Mathematically, a point has no dimension, length, width, or depth. It doesn’t occupy space. I’m not a mathematician, but to me that means points don’t exist.

And yet, we see them, use them, and literally navigate to them. Your map says, “Turn left at this point,” and you do. Eventually, you arrive at the destination, but the destination never had substance in the first place.

We live in a world filled with nonsense, and yet people expect to make sense, even though every bit of it is a collection of made-up destinations we treat like real things.

Points do have a point, though, insomuch as they give structure to things that exist. Lines exist. We can draw them, measure them, trace them with our fingers. Same thing with shapes. Triangles, polygons, perfect little geometries composed of lines, and built on points.

We build worlds out of them. We design software, sketch blueprints, draft stories, and plan our lives using lines and shapes and 3D models.

And yet, the structures, logic, and systems we rely on are scaffolding built atop something that isn’t even there. And somehow, it still works…

…except when it doesn’t…

…and then again when it does…

…until it doesn’t another time…

…and it’s all chaos.

How do you even? Well, the solution might be kind of odd. Let’s talk Gödel. Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems state that any system powerful enough to describe the world will contain truths that can’t be proven within it.

Gödel proved there is no way to explain everything while you’re inside that everything, which means there can never be a unifying theory of everything.

We would have to extract ourselves from the very everything we’re trying to define to have any hope of ever actually defining it…which would definitionally make it not everything.

At some point, we believed that there were “immutable laws of physics” that fully explain the universe, but Einstein and Newton left the building long ago.

In the past 100 years, quantum physics blew up everything we thought we knew about reality, and in doing so created a much better explanation of building a business than anything else I’ve come across before or since.

I know you’re not a quantum physicist, and there’s a good chance I have already broken your brain, but this next part can be fun if you just let it wash over you.

For a long time, classical physics held that the basic building blocks of matter were stable, consistent, 'solid' units called atoms.

At the subatomic (or smaller than atom) quantum level, through, we found that these 'solid' particles are actually probabilities that are sometimes act as particles, sometimes act as waves, and maybe sometimes something else…you can’t know which is which without fundamentally altering it.

Until you do, they’re both and neither. You know what else behaves that way? Your business.

Your business only makes money or gets exposure when someone interacts with it. Your stories only really live when someone reads it, and even then it exists differently inside everyone who does. That course? That Kickstarter? That mailing list you’re obsessing over?

None of it has tangible economic value until somebody responds to it. And when they do? The act of them looking changes what you’ve built.

This whole time, we thought we’ve been living in a world of Newtonian Capitalism, but it turns out the reason nothing makes sense is because we’ve really been living in a world of Quantum Capitalism all along.

In Quantum Capitalism, there is no guaranteed structure or predictability. There are likely outcomes and less likely outcomes, but there is always a possibility of randomness and nonsense.

We were all taught that businesses (and the customers who frequent them) behave rationally, but I’ve never met a human who works rationally all the time.

People are consistent, yes, but only within their own moral frameworks. Multiply that by eight billion people in a world that actively rewards individuality, and the result is chaos.

On a small, local level, that consistency might look rational at first. Inside a single community, shared assumptions often smooth humanity’s chaotic edges.

Once systems grow large enough to include many communities, though, they stop behaving in ways that feel linear or explainable. The “rational” assumptions that feel obvious to one group smash headlong into another where those same norms feel like blasphemy.

At scale, systems that look rational at first reveal the chaos bubbling under the surface when you stress-test them even a little.

Early on, running a business is straightforward. You see a problem, fix it, and the business responds. If sales are slow, you change the offer. You can often call every customer in a single day and tell them about it.

When customers complain, you adjust the product almost immediately. When something breaks, you step in, make a decision, and things improve. There’s very little distance between noticing something is wrong and doing something about it. You’re the one making the calls…and largely the one executing them.

Over time, that distance grows, though.

You bring in partners. You hire people. Word spreads beyond your original circle. You work with agencies. You delegate execution. You lose control of the narrative.

Decisions start moving through other hands, other interpretations, other priorities. You still see problems and still try to fix them, but the response changes. The business has become too complex to manage alone, which means every fix now runs through other people before it hits the system.

You adjust pricing and sales don’t move the way you expect. You fix a bottleneck, and another one appears downstream. You make what feels like the right call, and the outcome shows up weeks later, diluted by a dozen other decisions you didn’t personally make.

The loop breaks as your business no longer responds to individual fixes.

• Too many things are happening at once.

• Too many people are touching the system.

• Too many variables sit between the decision and the result.

You can’t just see a problem, fix it, and expect a clean response anymore. The work shifts from fixing outcomes to shaping behavior.

A lot of the tension here comes from how often cause and effect appear to work.

On a small scale, they do. In one market, with one customer, with one product, you can change something and see what happens next. Fix a problem, get a response. Push here, and something moves there. Day-to-day business rewards this way of thinking because it happens close enough for you to observe.

Zoom out, though, and the picture changes.

As systems grow, individual actions stop standing on their own. They overlap and interfere with each other. What felt predictable up close starts to look noisy from a distance.

Neither view is wrong. They coexist at the same time, at different scales.

At one level, the world looks orderly and responsive. At another, it looks chaotic and hard to explain. Trouble starts when we try to apply the same mental model everywhere.

For most of human history, we’ve understood the world through the lens of mechanical cause and effect. If you know the starting conditions and understand the rules, you can calculate what happens next.

Let’s bring this back to physics.

Newtonian physics is the fundamental structure we’ve built our entire society around for eons. For centuries, we believed the universe functioned like a perfect machine. If you knew the starting point, you could calculate exactly where an object would be at any moment in the future.

Success, according to this worldview, should work the same way.

• Do the work → Get the result.

• Follow the formula → Achieve the outcome.

• Input = Output.

• Cause → Effect

This is Newtonian thinking at its core. It’s linear, predictable, and comforting. If I check all the boxes, success should arrive right on schedule.

It would be so nice and convenient if the world worked that way.

Unfortunately, as we’ve already talked about, that model only holds in the observable world. When you drill down to the subatomic, we discover particles don’t move in neat, predictable lines. They exist in a cloud of possibilities.

Every conversation, every project, every risk you take creates possibilities that collide around in chaotic and unpredictable ways following the laws not of Newtonian physics, but quantum entanglement.

Quantum thinkers don’t just grind. They play in the field of possibility. They know:

• One connection at a conference can change everything.

• One launch can open ten unexpected doors.

• One piece of content might flop, but another might go viral and rewrite your entire career.

It’s not about control. It’s about increasing your odds and staying open to the unexpected. It’s about being focused with what you want, not how you get it.

Most of us were trained in Newtonian thinking. We grew up with report cards, syllabi, and standardized tests. Work hard, get good grades. Follow the instructions, get the gold star. That’s how school works.

But success in life doesn’t follow that linear path anymore, if they ever did. The system is too complex to rely on Newtonian thinking.

The old career ladders no longer exist. There’s no linear climb to tenure, no clear pipeline from debut to bestseller. We live in an economy that punishes predictability. The safest path that everyone followed for generations is now the one most likely to collapse under you.

Quantum thinking matters because uncertainty isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. The people who thrive aren’t the ones who follow the formulas most perfectly. They’re the ones who stay adaptable, playful, and open to possibility when the formulas stop working.

Now, I’m not saying Newtonian thinking is bad. In fact, you need it for lots of things. Newton gives you discipline, consistency, and structure. You can’t write a novel, launch a product, or build a business by accident. You need routines. You need habits. You need gravity to keep you grounded.

But Newton alone won’t get you the breakthrough. It will keep you stable, but it won’t help you leap. By doing the same inputs, all you’ll get back are the same outputs.

That’s where quantum comes in. Quantum is the spark of wild collision you never saw coming.

Let’s break it down into a practical comparison:

• Newtonian mindset:

  • “If I run X ads, I’ll get Y customers.”

  • “If I follow this playbook exactly, I’ll win.”

  • “I won’t move unless I can predict the outcome.”

• Quantum mindset:

  • “Each campaign increases the probability of traction.”

  • “I’ll run multiple experiments, knowing most won’t hit, but the few that do will pay off disproportionately.”

  • “I’ll create conditions where luck can find me.”

Newtonian thinking seduces you with certainty. It whispers that if you just check the right boxes, if you just follow the rules a little tighter, the outcome is guaranteed. That illusion is comforting, but it’s also dangerous.

That’s why you can’t afford to stay Newtonian. The world has changed. The formulas are broken. If you want to thrive, you’ve got to stop chasing guarantees and start chasing possibilities.

It’s not that you aren’t strategic. You are just strategic in a way that looks wholly different to anything you’ve done up until this point.

By intentionally entering situations and interacting with people that expand your probability field, you are inviting more of these agents to work in your favor. This is why conferences are so powerful.

It’s not just that there are lots of people there. You could go to a Dairy Queen for that.

It’s because they’re filled with people who are intentionally on the same journey as you. They’ve all been attracted by the location, the speakers, the organizers, and the vibe to go on this journey with you. Everyone there is highly activated and very likely to be able to help you break through your blocks and move you forward.

I have no idea who can help you, but it’s almost guaranteed that if you’re in the right rooms, somebody can help you move forward. You just have to hold loosely who that might be, and how it comes to you.

By walking through the door and being open to possibilities, you allow the universe to guide you into the right directions to put you in a position to win.

This is that good good good chaos. Those spontaneous meetings that end up being the best part of any conference? That’s good chaos, born from dropping that schedule and allowing probability to work in your favor.

It means being very strategic about what you want, but holding loosely how you get it or where it comes from.

Unfortunately, what people often do instead at conferences is try to block out every minute of every day, giving order to chaos and thus shutting themselves off to the chaotic good nature of an event like that.

This is exactly how Newtonian thinking can seriously impede your success. You miss out on serendipity to seek perfection, but the universe just doesn’t work like that.

This effect doesn’t just happen in person, either. The reason a mailing list is powerful is because it aggregates and focuses on the good chaos. The more people see your message, the more people get inspired by it.

I am constantly surprised which people I’ve met over the years have stayed on my mailing list, and which have fallen off of it. Many of my best friends have never subscribed, and yet I constantly meet people who have been on my list for years and I’ve never talked to before.

Some of the most powerful people in publishing read my work, while others couldn’t care less, or even have an active distaste for me. I have no control over that, but I do have control over what I put out into the world, the situations I enter, and how to walk through the world while I’m there to attract the right people to me.

After that, I have to trust that good chaos will work in my favor, and connect me with the people who resonate with what I have to say.

That doesn’t mean I’m passive. I actively ask people to join my mailing list when appropriate, host events to build my list consistently, and follow up with people after meeting them to stay in contact.

I am very intentional and strategic, just not in a Newtonian way. I have no idea what will come out of meeting good people. I just know that if you are good to good people, good things will happen.

It’s this kind of good chaos that people don’t understand at the beginning of their career, and it’s the secret to why any online community is successful. It’s the reason behind why you should focus on growth even if you don’t want to monetize. It’s why influence can compound over time. It’s the reason nobody is paying attention to you right now.

Success isn’t a machine you can crank, it’s a probability field. Newtonian thinking will get you started. It teaches discipline, consistency, and structure. If you want true breakthroughs, you have to go quantum.

That means showing up, stacking experiments, nurturing connections, and letting go of the illusion of control. It means trusting that somewhere in the messy field of possibility, your big leap is waiting to collapse into reality.

Here’s what taking advantage of quantum capitalism looks like in real, actionable terms:

1. Stop looking for proof and start collecting patterns. There will never be a guaranteed path, but you can notice what tends to work for you, your people, your energy, your voice. Build from that.

2. Play with the math. If A = xylophone, then start asking better questions. What’s your xylophone? What weird, irrational, unexpected connection keeps showing up in your work? That’s your angle. Lean into it.

3. Use your voice as the constant. You don’t control algorithms or markets, but you do control your voice, your resonance and your vibe. Make that consistent, and your audience will follow even when the rules change.

4. Make meaning, even if it’s made up. Your whole job is creating meaning where there was none. Why would your business be any different?

5. Sell stories like they matter. In quantum capitalism, they’re the only thing that do.

Build your line, one imaginary point at a time. Because even if the system is nonsense, even if A = xylophone, even if we’re all faking it…

If you don’t see the point in all this, that’s okay…because the point doesn’t exist anyway. It’s what you make of it that matters. If you want a good starting place, then maybe our Hapitalist Quick Start Workbook can help.

Hapitalist Quick Start Workbook

1.62MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Subscribe now

Every week, somebody asks me some version of the same question:

“Russell, how do I know what to focus on when there’s so much coming at me all the time?”

It’s hard, especially with a billion things flying at you every second of the day. You’ve got a dozen strategies floating in your head. Your inbox is full of newsletters saying you need to be on TikT…

Read more

Entrepreneurs often talk around how their market is oversaturated.

And, yes it’s at least partially true. If we stopped making things today, humanity would still have enough non-food stuffs to last a while.

By all logical accounts, this should mean you don’t stand a chance but, contrary to popular opinion, competition isn’t what’s killing your career. What kills your career is believing you’re trapped in the same game as anyone else, and that you’re already losing.

Success is a blue ocean, and we need to start thinking like it. Blue Ocean Strategy is all about refusing to drown, or get eaten, in the bloody red waters of competition.

In a red ocean, everybody’s fighting over the same customers, slashing prices, and clawing for attention, and it’s miserable. In a blue ocean, you carve out your own lane, create something so different that you’re not competing at all.

You win by shifting the rules of the game, by offering unique value that feels obvious once people see it, but invisible to everyone else still stuck brawling in the red ocean.

Amazon specifically is the definition of a red ocean, where everyone is fighting over the same customers, slashing prices, and bleeding each other dry.

You win by changing the axis to one you can win and refusing to let anyone else define you by theirs.

An axis could be:

• The format you create in.

• The platform you choose to build on.

• The community you build.

• The style only you can deliver.

And there are an infinite number of these axes. Every time you pivot to a new axis, you create a blue ocean where nobody else is competing because you’ve redefined the game.

When people struggle, they are almost always relying on another company’s positioning to define their own. You might thing they define the market, but they don’t.

They only define their market. And they define it so well that anyone who buys into their definition will obviously buy from them, not you. By framing yourself in their terms, you’re essentially selling their product for them.

Why would you do that? Why would you hand them your customers?

That kind of positioning only works when the arbitrage (the gap between supply and demand) in the market is wide enough that you can skim off opportunity. Once a market is saturated, that arbitrage disappears.

Then, the only reliable way to find arbitrage is to make your own, which means you have to stop playing on axes where you can’t win.

Stop trying to compete on the same stage as mega corporations and redefine your edge.

• Define your own stage.

• Build your own axis.

• Create a game where you are the obvious, inevitable choice because you’re the only one playing it.

There is always a game you can win. The market leader often defines the opportunity, like Amazon, and gives people the language to talk about it, but they also create legions of people dissatisfied with that experience and want something else…and that’s the crack in the dam.

For every customer that adores a business, there are others who can’t stand them. For every person who happily one-clicks on Amazon, there are plenty who are sick of the algorithm, the ads, and the endless sea of sameness.

That’s where you come in.

The real opportunity is in identifying the people who aren’t being served fully in the existing market, and then offering them something that resonates with their frequency instead.

That’s soul resonance selling, where you’re not fighting over scraps, but building work that vibrates with on the right weird frequency so deeply that customers who’ve been hungry for what you offer can easily find you.

The general tenor of my marketing method is that I am gonna find as many potential customers as possible and say stuff so bonkers (but also true) that nobody else would even think about saying it because nobody would even fathom connecting those dots in that way.

Yeah, most people will say “no thanks”, but those who resonate with it have no choice but to hang out with me because I am the only person talking about this stuff in this way. At the end of the day, if you like the Russell thing, I have that, and if you don’t, well I still have the same Russell thing either way.

My focus then becomes having you make up your mind as to whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

That is a much different value proposition than whether you buy my stuff or not. I don’t care about that even a little bit, because I know that if enough people make up their mind then the rest will work itself out.

Right now, too many businesses are selling their work like a charity drive, making customers feel like the only reason they should give you their money is out of pity, obligation, or some vague moral duty.

Guilt might work once, but it doesn’t build a career.

Customers don’t owe you a living. If the entire backbone of your sales funnel is “support me because I’m small and scrappy,” then you’ve already lost.

Customers don’t wake up in the morning thinking, “Man, I really hope I can support some random small business today.” They wake up thinking about what will serve them, fulfill them, and make their lives better.

This is another version of the same trap. You’re playing someone else’s game.

Amazon has already defined the buying experience as easy, cheap, and fast. If your entire pitch is “buy direct to support me,” you’ve basically admitted you can’t compete on their axis and, instead of creating your own, you’ve tried to make customers feel bad for choosing the option that actually serves them better.

That’s backwards.

Sales only works (unless you’re already a market leader) when you offer something others can’t and define yourself by the rules of your game. Kickstarter’s real revelation, for those that do it right, is that it helps you define your game. It shows what you care about and why your business matter.

People don’t back a campaign because they feel sorry for the creator. They back it because they want to be part of something exciting they can’t get anywhere else. That’s an axis Amazon can’t touch.

If you need help finding your axis, then here’s something akin to ikigai, the Japanese concept of purpose at the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for.

Draw three overlapping circles:

1. Joys: What lights you up instead of draining you? (This is the work you’ll actually sustain.) Examples: “I love bantering with customers in person,” “I get obsessed with making the most complex apple pie,” “I live for designing simple products.”

2. Jolts: What makes your customers lean in. (This is the resonance piece.) Examples: “People tell me my cookies are super gooey,” “Fans beg for more behind-the-scenes peeks at my art,” “People say they feel ‘seen’ in my products.”

3. Gaps: You have to love the standards in your niche, but some of them are overdone, cliché, or just plain disconnected from reality. And customers feel it, too. They roll their eyes, sigh, and mutter, “Not this again.”

The overlap of Joys + Jolts + Gaps is your unique axis. It’s the place where you’re most alive, your customers are most lit up, and the market has left a hole big enough for you to stomp through. (By the way, you can have more than one. You can have unlimited.)

Once you realize there are infinite axes, you stop seeing other businesses as competition at all. You’re not playing their game. You’re building your own.

That’s why competition isn’t real. There are only axes you can’t win and ones where you still can. The moment you step onto an axis where you can win, you’ve already left the red ocean behind.

And the funny thing? Once you do that, you realize the supposed giants aren’t your enemies or your competition. They’re the ones creating the opportunity. Every customer they fail to satisfy is a customer who might find a home with you.

So stop measuring yourself against their scoreboard. Stop playing their game. Define your axis and play your own game because the second you do, all that bloody competition vanishes.

Subscribe now

Most successful people I know are masters of chaos magic. I don’t mean they are chaos; I mean they understand how to live in chaos, harness chaos, and use chaos in a restful way.

When I started on my path to success, I thought I’d eventually become like President Business from The LEGO Movie: structured, orderly, in control of everything. I pictured a…

Read more

Lining up the right problems with the right solutions is something that everyone deals with all the time. Since this is where I live the vast majority of my existence, I thought I would share with you the three questions I ask all the time, and have been the most helpful reframes inside my community.

What am I missing here?

This is my favorite single q…

Read more

I’ve spent most of my career trying to brute-force the universe. I thought that if I did the work, and not just any work, but the right work, then I’d get what I wanted.

And what I wanted wasn’t outrageous. At least not to me.

• I wanted to write the books of my heart.

• I wanted to reach a loyal audience.

• I wanted to build a thriving business.

• I wanted to be respected, paid, and lauded.

I thought that was the depth of it, but my needs really went deeper…because I also wanted it my way.

• I wanted it on my weird horror comedy comics, even though there wasn’t a big audience for them.

• With massive comic book store distribution, even though only a couple hundred stores in the world back in 2011 stocked indie comics.

• And I wanted it immediately.

• Without having to do that thing over there that felt gross or stupid or beneath me.

If it wasn’t the exact result I pictured when I closed my eyes, then it wasn’t a success. When things didn’t unfold like that, I didn’t feel disappointed. I felt betrayed.

After all, I had followed the rules, played the game, sacrificed, built redundant systems, and shown up for years.

So where was my reward? Where was the neatly wrapped success story all the books and courses and mastermind groups promised me?

Well, it was right there staring me in the face. I just refused to see it.

All the way back in 2015, I got labeled “the Kickstarter guy”. People started to find me, even a decade ago, and ask for help with their campaigns. I bristled, and ran away. I didn’t want that kind of success. I wanted to be known for my work, not a platform. I wanted to be an author, not a speaker. I wanted—

Ugh, even writing it now makes me want to smack myself. Like, didn’t I start this saying I wanted to be successful? And weren’t people paying me to do work I was good at and enjoyed success? Why was I so obtuse when I was younger?!

It’s so frustrating, and it wasn’t until 2021, when my ex-business partner told me they were going to use my work as a guide to co-write a Kickstarter book with me, that I finally had no choice but to become “The Kickstarter guy”…

…and guess what? It’s great to be that guy.

I constantly get to talk, strategize, and hang out with some of the most successful people in the world, get paid for my knowledge, and receive emails from giddy people that turned their careers around thanks to what I taught them.

I never got that with my fiction, even though that’s where I made most of my money for over a decade.

That is success, isn’t it? So, what was my problem all those years? So, so many things, but it boiled down to the fact that I was way too worried about influencing how things happened, instead of focusing on what I got out of the deal.

What I wanted was to wake up, do things I liked with people I liked, and have frictionless ease bringing new projects into the world. It would have been nice if it was in comics, or novels, but what I really wanted was the space and freedom to do whatever caught my fancy.

And I, largely, got that, despite the fact that it didn’t happen how I thought it “should”.

When I stopped focusing on the “how” and focused instead on the “what”, a whole host of new possibilities opened up to me.

The should held me back. It stuffed me into a very narrow lane filled with other people when there were open lanes to success everywhere else.

What nobody tells you (or maybe they do but you don’t actually believe it until it happens to you) is that you usually don’t get to dictate the path. You don’t get to choose how you become successful. You only get to choose what you’re willing to fight for.

You get to name:

• The kind of life you want.

• The kind of work you want to do.

• The kind of people you want to reach.

• The kind of impact you want to have.

But you don’t get to script the moment it happens. You don’t get to choreograph who notices, or how they find you, or which version of your work becomes the one that sticks.

Even if you somehow get all the things you ever wanted, and the book of your heart becomes a household name, there will be all sorts of chaos associated with it that you don’t expect. You’ll be saddled with things you don’t want, have to do things you don’t like, and have expectations foisted on you that you couldn’t imagine.

I realized way too late that the actions associated with my fiction, like actually talking about my books, were things I hated. I liked people reading my work, and I loved writing it, but all the marketing actions I liked revolved around my non-fiction.

Shocking that was what took off, right?

If you hold the path too tightly, if you cling to the idea that it must happen in this one specific way or else it doesn’t count, you will miss everything good that’s trying to find you.

You’ll say no to the thing that wants to work because it doesn’t look like the thing you thought would work. You’ll sabotage yourself in the name of purity. You’ll burn your career down in defense of a version of the dream that maybe never really served you in the first place.

And I get it because I’ve done it. I’ve thrown tons of great opportunities in the trash because they didn’t arrive wearing the right costume.

Eventually, I had to learn to stop making deals with the universe. I had to stop saying “I’ll do this if you give me what I asked for exactly the way I want it.”

It’s about getting out of your own way.

Because the truth is, the universe is a terrible negotiator. It doesn’t barter. It doesn’t owe you clarity. It doesn’t care about your timeline, but it does reward momentum, iteration, and stubborn clarity of want.

Not how. Just what.

So, I stopped fighting for the how. In 2022, after my first Kickstarter book blew up, I turned into the skid. We built a very popular Kickstarter course and I started getting booked to speak about Kickstarter everywhere. I made connections with everyone. I suddenly went from decently networked to amazingly networked, and people were talking about me.

I stopped needing it to look a certain way, sound a certain way, or arrive through a specific door.

And the moment I did? Weird things started working. I could take that momentum and turn it into things I cared about more than just Kickstarter. I was able to thread it into direct sales, and capitalism, and taking control of your career, and even my weird fiction books.

Not just in a general sense, either. For years, I’ve been trying to build a successful membership. I developed an app, hosted a Circle community, tried a Patreon, and more. Each time, I was trying to force a community to grow somewhere it didn’t have any interest in growing.

It wasn’t until I found Substack that I started having success. I don’t think I had 100 paid members across all my previous communities combined, but here I got that many with my first launch. I’ve grown it to over 1,000 members, and almost $35k in annual revenue.

It wasn’t exactly how I wanted it to happen, but once I let go of that and focused on what I wanted to happen, success started to unfold.

Even back in the day, the anthology that broke my career open, Monsters and Other Scary Shit, only happened because instead of writing my esoteric novels I asked people what they wanted (which was monster comics) and gave it to them. I didn’t really have any special love for monster comics, but I loved my audience, and I loved the creators, and my life has never been the same because of it.

Success isn’t a straight line. It’s a labyrinth. You don’t need to know how you’re going to get there. You just need to be ruthlessly clear about what you want, and willing to meet it wherever it shows up.

It’s likely going to be ugly. It’s probably going to look nothing like you planned. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t count or that it isn’t working. It just means you’re finally starting to understand the rules of this game.

Subscribe now

A man’s son gets kicked off a horse and breaks his leg. People tell him that’s terrible. He says, “Maybe. We’ll see.”

Later, a war breaks out. All the young men are drafted except his son. People tell him that’s great. He says, “Maybe. We’ll see.”

It continues like that, each iteration bringing what looks like ruin or salvation, but the farmer refuses to do the thing most of us do automatically, which is decide what something means the moment it happens.

Entrepreneurs get into trouble with this all the time.

Something goes wrong and we immediately treat it like a verdict. A launch doesn’t land. Revenue dips. A platform changes something with no warning. Before we’ve even had time to look at the numbers, our brain has already decided the story: this is bad, this is dangerous, this is the beginning of the end.

Sometimes the opposite happens. Something works. A post pops. A campaign overperforms. Suddenly it’s good. Finally. Proof that we’re doing the right thing.

Both reactions do the same damage when they push us to react before the situation has finished unfolding.

Entrepreneurship doesn’t move in clean arcs. What happens today often doesn’t make sense until much later, and sometimes it never makes sense at all.

When you decide too early, you don’t just get it wrong emotionally. You get it wrong operationally.

You make changes you didn’t need to make. You abandon things that would have worked if you’d given them more time. You double down on things that looked good in the moment and turned out to be fragile. You speed up when you should slow down and panic when nothing is actually broken.

The problem isn’t that bad things happen. It’s treating every event like it’s the conclusion instead of just another data point in a system that’s still moving.

Neutral thinking starts with letting things exist without immediately grading them. Something happened. That’s it. No gold stars. No red flags. Just information.

Things fail for reasons that have nothing to do with effort or intelligence. You can do the right thing and still get wrecked. You can do the wrong thing and get rewarded for a while.

Positivity doesn’t handle that well.

When you’re trained to expect things to get better, every setback feels like a violation. When improvement doesn’t arrive on schedule, it destabilizes your foundation. You start scanning for what you did wrong. You look for hidden flaws. You assume you missed something obvious when it’s just one data point.

Neutral thinking doesn’t promise things will improve. It doesn’t warn that they’ll get worse. It refuses to pretend you know the ending before enough time has passed to see it.

Something happens in your business. You notice it. You don’t decorate it. You don’t interrogate it. You don’t turn it into a story about who you are or where this is going.

You say: that happened.

• Sales dropped this month.

• An email underperformed.

• A platform throttled reach.

• A reader unsubscribed.

That happened. It’s not amazing and terrible. It simply exists as a data point. This is where neutral thinking is a powerful it. It forces you to stop there, at least for a moment.

Most people skip that pause and jump straight to interpretation. They decide it’s a sign, a warning, or proof they’re falling behind. By the time they sit down to analyze, they’re already trying to confirm a story their nervous system wrote for them.

Neutral thinking keeps the order intact.

• First: acknowledge the event.

• Second: stabilize.

• Third: decide what, if anything, needs to change.

Not everything that happens requires a response. Not everything that feels urgent actually needs attention. Some things resolve on their own. Some things repeat and become patterns. Some things look dramatic and turn out to be noise.

You can’t tell which is which if you react to all of them the same way.

Neutral thinking lets you separate “this is uncomfortable” from “this is dangerous.”

That distinction matters.

Entrepreneurship creates constant low-grade discomfort. If you respond to discomfort as if it’s a threat, you’ll exhaust yourself chasing phantom emergencies. If you ignore real threats because you’re numb, you’ll miss the moment to intervene.

Neutral thinking sits in the middle.

It doesn’t deny what’s happening, but it doesn’t rush to fix it either. It gives you enough space to decide whether this is something to observe, something to mitigate, or something to change.

If you decide something is a failure too soon, you abandon it before it has time to work. If you decide something is a breakthrough too soon, you build your future on a shaky foundation.

“Maybe” isn’t indecision. It’s refusing to pretend the story has finished when it hasn’t.

If you’re on the edge, every event feels existential. You don’t get to say “maybe” when the answer determines whether you eat next month. You react because you have to.

That’s why runway matters.

Runway is the amount of time and tolerance you have before a single problem forces a bad decision. Runway is what turns emergencies into problems. Problems can be worked. Emergencies force bad decisions.

Most people think of runway as money, but money is only one part of it.

• There’s financial runway.

• There’s operational runway.

• There’s emotional and physical runway.

The shortest one dictates how reactive you are.

• If you’re exhausted, everything feels louder.

• If you’re overleveraged, every dip feels fatal.

• If your systems are brittle, small shocks do real damage.

Money matters, obviously, but it’s rarely the first thing that runs out. You can have cash in the bank and still be operating on zero runway if your systems are fragile or your health is shot. You can be broke and still have runway if your costs are low, your expectations are sane, and your business can survive small hits without collapsing.

This is the same lens I use to think about growth, platforms, launches, and sustainability: reduce fragility first, then decide what anything means.

Most entrepreneurs are running businesses that are too brittle. When that one thing wobbles, the whole system shakes. Of course it feels catastrophic…

…because it is.

You need enough runway to wait, enough restraint to not decide too early, and enough redundancy that no single event gets to define you.

Most things don’t mean what you think they mean yet. Success can destabilize you just as easily as failure can save you. You don’t know which is which until enough time has passed and you’ve collected enough data.

In a chaotic system, “Maybe. We’ll see.” isn’t always avoidance. It’s often how you stay upright long enough to make the next decision without panicking.

Subscribe now

What you can do as a single human to overcome what seems like overwhelming odds stacked against them when building a business? It really comes down to three words.

Build leveraged assets.

Yes, I know the words “building leveraged assets” is peak business speak, and your eyes are glazing over, but bear with me because those three words can change your li…

Read more

I’ve worked with hundreds, heck, probably thousands, of authors over the years and (despite their protestations) all of them like marketing.

No, really. They do. They just don’t call it marketing. When I ask authors what they enjoy doing to grow their audience, I hear answers like:

• “I love hosting my podcast.”

• “Writing a weekly newsletter is actually f…

Read more

Most entrepreneurs believe success is a leading indicator that shows they’ve arrived.

Whether that’s the huge launch, getting a big award, being offered the speaking invitation, or the profile in a magazine

These are the markers we chase, the evidence we’ve crossed some invisible threshold into “made it” territory.

We watch for them like sailors scanning the horizon for land.

It’s really the inverse, though. What I’ve learned working with highly successful entrepreneurs for over a decade is that success is actually a trailing indicator.

It’s not the beginning of something. It’s the evidence of something that already happened internally, often months or years before the external world caught up. Honestly, it’s true, but it’s also something that only really makes sense after you see it play out as many times as we have, with a diverse case of success stories.

Think about the author who lands a six-figure deal. By the time that contract appears, something fundamental has already shifted.

• They’ve already developed the discipline to show up at the page.

• They’ve already pushed through dozens of failed drafts.

• They’ve already cultivated the ability to hold a vision while everyone around them sees nothing.

The deal doesn’t create the entrepreneur, it reveals them.

What about the novelist whose third book finally breaks out? Their success isn’t what changed them.

This pattern repeats itself across every success story I’ve witnessed. In every case, the external recognition was a lagging confirmation of an internal transformation that had already taken place.

Before the external markers arrive, something internal solidifies. A shift happens in how you see yourself and your work.

You stop waiting for permission and develop internal authority, the quiet certainty that what you’re doing matters, regardless of who’s paying attention.

This shift isn’t dramatic. There’s no lightning bolt moment. Most can’t even pinpoint when it happened. They just notice one day that they’re approaching their work differently.

This is the actual leading indicator. This is what precedes everything else.

I’ve seen this shift take different forms. You stop asking “Is this good enough?” and start asking “Is this true?” You stop waiting for the industry to validate your existence and start validating your own choices.

When you understand that success is a trailing indicator, everything changes.

You recognize that the transformation has to happen first, and that it’s entirely within your control, and start focusing on the things that actually create sustainable success: showing up consistently, developing your craft, building your capacity to handle uncertainty, learning to trust your own judgment.

These aren’t sexy, and won’t make good Instagram posts, but they’re what successful people do in the years before anyone’s watching. Your current lack of recognition isn’t evidence of your lack of talent, but simply evidence that the trailing indicators haven’t caught up yet.

When somebody declines working with you, they’re not rejecting your potential. They’re making a business decision based on current market conditions, their existing list, their editorial capacity, and a dozen other factors that have nothing to do with whether you’re becoming the person you need to become.

The rejection is data, not verdict.

It changes how you relate to other’s success, too. When a colleague lands the deal you wanted, you can recognize that their external success is trailing behind internal work you didn’t witness. Their trajectory says nothing about yours. Your leading indicators are just operating on their own timeline.

There’s something deeply freeing about recognizing that success trails behind internal change rather than leading to it.

It means you don’t have to wait. You don’t need anyone’s permission to become who you want to be. You don’t need success to start acting like a professional. You don’t need the audience to start respecting your own time and work.

You can make this internal shift today.

You can decide that your work matters. You can commit to the craft. You can build the habits that will sustain you through the long middle of a career.

And then, months or years from now, the trailing indicators will arrive. The opportunities will appear. The recognition will come, not because they created something new in you, but because they finally caught up with what you’d already become.

It means you can stop refreshing your email for agent responses and use that time to study. It means you can stop comparing your product to others and instead focus on what you’re learning from this project. It means you can stop trying to reverse-engineer the market and start building a body of work only you can create.

The entrepreneur who understands this distinction operates differently in the world.

They are less fragile because their identity isn’t hostage to external validation. They’re more consistent because they’re not waiting for motivation from outside sources. They’re more original because they’re listening to the work rather than to the marketplace’s echo chamber.

They’re also, paradoxically, more likely to achieve the traditional markers of success because the habits and mindsets that create internal authority are precisely the qualities that eventually produce great products.

The success will come. It’s a trailing indicator, remember? It will eventually catch up to the person you’re becoming.

But the becoming? That’s the only part you can control.

And it’s also the only part that matters.

The external validation will arrive or it won’t. But you’ll be an entrepreneur either way. You’ll have done the work that matters. You’ll have built something real.

And when the trailing indicators finally catch up you won’t need them to tell you who you are.

You’ll already know.

Subscribe now

Give us a tip

I know you want to chase that shiny new thing. You think it’s going to save you, and that if you could just catch it then all your problems will be solved, but let me ask you this:

How do you really think your life will feel once you finally nab that new shiny and it becomes your new normal?

I have been there a few dozen times in my life, and I’ve caught that new shiny more times than I can count. Let me tell you that more often than not my life did not change at all.

In fact, it almost always got worse until I figured out how to jettison it again. Yes, I was able to suck out some experience from it, and often level up in my business knowledge, but day-to-day it was usually insufferable.

We’re obsessed with what we’re missing. The skills we haven’t mastered, the income streams we haven’t built, and the transformations we haven’t achieved, but do you actually want what your life becomes if you pursue that thing?

Do you want to become an SEO expert? Do you want to master Facebook Ads? Do you want to be a non-fiction speaker or high-ticket coach?

Sure, it all sounds glorious from the outside, but do you want that life when it stops being exciting and simply becomes...Tuesday?

I thought I did every time I caught that pretty bauble. Take coaching, for example. I’m good at it, like really good, and I could make a fortune doing nothing but coaching calls all day…

…but I would genuinely rather have a job because that sounds like my nightmare.

A few coaching calls a month? That’s fine. It’s energizing even, but more than 2-3 a week makes me feel claustrophobic. The money is excellent, but how much money do I need, really?

It’s not the clients, either. It’s because every time I accept a coaching call, I am agreeing to show up at a specific time, which takes away from my time freedom. If I start committing to more than one thing a day, I get jittery.

I much prefer asynchronous communication, like a podcast or blog, where I can create at my timeline, instead of working on somebody else’s. It’s the same amount of effort, often for even less money, but it allows me to keep my schedule flexible.

Because I know that truth about myself, I generally only take meetings between 9:30am-3pm PT on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. On top of that, I book at most two calls a day.

If I was just motivated by money, I would probably get a high-paying sales job in tech with benefits and stock options. I choose this life because it gives me time wealth, and that means not being shackled to things.

Yes, it probably means I’ll never make more than $200k a year before expenses, but I get to go to the movies every day if I want and make a few cool projects with people every year. That’s what I would be working for anyway.

Other people do coaching and love it. It fills them up. They finish a day of back-to-back calls feeling alive and purposeful.

That’s not me, though. For me, it’s exhausting work that requires too much effort, regardless of the financial reward.

I’m a very good coach, but I don’t want a life that centers around coaching…

…and that’s exactly what would happen, too. Your life warps around the things you do, for the better and for the worse. I’m as often turned off by what having success doing something looks like as I am by wasting time trying it.

I know I can have success doing a lot of things, but I don’t want what my life becomes when that inevitable success happens.

For anything to work long term, it requires consistent care and attention. It doesn’t just sit politely in the background. It expands to fill the space you give it.

That’s what happened when I used to run Facebook Ads to help people grow their mailing list.

I hate running ads. Despise it, really, even though I’m legitimately good at them and they pay well. Some months, I would make $1,000 per hour doing that work.

It paid my bills and let me funnel money into book production for years, but I loathed every single minute of it. The money was so good that I felt obligated to keep doing it, but the work made me miserable.

That’s another thing they don’t tell you. If you hate something, but it pays well, it’s really really hard to stop doing it, especially when people start coming out of the woodwork to pay you to do it for them.

It’s the most expensive free money you’ll ever make.

You want to know what’s stopping me from running ads for my own books right now? It’s not lack of knowledge or skill. It’s that I literally cannot bring myself to open the ads dashboard.

Because I know what happens when I do. It becomes my life, and I don’t want Facebook ads to be part of my life.

The checking. The tweaking. The optimizing. The dashboard becomes the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing I check at night. The metrics worm their way into my consciousness and set up permanent residence.

I refuse to let that happen again…and it will happen again.

You literally cannot do all the things, because you exist in linear time like the rest of us mortals…

…but more importantly, you shouldn’t do most things because most things will suck once they become normal.

The majority of business opportunities, no matter how lucrative or impressive they sound, will drain you once the novelty wears off and they become the thing you do every single day.

You shouldn’t do things that will make you unhappy, especially because even doing things you want to do will often make you unhappy.

This is especially true if you’re running your own business. The entire point of entrepreneurship is to build a life that doesn’t suck.

So why would you construct a business around activities that make you miserable?

• The money doesn’t matter if you hate your days.

• The status doesn’t matter if you dread your work.

• The expertise doesn’t matter if applying it makes you want to crawl back into bed.

Before you chase the next opportunity, ask yourself the question again:

Do I want this to be my normal?

Not “Would this look good?” or “Would this be impressive?” or even “Would this be profitable?” The question is:

“Do I want to do this thing so often that it becomes mundane? Do I want my life to warp around this activity?”

If the answer is no, you have my permission to walk away. You have my permission to be good at something and still choose not to do it. You have my permission to turn down money in favor of a life you actually enjoy living.

Because at the end of the day, what matters is not what you’re missing, but whether what you’re building is actually worth inhabiting once the shine wears off and it simply becomes your life.

Subscribe now

Give us a tip

When I tell entrepreneurs that “good chaos brings stability,” I’m usually met with skeptical looks. It sounds like the kind of thing someone says to justify their scattered attention span.

I’m not saying it would work for every business owner, but if you are already a walking ball of chaos, then it can be strategically beneficial.

My career looks chaotic. From the outside, it probably seems unfocused, even reckless, but over enough time (and we’re talking years, not months here), patterns emerge.

Let me give you some numbers. This is my career, distilled:

• 1,000 finished comic pages I’ve written (plus countless more never produced)

• 350 produced podcast episodes

• 212 comic pages I’ve drawn and released

• 200 podcast appearances across 150+ shows

• 120 talks at 60+ unique conferences

• 55 group giveaways run for authors

• 50 publishing contracts signed

• 44 novels

• 40 anthology appearances

• 39 fashion models shot during my photography days

• 30 websites built

• 27 transmedia projects I’ve helped adapt

• 21 nonfiction books written or co-written

• 13 years with some form of representation

• 10 conferences hosted (including 3 in person)

• 8 signature courses designed and released (not counting dozens of masterclasses)

• 7 companies started (2 production companies, 2 telecom companies, 1 publishing company, 2 education companies, and a photography studio)

• 5 anthologies edited

• 4 projects optioned to Hollywood

• 3 web series directed (one started as a movie)

• 2 apps built

• 1 year as executive producer of an internet television channel

Look at that list. Does it seem focused? Does it look like someone who “stayed in their lane”?

Absolutely not, and that’s precisely the point. Long ago, when I wasn’t the best at anything, I learned about the concept of skill stacking. It posits that there are two main ways to build a durable creative career:

1. Become the best at one thing.

2. Become really good at a few things that, together, make you stand out.

Both paths work, but most people won’t reach the top 1% in any single skill. Being the best takes extreme focus, the right timing, and usually a fair amount of luck. I’ve never been particularly focused or especially lucky, so I knew I probably couldn’t ever be the first thing.

You can be top 20–25% at a handful of skills—and that combination can still make you more valuable than someone who’s top 1% at just one.

That’s skill stacking.

You don’t have to out-launch every founder, out-market every marketer, or out-teach every teacher. If you can do all three well enough to connect the dots? That’s a competitive edge most people simply don’t have.

I wasn’t very strategic about it, but skill stacking made intuitive sense to me. It also gave me the ability to shift between lots of different mediums, which I desperately need. Even though I love writing, I don’t want to write all the time. Whenever I am too tied to one form of expression, I start to feel itchy.

There’s very rarely something I hear in conversation where I can’t contribute meaningfully. Publicity strategy? I’ve run campaigns and booked hundreds of podcast appearances. Web presence? I’ve built thirty sites from scratch. Video content? I’ve directed web series. Course creation? I’ve launched eight signature programs.

I’m a Swiss Army knife of skills, connections, and hard-won knowledge. This creates resilience through diversity, and what I mean by “good chaos”. The more things you chaos around and learn about, the more valuable you become.

On top of that, Every item on your skill list represents more than just work completed. Each one is a node in an expanding network.

Those 200 podcast appearances? That’s 150+ hosts who know my name, my work, my reliability. Many became friends. Some became collaborators. A few became clients.

Those 120 conference talks? That’s thousands of people I’ve connected with, helped, and stayed in touch with over the years. When I launch something new, I’m not shouting into the void. I’m reaching out to people who already know me.

Those 50 publishing contracts across multiple publishers? I understand how different houses operate, what different editors value, and how various imprints position books. I can talk shop with traditionally published authors, hybrid authors, and indie authors because I’ve lived in all those worlds.

Productive chaos builds a web of relationships, skills, and experiences so interconnected that it becomes nearly impossible to fail completely. You’d have to burn down the entire forest, not just one tree.

So what makes chaos “productive” rather than just scattered?

Read more

It’s a quiet kind of miracle when something actually makes it out into the world. You push this fragile, too-big dream through the clogged gears of life, and for some reason, sometimes, it works.

Those moments matter. They keep you going.

But they don’t tell the whole story…because the longer you stay in this business, whether you’re writing emails building a social community, launching, or trying to keep any creative machine running, the more likely you are to wake up disappointed by something. Something will have slipped through the cracks. Someone will have let you down. A thing you thought was solid will start to shake.

Every time you meet someone new, sign on for a project, release a product, or even move something one step forward, there’s a chance it won’t go how you hoped. And over time, the chances stack up. So do the little heartbreaks.

• At the beginning, you feel the weight of not enough. Not enough work, not enough sales, not enough attention. That’s its own kind of pain. But when things finally pick up, the pain shifts. Now it’s about watching some of those yeses fall apart.

• By year one, you’ve got a few stories that didn’t sell. Maybe a newsletter you forgot to update. A collaborator who flaked.

• By year three, you’ve got a graveyard of unfinished projects, a pile of polite “no thank you” emails, and probably a few more scars than you expected.

• By year five or ten, the numbers are bigger. More projects that never saw daylight. More people who never responded. More money spent on ideas that didn’t convert. More emotional investments that never paid off.

I currently have hundreds of paid members and tens of thousands of subscribers, and every single day people unsubscribe and end their subscription. Every day people don’t buy my work.

If you’ve been doing this for five or ten years, you’ve probably been part of dozens, maybe hundreds, of creative starts. Each one held a bit of your hope. Each one had a shot at becoming something real. And most of them didn’t.

That’s the job.

It’s not just that projects fall apart. People do, too. Everyone you meet and love and trust will eventually disappoint you in some small, or not so small, way. Sometimes it’s personal. Sometimes it’s just bad timing. But every relationship you build carries the possibility of letdown. That doesn’t mean you should stop building them. It just means you need a strong stomach.

Most of the time, people don’t mean to let you down. It’s not malice. It’s just life. Deadlines slip. Emails get buried. Priorities shift.

Sometimes the person who vanished on you was dealing with a sick kid, or burnout, or a full-time job that ate them alive. Other times, they were simply overwhelmed.

That doesn’t make the disappointment hurt less, but it does make it easier to carry. And that’s what you must do, carry it.

When you realize that most of this isn’t personal, it becomes something you can work around instead of something that breaks your faith in people.

If you go looking for disappointment, you’ll find it. Every time. You won’t have to look hard.

What matters is fact that anything survives the gauntlet of creation is enough reason to keep going. The fact that work get finished, campaigns fund, communities form, and magic slips through despite everything, that’s the miracle.

And once you understand that, you stop chasing perfection, stop measuring yourself by what didn’t happen, and start seeing the quiet success in every step that did move forward.

If you’ve been disappointed lately, maybe you’re not stuck. Maybe you’re leveling up. Maybe you’re finally learning what every long-term creator figures out eventually:

You can’t dwell on the things that failed. You have to hold tight to the ones that somehow didn’t.

Because those few that make it? They’re the reason you started this in the first place.

The only people who don’t have these stories are the ones who quit. The rest of us carry them. Some days they feel like baggage. Some days they feel like armor.

That part depends on you.

The key is not to build a wall out of disappointment, but a platform. Something you can stand on. Something solid enough to lift you to the next step. Because there is a next step. There always is.

This is the part they don’t talk about in most creative advice. The slow, gritty part where you learn how to live with the emotional fallout of your own ambition.

Because ambition hurts.

It hurts when you care deeply. When you pour your soul into a launch and get ten sales. When you send out your best pitch and it goes ignored. When a collaborator says they love your work and then vanishes.

The pain is real. But it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.

It just means you’re doing it.

Keeping going means holding disappointment in one hand and possibility in the other. It means knowing how to grieve a thing that failed without letting it take your voice. It means being stubborn enough to try again, and again, even when you feel like a fool for believing.

If you’re still showing up, you’re winning. Even if it doesn’t feel like it.

It’s easy to romanticize the creative life. What’s harder is recognizing that the real work is often emotional, not just tactical.

The real work is:

• Holding yourself together after a launch tanks

• Continuing to create while nobody’s watching

• Making the next thing while still bleeding from the last one

Nobody claps for this part. There are no awards for resilience.

But if you learn how to navigate disappointment and how to keep showing up even when it sucks, then you become unstoppable.

Because in the end, it’s not about perfect outcomes. It’s about staying in the game long enough to give magic a chance to find you again.

And it will.

Success, real success, is often boring. It’s slow. It’s built in the gaps between disappointments. It’s earned through repetition, stubbornness, and the occasional flash of magic.

And when it shows up and something actually works, it will feel like lightning. Not because you didn’t earn it, but because you kept going long enough to receive it.

So if you’re tired right now, if you’re bruised and bitter and wondering if it’s worth it, this is the part where you decide to keep going.

Because sometimes, things do work.

And that’s enough.

Hold tight to that.

Subscribe now

Somewhere along the line, we got tricked into believing that efficiency equals success.

We started to believe that the person with the fullest calendar, highest productivity metrics, and shortest email response time is the one who’s winning.

We began treating our lives like machines with every second accounted for, every task tracked, and every outcome optimized.

This was supposed to make life easier and better…

…and yet, we’re exhausted, unhappy, and worst of all, we’re still broke despite running faster and faster on the hamster wheel for years. “Gurus” have been telling us all along that time=money, but what if the real flex isn’t doing more, faster, better?

What if the most radical thing you can do today is take a nap at 2 pm, go see a movie in the middle of the week, or sit quietly with a cup of tea doing absolutely nothing productive?

In a world addicted to hyper-efficiency, choosing deliberate inefficiency is a power move.

This is something aristocrats have known for centuries. There’s nothing more gauche than working…unless it’s for them.

They will dangle the carrot in front of you as long as it keeps you working for their bottom line, but no matter how much you work for them, they always want more. The cult of efficiency is built on the foundational lie that doing more makes you worth more.

We’ve all internalized this belief to some degree. We feel guilty for resting. We apologize for delayed replies. We hustle through burnout and call it “grind culture.”

The system demands more output, but not necessarily better input. It feeds on your constant motion. When you slow down, it starves the machine, taking back your time, and reclaiming your sovereignty.

That’s the real power, but more importantly, it’s just more fun to inefficient. We simply like our lives more when there is space to play around. No matter what productivity makes us think, we humans usually think it’s pretty great to get lost in a useless moment.

Honestly, I can’t believe I have to write this, since it should be so obvious that “wasted” time is where the good stuff lives, but I’ll bet every memory you treasure and photo you’ll never delete was probably created inefficiently.

While I’ll grant the idea that in some jobs working faster actually makes you more productive, that’s not true for knowledge workers that thrive on great ideas. When one great idea is worth a million, or even a billion dollars, churning out more and more average ideas is ludicrous.

You don’t get breakthrough ideas while grinding through back-to-back meetings. You get them in the shower, on a walk, or while doodling in the margins of a notebook.

When we create margin in our lives, we invite innovation. We create space for insight.

And even when you’re not in pursuit of some big epiphany, giving yourself permission to waste time is restorative. Watching a movie in the middle of a Tuesday isn’t indulgent. It’s why life is worth living.

You might think that inefficiency a privilege, but our ancestors literally died to make it a human right. They died for a weekend, a 40 hour workweek, and to not be worked like a robot.

And here we are letting it happen again!

We’ve been conditioned to maximize every moment, while those with power and money build in leisure as a default.

Efficiency is a trap. It’s a race designed to keep you constantly performing, constantly optimizing, and constantly comparing your worth to someone else’s output. It’s a game you can never win, because the finish line keeps moving.

Yes, a big part of your job is to show up consistently, but showing up doesn’t mean burning out. It means letting boredom creep in sometimes. Letting your subconscious do its thing. Letting the gaps between tasks breathe a little.

Truly original work is born from the liminal spaces, unoptimized hours, and inefficient parts of your life that don’t make it into the Instagram highlight reel.

And ironically? Those inefficient moments are often the ones your audience connects to the most.

I have meetings every week where super successful people confess they still feel the need to grind it out, not because their bank account is low, but because they have been trained since birth that any time they have must be filled with work to fuel the machine.

If even they are brainwashed, what chance to we have of breaking free? None, unless we do it with intention.

Money means nothing if we don’t use it wisely. Yes, we need some baseline to live, and some amount saved to feel safe, but after that the only thing worth buying back in this business is your time.

That said, what’s the point of even doing that if we can’t feel good about using it to putz around? Pursuing money in service to pursuing more money is an miserable game that never leads to happiness.

If this idea feels radical to you, good.

It shouldn’t, though, and that’s the problem with the whole system.

This should be the obvious base state of every single human on this planet. I shouldn’t have to convince you that you get the best ideas in your downtime because I should never have to justify taking downtime.

Don’t worry, though, you’re not alone. Everyone feels this way, even me a lot of the time. So, to help break this cycle, here’s how to start flexing your inefficiency muscle:

1. Schedule blank space - Yes, actually put it on your calendar. A morning off. An evening without screens. A whole Saturday with no agenda. Let the blank space be sacred.

2. Say no without apology - Not every opportunity is worth your time. Not every hour needs to be monetized. Your calendar doesn’t need to be full to justify your existence.

3. Do one “useless” thing a day - Watch a movie. Go to the beach. Bake bread. Sketch. Dance badly. Something purely for the joy of it, with zero ROI.

4. Plan elasticity - Leave space in your workflow. Don’t book every minute. Build in valleys between the peaks. Let your schedule breathe.

5. Protect your peak creative time - Whether you’re a morning tinkerer or a midnight dreamer, protect that sacred time. Don’t dilute it with meetings or admin. Let it be inefficient and exploratory.

It makes me so sad that I have to make a list to tell you how to relax and not feel burdened about it, and yet here we are.

You don’t have to prove your worth through busyness. You don’t have to chase every shiny productivity hack. You don’t have to collapse under the weight of a to-do list written by expectations.

You are allowed to rest, wander, and be gloriously inefficient.

Because inefficiency isn’t failure, it’s freedom. It’s the space to create, connect, and breathe.

And that? That’s the real flex.

Subscribe now

My word(s) for 2025 are feral chaos. When I decided on them, I had no idea what they meant. What I knew was that I wanted to stop focusing so much on controlling my life, and more on learning how to thrive in the chaos of the universe.

I have, historically, tried to hold success tightly, and it was driving me crazy. I don’t use the term crazy lightl…

Read more

Recently, I read On Freedom by Timothy Snyder. It’s the companion piece to his On Tyranny book everyone talks about, rooted in politics and philosophy, and not the kind of thing you’d expect to offer a profound insight about running a creative business.

Still, I can’t stop thinking about the the difference he draws between freedom from and freedom to.

After all, freedom is the holy grail, right? At the end of the day, doesn’t everyone tell us what we want is freedom?

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a speech, at least not a political one, that didn’t talk about some type of freedom, but most of the time what they tell us to chase is freedom from something, whether it’s freedom from jobs, from rules, or from gatekeepers.

Freedom from is a powerful drug. When we are shackled, that is the kind of freedom we yearn to have in our lives, and we’re all pretty much shackled to something these days; work, kids, marriage, debt, addiction, or something else. Pick your poison, but there’s not a lot of “freedom” in the “land of the free”.

In that kind of world, freedom from is the easy sell. It’s the clean break that starts you on the hero’s journey.

You pass into your new reality, and that sounds great because your current reality suuuuuucks…

…but that’s only the end of the first act. Even if you find and slay the big, bad monster at the end of the story, that’s still probably only the first book.

What do you do for the rest of the trilogy? If you’re the hero of your own story, you learn to stop running from something you fear, and start running toward something you want instead.

Freedom to is the long game. It’s proactive, constructive, and grounded in values, not just reactivity.

Freedom to means:

• Freedom to build systems that support your work.

• Freedom to define success on your own terms.

• Freedom to focus, to say yes with intention, not just no out of fear.

• Freedom to create weird, vulnerable, unmarketable stuff, and maybe marketable stuff too.

• Freedom to take up space without apology.

Each one of those requires a commitment you have to choose proactively after accepting that no one’s coming to save you. We can’t even save ourselves. So, you have to save yourself.

There’s no boss. No teacher. No editor with a magic wand…

…and no villain, either. Not anymore.

You slayed that dragon. Now, you’re just standing in an empty field with a sword, trying to remember what you were fighting for in the end. That’s when you have to make the shift from what you don’t want to what you do.

If you’re going to build a life around your business, you can’t just be anti. You need to be for something. After all, if you stand for nothing, then what will you fall for, right? They say that in Hamilton, so you know it’s true.

It’s so much easier to be oppressed. It’s so much simpler when you have a villain, when you can blame the market or the publisher or the platform or the audience. It’s even easier to blame yourself than it is to take the reins.

But you can’t have real freedom without responsibility.

That means:

• Owning your schedule.

• Owning your failures.

• Owning your choices.

It’s about owning your success, however you define it. Nobody’s going to do this work for you.

Which, yes, is terrifying.

But also? That’s the power. When you claim your freedom to, you’re no longer at the mercy of anyone’s permission. Ultimately, this isn’t just about doing more, or building better habits, or optimizing your time. It’s about becoming someone new.

That’s the deepest promise of freedom to. Not just to ship or build, but to step into a version of yourself that you used to only imagine.

The creative life, at its best, isn’t just a rebellion against the old. It’s a declaration of the new. It’s crafting a vision for the future and them walking toward it, even if nobody else can see it.

And that’s terrifying because becoming something new is a risk. It means letting go of the safety of your old identity and replacing it with one you build from scratch. One that might fail, and is certainly not guarantee to work.

But that’s also the most profound use of freedom.

So, if you’re standing in that empty field right now, sword in hand, wondering what you fought for, this is it.

Not safety, or avoidance, or perfection, but the subtle art of becoming. You get to decide. That’s the gift and the burden of this path.

The longer you stay in the purgatory of freedom from, the more your dream decays into regret.

So, I’m not going to end this by telling you to quit your job or start a SaaS company. I’m just going to ask this one question.

What are you building with your freedom, and is it enough?

Think about it. Who you? Who are you? Who are you? And whatchu gonna do? Let us know in the comments, and yes, that’s another Hamilton quote.

Can you can find the 1998 metal lyrics hidden above, though? Bonus points for the first person who takes a stab at it. Slightly Darker Days for anyone else.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

“Kindness is soft, and soft is weak.”

That’s the story we’ve been told since we were kids. If you want to survive in this world, you have to be tough. You have to cut before you get cut. You have to hustle harder, outwork everyone, and grind your bones into dust just to get noticed.

It’s exhausting.

I tried living that way, and it hollowed me out. It m…

Read more

My wife thinks I’m nuts when I say this, but I truly believe you can always make more money.

And I don’t mean “work more hours” or “grind harder” or “manifest abundance” with a vision board and a mug of turmeric tea. I mean you can literally pull money out of thin air.

I do this all the time. Launch a course? Boom, money. Drop a Kickstarter? Boom, more money. Offer a consulting call, publish a book, run a Substack promo…every single one is a container for money.

A container is anything people can buy from you.

Books, courses, consulting, subscriptions, merch, paid webinars, live events, even a signed postcard with a doodle counts if someone values it.

The moment someone gives you money, you’ve pulled that cash from the ether using your container.

• The better the container fits your audience, the more easily it fills.

• The better container you make, the more money fills that bucket.

• The more aligned that container is to your audience, the more money fills that bucket.

• The more often you launch, the more money (usually) fills those buckets.

• The bigger your audience, the more money fills those buckets.

If you’re not making the money you want, then you need better containers. Let’s say you release something, and it flops.

That’s not the end of the world.

It just means:

• Your container was suboptimal, and/or

• Your audience wasn’t big enough to fill it, and/or

• You offered some combination of the wrong thing to the wrong people at the wrong time.

No big deal. Change the offer. Build a better container. Find a different audience. Rinse and repeat. The reason I succeed as an entrepreneur isn’t because I’m smarter or better than anyone else. It’s because I don’t stop building containers.

I just keep throwing buckets into the ocean until one comes up full. If a launch doesn’t go well, I build a different container to make up the difference.

The product is the container.

The platform is the spigot.

The launch plan is the method by which you turn off and on the spigot.

Over my career, I’ve build a collection of spigots and methods that I know reliable make me money when I need (or want) it.

• Launch a book on Kickstarter? That’s a reliable container and spigot.

• Do a convention? That’s a reliable spigot to sell my containers.

• Offer a discount? That’s a reliable spigot.

• Launch a course? That’s a reliable container.

Really we’re all building containers, spigots, and methods that align with our audience in order to pull money from thin air.

Some containers take longer to build than others. My Hapitalist membership is something that is currently a great container without a very good spigot or method.

My hope is that my talking about it often and then running periodic launch events, I can grow it like I grew my membership, 25-50 people at a time. If I can maintain the 70% retention rate, then after 1-2 years I’ll be making the money I want from it.

Meanwhile, while a launch like Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold was a good spigot, container, and method for a one time event, building beyond that is opaque to me, as neither book fits into a series.

That’s all this whole thing is about, really. Everything you ship is something you want somebody to buy, and thus it becomes a container for money. Where you launch it (KU, wide, direct to customer) is the spigot by which people find and give you money. How and where you talk about that launch is the method by which you turn on and off the spigot.

Most creators fail because either they don’t have these reliably tested and available or they are building terrible containers that will never support them.

If you make a book that costs $10, and you want to make $10,000, you need 1,000 people to buy. Since most decent offers convert around 1-3% of your audience, that means you likely need a 30,000-100,000 people in your audience to make that offer work.

But if you create something that costs $1,000, then suddenly you only need 10 buyers. And you probably already have 10 super-fans who would buy, if only you gave them the opportunity.

The only limitation on the amount of containers you can build is the number of people in your audience willing to buy that thing, and how often they are willing to buy from you.

If you have a 10,000 person email list, you can reliably do 4-5 launches a year. If you find other people’s audience, you can do more. You can sustain between those launches (and/or support them) with ads.

Want to make more offers? Build a bigger audience. It will take about 1-2 years for the bigger audience to stabilize, then you can make more offers to them.

Want to make more money? Build a bunch of containers.

• Want a bigger audience? Build a free container to capture new people.

• Want more people to buy? Build a $10 container to give people a taste at a low entry point.

• Want to make your career sustainable? Build a $100 container. Build a $1,000 container. Build a $10,000 container. Build a recurring revenue container.

And build an ecosystem of people who want to fill them.

Is this crass? Yes, but it’s also not magic. I’m not saying you shouldn’t take care in what you build. Far from it. You should love all your containers, and you should treasure anyone who buys them.

But under the surface, it helps to also understand the mechanisms powering your career. If you are failing, you aren’t a failure. You just need better containers, better spigots, and/or better methods.

If you want to survive and thrive as a creator, you better believe this with your whole chest:

You can always make more money.

Always.

Always.

ALWAYS.

And if you don’t believe that, you’ll always be afraid to take risks. You’ll freeze when it’s time to launch. You’ll panic when something fails. You’ll convince yourself you’re not cut out for this.

The people who make it? They trust they can always create another offer. Another opportunity. Another container.

Because entrepreneurship is the act of gambling time and money now for future gain, and you can only play the game well if you believe you can earn it back.

So, go build a container.

Doesn’t have to be big. Doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to exist.

Not someday. Not when you’re “ready.”

Now.

Subscribe now

When I first started my career, everything felt exponential.

Every show I tabled at, I met more people. Everything I put out, I doubled my audience. Every launch seemed bigger than the last. It was a rush.

And like most new entrepreneurs, I assumed the curve would just keep going up forever.

Spoiler: it doesn’t.

Eventually, I started seeing the same peop…

Read more

My wife and I are both chronically ill (and she helped me build the resources for this chapter, which was a huge help). I talk about my thoughts and challenges in this chapter, so I’m not going to go into it here, but it’s…suboptimal, to say the least.

For years we lived in the margins, scraping through deadlines, burning out, then doing it all over again because there was no space to stop. We were surviving, not thriving. And for a long time, that felt like the only option.

But then things started to shift. Not because we got better overnight, or found a miracle cure. We just started experimenting. Testing small, practical changes. Building in micro-moments of safety. Over time, those experiments gave us back pockets of energy. Focus. Joy. Now, we can even travel for two weeks to Europe and not feel like death afterward.

It turned out that the same strategies we were using to reclaim our lives were the same ones that helped our bodies “recover”, which I put in quotes because we’re still very much chronically ill.

Why is this relevant to entrepreneurs, despite the fact that statistically many of you reading this either are or will be chronically ill in your life? Because your body is actively working against you.

This isn’t metaphorical, it’s biological. Your body cannot tell the difference between physical danger and mental danger. When you try to push past your comfort zone, your body interprets that just like it would interpret being chased by a lion.

When you’re going into mentally dangerous territory, like a place outside your comfort zone, your body wants you to stop. It wants you to stay in the safe space because if you stay in the safe space you know, you won’t die. We haven’t evolved past this primitive response, even though the “dangers” we face are more about ego than survival.

What makes it harder is that everyone around you also wants to stay in their safe space. They have all evolutionarily been brought up to be in that place too. So you have to break through a lot to do this work.

Every time you sit down to make something new, you’re going against millions of years of evolutionary programming telling you to stick with what’s safe. Your body wants you to stay in your comfort zone because historically, that’s what kept our species alive.

The best founders have broken through hundreds of these internal blocks to be able to speak authentically and vulnerably. Each time they pushed past their comfort zone, they expanded what their body considered “safe territory.”

This is why positive self-talk is so crucial. Your body is already telling you negative stories about danger and safety. You need to actively counter those stories. You need to remind yourself that stretching beyond your comfort zone is how you grow, that the discomfort you’re feeling is the sensation of progress.

Understanding this biological resistance has transformed how I think about productivity. It’s not just about time management or productivity techniques or business strategies. It’s about learning to work with, or despite, your body’s primitive survival instincts.

The resistance you feel is natural, but it’s also outdated. Your body thinks it’s protecting you, but it’s actually holding you back from the very things that will help you grow and thrive in the modern world. Understanding this is the first step to building a sustainable career.

Just doing the mental work isn’t enough. We could be the most intellectually advanced human in the world, and our body’s evolutionary wiring will still betray us.

If you’re going to create consistently, sustainably, and with any shot at joy, you need to make peace with your body. Below are a collection of practical strategies for doing just that.

Before we get started, I am NOT a doctor, this is NOT medical advice, and I am not ignoring your method because I hate you. This is simply what has, or is, working for us, and my thoughts on it.

We won’t be held liable for what happens if you take any of this advice, and nothing here is a substitute for consulting with a doctor.

Your nervous system is not broken. It’s just doing its job

Most animals don’t stay panicked. They encounter a threat, activate their stress response, flee, and then, almost immediately, they reset. You’ve seen it happen. A deer bolts after hearing a snap, then goes right back to grazing once the coast is clear. They shake it off. Literally. That’s not just poetic, it’s biological.

Humans? We don’t do that. We see the threat. We run. But when it’s over? We keep panicking. We keep rehearsing it in our heads, replaying the worst-case scenario, stewing in adrenaline long after the danger’s passed. We carry the email from our boss, the look from a stranger, or the memory of a past failure like it’s still happening.

That lingering state of panic is where chronic stress lives. It’s where chronic illness breeds. And it’s why so many of us, especially creatives, feel like we’re trying to produce magic from inside a burning building.

So, if you’re stuck in that place, you’re not weak. You’re human. But if you want to create again, and not just create, but create from a place that doesn’t torch you in the process, you need to learn how to reset like the deer.

Most of us are living in a constant state of threat. Not because we’re being chased by tigers, but because our bodies can’t tell the difference between a real emergency and an overflowing inbox, a fight with a partner, or scrolling past someone else’s six-figure launch.

That “danger” gets registered in your autonomic nervous system, which is the part of your body that runs things behind the scenes. It has two main gears: sympathetic (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) and parasympathetic (rest and repair). In a healthy system, you should be able to switch between the two easily. Gear up when needed, then downshift when the threat is over.

If you’ve ever made your best work while under extreme pressure, pulled off miracles on deadline, or somehow come alive when everything’s falling apart, that might not be creative brilliance, it might be a dysregulated nervous system. You might be running on survival-mode chemistry. Adrenaline. Cortisol. Emergency drive.

That kind of wiring can push out short bursts of brilliance, sure, but it leaves wreckage. It’s not sustainable, and when the crash comes, it hits hard.

For most people, especially those of us with chronic illness, trauma history, or burnout, our nervous system is jammed. We’re stuck in sympathetic overdrive, even when we’re trying to rest. Or we flip into a parasympathetic freeze: exhausted, numb, and shut down.

So when you sit down to do something, and your chest tightens or your brain fog rolls in, it’s not because you’re broken. It’s because your nervous system doesn’t believe that it’s safe. After all, you’re asking it to do something unsafe, namely to be visible, take risks, and/or create without a net, among others. Of course it slams the brakes.

That’s why all the strategies below work so well. Not because they’re productivity hacks, but because they rebuild that trust. They show your body, slowly and patiently, that it’s okay to create again.

If you want to read more on this, we recommend The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe by Stephen W Porges

Brain retraining therapy

Pain is just the start. And for a lot of us, it’s not even the main issue. Fatigue, dizziness, brain fog, numbness, tightness, shortness of breath, and more, can all be part of the same loop.

Your brain learns where pain is to save us from hurting ourselves worse. What wires together fires together, they say, and if things wire together long enough, they create deep grooves, even when the roots of the pain are gone.

This goes beyond just pain. It includes fatigue, dizziness, brain fog, numbness, tingling, tightness, shortness of breath, basically all the weird symptoms that make you feel like you’re losing your mind. It doesn’t mean those sensations are fake. It means your danger system is stuck on high alert. Even if there’s no physical threat, your body keeps reacting like there is.

Pain reprocessing, sometimes called Brain Retraining, is about interrupting that loop. It’s about gently teaching your brain that your body is safe. Not with affirmations or positive thinking, but by noticing the sensations without freaking out. By staying with them long enough for your system to go, “Oh. Okay. We’re not about to die.”

This starts with somatic tracking, which is all about checking in with your body when it is stressed, reassuring it, and noting your reaction.

You start small. Just a few minutes at a time. Sit with the ache or the wave of exhaustion and talk to it like a scared kid: “You’re okay. This is safe. You’re allowed to rest.” Over time, the symptoms that used to knock me flat began to soften. Not disappear overnight. But lose their grip.

It’s not a miracle. It’s a retraining process. It’s unlearning fear. And it’s real. The symptoms aren’t gone, but they’re not steering the ship anymore.

Where to start: Curable app and The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain by Alan Gordon.

Pacing

Pacing, in the chronic illness world, is about respecting your body’s current capacity. For people with energy-limiting conditions like ME/CFS, pacing is a way to avoid triggering post-exertional malaise (PEM), where even a small push can lead to a total system crash.

This isn’t about working smarter or taking breaks when you remember. It’s about organizing your day around your body’s energy envelope, what it can realistically handle right now, not what you wish it could. It means letting the body set the boundaries, and actually honoring them.

When we first started pacing, we thought we were being careful. But we were still doing too much. We’d take advantage of “good days,” push harder than we should, and pay for it for days after. Real pacing meant watching our heart rates, resting before symptoms started, and making peace with the fact that joy, work, and even fun had to be measured.

Now we build our days with recovery in mind. We don’t wait to feel tired. We ask, right from the start: where’s the margin? What will we drop if things go sideways? What does “just enough” look like today?

It’s not about giving up. It’s about staying steady. Not sprinting, not collapsing—just showing up again tomorrow with enough in the tank to try.

Where to start: Visible app. I also recommend a Garmin Vivoactive 5 with the Pacing watchface.

Visualization

When your nervous system is stuck in fight-or-flight, it’s partly because your brain keeps running the same mental footage on loop, and it’s never the good stuff. It’s the worst-case scenario, the project that failed, the body that hurt, etc. Visualization interrupts that loop by giving your brain new footage to run instead of a different story.

Before a hard conversation, close your eyes and spend two minutes imagine it going well. I love the mantra “What’s the best that could happen?” It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but your brain doesn’t distinguish well between a vividly imagined experience and a real one. T

The same principle applies to your body. If you’re living in chronic pain or persistent fatigue, your brain has learned to expect suffering. Visualization can slowly, patiently offer it a different expectation. You’re not pretending you feel fine. You’re showing your nervous system what “safe” might look like, so it stops treating every ordinary moment like a threat.

Even five minutes before sleep, imagining your body calm, your day done, your work enough, can shift what you wake up carrying. Start there. Keep it short. Keep it honest. The goal isn’t to trick yourself into happiness. It’s to give your brain something to move toward instead of away from.

Where to start: Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything by James R. Doty MD, and the Headspace app for guided visualization meditations.

Individualized nutrition

You can’t fuel a spaceship with pond water. And you can’t fuel a body with whatever’s quick, easy, or marketed as “energy boosting.” Nutrition is personal. What works for one person might absolutely wreck someone else.

We found that out the hard way. I can eat fruit all day and feel great. My wife? It spikes her blood sugar, tanks her energy, and sets her back hours. That is, unless she eats nuts beforehand. Then, she can curb that blood sugar spike.

That’s not about willpower or preference, it’s biology. Our bodies just respond differently.

My wife only found this out after wearing a blood glucose monitor for two weeks and getting a personalized nutrition plan that told her exactly what to eat, what not to eat, and how to sequence her eating.

I then learned about it from her, but admittedly didn’t do the glucose monitor.

This isn’t a diet. It’s an experiment. Be curious. Test small things. Try shifting one piece at a time and notice what happens. There’s no right plan, no universal fix, just the one your body responds to.

Once you start seeing the patterns, it gets easier to support the body that actually wants to create, instead of accidentally sabotaging it with every bite.

It doesn’t matter what works for your brother, your mother, or your kid. Everybody’s body is different.

Where to start: Zoe. They also have a podcast my wife swears by.

Gut health

One of the most overlooked but powerful factors in energy, mood, and overall regulation is your gut. Your gut isn’t just a digestion machine, it’s a major command center for your immune system, inflammation, and even your neurotransmitters. And when it’s out of whack, everything feels harder.

We didn’t know how much gut health mattered until we started seeing connections. Certain foods didn’t just give us stomach issues, they wrecked our focus. Sleep got worse. Our capacity for stress shrank. We’d get weird mood dips or feel unreasonably irritable, and it all traced back to the gut.

To help this, experts recommend fiber rich and fermented foods, along with whole plants.

The bacteria living in your digestive system, your gut microbiome, can either help regulate your system or keep it on high alert. And the tricky part? You don’t always feel it in your stomach. You feel it in your brain, your joints, your fatigue levels, and even your stamina.

The goal isn’t to be perfect. It’s to reduce chaos. Pay attention to what foods feel good not just in the moment, but in the hours that follow. Fiber, fermented foods, diversity in your meals, they all seem to help. But ultimately, it’s about tuning into what helps your gut help you.

Where to start: Zoe, again, and their podcast, again.

Breathwork

Breathing seems like the most basic thing. You do it all the time, right? But for most of us, especially those of us dealing with chronic stress or illness, our default breath is short, shallow, and stuck in the chest. It keeps the nervous system wired, the stress hormones high, and the body primed for threat.

Deliberate breathing is a shortcut to calming your system. It’s not woo-woo. It’s science. Slow, deep breathing activates the vagus nerve, which signals your body that you’re safe. That you can stop running. That it’s okay to rest.

The ideal is what’s called “resonant breathing”, about 5.5 breaths per minute, in and out through the nose. It’s not about counting, performing, or doing it “right.”

It’s about slowing down just enough to interrupt the panic spiral and let your body exhale fully. Just a minute or two at a time, enough to say to the body: you’re okay now. You can put the weapons down.

The body doesn’t respond to thoughts. It responds to cues. And breath is one of the clearest, most powerful cues we’ve got.

Where to start: Elite HRV app, specifically the section Biofeedback (breathing exercises), and specifically 10-week breathing program. Also the book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor and The Breathing Cure: Develop New Habits for a Healthier, Happier, and Longer Life by Patrick McKeown.

Meditation

I used to think meditation meant sitting still with an empty mind for twenty minutes and transcending reality. Spoiler: that never happened. What did happen was racing thoughts, muscle twitches, and a growing sense of failure.

I told my wife meditation wasn’t for me a bunch of times, but then I heard a podcast talking about how meditation is about focusing on your breath, and I realized that I often laid in bed in the morning for over an hour doing 4-7-8 breathing, the ideal meditation cadence for me, and realized I ruled at meditation.

More importantly, I had been feeling a lot better since doing it.

Even a few consistent minutes a day made a difference. Not always dramatically, but enough to create a crack in the panic. Enough to slip one calm breath into the middle of the chaos.

Meditation doesn’t need a cushion or a mantra. Just a willingness to sit, even briefly, with whatever is happening, and let that be enough.

Where to begin: Calm app.

Nonsense

Sometimes the most effective thing you can do to heal your nervous system is be completely, unabashedly ridiculous.

I’m serious.

Limbic system retraining, the practice of teaching your brain to stop firing off danger signals when there’s no actual danger, works in part because you’re trying to create new neural associations.

Nonsense does that. Silliness does that. Dancing badly in your kitchen does that. Making up a stupid song about your coffee does that. The more creative you can be, the more your body will flood itself with endorphins instead of cortizol.

When you’re deep in chronic illness or burnout, everything gets very serious very fast. Every symptom is a data point. Every bad day is evidence. Your brain is running a very grim, very focused threat-detection program, and it is very good at its job.

Nonsense short-circuits all of that stuff. It’s hard to stay in fight-or-flight when you’re giggling. It’s hard for your limbic system to insist you’re in danger when you’re doing a silly walk down the hallway. The absurdity itself is the medicine.

There are plenty of programs that build this in deliberately, but we learned it from Yay! Neuroplasticity Coaching. They ask you to do things that feel embarrassing or childish, cheering for yourself, doing little dances, saying affirmations in goofy voices, because the point isn’t the content. The point is the state it creates. Playfulness is a nervous system signal. It says: we are not being chased right now. We are okay.

You don’t need a program to start. You just need to give yourself permission to be dumb about it. Sing the wrong words. Make a face at yourself in the mirror. Let something be funny that doesn’t deserve to be funny.

Your nervous system doesn’t need more seriousness. It needs proof that life isn’t only hard.

Where to start: Yay! Neuroplasticity Coaching is where we learned it, but there are plenty of other places that teach it.

The McGill Big Three stretches

There’s a lot of pressure to have a perfect movement practice, but when you’re chronically ill or dealing with persistent pain, even gentle movement can feel like a minefield. That’s why I do the McGill Big 3 every morning.

I spent decades not stretching before I pulled my back multiple times. I wasn’t about to do an hour of stretches, which is what most doctors said, but then I met with a chiropractor who gave me just three stretches called the McGill Big Three.

Originally designed for spinal rehab and core stability, the McGill Big 3 are simple, controlled movements that stabilize the spine and strengthen the core without flaring symptoms. They’re not flashy. They’re not really much of a workout. But they help reconnect with my body on days when almost nothing else feels accessible, and they’ve helped me increase the range by which I operate.

Here’s what they include:

1. Modified curl-up – Keeps the low back supported while strengthening the abdominal wall.

2. Bird-dog – Builds cross-body coordination and supports the back without strain.

3. Side plank – Activates the obliques and deep core stabilizers that keep everything aligned.

I do them slowly, with breath. Always with the intention of building trust, not strength. Just enough to remind our bodies that movement is possible. From there I started adding in vinyasas, upward dog, downward dog, wall stretches, and my “three little stretches” had now become a whole 20+ minute routine every morning.

But it didn’t start there. It started with just three.

Where to begin: The McGill Big 3.

Sleep

Sleep is not a reward. It’s not something you get once you’ve earned it by clearing your inbox or hitting your word count. It’s a biological requirement, and for those of us with chronic illness, it’s often the single biggest lever we have to pull.

But it’s also elusive. Chronic pain, nervous system dysregulation, hormone swings, anxiety, it all messes with sleep. And poor sleep makes all of those things worse. It’s a vicious cycle.

We’ve tried everything: sleep hygiene, blackout curtains, supplements, tracking apps, no screens before bed. Some of it helped, some didn’t. What did make a difference was treating sleep like a hard boundary. We stopped pushing through late-night work. We gave ourselves wind-down rituals. We prioritized low-stimulation evenings over “catching up.”

Good sleep doesn’t always happen. But better sleep? That’s usually available. And even if the night is bad, a gentle morning helps: dim lights, soft movement, warm food. No shock to the system. Just easing in.

Sleep might not feel productive. But for your body, it’s where all the real repair happens. Honor it like the cornerstone it is.

Where to start: The Sleep Reset program and Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker PhD.

Boundaries

We talk about pacing our work and honoring our bodies, but none of that sticks without boundaries. Not just with other people, but with ourselves.

Boundaries aren’t walls. They’re agreements. With your time. With your energy. With your nervous system. They say: this is how I protect what matters, including my capacity to create.

For a long time, we said yes to everything, because we were afraid they’d stop coming. But every yes drained the well. Until one day there was nothing left to give. That’s not discipline. That’s collapse.

Now we ask: Does this actually support my work? My body? My recovery? If the answer isn’t a clear yes, it’s a no. Or a “not right now”. Or a “not like this”.

The hardest boundaries are often internal. The ones that say I won’t let myself spiral after 9pm. I won’t check my email before breakfast. I won’t guilt myself into a task I know will knock me out for two days.

You can’t create from depletion. You can’t heal in chaos. Boundaries are what let you do both. Not all at once. But enough to keep going.

Where to start: Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself by Nedra Glover Tawwab

Habits

When your body’s exhausted and your brain is glitching, the last thing you want is another list of things you “should” be doing. But the truth is, we already have habits. We already have default settings. The question is whether those defaults are helping us heal or keeping us stuck.

We used to wake up and scroll. Or skip breakfast. Or doom-think about all the things we hadn’t done yet. Not because we chose to, but because those were the grooves we’d worn into our days. Our bodies followed the path of least resistance, and that path led straight to burnout.

Changing that didn’t mean overhauling everything. It meant inserting tiny switches. One new anchor at a time. Five minutes of stretching before opening the laptop. A glass of water before coffee. A check-in with our energy level before deciding what work to attempt.

We didn’t need habits that made us “better.” We needed habits that made us safer. More grounded. Less likely to tip into the shame spiral when things didn’t go as planned.

Habit change isn’t about discipline. It’s about design. It’s about making the helpful thing easier to reach than the harmful one. And when your body learns to trust that your patterns won’t sabotage it? Everything else gets easier.

Where to start: Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything by BJ Fogg, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear, and The Power of Habits: Building a Life You Love by Daniel King.

Medication and supplements

None of this would have been possible for me without support, specifically, pharmaceutical support. I’m not ashamed of that. SSRIs for depression and beta blockers for anxiety helped create enough baseline stability that I could even begin to notice what was going on in my body, let alone start healing.

These weren’t magic fixes. But they were scaffolding. They turned the volume down on the emergency signals just enough to try things, like breathwork without immediately crashing.

Then, one day the voices in my head telling me to kill myself stopped and I turned to my wife and said “Wait, that voice isn’t normal?”

Remember, that voice is NOT NORMAL! I feel like a superhero now after spending almost 40 years working through that nagging voice telling me to stop and die.

And on top of that, we found certain supplements that helped regulate our systems. Not as a replacement for meds, but as a complement. Things like magnesium, omega-3s, B, C, D, electrolytes, etc. We tried them slowly, one at a time, and tracked what actually made a difference.

This is not medical advice. I’m not a doctor. But I am someone who’s tried a hundred things just to get my feet back under me, and meds were a crucial part of that picture. If your nervous system is screaming 24/7, sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is quiet it chemically, so you can start hearing what else it might be saying.

Where to start: Your doctor, or a trusted friend, or at least a nutritionist.

Talk therapy

Some of the most powerful healing I’ve experienced didn’t come from fixing my thoughts. It came from being heard. Really heard. Not by friends trying to cheer me up, or family trying to fix me, but by someone trained to sit with the mess.

Talk therapy gave me language. It gave me perspective. It gave me a place to say the hard stuff out loud without needing to justify it. Sometimes it helped me unpack trauma. Sometimes it just helped me name what I was feeling so I could stop storing it in my body.

Not all therapy is created equal. It took a few tries to find someone who got it, who didn’t pathologize chronic illness or minimize nervous system dysregulation. But when I did, it gave me a kind of support that nothing else could touch.

Therapy doesn’t fix everything. But it loosens the knots. It gives you a place to offload what your body has been carrying.

Where to start: Your doctor.

Choosing joy over happiness

For a long time, I thought the goal was happiness. The big, fireworks kind. The launch that went viral. The project that finally felt “done.” But what I’ve come to realize, especially while living with chronic illness, is that happiness is unreliable. It’s a high, and chasing highs keeps your nervous system on the hook.

What’s actually sustainable? Joy. Contentment. The quiet kind. The joy of a good cup of tea. The satisfaction of a paragraph that sings. The small victories that don’t announce themselves with trumpets, but build something steady underneath you.

Chasing joy doesn’t mean toxic positivity. It doesn’t mean pretending things are okay when they’re not. It means noticing what is okay. Letting that be enough for today.

For us, that shift changed everything. We stopped trying to feel amazing all the time. We started seeking out what felt gentle, what felt true. And our bodies responded. Not with instant healing, but with a little more trust. A little more space.

This work is hard, but joy makes it easier. Contentment makes it possible. And they’re both more available than happiness ever was.

Where to start: The Happiness Lab podcast, along with Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness by Ingrid Fetell Lee, The Happiness Trap (Second Edition): How to Stop Struggling and Start Living by Russ Harris, and The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness by Robert Waldinger.

Gratitude

Gratitude gets a bad rap because it’s constantly shoved in your face. When you’re chronically ill or burned out, the last thing you want is someone chirping, “Just be grateful!” while your body is on fire. That kind of gratitude is performative. It’s a bypass. It denies what’s hard.

But there’s another kind that actually helps.

This kind of gratitude doesn’t override your pain. It sits next to it. It says: “Yes, this is hard. And also… this tea is warm. The sun hit my face for a minute. That sentence I wrote wasn’t terrible.” Micro-gratitudes. Grounding truths.

It’s not about being grateful instead of struggling. It’s about noticing what’s good while you struggle. And when you do that consistently, something shifts.

Studies show that gratitude reduces cortisol, eases inflammation, and nudges your nervous system out of fight-or-flight. It calms the amygdala. Helps your heart rate settle. Makes you feel physically less threatened. Not magically. Not instantly. But enough to matter.

And no, you don’t have to feel grateful all the time. You don’t have to fake it, but if you can find one real , small thing that doesn’t suck? That’s a crack in the armor. That’s your body starting to believe it’s safe.

Where to start: Gratitude app.

Touch therapy

The first thing I did with any regularity aside from supplements and medicine was chiropractic. It took seriously blowing out my back before I decided to give it a go, and now I’ve been going for years.

My wife, my mom, and my sister had all been doing it for a long time before I got over myself and made an appointment. They swore it helped. I shrugged it off. Too “woo” for me. Not enough evidence, I thought. Not serious enough. I figured if I ignored the pain long enough, it would just go away.

It didn’t. So, I went. And it worked.

Don’t get me wrong. There are lots of scammers in this space, but there are plenty of good people, too. You just have to look for them.

Getting chiropractic care cracked something open, literally and figuratively. I started questioning the story I’d been telling myself about what “counts” as care. Once you pick at a corner, it’s hard to stop picking.

Massage came next. Luckily, my chiropractor has two massage people who work inside her practice. At first, it felt like a treat, but my masseuse said something that stuck with me: “After 40, massages aren’t for luxury. They’re for maintenance.”

That changed my mindset. I am getting older, and my meat suit is not working as it once did. Maintenance. Not indulgence. Just what it takes to function in a body that’s been carrying too much for too long.

I haven’t done acupuncture, or anything else in this space since I really don’t love to be touched, aside from physical therapy (which I also recommend), but I can tell you that it’s very hard to do work at a high level when your spine and muscles are messed up.

Don’t be stubborn like me. Find a good practitioner in your area, one at least one person you trust swears by, and give it a try.

Where to start: Asking people for a referral.

Interdependency

None of this is about finding the one thing that fixes everything. It’s about building trust between your brain and your body. That trust won’t come from muscling through or pretending you’re fine. It comes from showing up, again and again, with honesty, curiosity, and care.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do for your creative work isn’t to push harder, but to pause, ask your body what it needs, and listen.

You are not weak for needing rest. You’re not lazy for needing systems. You’re not broken for having limits. You’re an entrepreneur with a body. The better you treat that body, the more it will trust you to do the work you came here to do.

Books to read

These books go beyond what we talked about above. I couldn’t add them to any specific section because they are more holistic, or they are a necessary datapoint more than a practice.

Women’s Bodies & Hormones

I know that there are men who read this, but I still think everyone should read these. Even if you learn nothing about yourself (which you will), everyone will have at least one person they love affected by what they talk about in these books.

• The New Menopause: Navigating Your Path Through Hormonal Change with Purpose, Power, and Facts by Mary Claire Haver, M.D. - A science-backed, compassionate guide to navigating hormonal changes with purpose and clarity. Haver combines her OB-GYN expertise with anecdotal relatability, offering practical toolkits around symptoms, lifestyle adjustments, and medical options, including hormone replacement, while debunking myths and stigma.

• Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World by Elinor Cleghorn - A sweeping cultural history exposing how misogyny has shaped the misdiagnosis and mistreatment of women from ancient womb theories to modern autoimmunity. Cleghorn blends personal narrative (her lupus journey) with academic research to show how women’s voices have been sidelined in medicine.

• The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness: A Memoir by Sarah Ramey - A memoir told with sharp detail, weaving investigation and advocacy as Ramey recounts her multiyear struggle with undiagnosed chronic illness. It’s a compelling insider view of what it’s like to chase healing when no one seems to understand what’s wrong.

• Unbreakable: A Woman’s Guide to Aging with Power by Vonda Wright MD - While there are lots of other books about mindset, this book is about actually keeping your body healthy, what to eat, how to exercise, and it is a lot. Like…an oppressive lot, but it’s really good info. Be warned, she just assumes you don’t have chronic illness and can do all this stuff, which is really frustrating.

Trauma, Mind & Body

If you’re going to go deep on body healing, then the first two books in this category are essential. I didn’t put them first because they are very heavy books, and taken together are a bit bleak. That said, they are also the basis by which all the rest of it revolves around.

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. - Landmark work exploring how trauma imprints on both brain and body. Covers neurobiology, narratives, and somatic healing, ideal for people dealing with latent trauma or embedded stress. This is a very heavy book.

• When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté, M.D. - Maté connects chronic illness to emotional suppression and long-term stress. He argues that ignoring emotional needs often results in physical breakdown. Do not read this book without reading The Body Keeps the Score, and probably the other three books above, first.

• Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship with Food by Rachel Herz, PhD - An exploration of the psychology, neuroscience, and sensory cues behind our food choices, showing how smell, memory, and context shape what, and why, we eat.

• The Personalized Diet: The Pioneering Program to Lose Weight and Prevent Disease by Eran Elinav - Based on large-scale clinical research, this book reveals how individual blood sugar responses, driven in part by gut microbes, make one-size-fits-all diets ineffective, and provides a framework for customizing eating plans to optimize health.

• What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo - A memoir about trauma that dives deep on how it feels inside your body when you have complex PTSD, and how hard it is to recover from it. The other books on this list might seem like it’s quick and/or easy, but this will show the process on a granular level.

• It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn - Generational trauma has less scientific backing them a lot of the other books on this list, but I think it’s informative to read this book to see how longitudinal trauma can be, and how to work through it.

• Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One by Dr. Joe Dispenza - If you want to learn the science of manifesting, and how it connects to research, quantum physics, and general practice, this is a very deep guide, but it is also very far from what you know. So, it might sound batty.

• Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness by Ingrid Fetell Lee - I love how Lee talks about the aesthetics of joy, and how happiness is heavily influenced by your surroundings. This book goes through all sorts of ways to experience joy from texture to smell and everything in between.

• The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris - This is as much about radical acceptance as anything, but it’s mainly about the six principles of ACT; Acceptance, Cognitive Defusion, Mindfulness, Self-as-Context, Values, and Committed Action. ACT combines a lot of the other frameworks in this syllabus into an overall, more robust methodology for going through the world.

• The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain by Alan Gordon - This book will teach you the basics of somatic tracking, maybe the single most powerful single thing you can do today to improve your bodywork. This book will show you how to listen to your body.

Work, Productivity & Burnout

We’re all either in burnout, recovering from burnout, or on the way to burnout, and these books can help you find a path forward for yourself that is sustainable and manageable.

• Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport - Recasts productivity away from hustle culture, advocating for measured, meaningful work. A grounded guide for creatives who want consistency over frenzy.

• Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You by Ali Abdaal - A practical, human-centered “productivity with heart” playbook less about spreadsheets, more about what matters most.

• Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Francesc Miralles - This book blends a lot of mindset, meditation, and burnout prevention while also helping you narrow and focus on your bliss.

• Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Amelia Nagoski, DMA
  Examines the stress cycle and how to close it, offering empathetic, research-backed ways to move past burnout, especially important for chronically exhausted creatives.

• The Cure for Burnout: How to Find Balance and Reclaim Your Life by Emily Ballesteros - A holistic burnout recovery plan centered on five pillars, mindset, personal care, time management, boundaries, and stress regulation, to help rebuild balance and resilience.

• Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant - Adam Grant’s Think Again explores why rethinking our beliefs, and staying open to changing them, is essential for growth, learning, and leadership. Here’s a breakdown of the core ideas and how they can transform how you think, decide, and relate to others.

• From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life by Arthur C. Brooks - When we are young, we have a lot of fluid intelligence that lets us move from thing to thing and adapt quickly. As we age that is replaced by crystallized intelligence, which is better for making connections between things. However, almost everyone and everything is taught around fluid intelligence.

• The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game by C. Thi Nguyen - If you have ever wondered why systems work the way they do, it starts with what they measure, and how they track success. This book exposes the truth behind how we keep score.

Mindset and Meaning

If I could recommend only one book on this whole syllabus, it would be The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control. All of my clients are perfectionists, and it’s the first time I’ve ever heard somebody say that perfectionism isn’t bad. They are all great. We gifted Chatter to my mother after my wife and I both finished reading it.

• Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross - Explores the voice in your head, why it matters. and techniques to channel it. Great for helping quiet the inner critic.

• The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power by Katherine Morgan Schafler - Breaks down how perfectionism shows up, especially for creative types, and how to shift toward peace and productivity. This did more for me than almost anything else on this list because it talks about how perfectionism isn’t bad, the fact that we use punishment to encourage it is the problem.

• How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur - A humorous moral philosophy dive from one of TV’s best creators, irreverent, insightful, and useful for living with internal “should’s.”

• Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life by Shigehiro Oishi, PhD - Argues for dimensional living, curiosity, exploration, novelty, as a route to deeper satisfaction, especially for those worn down by routine.

• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell -A protest against the attention economy, encouraging intentional rest, awareness, and creative presence.

• The Gifts of Imperfection: 10th Anniversary Edition: Features a new foreword and brand-new tools by Brené Brown - A warm, research-backed guide teaching you how to embrace vulnerability, release perfectionism, and cultivate wholehearted living through courage, compassion, and authenticity

• Stress Resets: How to Soothe Your Body and Mind in Minutes by Jennifer L Taitz PsyD Abpp - Packed with quick, research-backed techniques, from ice-face dips to mindful pauses, for calming the body and mind in minutes

• The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems--And What to Do about It by Karen Dillon - A look at how tiny daily irritations, emails left unanswered, curt comments, minor disruptions, accumulate over time to erode mental and emotional well-being. Backed by solid research, it shows how addressing micro-stress across relationships and rebuilding multidimensional lives can restore energy and focus

• The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity by Nadine Burke Harris - A study into how adverse childhood experiences rewire our biology, impacting immunity, stress systems, and lifelong health, and outlines practical interventions to heal toxic stress before it becomes chronic disease

• The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga - You should definitely read the audiobook because the whole thing is a dialog between a philosopher and a young man about how to live a good life, find freedom, and stop worrying about being liked.

Creative Career, Community, & Communication

These books are less about your body specifically and more about your relationship to others and the outside world. Finding ways to interact better and not getting twisted about it is essential for a calm existence.

• Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life) by Thomas Erikson - A guide to decoding four behavioral types, tools for smoother communication, better work relationships, and smarter marketing.

• Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict Into Connection by John Gottman PhD - Though relationship-focused, Gottman’s conflict strategies foster kinder communication, even with editors, promoters, or yourself.

• Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes by Jessica Pan - A witty, honest memoir in which an extreme introvert embarks on a year of deliberately “saying yes”—from solo travel to stand-up comedy—to explore what happens when social boundaries are pushed and self-imposed limits are dismantled

• AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing by Liz Tran - This book shows a very interesting archetyping system built around agility to change, proactive and reactive agility, and the stages of change you can bring into your own practice.

Perspective & Presence

These books deal with everything from manifestation to mindset, and I just really think they build a basis for how to go through your day and think about the world in peace.

• The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff - A whimsical introduction to Taoist simplicity and flow, told through the characters of Winnie-the-Pooh.

• The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer - This short book is all about how to create sustainable systems in economic that honor reciprocity between humans and nature, deeply restorative for those weary of burnout.

• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman - A realist’s guide to time, encouraging acceptance of limits and a focus on what truly matters.

• Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman - A four-week practice in embracing limitations and cultivating mental space, a perfect companion to the heavier mindset books.

• Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything by James R. Doty MD - Blends neuroscience and manifestation; explores how intention and belief can shape our bodily systems.

• Stop Missing Your Life: How to Be Deeply Present in an Un-Present World by Cory Muscara - lays out the foundation of meditation, focus, and being allowing bad experiences not to shake you. I love the presence haiku idea he shares in it.

Subscribe now

For years, I’ve heard the same advice repeated in the entrepreneurship community: create more, ship more, market more. The modern world seems obsessed with churning out content at an ever-increasing pace. But after spending over two decades in this industry, I’ve come to realize we’ve been thinking about productivity all wrong.

When I talk about prod…

Read more

Most people sabotage themselves through inaction. They dream but never start. They talk but never ship. The blank page beats them. The market intimidates them, so they freeze.

That’s certainly the story we’re told, right? But what if your failure isn’t because you’re too slow… but because you’re too fast?

I didn’t sabotage myself by waiting. I sabotage…

Read more

I think about trust a lot; probably too much. I think about trust with my wife, my collaborators, and my customers all the time.

Maintaining trust with customers is a critical part of building a sustainable career. Customers don’t just invest their money in a brand. They also invest their time, energy, and emotional engagement in the products they cre…

Read more

We finished conference season not too long ago, and wow was it sobering to see so many people I love and respect burned out beyond what I thought possible last time I saw them when they were already burned out beyond what I thought possible.

The exhaustion wasn’t just physical; it was emotional. We’re talking about the kind of burnout that comes from …

Read more

Too often in life, the answer to “why am I not having success?” is that time has to happen. It is the not satisfying so most teachers and coaches will never say that part out loud, which leaves entrepreneurs thinking that something must be broken in their own process.

So, I’ll say the quiet part out loud. Even if you have a perfect strategy, it doesn’t matter until you execute it.

• If you want to make $100k in 2024, guess what? The whole year still has to happen.

• If you want 10,000 new subscribers in the next six months, guess what? You have to set metrics and plod through a lot of muck to get there.

• If you want to ship 12x this year, guess what? You actually have to build and create those, and it takes time.

We often operate with the belief that if we have the right plan, success will follow quickly. But time is an inevitable factor that no one can circumvent.

This was a mantra for me at Writer MBA, because a conference is the ultimate “time has to happen product.” Even though people do buy throughout the year, upwards of 25% buy within the last six weeks, and hardly anyone buys until three months before.

That said, vendors still want their money early, which makes for a fun cash crunch challenge. It’s impossible to announce speakers until you, like, have speakers to announce.

You can run ads, craft highly persuasive email campaigns, or engage potential buyers in person, but for most people, it simply doesn’t matter until a particular window opens. Most won’t buy until three months before an event or product launch. Sure, there are tactics to create urgency and move things along, but if your portfolio consists of a few articles, a single release, or if you’ve only been building your audience for a short while, success won’t appear overnight.

This brings us to a crucial point: planning for time to happen. The reality is that time needs to pass for success to materialize, but the way you approach that time can make the waiting less stressful and more productive. Instead of focusing solely on speeding up the process, it’s about getting comfortable with the time it takes and understanding how to plan for it wisely.

A lot of my consulting revolves around a key question: Is it reasonable to expect the success you want, based on everything you’ve done so far? It’s a question that forces us to evaluate our progress realistically. Here are some indicators that can help you assess whether your success expectations are reasonable:

1. Do you have a sufficient track record?
   If you’ve been working at something for a few months but expect the results of someone who’s been in the game for years, you may need to adjust your expectations. Success often builds over time, and a consistent body of work or long-term engagement with your audience is usually necessary before you see big results.

2. Are you measuring the right metrics?
   Often, success doesn’t show up immediately in the most obvious ways, like sales numbers or subscriber counts. Instead, it may appear as growing engagement, positive feedback, or increased visibility. Focus on the smaller, incremental wins that signal you’re on the right path, even if they’re not the ultimate goal.

3. Have you put in the necessary effort?
   Have you done everything in your power to set yourself up for success? This includes not just the creation of your product (whether that’s writing, marketing, etc.) but also how effectively you’ve communicated with your audience, built relationships, and leveraged opportunities. If the effort isn’t there, the results won’t be either.

4. Are external factors in your favor?
   Sometimes, success hinges on things beyond your control, like market conditions or timing. If you’re in a competitive industry or trying to launch during a time when the market is saturated, your success might take longer than expected. It’s important to be mindful of factors that could affect your trajectory.

5. Have you given it enough time?
   Finally, and most importantly, have you allowed enough time for success to materialize? This is where the concept of letting time happen really becomes important. Many people give up just before they would have seen the fruits of their labor. Assess how long others in your field took to reach similar levels of success, and give yourself that same grace.

Rather than obsessing over the final outcome, focus on the process. Every big goal, whether it’s making $100k or releasing an album, can be broken down into smaller milestones. Those incremental steps not only help you feel a sense of accomplishment along the way but also make the passing of time feel more manageable. It’s the routine that matters most.

Gary Keller and Jay Papasan wrote an amazing book called The One Thing. In it, they talk about the benefits of finding the one, single thing which could change your life forever, The Big Domino, and putting an inordinate about of time and effort into tipping it over. In order for the domino to tip, there are all sorts of smaller dominos that need to fall, too, but all in service of toppling the big domino.

Unfortunately, it takes time to set up these dominos to fall, but we humans like want everything Veruca Salt fast.

Patience isn’t a natural skill for most of us. It’s something we have to practice. Every time you resist the urge to push too hard, every time you let things unfold at their natural pace, you’re strengthening your patience muscle. Over time, you’ll find the waiting period less overwhelming because you’ve trained yourself to endure it.

If you’ve just started, it’s not fair to expect the same level of success as someone who’s been at it for years. Success usually builds gradually, and part of getting comfortable with letting time happen is acknowledging that this growth takes time. Be patient, but also be strategic.

I believe you only get 1-2 shots to level up a year, and 90% of your time is moving the pieces around in the background to make that lurch happen. You rise to the level of the structures you have in place, and most of life is building those structures so that when you make your leap, they catch and support you.

Yes, you might be able to make a gigantic leap quickly, but if your structure is shaky, or if you haven’t constructed it at all, you’ll likely fall back down to Earth and hurt yourself, possibly irreparably, in the process. Most of the successful people you see have either been building their support structure for years or are about to flame out because they grew too fast.

Now, this brings us to the question I ask many of my clients: Is the success you expect reasonable given the efforts you’ve put forth and the support structures you’ve put in place? Often, the answer is no. That’s not a negative. We just have to realign your expectations with reality. Do you have enough of a track record to expect success at the level you’re aiming for? Have you been consistent enough in your efforts? Do you have the network in place to support you? These are the questions we need to ask ourselves, honestly, when assessing our path.

I ask myself these same question constantly. I’m incredibly ambitious, and with that comes impatience. I want to achieve my goals yesterday, and I sometimes forget that I’m only human. I remind myself, and now I remind you, that it’s not just you who feels this way. We all have to balance ambition with the understanding that time is a fundamental component of success.

So, what do you think?

• What’s one area of your creative journey where you’ve had to let time happen, and how did you manage that waiting period?

• Do you feel like your current goals are realistic based on the time and effort you’ve already put in? Why or why not?

• What strategies do you use to stay patient and productive while waiting for results to materialize?

Let us know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Did you know that most people don’t actually want to be helped when they share their thoughts online? It might sound surprising, but simply acknowledging someone’s feelings can often be more supportive than offering unsolicited advice. Scrolling through your social media feed, you might find that a simple “that sucks” can be more comforting than an a…

Read more

I always thought that the more successful you became in business, the more rational, logical, and measured you would be, but I’ve had a different journey. I started in business very “business-minded”.

I put quotes around business-minded because while there is a perception of what being business-minded means, my journey has been a descent into chaos. Traditionally, being business-minded entails possessing a mindset focused on business-related activities, including entrepreneurship, management, finance, and strategic planning. Individuals with this mindset demonstrate strategic thinking, analyzing situations to identify opportunities and developing plans to achieve business goals while also being willing to take calculated risks.

That’s not to say my successful friends don’t have all those qualities. They do. It just paints a picture of a stodgy old man who sits around a computer studying spreadsheets.

Basically, it brings to mind President Business. Meanwhile, most of my successful friends are closer to Princess Unikitty.

Let me be clear: Princess Unikitty is a killer business being. They somehow keep Cloud Cuckoo Land running even though it is pure chaos, and they do it all with an upbeat smile and a heavy dose of magic. On top of that, Cloud Cuckoo Land works effectively-ish, so much so that many master-builders choose to live there. In the chaos, they thrive.

When I first started in business, I thought it was Lawful Evil, like President Business, but I have found business is more Chaotic Good, like Princess Unikitty. Can you explain why Cloud Cuckoo Land works? No, but it certainly does work…until order is imposed on it.

To succeed, it’s usually better for both your company and your mental health to focus chaos productively than to impose order onto it.

After that article, people asked me what they could even do if the world were pure chaos energy. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and I think my business started growing when I embraced that chaos and found ways to embrace it in more productive ways.

Mostly, I have fully embraced a concept I’ve been talking about called “planned serendipity”.

It’s not new. There are articles about it dating back over a decade.

Planned serendipity involves creating environments and processes that encourage unexpected discoveries and insights. Here are some main concepts it offers for putting planned serendipity to work in a business:

Read more

I think about whisks a lot. Yes, those kinds of whisks. The ones you use to whip eggs and do basic cooking tasks. Did you know that before the 19^th century, ​whisks were basically just a bunch of sticks and thatch bundled together​?

Think about how inefficient it would be to​ use a bunch of sticks to stir ingredients together​. It took forever, and ​…

Read more