Process > Outcome Your progress is holding you back. You’re getting the outcome you want at the expense of becoming the person you’re supposed to be. And because the outcome looks good, you have very little reason to question how you got there. You finish the project by taking over everyone else’s work. The deadline gets met, but you reinforce the belief that you have to do everything yourself. You get promoted because you produce results. But you still can’t take feedback or handle conflict....
5 days ago • 2 min read
The Trap of Competence If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably growth-oriented and a pretty capable person. You care about doing things well, people know they can count on you, and you’re usually looking for ways to get better. That also means you probably have a lot on your plate. You keep signing up for new responsibilities at work and at home, and people keep assigning them to you. Being capable, helpful, and dependable are qualities worth keeping, but when they become central...
18 days ago • 2 min read
You'd know what to do if it wasn't you! A client came to me feeling overwhelmed. He kept over-comitting, worried about disappointing people, and had started resenting commitments he voluntarily made. The more he spoke, the more his pattern revealed itself. Saying no meant risking someone’s disappointment, so he kept saying yes and absorbing the cost himself. We explored which obligations actually mattered and what it would take to tolerate the discomfort of declining the others. Later,...
25 days ago • 2 min read
The Art of Self-Sabotage Self-sabotage can be hard to recognize when it feels like you’re doing everything you can to make something work. Sometimes we’re so focused on the outcome we want that we don’t notice how we’re getting in our own way. For me, this has a lot to do with control. I’m actually pretty okay with allowing people to do things their way. Where I struggle is when I feel at the mercy of my circumstances, when my effort no longer feels like the main variable determining the...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
I was trying to come up with an idea for this newsletter and nothing was coming. The harder I tried to force an idea, the worse it got. Creativity is weird that way. You can sit at your desk for an hour and produce nothing, then have the thought you were looking for while driving home. We understand this intuitively with physical performance. You cannot force yourself to run faster, lift more weight, or recover instantly just because you really want the outcome. You train the capacities that...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
How do we measure effort? We tend to divide effort into categories. Exercise trains your body. Work challenges your mind. Relationships demand patience. We schedule them separately and often assume that what happens in one stays there. A study published in 2023 suggests those boundaries may be less distinct than we think. Researchers studied 50 cyclists across two experiments. Everyone followed a cycling program for six weeks. After each workout, one group also completed challenging computer...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
One of my favorite recent quotes comes from Arthur Brooks: “Happy people love people, use things, and worship the divine; unhappy people use people, love things, and worship themselves.” Love people. Don’t use them. Using people rarely looks as obvious as exploiting someone. More often, it looks like only calling when you need something, networking exclusively with people who can help you, keeping someone around because of what they provide, or treating attention and affection as proof of...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
What Not to Outsource to AI AI literacy is quickly becoming a basic professional skill. LinkedIn reports that U.S. jobs requiring AI-literacy skills grew 70% over the past year, and if you care about increasing your output or simply keeping pace professionally, learning how to use these tools is becoming less optional by the month. Somehow, we have arrived at this point without ever really figuring out social media literacy or even basic technology literacy, which is kind of insane, but I...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Resonance I'm teaching a course right now, and one of the first things I noticed was that the students seem to lock in most when I start riffing. Not when I'm reading off a slide or delivering something exactly the way I rehearsed it in my head, but when I'm actually thinking in real time. I'll make a connection I hadn't planned to make, follow an example a little further, or start working something out out loud, and you can feel the room get more attentive. I think people like watching other...
3 months ago • 2 min read