Do the work privately enough that it stays honest

Growth that needs applause is often not growth at all. Keep some of your development offline, unbranded, and unshared long enough to find out whether it is changing your life or just your image. 

Aim your self-improvement at relationships, not just yourself

It’s easy to turn self-help into a solo sport: more reading, more refining, more private drills on an empty field. But life is not practice. Life is the game. And the point of growth is not to become an endlessly polished individual; it’s to become better at loving, relating, contributing, and showing up when other people are involved. A lot of “working on yourself” is really just a way of delaying the messier, riskier, more meaningful work of human connection. So use self-improvement to get out of the harbor, not to build a prettier boat.

Unpaid Labor

When you add up all the ticking, tokking, and clicking, what’s the return on that investment? Is your vacation more fun when you spend it taking photos for your Instagram followers? Are you feeding Facebook, or is it feeding you? Labor is work that we get paid for. It’s work we wouldn’t do for free. And for most people on social media, it’s unpaid labor on behalf of the platforms.

If it’s paying off for you, keep going! If it’s not, it might be worth reconsidering. The simple test: when you do it more, do things get better?

Add intentional randomness to one small decision each week

Pick an area where your preferences have become automatic, like what you eat, where you walk, what music you hear, what cafe you visit, or what event you attend, and deliberately choose something outside your usual pattern. The goal is not to outsource your life to randomness, but to interrupt the algorithm of habit long enough to discover something new. Afterward, ask: Did this add energy, perspective, connection, or curiosity? Keep the randomness that expands your life, and drop the randomness that only creates noise.

Guarding your time isn't rude

People who get an unusual amount of work done are maniacal about removing things from their lives that others tolerate. Guarding your time isn't rude; it's how you get stuff done. Letting a conversation go on longer than necessary is nice to them, but unkind to yourself. Nice is what people want from you. Kindness is what you owe yourself.

Actual Intelligence

Actual Intelligence, the kind we’re born with and can develop if we choose. It’s worth more now than ever before:  The difficult work of making choices. The act of curation. The responsibility of putting your name on it. The judgment to ask the right questions and skip the other ones. The imperative to ship useful work. The pursuit of good taste. The patience to sit with the right problem rather than solving the wrong one. The generosity to create for someone specific. Seeking justice. Offering dignity. Knowing when to stop. Investing in deep empathy, not a shallow substitute. Taking initiative and doing the reading. Being patient, or impatient, depending on what’s needed. Ignoring the noise. Making something that matters. Caring. Alas, it’s rarely taught in school!

The second thing

It’s useful and satisfying to have people go along with your wishes and your taste. But hoping that they’ll be delighted to do so and that you'll thank them for pointing out their previous errors might be asking for too much. It’s one thing for people to act as if you’re right. It’s a whole other thing for them to acknowledge that they are wrong. It might not be worth what it costs to achieve.

Making mistakes is the privilege

Only while sleeping does one make no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active ones who can correct their mistakes and put them right.

Say no more intentionally

Pause before agreeing. Every “yes” costs time and energy. Decline what doesn’t align to prevent resentment and burnout.

Release unnecessary control

Stop trying to manage every outcome. Focus on what you can influence and let go of the rest. Acceptance reduces friction and frees mental energy.

Close open loops

Shorten your to-do list and finish what you start. Unfinished tasks occupy mental bandwidth and quietly drain energy. Completion restores clarity and momentum.

Reduce excess possessions

Own less, especially the items you rarely use. Everything you keep requires attention, storage, and mental space. Remove what you don’t need to eliminate invisible cognitive clutter.

Each of us chooses the right path

Given the chance, each of us chooses the right path. Based on who we are, what we believe and what we want, of course, that’s what we do. The challenge of ‘everyone’ is that there’s no such thing.

Regularly test and train your ability to move from the floor

Hip mobility is one of the clearest signs of whether your body still has useful movement options. As a basic standard, you should be able to squat with your hip crease below your knee, stand on one leg and pull the other knee above 90 degrees, and get down to the floor and back up without obvious compensation. A simple way to assess this is the sit-and-rise test: stand up, cross one foot in front of the other, sit down into a cross-legged position without using your hands, knees, or another surface for support, then rise back up the same way. The test is not magic, but it reveals hip range of motion, balance, coordination, and movement problem-solving. Use it as both an assessment and a practice.

Building a body

Most people do not need a more complicated fitness routine. They need a body that feels reliable. The real goal of training is not to become better at exercise itself, but to create a body that can handle the demands of everyday life with confidence, resilience, and adaptability. That means learning to interpret pain differently, improving movement quality before dysfunction accumulates, and focusing on the basic inputs that help the body recover and perform well over decades. Rather than chasing perfect metrics or trendy optimization systems, the focus should be on something much more practical: building a body that continues to move well, tolerate stress, and support the life you actually want to live.

Cats & Dogs

A dog gets fed and thinks his person is an omniscient, benevolent being. A cat gets fed and thinks it is. How we see ourselves in this analogy is actually up to each of us, every day.

Luck flows through people

Luck flows through people and travels by conversation. The people you talk to determine the opportunities you find. Keep talking to the same people, keep finding the same opportunities. Start talking to new people, start finding new opportunities. If you want different luck, start walking into different rooms.

Treat your body better

You can’t be at ease in your own skin when you treat your body like garbage and continually feel like trash. You must do what you can to feel good and maintain a stable mood. Move daily, drink water, and sleep at a sensible hour. Boring works.

Empathy is difficult

It requires skill and effort. It can be taught. And it’s worth prioritizing. When we wing it, allocate little time to it, or assume it’s a side effect of our work, we diminish the effort and blur our focus. “I wonder what it’s like to be you” is part of what makes us human, but we’re rarely as focused on this work as we could be. Simply announcing how hard it is is a fine place to begin.

If You Don’t Know What To Do Next, Try Inversion

If you don’t know what to do next, think about what the worst action would be and do the opposite.

Example: If you want to lose weight but don’t know where to start, think about ways to gain weight (drink soda, eat fast food, eat lots of sweets) and do the opposite (avoid soda, avoid fast food, avoid sweets).

Most beliefs are soft until challenged

Most beliefs are soft until challenged. When you tell someone they're wrong, the belief hardens. Instead of trying to convince someone they're wrong, assume they know something you don't and figure out what it is. I've found that saying, "Seems like you have a reason for saying that ..." helps them explain instead of defend. Half the time, they'll find gaps in their own reasoning before you have time to point them out. The other half, you'll learn something and change your own mind.

Audit Your Attention Leaks

Spend one day noticing where your attention gets pulled away. Track things like phone checks, notifications, open tabs, unnecessary messages, and small decisions that interrupt focus. At the end of the day, identify the two or three distractions that happen most often but add the least value.

The people who show up for you

The people who show up for you when you need them are never the ones you tried to impress. They're the people you helped when there was nothing in it for you.

Multi-tasking is mostly an illusion

Multi-tasking is mostly an illusion. What we’re actually doing is slicing our focus, jumping from one thing to another, and then back again. All that jumping decreases our productivity and, worse, erodes our peace of mind. You’re only doing one thing at a time anyway. Might as well embrace that instead of spending so much time shifting gears.

Just like me, but…

The actor, artist, mathematician, pianist, speaker, leader, tech nerd: Just like me, but talented. I’m not so sure. It might be more accurate to say “just like me, but dedicated.” The first approach lets us off the hook. The second approach opens the door to possibility.

The gap between event and reaction

Pay attention to what’s in front of you. Don’t let fear contaminate your understanding of the situation. Act with commitment. Notice the gap between event and reaction. Embrace the resources that are available to you.

We wish to be happier than other people

If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

Everyone falls off from time to time

The most expensive part of a bad habit is rarely the action itself, but rather the identity it quietly reinforces underneath. The issue isn't skipping once. It's that you practiced being someone who skips. Now, that doesn't mean you need to be perfect. Everyone falls off from time to time. But it is good to have a plan for getting back on track quickly. And try to find a small way to practice being the type of person you want to be today.

You can always adjust

You can always adjust: your career path, your business strategy, your relationships, your workout program, your plans for next Friday. It's all adjustable along the way. So, pick a direction and get moving. Once you start, you learn along the way, and there are plenty of opportunities to refine your plan.

Take things seriously without taking them personally

You can take things seriously without taking them personally. Our tendency is to turn any criticism or complaint into a personal attack. We reply to it, defend against it, build a counter-argument, lose sleep over it. You don't have to eat everything that is served to you. You can respond to criticism without digesting it. Take what's useful, do your best to improve, and leave the rest.

Life today is usually better than life once was

Life today is usually better than life once was, even if memory edits that fact out. So yes, notice what is broken and work to fix it, but also learn to notice what has already been fixed. Somewhere inside the chaos, progress is being made quietly, steadily, and almost invisibly. You only have to slow down long enough to see it.