A need to “prove oneself” to internalized authority figures leads to things like climbing conventional status ladders, or staying in an unhappy marriage, or piling up as much money as possible to preserve the appearance of having “made it”.

What motivated Esther to do things like take a receptionist job at a film company, pick up her life and move to San Francisco, and risk her savings on her startup was something far more personal and idiosyncratic: a conception of the interests she wanted to explore, the people she wanted to meet, the products she wanted to create, the life she envisioned and wanted to build for herself—and, yes, the proof that she really could count on herself to do it.

This is super inspiring on so many levels.

It seems like life becomes a little more palatable once you figure out who you are and start leaning into that.

In these latter days everybody is familiar with concepts like the carbon footprint, sustainability, and the like. Measures of the ecological cost of the things we do. One of the most irksome problems bedeviling Earth's biosphere at present is the outrageous cost of many aspects of many human lifestyles. Society is gradually and too late awakening to, for example, the reality that there is an inexcusable, untenable cost to shipping coffee beans all around the world from the relatively narrow belt in which they grow so that everybody can have a hot cup o' joe every morning. Or that the planet is being heated and poisoned by people's expectation of cheap steaks and year-round tomatoes and a new iPhone every year, and that as a consequence its water-cycle and weather systems are unraveling. Smearing the natural world flat and pouring toxic waste across it so that every American can drive a huge car from their too-large air-conditioned freestanding single-family home to every single other place they might choose to go turns out to be incompatible with the needs of basically all the other life we've ever detected in the observable universe. Whoops!

This article really lays into Elon at the end, which honestly, as I’m getting older, I feel okay with.

Also: one of my main values in life is balance, which is essentially the goal of sustainability. How can we balance our needs with the needs of our planet?

Like any parasite, our species needs to achieve some sort of symbiosis with our host. You can’t extract so much that you kill it, but you need to live at the same time, so how do you reach that balance?

My brother-in-law is unabashedly into marching band competitions.

Last night, while playing cards at my house, he had the DCI World Championships playing on his phone in the background.

Competitive marching is his "thing".

He and my sister attend various competitions throughout the summer, and their goal is to make it to the finals in Indianapolis one year to witness the presentation of the Founders Trophy in person.

As a young kid, I used to have a ton of "things."

In the early 90s, it was the Minnesota Twins. In the late 90s, it was the Minnesota Vikings. Peppered throughout that decade, it included Animorphs, Power Rangers, Harry Potter, the Simpsons, Pokémon, and music.

As a high schooler, I became all too aware of people who had a "thing". When all your friends tease people because of their love for Texas Hold 'Em or pro wrestling or The Sims, you start to get self conscious.

What is my "thing" that everyone is teasing me about behind my back?

I made a choice somewhere around that time to never allow myself to be pinned down as someone who has a "thing".

In my late 30s, I occasionally find myself in this exasperating situation where I don't know what to do with my idle time.

I've been getting into small electronics repair, teaching myself soldering and fixing my old iPod. I've been playing guitar more often.

But my problem is that I don't have much idle time, because I have two small kids and a wife who I really, really enjoy being around.

And collectively, we don't have a "thing".

Growing up, our family's "thing" was attending each other's activities.

I remember being bribed by my parents with Pokémon cards so I didn't throw an absolute fit when my sister competed with her dance team at Williams Arena.

I remember getting together with the boys in the far corner of the stadium, playing 500 while my brother played a real game of football on the turf.

Every band concert, every theatre production, every softball game... that's what we did as a family.

But I don't recall having a "thing" that wasn't something we participated in.

We weren't huddled around a TV watching sports. We didn't go see shows together.

We mostly just supported each other.

That was our "thing."

The Olympics provided a great testing ground for various "things" we might adopt.

Every night for the past couple weeks, I've forced the kids to watch nearly every single sport with me.

The Olympics is a hot bed of weird, esoteric "things" that somehow get even more esoteric as the years wane on.

That's not a read, by the way: I am 100% here for competitive surfing, break dancing, underwater acrobatics, and dressage.

I can't say that we found a "thing" outright from watching the Olympics with the kids, but I learned that my son enjoys archery and my daughter enjoys hand-to-hand combat sports and track. Both of them enjoy gymnastics and soccer.

I want to find a "thing" that we, as a family, can all rally behind.

I used to assume that "things" become "things" organically, without much intentionality behind it.

As I'm getting older, I'm realizing that "things" only become "things" when someone decides to expose themselves to a new experience.

I'm unsure whether our "thing" will take the form of a sports team, or something in nature, or a TV show, or a book series, or something completely unexpected.

It could be something that's dorky like competitive marching¹ or more mainstream like professional football, it doesn't really matter to me.

All I know is that I need to start actively placing my family into situations where we can experience a "thing" together.

As everyone was celebrating and feeling good, I was barely functional. Truthfully, I had never felt closer to death in my life. I’ve done hard workouts before. I know what it’s like to push myself. I’ve been running for over a decade. But what I experienced after crossing that finish line was something else entirely.

And for what? To have a 07:25 pace instead of a 07:30 pace? Remove my two sprints from the race and I come in maybe 30 seconds later. What difference would it have made in my life? None. I don’t win some extra prize by coming in at 25:57 instead of 26:27. 

So why did I do it? Yes, I wanted to push myself. Yes, I wanted to beat my goal. But, ultimately, I did it because I was selfish.

I love a good running analogy.

I heard Derek Sivers make a similar point with biking a few years back. Pacing is an important aspect to a well-lived life.

I also enjoyed this Josh Brown quote he included in this article:

Make yourself useful to smart, successful people. That’s how you should spend the first ten years of your career.

Surround yourself with smart, successful people and then bet on them. That’s how you should spend the next ten years.

A long time ago, a manager friend of mine wrote a book to collect his years of wisdom. He never published it, which is a shame because it was full of interesting insights. One that I think a lot about today was the question: “How are you paying your team?”

With this question, my manager friend wanted to point out that you can pay people in lots of currencies. Among other things, you can pay them in quality of life, prestige, status, impact, influence, mentorship, power, autonomy, meaning, great teammates, stability and fun. And in fact most people don’t just want to be paid in money — they want to be paid some mixture of these things.

When I was in college, the phrase “it’s all about the perks” became something I ironically said often when people described their jobs.

I’m realizing as I get older just how true that axiom is.

We've all heard the personal finance advice popularised by Robert Kiyosaki: "Pay yourself first."

I've never liked this advice. It rings hollow. It feels selfish.

When you run a business, you don't pay yourself first. No, you have an obligation to pay your taxes first. To pay your employees second. Your vendors and suppliers third. And yourself? Dead last. This is how business works in the real world. Personal greed is a poor substitute for personal responsibility.

As an individual, yes, I find the “pay yourself first” mantra to work well for me.

As a business owner, I feel gross paying myself. I feel like someone is always gonna come after me for more money.

Maybe this is why I’m not a great entrepreneur.

But maybe there's a kernel of wisdom in "pay yourself first" that we can apply - not to money, but something far more precious - to our time.

This feels like a way more fitting application of the axiom, and it’s certainly something I’ve been prioritizing these past few months.

Maybe this advice will help you, too.

Value-driven responses are not as immediately appealing as finding a hyper-charged digital escape, but these latter escapes inevitably reveal themselves to be transient and the emotions they’re obscuring eventually return. If you can resist the allure of the easy digital palliative and instead take on the heavier burden of meaningful action, a more lasting inner peace can be achieved.

I’ve been finding more and more ways to become detached from my devices the past couple weeks¹, and believe it or not, it has been an unbelievable boon for my mental health.

Here is a short list of things I’ve done:

• Turned on grayscale. I wanna find a way to wire this up to my shortcut button on my iPhone 15 Pro, but (a) too much work and (b) see my next bullet point.
• Steeling my nerves to activate my Light Phone 2 that I got for Christmas. It’s a pretty big commitment to switch off the iOS ecosystem, but I’m getting close to trying it for a month or so.
• Deleted most apps off my home screen. Everything is a swipe away anyways, so why not just have a barren screen that messes up your negative muscle memory?
• Used a content blocker to block Reddit and LinkedIn. I can’t tell you what a relief it has been to not go down the politics rabbit hole this cycle so far, and that’s all because I blocked Reddit. LinkedIn is just as bad for me, and if I am going to keep building my network over there, I should try to be strategic about it and not mindlessly scroll it all day.

Tech is so, so cool, don’t get me wrong. But I, for one, am sick of being addicted to the allure of social media.

I’d rather spend my tech time building goofy websites and writing stuff.

Listening to him name exactly what he liked about the wine turned up the hairs on the back of my neck. Suddenly, my own experience of the wine felt deeper and more satisfying. I wanted to know: How was he able to identify these flavors?

He told me the secret was to blindly smell things and try to label them. You see, the part of your brain that’s responsible for smells is naturally mute. It’s called the olfactory bulb, and it’s an ancient fist of neurons just behind your eyes. It has only indirect backroad connections to the parts of the brain that control language, like Broca’s area. So, even though you might have an easy time knowing whether or not you like a scent, it’s not easy to label that scent with a word. It’ll feel like groping through a dark closet for something you know is there, but can’t quite find.

I did not know this, and now I will be nerding out on ways to train my taste buds.

But this article isn’t just about developing your sense of taste. It’s also about defining your style.

In much the same way the author describes how he is, for the first time in his life, articulating what he likes as a writer, I am starting to do the same with several areas of my life.

Case in point: I have a huge collection of quotes that you can see on the main page of this site.

I just fed all of them through ChatGPT with this prompt:

I’ve attached a series of quotes which are meaningful to me. First off, tell me the consistent themes you recognize across all of the quotes. Then, tell me what this says about the things that inspire me.

Here is the result:

Across all the quotes, several consistent themes emerge:

1. Growth and Self-improvement: Many quotes focus on the importance of personal growth, overcoming challenges, and continuous improvement.
2. Perseverance and Resilience: There's a strong theme of enduring hardship, staying strong in the face of adversity, and the importance of perseverance.
3. Wisdom and Perspective: The quotes often reflect on acquiring wisdom, gaining perspective, and understanding life's deeper meanings and truths.
4. Happiness and Contentment: There's an emphasis on finding happiness, being content with what one has, and the pursuit of joy in life.
5. Community and Relationships: Several quotes highlight the value of community, the importance of relationships, and the strength that comes from vulnerability and connection with others.

These themes suggest that you are inspired by ideas related to personal growth, resilience in the face of adversity, the pursuit of wisdom and understanding, the importance of happiness and contentment, and the value of community and relationships. It paints a picture of someone who values both internal development and external connections, seeking both personal fulfillment and meaningful interactions with others.

:extremely Marge Simpson voice: “Well, duh.”

(For real though, pretty awesome that we have a tool that is exceptionally good at summarizing large amounts of data and picking out patterns throughout the dataset.)

Both the “drill sergeant” and the “Zen master” mindset share a common underlying worldview on which our lives do not fully belong to us, in that we have relatively little agency over the goals we set and the means by which we pursue them.

The “builder’s mindset,” by contrast, flows from a qualitatively different and deeply countercultural worldview: one on which all of our efforts can and ought to be organized around the ultimate goal of building and enjoying our own best life.

My goodness, this hits me right in my feels.

I’ve been absolutely obsessed with reading Gena Gorlin’s work lately. Several of her articles have deeply resonated with me.

I’m gonna share this passage as well, because again, as I aim to come up with some sort of tangible list of values, this will be helpful:

The “builder’s mindset” represents a fundamentally different set of underlying core assumptions about the kinds of beings we are, what we can do, and what is worth doing, compared to the other mindsets. This includes:

1. The view that we are rational agents capable of and responsible for shaping the natural world according to our needs (i.e., of building).

2. The view that exercising one’s agency to build one’s own fully-lived life is a self-sufficient end goal, needing no further justification or permission.

3. A primary motivation by love and values, rather than fear.

4. The view that human relationships are necessarily win-win, not win-lose or lose-win.

For point number one, she even references my favorite Steve Jobs quote. I mean, come on… this article was tailor made just for me.

As people keep trying to make Twitter 2 happen, we are now in a period that I'm calling Eternal Woodstock — every few weeks, users flock en masse to new platforms, rolling around in the mud, getting high on Like-dopamine, hoping that they can keep the transgressive, off-kilter meme magic going just a little longer, even though social-media culture already been fully hollowed out and commercialized.

I haven’t signed up for any of the new Twitter clones. I do have a Mastodon account that I created back before Twitter got terrible, but besides a futile one week attempt to get into it, it too has sat dormant.

Maybe this is just part of progressing through life, progressing through society and culture.

It’s something I’ve noticed now with having kids: as a kid, you are extremely tuned into social status. Everyone else listens to the ZOMBIES 3 soundtrack? Now you have to be into it. Your little brother likes it now? Now you have to be too good for it.

But for that brief moment, you feel like you’re ahead of the game. You’re a tastemaker.

The times where I’ve genuinely been the happiest in my life have been when I’ve done something just for myself. If it makes those around me impressed or weirded out or indifferent, it was of zero consequence to me.

The short list of things I can think of that fit that bill: this blog (which has existed in some shape since I was in sixth grade), making clips for television production class, learning something new, 90s/00s pro wrestling, running, and playing the guitar.

It’s only when I start to look around at others when I start to get depressed.

And maybe that’s a key insight into why I feel like I feel right now. I don’t have a job at the moment. At my age, your social status is determined by things like the vacations you go on, the home you have, and the title you hold.

But really, none of that stuff matters. What matters is the stuff that brings you joy.

It just so happens that those things, in fact, do bring me joy. The vacations I’ve gone on in the past 12 months have been the happiest I’ve been in ages. I spent all morning deep cleaning several rooms in my house, and it feels incredible.¹ Building software and solving problems for people is what makes me happy, not being a director of this or a chief whatever.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I should stop feeling guilty about not posting a whole lot on social media.

My home is this website. People can come here if they wanna hang out.

Sure, I’ll poke my head up and see what’s going on with others around me on occasion, but I don’t need to feel compelled to chase the feelings that come alongside taste-making.

Those feelings are like capturing lightning in a bottle, and ultimately lead me to my deepest forms of depression.