind your vision and trust. If you consistently show that your decision making leads to optimal outcomes, they will eventually learn to respect your judgement.

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It’s fashionable to embrace ones villain arc, but I suggest reserving this to activities such as fighting Superman, eradicating the population of Gotham or eliminating half of live in the universe. If your goal is to not alienate people or avoid sucking in 2025, I would avoid sleeping with people’s spouses. Especially if they work for you.

(Am I the only one wondering which CEO this was?)

4. Don’t bring up politics or taboo topics

Conversations are for connection, not confrontation. Topics like politics, religion, or personal beliefs often evoke strong emotions and can quickly derail an otherwise positive interaction. While meaningful in the right context, they’re rarely helpful for building rapport with someone new.

Instead, focus on shared experiences or interests, areas that bring people together. Like building a camp fire, you need to progress from small talk, to medium talk. If you start with a very heavy topic too early, you could smother the fire of what could be a promising relationship.

If sensitive subjects come up, listen thoughtfully and respond with curiosity, not debate. A simple “That’s an interesting perspective—how did you come to that conclusion?” can keep things open without creating tension.

Borat appeared to not get the memo.

5. If the beacons are lit, accept the call

The true test of friendship is showing up when it matters most. Being a friend during good times is easy, it requires little effort and no sacrifice. But until a friendship is tested, you can’t truly know its depth or authenticity. This is why time often strengthens friendships; the longer you’ve known someone, the more opportunities you’ve had to prove your commitment.

That said, meaningful actions can accelerate closeness. If you show up for someone in a significant way early on, you might forge a bond stronger than with someone you’ve known for years but have never had to rely on or inconvenience for support. True friendship is about effort, not just time. There is no better example of friendship than when Rohan lifted the siege of Gondor.

Despite having only recently fought off a force of thousands of Uruk-hai at the Battle of Helms Deep, King Théoden immediately accepted the call, mustering all of the troops that he could. After riding cross country for nearly a week, the riders of Rohan arrived at the Pelennor Fields, to see the men of Gondor demoralized and their walls nearly breached. Without taking a moment to gather themselves, Théoden roused the riders with a riveting speech, which ended with them chanting death as they charged head first into an army of Orcs, Elephants and Nazgul riding fell beasts.

People willing to do those things don’t suck. If you want to steer clear of the growing epidemic of loneliness, here’s a simple formula: show up on time, ask thoughtful open-ended questions, stay far away from your employees’ spouses, avoid divisive topics like politics, and, most importantly, be there for your friends when it matters.

This should be the standard you aspire to in 2025.

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The average human process around 74 gigabytes (GB) of information each day. This is the equivalent of 16 movies, or a slow Marvel year. Some of this information comes from our sensory input, what we see, hear and touch, other pieces happen in our subconscious. Even when we are asleep, we are processing information, making it difficult to notice everything we interact with.

Contrary to the election coverage we’ve seen, the human brain is smart. So much so that it doesn’t want to waste it’s time on information it doesn’t consider noteworthy. If your brain tried to acknowledge all 74 GBs it came into contact with each day, it would spread itself too thin. Instead it employs a few techniques to be efficient.

There are some obvious advantages to this efficiency but the result is that we can’t notice everything, so we need filter out what is important and worth paying attention to. As a result, we mostly focus on contrast, something that stands out from the rest.

People working in media or advertising are well aware of this, they employ techniques to ensure that we focus on what they are trying to show us. This article will give a quick overview of how our brain pays attention, why contrast theory drives much of the weirdness we see on the internet & other aspects of life.

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Getting our brain’s attention: Signal vs Noise

"Your focus determines your reality." — Qui-Gon Jinn

We are psychologically wired to notice differences. Whether these are changes to our environment or internal bodily functions, we look for signals that something is changing or different. We do this instinctively to ensure our survival, we don’t want to be taken by surprise by a potential threat. This is why when we hear an unfamiliar noise in our home in the middle of the night, we suddenly jump to attention.

Since we encounter constant stimuli, our brain needs to decide what it wants to focus on. It can’t pay attention to everything, so it uses a few hacks to reduce the less relevant information, let’s call this noise. To eliminate most of this noise, the brain will pay selective attention, process routine tasks automatically, rely on rule of thumbs/heuristics or reduce the sensitivity to rapidly repeated stimuli (habituation).

You can think of this as the same that your phone or computer will stop running programs you haven’t opened in a while. This is necessary because if we were completely focused and deliberate about everything we did or experienced, our brain would quickly become exhausted.

On the other hand, if we never paid attention to any of the information, it would be difficult to accomplish anything new or with even slight difficulty. The key is to make sure we are focusing on important or relevant information, let’s call this signal.

These are major simplifications but the point is our brain is constantly trying to decipher signal from noise in order to ensure our survival and help us make good decisions. This isn’t easy because there is a lot of noise out there, especially if you spend a lot of time consuming “noisy content”. Noisy content, is most of what you find on TikTok, Instagram, any social media really, not to mention what the legacy media shows us these days (see We Live in a Post-Truth Society to see why). This content grabs our attention but does not help us make better decisions, or enhance our survival. This is largely by design.

Attention Grabbers

"The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." — Japanese Proverb

We’ve established that to save ourselves unnecessary mental strain from information overload, we try to only pay attention to what we deem most relevant. We try to ignore the noise and look for the signal. Sounds simple enough but information does not list their pronouns in their email signature or self identify as relevant or irrelevant. This is in the eye of the beholder.

Depending on the context, the same information can be either. It’s difficult to find signal in such a large quantity of noise and often times noise will disguise itself as signal. This assumes that the information you are getting is actually accurate. Any time we go through a decision making process, we only have the information at our disposal at that time we try to make that decision. Human decision making is subject to many types of biases that distort our ability to decipher signal from noise, not to mention being able to make the right decision when we have good information.

Prime among these is the availability bias, we make decisions based on the information we can most easily recall or find. Just because information is easy to find, does not make it signal nor the best information from which to base a decision. Since most people make decisions this way, others will aim to exploit this. This is why during election season, you will see endless ads trying to convince you to vote for a party or candidate. Their hope is that you will prioritize the most recent information they share with you, instead of your feelings about the candidate since the last election.

Whether it’s an election year or not, all advertisement is trying to try to alter your decision making. They need to convince you that their message has at a minimum some embedded signal but they can’t do this unless you are paying attention. To grab your attention, like an unfamiliar noise in the middle of the night, they introduce new stimuli aimed to make you at least temporarily take notice. This is why TV commercials always play louder compared to the regular program that you are watching, and often employ extreme situations or cute puppies.

Many books and courses discuss how advertisers use all types of marketing techniques to catch and hold our attention, but to overly simplify things, good marketers know how to capture their audiences attention with contrast. If you walk into a room filled with mostly short people and only one very tall person, you would notice the tall person because their height clashes with everybody else. Similarly, if you walk into a grocery store looking for a particular item but all of the packaging looks identical, it’s difficult for any particular product to stand out.

Catching an audience’s attention, keeping it, then conveying a winning sales pitch is not easy; this is why good marketers can justify big paydays. Adding to the difficulty is that competitors will see successful strategies and copy them. This in turn makes it even harder for one particular product to stand out. Marketers need to employ increasingly aggressive tactics in order to stand out. This might mean louder colors, bolder claims or weirder publicity stunts. People on the internet, employ similar tactics.

Why people on the internet are so weird

In the ~30 years people have been using the internet, there has been an incredible growth in knowledge sharing coming from search engines such as Google, online encyclopedia’s such as Wikipedia or social networks. This has been a good thing and helped more people to find signal, but this has also come with more noise. With 402.74 million terabytes of data, created every day, it makes it increasingly difficult to filter good information from bad.

People spend so much time on the internet because, our internet experience is shaped by algorithms, that try to to make us spending more time on the internet. Unlike with previous forms of media such as newspapers and TV, on the internet most of the content is user generated. With thousands of hours of content uploaded to Youtube and millions of Instagram upload and X tweets, every day, it becomes increasingly difficult to stand out. This is no different than the challenge marketers face trying capture our attention with their annoying ads or differentiated packaging.

Just like marketers, content creators have understood that they need to keep doing differentiated things if they want to stand out from the crowd. Even though people consume hours worth of content each day, according to Linktree, there are 207 million professional content creators worldwide. Only about 2% have at least 100K followers and around 75% have less than 10K. Breaking above this 10K mark is very difficult, even if you are talented. As a creator with a small following, if you want to get noticed you will need to do something different than the other 200+ million people out there. Since you probably don’t have the same budget as the large creators, the easiest way to do this, is by being really weird.

Dr. Sandra Lee (Dr. Pimple Popper) tapped into a weird corner of the internet by posting videos of her popping pimples and performing other dermatological procedures as part of her job as a dermatologist.

Nusret Gökçe (Salt Bae) caught people’s attention by his dramatic and unusual way of sprinkling salt on meat.

Franky and Alex Venegas (“Island Boys”) Went viral on TikTok because of their weird style and bizarre music.

There are countless examples like these. Even if some of these creators didn’t intend to go viral or think what they were doing was weird, clearly the internet thought so. The longer you spend on the internet, the more you start to habituate what you are seeing. After scrolling for hours at a time, it takes increasingly racy content to make you notice. Social media serves you content in short doses and doesn’t require anywhere near your full attention. This is why for most of us, unless we see contrast with everything else we see on there, we probably won’t even notice most of the content we’ve seen.

It’s not that everybody on the internet is weird, it’s just that we don’t notice the boring ordinary people. Somehow the weird people become the signal, since we are looking for something to stand out and entertain us. This isn’t the internet’s fault. Internet companies are trying to give us what they think we want. When we like, comment and share this odd content, they interpret this as we want to see more of this. Unfortunately, this type of content is exactly what draws this type of reaction.

Given the way our brains work, this is a natural urge. The only real solution to this, is to use the internet less, or minimize your use of the internet for entertainment. The more you use the internet for this purpose, the more you will notice this weird content, probably just to feel something.

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Growing up, we all had to suffer through countless maxims and quotes emphasizing the power of the collective. Clearly some covert socialist plot concocted by federally run education departments. Thankfully Ayn Rand and tasteful men’s cologne commercials helped maintain the belief in the magic power of individualism.

With age and experience, it’s clear that not everyone can be John Galt. The achievements of Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan & Rafael Nadal are undeniable but they would not have reached nearly the same level of success if not for the people around them.

Active networking and social climbing can only bring you so far, the people you build connections and spend time with have an outsized impact on your success or lack thereof. In today’s article, I will use the premises of local maximum, iron sharpening iron, relative & absolute improvement to explain why success breeds more success.

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Local Maximum

For most of human civilization, it was considered humanly impossible to run a 4 minute mile. Despite many attempts, the milestone would not be broken, creating as much of a psychological barrier as physical. On May 6 1954, Roger Bannister clocked in a mile at 3 minutes and 59 seconds. 6 weeks later, another runner clocked in a time of 3 minutes and 58 seconds. Within a year, 3 more runners ran sub 4 minute miles. Once Bannister showed it could be done, it removed the psychological barrier, making the mark possible1.

This story exhibits The Power of Confidence (last week’s article). Seeing greatness will inspire more people to attempt incredible things. This is why it’s important to surround yourself with people attempting to push boundaries or operating at a much higher level. Seeing them succeed, will show what’s possible, removing psychological barriers and limiting beliefs.

In mathematics, the local maximum is the point where a function's value is higher than at any nearby points, while a local minimum is a point where the value is lower than at any nearby points, there might be higher or lower points elsewhere (global extrema). In the case of Roger Bannister and Big Sean, they serve as good examples of local and global maximums.

If people are under the impression that it’s impossible to run a mile under 4 minutes, that mark serves as the global maximum. If the fastest person you know can run a mile in 4 minutes and 15 seconds, that is the local maximum. This distinction is important because everybody except the top performers in their respective domain, benchmark themselves with the local maximum. The global maximum can often feel out of reach, so we compare ourselves against people we know, or with similar circumstances.

Rapper Mike Posner in several interviews has stated that seeing his friend Big Sean get signed by Kanye then release award winning songs, made him believe that he too could reach similar heights. Within a few years his songs, “Cooler than me”, “Please Don’t Go” and “I took a Pill in Ibiza” were achieving worldwide acclaim. If Posner didn’t have a Big Sean in his life, he would not have believed he could become a worldwide renowned recording artist. This exhibits the concept of the local maximum.

Without Big Sean, the most successful person Posner knew was playing local night clubs. This would have been his local maximum, and likely the height of his success. By seeing somebody he considered a peer jump to a new level, it let him believe he could accomplish the same thing. Meanwhile, Big Sean by hanging around Kanye West, Jay-Z, Pusha T and other huge rappers, at the top of the game gave him a new local maximum, propelling him higher. Even if Big Sean wasn’t at their level, by working and collaborating with them, he could accomplish things he never would have. As your circles becomes successful, your local maximum rises, increasing your potential for greatness. On October 13th, Elon Musk raised the global maximum for space travel when Space X successfully caught a Starship rocket on the launch pad2.

As helpful and inspiring that these idols are at helping eliminate psychological barriers, this on it’s own will not breed success.

Iron Sharpens Iron

Not only will the people around you remove psychological barriers, they also help refine technical abilities. This is why the greats, in any domain had at least one:

1. An incredible coach/mentor (Mr. Miyagi for the Karate Kid or Benjamin Graham for Warren Buffet)

2. Excellent peer (Warren Buffet & Charlie Munger or Sherlock & Watson)

3. World class training partner (Arnold Schwarzenegger & Franco Columbu)

4. Major rivals/opponent (Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs or Messi & Renaldo)

Each of these relationships play a different role but the impact is the same, they help you accomplish more than what you could achieve on your own. A coach or mentor might have already reached your desired level of success and can teach you what they learnt along the way. With a peer or training partner, neither of will have the answers alone but in aggregate you can share learnings and get shorter feedback loops. These are generally positive sum gain relationships, where both parties improve and the domain as a whole gets better. Michael Jordan had one of the best coaches in Phil Jackson, an all time great side kick in Scottie Pippen and a peer in Magic Johnson also at the top of the sport. Jordan also had to defeat Isiah Thomas and the “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons before he and the Chicago Bulls could begin their run of dominance.

In the case of rivalries, while competitors might not share best practices or secrets, having a great adversary will add motivation or urgency. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic; all won at least 20 Grand Slam titles, smashed the previous records while raising the overall standard for the sport. The presence of the other champions may have resulted in fewer titles but forced them to improve their play because of the strength of competition they faced.

With more people vying to be best, the bar gets raised, increasing the local and global maximums. This is why with so many participants, world records are set at each Olympics and industries with many competitors are generally producing more innovation, then industries with state mandated monopolies. If your goal is to get better, you should ideally find great coaches, peers, partners and adversaries.

Relative vs Absolute Improvement

Too often, people judge their progress on a relative basis instead of in absolute terms. We feel like we are good at something if are better than the people around us; our win-loss record is what matters. People overly fixated on winning instead of absolute performance, are discouraged from seeking out stronger competitors that will likely beat them. They would rather stay near the top of their local maximum, instead of trend towards the global maximum.

If your goal is to get in better shape, you should choose a gym with people that are much more fit than you are. Most will select gyms based on the amenities, proximity to their work/home, or the presence of good looking men & women. Not me. When I go to a gym I hope to see massive jacked dudes, gorillas. Men so wide they need to walk sideways through door frames. When I see somebody lifting my max weight as a warm up set, I know I’ll need to step up my game that day.

This applies to all kinds of domains. If you are always the smartest person in the room, what incentive will you feel to push yourself further? This is why it’s better to be around people that are better. If you work somewhere with brilliant people working around the clock, you might view yourself as dumb and lazy. The day you go to work elsewhere, you might suddenly realize you were only dumb and lazy on a relative basis but compare well against the average person.

Watch former NBA benchwarmer Brian “White Mamba” Scalabrine go to town against non-professional basketball players (you can skip to 3 mins):

In the short run, you should only look at winning and losing as feedback. If you can’t beat your current competition, you need to change your approach. If you are winning a lot, you might be doing something right but should continue to raise the stakes. This is why relative success is only of limited usage. If you are constantly winning, it could be a sign of your prowess but it’s more likely a result of you not challenging yourself.

If your goal is to become successful at anything, the formula is not complicated. Find people at it much better than you are and surround yourself with people also motivated on becoming successful. Winning and losing, only tells you where you stand relative to your local maximum. To be successful, absolute performance matters far more than relative, until you are at the very top of your domain. If you keep pushing to the top of your local maximum, you will eventually reach the global maximum, then eventually raise it for everyone.

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The Myth of Icarus, dating back to the 8th century BC, tells the story of Icarus ignoring his father, Daedalus’ warning and flying too close to the sun. Icarus fell out of the sky into the sea and drowned.

Of all the stories and myths from Ancient Greece, we still teach young children what happened to Icarus. Understandably, we want to minimize the number of people inadvertently plunging to their death but Icarus death serves as a warning.

Most takeaway from that story the dangers of hubris and overambition. It is better to remain humble and realistic, then to believe yourself to be powerful, even more than the gods (or the respective deity you find yourself believing in).

What if I told you that you missed a key message from that story?

Confidence is important if you wish to experience any success in life and this was known even by Daedalus. To this day we have a love hate relationship with confidence.

What does Icarus, Your Company’s CEO, Napoleon, Tom Cruise, Kanye West and Joe Flacco teach us about confidence?

Today I will explain why most people missed the main point of Icarus and why you should not be afraid to be confident, even if it means flying too close to the sun.

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People like confident people

“If you are a fan of Kanye West, you’re a fan of yourself!” - Kanye West

What many people overlook is that Daedalus gave Icarus two warnings:

1. If he flew too low, his wings would get wet in the ocean

2. If he flew too high, the sun would melt the wax and the wings would disintegrate

While most focus on the risk of flying too close to the sun, there is not nearly discussion about the first warning, flying too low. Many cultures are skeptical when it comes to ambition or overconfidence. Tall Poppy Syndrome refers to when people of high status, success, or talent are resented, criticized, or cut down by society. Tall Poppy is associated with Australian and New Zealand culture but is also present in other countries where egalitarianism is emphasized. The phenomenon discourages people from excelling or standing out for fear of being targeted or ostracized.

Despite this resentment, the hypocrisy is that men and women are attracted to confident people. Confidence signals positive qualities that are not always immediately observable, such as competence or status. You can generally tell if somebody is confident just by the way they enter a room and carry themselves. Gen Z and Gen Alpha might refer to people like this as having “Aura”.

Not everyone will admit to being attracted by confident people, but everyone agrees that some people exude Aura; these people generally rise to the top. Amongst these people, you will find common traits. Many studies have found that tall people, especially men, are associated with being more competent, authoritative and confident. Although only about 15% of American men are over 6 feet tall, more than half of U.S. Presidents and Fortune 500 CEOs exceed that height. Unless you want to be a jockey, it’s normally better to be tall (sorry Short Kings).

(6 feet is ~183 Centimeters)

There is not much proof showing taller people are more competent than their shorter counter parts, the link between height and confidence seems to come from positive reinforcement. People often assume taller individuals are more competent, and as they are treated accordingly, these individuals begin to believe it, which boosts their confidence. Conversely, shorter people might feel self conscious about their height, reducing their confidence impacting the way people treat them.

Being short is not a curse unless you allow it to be. Some very successful, competent and confident people managed to do so, while barely waddling off the ground.

You Need (Some) Irrational Confidence To Be Great

Nobody would accuse Napoleon Bonaparte (5’6), Tom Cruise (5’7) or Kanye West (5’8) of lacking Aura. It’s easy to have confidence when you grow up in an environment preparing you to one day realize your birthright but none of these men were “Nepo babies”. They had to earn their status through hard work and talent. Yet this alone wouldn’t have been enough. They must have had a profound believe in themselves, to have reached the heights they did, especially so rapidly.

Napoleon's tactical genius earned him the rank of general in his mid-twenties, but without the confidence to lead the Siege of Toulon, he may have perished following the orders of a less skilled commander.

Tom Cruise, at just 18, moved to New York to pursue acting with little experience. Within three years, he starred in Risky Business, launching one of Hollywood’s most legendary careers.

Kanye West started as a successful music producer, but his true ambition was to become a rapper—a goal few in the industry believed he could achieve. His persistence paid off when The College Dropout (2004) became a critical and commercial success, establishing him as one of the greatest artists of his time.

These men highlight the positive attributes of irrational confidence.

Rational confidence is when you have evidence that you have the necessary competence to do something. People with irrational confidence, don’t need proof or evidence. Napoleon, Tom Cruise and Kanye didn’t have evidence they could lead a siege, play a leading man or release an award winning rap album.

The truth is, almost anyone who achieved greatness needed a degree of irrational confidence to even attempt it. If they had relied solely on evidence, they might never have reached legendary status at a young age. Being able to reach for things outside of your grasp, is what propels you forward, faster than everyone else. Napoleon could have patiently worked his way up the ranks, but he might have died in battle before rising to power. Perhaps, Tom Cruise should have taken on more small roles before becoming a leading man, but by then, he would have been too old for some of his iconic roles like Risky Business, Top Gun, and The Color of Money.

If you are willing to attempt something new beyond your current comfort zone, your confidence is irrational. If you achieve it, then your confidence wouldn’t have been irrational; it would be justified. Nobody exemplifies this better than Joe Flacco.

The Legend of Joe Flacco

If you don’t follow American football, the name Joe Flacco might not stand out to you, but his career illustrates the impact of confidence on success. Flacco was the quarterback (QB) for the Baltimore Ravens from 2008 to 2018. While the Ravens were perennial playoff contenders during his tenure, much of their success was attributed to coaching and defense rather than Flacco’s play.

In 2012, after another playoff exit, when asked by a reporter, Joe Flacco said he believed he was an elite QB; a statement that was widely ridiculed. By most measures, Flacco was average even his supporters struggled to justify placing him among the league’s top QBs. Despite the criticism, Flacco stood by his claim.

In the 2012 regular season, Flacco's performance was in line with his career averages: a touchdown-to-interception ratio of 2:1 and a passer rating around 85—respectable but not elite. By most measures, he was was the 15th best QB in the league1. However, once the postseason began, Flacco delivered one of the best four-game stretches in NFL history. He led the Ravens to a Super Bowl victory, defeating Peyton Manning and Tom Brady along the way, throwing 11 touchdowns with zero interceptions, and earning a 117 passer rating.

A year after being mocked for calling himself elite, Flacco was named Super Bowl MVP and signed the largest contract for a QB at the time. Although he never recaptured that level of play, for those four games, he truly was one of the best. This was only possible because he had that irrational confidence that made it possible2.

While Joe Flacco serves as a heartwarming example of how having a profound belief in yourself can propel you to heights otherwise unattainable, having a lot of confidence or a big ego, can also be damaging.

The Dangers of Hubris

“Pride always comes before a fall.” 16:18 KJV

We’ve established how confidence helps you get ahead and can propel you to greatness but if this was always how the story went, there would be nothing to humble those arrogant but unaccomplished people that seem to be everywhere (especially places where people with no careers but many Instagram followers like to hang out).

Irrational confidence is ONLY good if it makes you strive for better, otherwise you are just annoying, an underachiever or sabotaging yourself.

The point where irrational confidence becomes dangerous is:

• When you alienate people by talking a big game without being able to back it up

• When the cost of failure is more than your dignity

Confidence is like an ingredient in a recipe—the right amount can enhance your life, but too much can ruin it. The key is balancing confidence with competence. The more skilled you are, the more confidence you can display. It’s not arrogant to make claims about your abilities, so long as you can back it up. Scottie Scheffler can say he’s the best golfer in the world, without being called arrogant because he’s held the number one ranking for past 104 weeks. If your weekend golf buddy that struggles to break 90, says it, it’s not even arrogance—it’s delusion. If he goes around telling everybody that he’s the best, the moment people see him play, nobody will take him seriously.

The difference between Scottie and your friend, is that Scheffler has spent countless hours perfecting his game, which is why he’s reached the top ranking. His hours of practice make his confidence justified or rational. This is why truly competent individuals don’t need to talk a big game—their performance speaks for itself. Scottie has receipts— trophies (Drake voice). Magnus Carlsen has won enough championships he doesn’t need to tell people he’s better than them at chess. Just keep in mind before Scottie Scheffler and Magnus Carlsen became giants in their crafts, they were just young kids, with the audacity to believe they could be the best in the world.

Even if you are very accomplished overconfidence can still lead you to do things, you really should not. Kanye West is widely viewed as arrogant but many people forget that part of his rise came because out of the hubris from another, more established rapper. Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson wagered his entire career that his album Curtis would outsell Kanye’s Graduation, set to release at the same time. 50 Cent was at the top of the hip-hop game at that time and should have won easily. Kanye ended up outselling him by a wide margin and this match up helped Kanye achieve even more mainstream success while fundamentally changing hip-hop music. By most measures, 50 Cent should have won but his hubris made him take an unnecessary risk, which opened the door for a young but confident Kanye to snatch the hip-hop crown.

If you are participating in activities where more than your dignitary is at stake, overconfidence can be a massive disservice. Fighting, investing, gambling or free solo climbing are all activities where it’s better to err on the side of caution, instead of trying to bite off more than you can chew. The stakes of being wrong could mean your life of your livelihood. These are examples where starting small and working your weigh up is the preferable. Even if you think you are the best fighter at your gym, you probably shouldn’t challenge a UFC fighter when you see them in a bar. More than your pride can be damaged. In general because of Tall Poppy Syndrome, even if you have irrational confidence, it’s often better to keep it to yourself.

To avoid being disliked or ruining your life, please consult where you fall on Competence-Confidence Axis above, which will let you know how big a game you can talk and how much risk you can take without alienating people:

Confidence is important if you want to achieve great things in life but there is a point where if you can’t back up these claims, you risk losing status or cause serious damage to yourself. Be as confident as you like but avoid talking too a big of a game if you can’t reasonably back it up. When more than your pride is at stake, it’s better to work your way up, to avoid complete ruin. As much as people claim they don’t like irrationally confident people, these are the type of people who consistently get ahead. There’s a reason tall, charismatic people are occupying executive and presidential roles. If Napoleon, Cruise and West did what they were supposed to, it’s unlikely we would know who they are.

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“The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.” Emperor Palpatine

Stoicism is a school of philosophy, that rose to prominence during Ancient Greece & Rome, that teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means to overcome destructive emotions. Stoicism encourages individuals to seek virtue and remain indifferent to external circumstances such as wealth, pleasure, or pain.

Stoicism largely died down during the 4th century during the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. There has been renewed interest in Stoicism during the 21st century, with many prominent figures such as Tom Brady and Arnold Schwarzenegger not to mention countless tech and finance bros, swearing by it. This revival can be partially attributed to popular books from writers such as Tim Ferris, Ryan Holliday and Mark Madsen penning “The Daily Stoic”, “Ego is the Enemy” and “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”. These books reframe the ancient writings of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, and others making it more accessible for a modern audience.

Stoicism has a certain appeal, especially among people with a high internal locus of control. While the philosophy is packed with nuggets of wisdom, it falls short as an overarching life principle for a few key reasons. We will explore this using Star Wars and other Pop Culture references. By the end of today’s article you will have at least a high level introduction to What is Stoicism? What did the Stoics get right? What does this have to do with Star Wars? and What did the Stoics miss?

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What is Stoicism?

Marcus Aurelius’ quote above is indicative of a central belief of Stoicism that while you cannot control external events, you can control your reactions to them. By focusing on what is within your power (thoughts, actions, and attitudes) and accepting what is not, you can find inner peace. When finding yourself in a traffic jam, you can go ballistic and start screaming at other drivers, or you can accept that your anger will not get you to your destination any faster and it is not worth ruining your day over it. A Stoic could be seen sitting in their car motionless unperturbed, maybe practicing some Wim Hoff breathing exercises completely indifferent to the chaos around them.

The philosophy encourages wisdom, courage, justice, and living in the present moment without being swayed by negative emotions like anger, fear, or excessive desire. The Stoics believe that by working on cultivating this mindset, you will be able to eventually control your emotions and prevent them from clouding your judgement. This is meant to prevent instances where you lose control leading to bad decisions, possibly yelling something rude or maybe punching a wall out of frustration.

The appeal is obvious, if you believe emotions can be disruptive to optimal decision making, by eliminating harmful distractions from the equation, you would be left with a clear mind. This clear mind will allow you to live up to your max potential. According to the Stoics, this will allow you to live the way nature intended. The more time you spend cultivating this Stoic mindset, the better prepared you will be to handle the challenges that life will throw at you. Mastery of Emotions = Mastery of Life, this is why Stoicism and discipline (which is overrated) are associated.

What did the Stoics get right?

Clear thinking and optimal decision making are important, even very intelligent people can make bad choices because they fall prey to their emotions. In way too many movies, the genius villain is about to win but then hoist themselves on their own petard by gloating in a long monologue which inevitably gives enough time for their plan to be foisted by the hero or their allies. Movie villains are often driven by anger, jealousy, insecurity etc., which can help fuel them to do great things but almost always prevent them from achieving the ultimate victory.

This is the living embodiment of the popular expression “you are your own biggest enemy”. By removing harmful obstacles, Stoicism can save you from yourself. Reduce any unhelpful thoughts or feelings and focus only on what is in front of you. Beyond impairing decision making, these emotions can cause you all sorts of unnecessary pain and anguish worrying about something you can’t do anything about. By worrying about what you can control, you reduce pain and free up mental bandwidth. In any case, many people would agree that life would be much easier if we never got distracted by anger, sadness and other harmful feelings. Some of these distractions impede productivity, others can completely change the trajectory of your life. This can be found in many stories where such feelings turn a hero into an unintentional villain.

What does this have to do with Star Wars?

Star Wars is a prime example of how desires or negative emotions can lead you astray. Anakin Skywalker quickly descends from “The Chosen One”, married to Natalie Portman, to dismembered and stuck in black suit of metallic armor. His fear of losing Padme and anger towards the Jedi council was easily manipulated by Palpatine, causing him to fall to the Dark Side. Once Anakin fell to the Dark Side, he lost control and started doing horrible things he never thought he was capable of. Now, I am not a psychologist but I would suspect that unemotional people, don’t willingly murder temples filled with small children (unless they are a psychopaths, then all bets are off).

If Anakin was less of a slave to his fears and emotions, he would not have turned into Darth Vader. This is an extreme example but ordinary people have their own version of the dark side, which lead to choices they later regret. By being able to control these feelings, you can save yourself from bad decisions and mental torment. If you believe you can can control emotions, you would likely agree the Stoics were right.

What did the Stoics miss?

Despite some very good insights, Stoicism falls short of being able to help lead a full and happy life on its own. Within Stoicism, there are many perspectives, therefore not all criticism applies but here a few holes left by the Stoics. One problem with Stoicism is that the philosophy is interpreted as advocating for isolationism. Stoicism's focus on inner peace and detachment from external events can be seen as a form of escapism. Indifference to things Stoics can’t control might lead some to take apathetic attitudes towards broader societal and political issues.

Humans are social creatures and we live in communities, the risk of blocking out everything outside of your control, might advance yourself personally, but it could come at the expense of your neighbors. If everybody ignored things they couldn’t control, would anyone look out for those not able to manage their own affairs? While it is fair to argue that you shouldn’t have to be responsible for others, a likely retort is that you would not want to live in a society where people did not care for others. Such an isolated society would likely feel pretty lonely or could descend into being very transactional instead of altruistic.

We see this a bit in Her (2013), where Joaquin Phoenix lives in a society where people are increasingly absorbed in their own digital worlds, often neglecting real-life human interactions. With personal AI assistants to cater to their every need and preference, the characters seem to be less concerned with the world around them. This highly individualistic society leads to a world where genuine human connection becomes rare and people are increasingly disconnected.

Beyond the isolationist concern, critics also take exception to Stoicism overemphasizing reason as the primary guide in life. Stoics fascination with rationality neglects other important aspects of the human experience, such as emotions, creativity, and spirituality, which are also important for a fulfilling life. Subject to debate, but great art is rarely accomplished without the artist feeling deeply passionate and emotionally invested in their creations.

When Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest film directors ever, made Taxi Driver (1976), he nearly shot a studio executive because he wanted to remove a scene from the film (seriously). The lack of emotion might lead to a society of dispassionate individuals incapable of creating incredible art. Rationalism is good but sometimes irrationality is needed to be truly great at something. Kobe Bryant’s obsession with greatness gave him a work ethic unseen by any other athlete1. A rational human would not have cared as much as Scorsese or Kobe, which is also why they standout from the rest.

A final criticism worth discussing, is the notion of control. Stoicism emphasizes worrying about what you can control, but hubris might expand your view of what falls under that definition. Instead of accepting the limitations enforced by nature, one could decide that they could bend nature to their will. In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche decided to choose violence with a devastating critique of Stoicism. Nietzche believed that the Stoics claimed they were following nature, but they were really just imposing their own ideals onto nature. He considered this as a form of self-tyranny, where the Stoics force themselves to see the world through a distorted lens, ultimately believing that their rigid discipline can somehow bend nature to their will (see footnote for whole quote2).

Instead of actually discovering the truth, Stoics need to take a more narrow perspective in order to believe that they have as much agency as they would like to believe. Returning to the Star Wars example, if you have seen the prequel films (Episode I-III), you will recall that the Jedi Council, who preach suppressing emotions amongst their acolytes, are themselves completely out of touch. The absence of the Sith or a great enemy turned them into bureaucrats or pawns of the senate. Their distorted view caused them to completely miss the entire plot hatched by Palpatine. They cannot blame their incompetence on their emotions; the Jedi were not making good decisions and for all their rationality, outsourced their thinking to the Senate.

As insightful as Stoicism is, controlling your emotions and focusing internally are not enough to avoid bad decision making. While the ability to control your emotions and avoid distractions are great tools to have at your disposal, this by itself will not guarantee you success and happiness. A few weeks ago, in Sorry Jocko, Discipline is Overrated, I discussed why discipline by itself won’t make you successful, I see Stoicism the same way. The ideas behind Stoicism are very appealing but taken to its extreme, a society filled with limited emotion where we could control everything, would not be very interesting.

Like it or not, there will always be elements that we cannot control and that is fine. If everyone always behaved rationally without experiencing pain or emotions, how would we even know if we were alive? Art would be much less interesting. Stoicism can prevent much unnecessary self-inflicted pain, but then it would also lessen the pleasure we receive. Finding the right balance between being able to experience emotions without allowing them to control you, can help you achieve more of your life goals without eliminating all the pleasure from your life.

I hope you enjoyed today’s article. Please Subscribe, I am only a few away from 300 Subscribers! If you did not enjoy today’s article, please feel free to let me know in the comments below or by replying to this email. I appreciate any and all feedback. If you liked this article, you might enjoy Mimetic Theory as Explained by The Talented Mr. Ripley.

If you want to read more about Stoicism, here is an article from (no not my burner account)

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