I wake up to -22°F. I stare upon the suburban tundra, and not a soul is stirring. No people, no birds, no rabbits. Then a strange thought hits me—how did turtles survive sub-zero temperatures?

Nine species of native turtles live around Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes. In the summer, this image is easy to imagine—a red-eared slider sunbathing on a log or a box turtle crawling through the grass. But on days like this, that prospect is impossible to fathom. Apparently, when winter arrives, turtles enter brumation. They burrow into the mud, slow their heartbeats until they become almost nonexistent, and enter this living state of suspended animation.

I withdraw from the freezing windowpane and realize how broken my conceptual definition is. Turtles are cold-blooded creatures, their internal temperature regulated by the external environment. They are quite literally solar-powered—needing a bright, warm sun to exist, right? Yet here they are, enduring -22 degrees.

I shiver and will myself to start the day. To brush my teeth, to stretch, to pray, to read, to journal, to pour some coffee, to light a candle, to set my timer, and to write for thirty minutes. One domino, two domino, three domino, four. Five dominoes, six dominoes, seven dominoes, more.

Nothing about fiction writing is that difficult. It takes no physical effort, no social energy, no careful research, and no capital. But because I treat it like a sacrament, all it takes is a slight disruption—a poor night’s sleep, an early meeting, a noisy house—and this delicate, daisy-chained link of rituals topples into oblivion.

It’s odd because I don’t have this problem with other areas. Take exercise. I never considered myself an athlete; I was a bit of a nerdy kid, more interested in action figures than sports. Yet, for all my adult life, I never struggled with exercise. No matter how chaotic a day, I can squeeze in a workout. Maybe it’s because my standards are low—thirty minutes of bodyweight movements or a light jog suffices. I’m not trying to become a world-class athlete, so I can do crappy workouts and remain in shape. Because I don’t identify as an athlete, I can survive as one.

With AI, it’s never been easier to be a knowledge worker. We have a custom tutor at our fingertips, so we can learn faster than ever before. But many people who, even after all the developments in the last few years, remain skeptical of it. “It couldn’t possibly do what I do,” they think. “It didn’t study case law for five years!” “It didn’t waste nights on StackOverflow, nursing a Red Bull addiction, to learn software engineering.” “It couldn’t possibly pen a quality product spec!” It’s funny, we complain about work and pine for the day we can retire, yet hold our work as so sacred that we can’t accept help.

When we cling so rigidly to these concepts of ourselves and our work, we can reject the very tools and opportunities that can help us weather the storms of change. Whenever a new technology emerges—Internet, mobile apps, social media, LLMs—dynamics shift. A rift opens, temporarily democratizing the means of production and leveling the playing field. Seasoned veterans find themselves competing with young punks with clever tools. We clutch the precious pearls of the past, squeezing them until they shatter in our closed fists.

What if we held our identities with less preciousness? We are told to thrive, but thriving is a luxury. The more sacred we make something, the more fragile it becomes. Enduring hardship, showing up on bad days, weathering rough seasons—this is the baseline. Without durability, we don’t get to play.

Turtles don’t preserve the days of summer. They endure the frozen nights of winter.

Junk Drawer

“The Egg” by Andy Weir, video by Kurzgesagt

I love to whine and complain. To vent and to rant. To shake my fist at the cruel world and bemoan its inarguable, unjust state of affairs. And one thing I loved to complain about was the dentist. No matter what you did, they’d always nag you about flossing more.

For most of my life, I took pride in my dental hygiene. I was a fastidious toothbrusher because my mom instilled in me a deep fear of cavities and vivid images of a creepy, corrupt dentist in a welding mask, boring into my teeth with a power drill. So, the fronts of my teeth always shone white and bright, and my breath, as far as I could tell, stank minty. As a member of the No-Cavity Club, I never bought into the whole flossing ordeal. The scoreboard reflected a perfect record.

Besides, my teeth were too tight for floss. And whenever I managed to break through, the string snapped violently against my gums, and I’d bleed into the sink. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember—or will myself—to floss before bed. So, I stopped trying, except for the night before my next dental visit, in a last-ditch attempt to bamboozle the hygienist. Wasn’t the point of these visits to scrape the plaque off your teeth every six months? From childhood to my mid-twenties, flossing was just something for dentists to nag me about.

Until, on a rainy March morning, a dentist told me I had seventeen cavities.

My childhood nightmare became reality. Power drills whirred in my mind as I imagined teeth spewing from my mouth and HSA dollars evaporating into the ether. It was the wake-up call I needed…time to get a new dentist!

Whether or not that dentist was right about those cavities, the claim forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth. My bleeding gums weren’t the result of tight teeth, but of inconsistent flossing. I hadn’t bamboozled the hygienists; I had bamboozled myself.

I finally accepted that something needed to change. There were many things I wanted to change about myself, so I read about habit development and scoffed at the simple apps designed to track it. They couldn’t possibly work, I thought. Why record trivial behaviors like flossing?

When I was locked down during COVID, perhaps out of desperation, I started logging my habits. Soon enough, I was flossing every night. The bleeding stopped. My next dental visit went well—no cavities, no nagging. A year later, I no longer needed to track it.

Sometimes I get frustrated with myself, convinced I’ll never make lasting change. I review my New Year’s resolutions and see the same items repeat year after year without progress. I start to believe I’m stuck in a fixed state of my own creation—that I am who I am, for better or worse.

This summer, I found myself standing on the edge of a glacier, fifty miles from the nearest road, flossing. I wasn’t doing it to prove anything—not to keep a streak alive, not to preserve some identity as a religious flosser. I hadn’t even thought about it.

Last night, when I picked up my floss, I remembered that moment. And that gives me hope.

Panic! at the doctor’s office.

Panic! at the grocery store.

Panic! at the disco.

If I could sum up all news about American culture, AI, geopolitics, healthcare, and economics into a single word, it’s panic! The word is so…energizing that it cannot even be written without an exclamation point, as a 2000s pop-punk band knew too well.

A responsible citizen must panic! If you are not stricken by grief, shock, and guilt every time you check the news, you must be a sociopath.

But even the ignorant sociopath isn’t free of panic! If you don’t rise, grind, and seize every opportunity before you, another hustler will take it, and you’ll be a downtrodden loser.

Panic! That jolt of fear should inspire action and urgency, neither of which is bad. But the rise of burnout, declining mental health, workaholism, and disillusionment in participating in a vapid, competitive society has made us skeptical of urgency.

This skepticism has spawned a new age of thought leaders, influencing us to “embrace slowness,” “do less,” and focus on “the essentials.” None of this is bad advice, yet this slow approach to life might leave us bored, under-challenged, and sedentary, leaving our goals stagnant as we invest energy into reactivity and perpetual optimization.

We find ourselves at this crossroads of contradictions: go fast while slowing down, act urgently but don’t rush. Is the slow group or the fast group right? Should we be the tortoise or the hare?

But what if there wasn’t a dichotomy? An ancient paradox suggests that we may not need to choose, even if the key to unlocking this paradox is rusted.

The Paradox

Emperor Caesar Augustus detested rash decision-making from his military commanders and is quoted as saying, “Nothing is less becoming in a well-trained leader than haste.” The calm confidence of a leader is not achieved by overreactivity. Yet, a leader cannot sit on their haunches. So, Augustus was famous for the paradoxical adage festina lente, meaning “make haste slowly.”

Like an out-of-touch manager berating their team to “Panic! But don’t stress,” Augustus’s oxymoron must’ve been infuriating to his reports. Yet, festina lente contains wisdom sorely needed in contemporary times. For the past year, I’ve made this a constant reminder.

The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius stamped a dolphin-and-anchor emblem into the editions he printed to signify the balance between boundary-pushing (the haste of the dolphin) and rigorous scholarship (the stabilizing slowness of the anchor). My pretentious computer background reminds me of this aspiration each day: not to get caught up in the noise of the moment—office politics, false fires, or competitor news—but to keep chipping away at the nonurgent but important.

The Stoics supported a similar thread in their philosophical musings, such as Seneca’s famous line: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” Festina lente suggests a balanced strategy—a bias for urgency with thoughtful intention. Don’t waste time or delay starting for the perfect moment. But don’t overreact to events and operate without a deliberate plan. Don’t go too fast to be reckless, nor too slow to be stagnant.

While festina lente is interesting in theory, I’ve found it difficult to practice. Of course, the discipline to tune out the noise and focus on the signal is hard, but the real challenge is more fundamental: a belief in the bigger picture.

The Foundation

Any psychology 101 course will discuss the marshmallow test. At Stanford in the 1960s, children were given a choice: receive one marshmallow immediately or wait fifteen minutes to receive two marshmallows, testing their ability to delay gratification. The experiment concluded that people better at delayed gratification scored higher on tests, had healthier lifestyles, and maintained a greater sense of self-worth. In other words, those who can wait for a reward end up wealthier, healthier, and happier.

Festina lente parallels delayed gratification. If we can avoid a short-term reward and hold out for a larger future prize, we can make haste slowly. However, what both the ancient proponents of festina lente and researchers on delayed gratification seem to neglect is one’s faith in the future. For a Roman commander not to make an impulsive decision to flee a battlefield, he must have faith in the strategic outcome of holding the line. For children not to seize the marshmallow before them, they must trust that waiting fifteen minutes will yield a second marshmallow.

I’ve long been a proponent of the financial independence movement—living frugally and investing one’s savings in index funds so compound interest can form a future nest egg. At 32, I am thankful that 22-year-old me invested a quarter of his paycheck into ETFs each month for a decade. I delayed some near-term pleasures on the belief that I could better use these finances in the future. However, I could only stick with this plan because I believed in the US stock market.

I did not have certainty in the economy—nobody does—but I had faith in it. In today’s world, faith doesn’t carry positive connotations. It gets associated with dogma and mystical thinking. It is viewed in direct contrast with the rational systems and institutions that make our world function: science, technology, and the lived experience of our increasingly global society. Making decisions based on faith, not data, is blasphemous at any reputable research institution or Fortune 100 company. Yet, the fuel that guides any meaningful endeavor is a belief in some future vision.

To escape panic, we must make haste slowly. But to make haste slowly, we need faith. When faith is low, we collapse into cynicism.

The Epidemic

The world is a dark place. As forest fires devastate thousands of acres, militias maul people in the streets, and consumers take on more debt than they can ever pay, holding out hope for a better future sounds naïve, if not absurd. Among so many other problems, we are experiencing an epidemic of cynicism. How can we trust institutions that have continually failed us?

Cynicism has its place. As a philosophical movement originating in ancient Greece, Cynicism rejected social constraints so that its followers could live more simply and align with their natural tendencies. By the 19^th century, however, any good intentions of capital-C Cynicism were overpowered by negative connotations, leading to our modern interpretation of lower-C cynicism: disbelief in a better future.

Lower-C cynicism emerges when trust is low. Confidence in the good intentions of others dwindles, and people become skeptical of anyone selling futures. We don’t believe the promise of a second marshmallow when the hand that offers it has slapped us in the face. This cynicism is exacerbated among marginalized groups, whom institutions have systemically betrayed through extraction and exploitation. For someone living paycheck to paycheck or within an unstable society, living for the future might mean failure, hunger, or deportation. Urgency becomes a rational response—act now; seize the opportunity before it is stripped away! When the hopeful and trusting are punished, we abandon notions of the future, opting for the here and now. Why invest a dollar in a market that won’t exist in ten years when we could buy vape juice to get through the day?

When cynicism infects the spirit, people lose the ability to take the necessary steps for a better future and to imagine that a better future is even possible. Declining birth rates, retirement contributions, and religious affiliation are all signs of growing disinterest in the future. We’re in a crisis of faith.

Without faith, festina lente has no fuel.

The Leap

Whenever I hear the word “faith,” I remember a song we recited during choir at Catholic school masses: “You gotta have F-A-I-T-H, you gotta have faith!” While it may sound trite, this simple verse contains the antidote to cynicism. One cannot know that God exists, so the very basis of religion is based on faith. One must believe, without evidence—contrary to all the conditioning of our scientific training and data-driven methodologies—that there’s something greater than this world.

Religion isn’t required to have faith, but it’s a means to hone that skill. Given my upbringing, I developed, relatively early on, the muscle of faith. That does not mean my faith in things always panned out. I gave trust to people and institutions that betrayed it. My naivety cost me time, money, and emotional well-being multiple times. Had I been more discerning and slower to trust, I likely would not have gotten hurt, scammed, or bamboozled. When people raised with faith see that faith betray them, it’s only natural to put up a shield of protection and crawl into a shell of cynicism.

But that shell is hollow. It keeps us stuck, hopeless, and bored. Yet, the way out of that shell doesn’t require some grandiose act of awakening—leaving a relationship, changing careers, or joining a cult. It’s like starting over again at the gym. After a year of not lifting, we can’t expect to load the barbell with heavy plates and squat what we used to.

Reclaiming faith follows a similar journey. Like salmon throwing themselves upstream, we must take a leap of faith. But that leap needn’t be massive. Start with small hops—develop trust in yourself by sticking to a simple schedule. Share your fears first with a journal, then with a family member, then with a friend. Take a chance and meet someone new in your community. Each jump strengthens our faith muscles.

The world may be dark, but within it, we can create light. Against all the odds, we must learn to believe that a better future is possible, especially when our actions today will not let us grasp it. With faith, we can make haste slowly.

At one AM on Easter Monday, I was somewhere in Wisconsin. Rain battered the windshield, and the wind threatened to shove me off the highway. Google Maps estimated three hours to get home. I had driven this route several times, yet here I was, looking at my phone to tell me to drive straight for 197 miles.

Suddenly, I heard Obi-Wan’s ghost in my ears: Use the Force, Justin.

Or maybe it was the caffeine speaking: Pay attention to the signs, Justin.

I flashed back to a solo road trip in 2012 when I left Ann Arbor to visit a friend in South Bend. No smartphone, no GPS, no MapQuest. Just me and the road.

Perhaps it was my 19-year-old self: Use your brain, Justin.

I closed Google Maps.

Our Smooth New World

It’s hard to remember life before the most basic apps like Google Maps. I remember going to garage sales with my mom, aunt, and cousins in my childhood summers. My mom would clip ads from the paper and drive to residences across Westside Grand Rapids. How she navigated to these addresses without GPS continues to baffle me.

Every time I press the button on my Keurig, let my face unlock my iPhone, or watch my Hue Lights fade to life at the sound of my voice, I remember I’m living in the future.

For me, the Apple Store was once a jarring, otherworldly place of glass walls, white tiles, smooth edges, and computers worthy of an art museum. Now, it feels like almost any other place. Its revolutionary design ethos has permeated most modern spaces, and its technology inspired entire industries of user-centric design, helping to shape the world into a miraculously convenient place. As evidenced by the COVID lockdowns, some of us can live in a perfectly seamless world: Join Teams meetings from a laptop in our bed, receive pre-made meals on our doorstep, walk on a treadmill in a climate-controlled room, and watch endless videos on our phones.

Modern life is like living on a conveyor belt; with little effort, technology carries us to our fates. And who are we to protest this smooth new world? No commuting is better for the planet, our wallet, and our schedule. Ordering items online is easier than making them ourselves and cheaper than buying them in brick-and-mortar stores. Not having to think about entertainment and getting curated content served the second we want it is irresistible.

Yet this smooth world sometimes feels like a life-sized game of Chutes & Ladders. As I run along, I am presented with options: A rickety ladder with splinted rungs dangling from the ceiling or a colorful chute at my feet. When I’m tired and stressed, it’s too easy to choose the chute and let it take me to another episode, processed snack, or digital rabbit hole. But sometimes, I can see the top of the ladder, where an aspiration balances on a shaky beam. I reach for the ladder, but the rungs evade me. I try to jump, but I can’t leave the floor. It’s like trying to move in a dream, but the floors are butter, and I make no traction. I fall down the chutes of distraction.

The Rise of Luddism

I cross the St. Croix River into Minnesota; so far, so good. Only forty-five minutes to go, but the tangle of the Twin Cities interstates lies ahead. Can I crawl across that web without Google?

It’s the middle of the night, and we have work in the morning. Getting home the most efficient way is the responsible thing to do. It will save precious time, money on fuel, and be safer in this sleep-deprived state. GPS is a great convenience, yet my phone stays dark.

Why do this irrational thing? Am I a Luddite?

Luddism is having a moment in the age of AI. A wide assortment of people I know hold strong opinions for resisting AI. When a fellow diver in my wife’s scuba-diving forum posted an AI-generated image of herself as an action figure, many criticized the environmental damage she caused by generating that image. Others argue a more humanist angle—that using AI is stealing good jobs from actual humans. Some succumb to reactionary politics and virtue-signaling. Another faction bemoans AI’s unforeseen consequences to justify their fear of change. Whatever the reason for this slow adoption curve, I find it interesting how we are quick to resist this tech while clinging so ardently to prior conveniences that have smoothed our brains.

I am no different. I would find it considerably easier to ask ChatGPT to write this essay, but here I am writing it long-hand. I’m not resisting AI because of the environmental impact or human rights reasons or some Ted Kaczynski-esque technophobia. I didn’t turn off navigation in Wisconsin to save data or protect my privacy from Google’s prying eye. While I’ve always been a bit of a masochist who purposely tries to make things harder for himself, that’s not why I avoid AI for writing or choose to drive without GPS.

The Wrinkly Razor

I read an article a few years ago about English cab drivers and how they needed to memorize the tangled streets of London to shuttle their passengers around the city effectively. A brain scan of these drivers revealed an enlarged hippocampus, as their brains physically adapted to store the complex spatial map they had learned. Their brains wrinkled to hold a map of the city. Ours risk staying smooth because we never even try to remember the way home.

A world in which we are not challenged to learn and adapt robs the brain of the opportunity to shape itself. While neuroscience has yet to fully study the effects of outsourced intelligence, I don’t think intellect is the proper measure. Life in a frictionless world is a spiritual problem.

The smooth world is a special type of hell. As we fall onto the conveyor belt of convenience and are carried through this stunning, curated space, we may wonder what lies above us. We may yearn to reach up and climb, but the ladders are precarious, and we feel we’ve lost our autonomy. Unable to live without tech, we begin to lose a spiritual war.

Sometimes, my urge to grab a ladder and climb is strong enough to force a leap. Many things I want to do, the things that feel the most rewarding and scratch a deep itch, like writing and mountaineering, require sustained effort and focus. To get words on a page or progress up a trail, you need traction. To get traction, you need texture.

You’ve likely heard the term “wrinkly brain” to describe an intelligent person with nuanced opinions. This term is a nod to the neurological idea that a brain with more folds and wrinkles has more neural pathways. I’ve come to think about technology from this lens, using what I call The Wrinkly Razor.

When evaluating a piece of tech, I ask:

If the tech doesn’t allow my brain to form wrinkles, it’s probably worth shaving away.

Meetup is a useful tool because it enables me to find nearby people to engage with. It’s an app that drives more in-person interactions, making life more interesting. Hinge embraces a similar ethos in their marketing: “The dating app designed to be deleted.”

TikTok is a drug that numbs the mind with an endless stream of curated content. It’s a digital distraction that metaphorically (and perhaps physically) smooths the brain.

Most technology falls somewhere in the middle. Google Maps is essential when navigating a new place but can become a mental crutch in familiar locales. ChatGPT can be a fantastic utility for refining concepts and expanding ideas, but our creativity can atrophy if we forget how to write without it.

Reclaim Your Brain

At three-thirty AM, I realized I made a wrong turn. I’m heading north along the Mississippi River when I should’ve turned west onto I-394. This mistake cost me twenty minutes, time I could have easily saved had I been using GPS. But me and my principles, yet again, drove us off course.

But I’m not the only weirdo concerned with Wrinkliness. There’s a neo-Luddite subculture emerging in many parallel domains. Cal Newport, a computer science professor and public intellectual, speaks at length about the dangers of social media and has coined remedies that have permeated the cultural zeitgeist: deep work, digital minimalism, and slow productivity. Michael Easter, a fitness journalist, describes the comfort crisis that afflicts contemporary America and advocates for deliberately choosing discomfort in everyday actions, like taking the stairs instead of the escalator. Wendell Berry, Jenny Odell, and Matthew Crawford embody similar ethos in their writing. These thought leaders are collectively igniting a revolution against soul-sucking tech and conspicuous convenience.

I humbly suggest a critical nuance. Resisting the smooth world—our world of modernity, convenience, and smart devices—isn’t the goal. Nor am I suggesting we revolt against these forces and seek liberation from their suffocating regime. Why fight something when we could return to what’s natural?

The Wrinkly Razor isn’t rebellion. It’s a reclamation of effort, attention, and memory. Write the first draft by hand. Take the stairs. Handmake your pasta. Turn off the GPS. Let the wrinkles form as you find your way home.

I loved The Berenstain Bears as a kid. They had a book about every scenario that could afflict a nuclear family of bears, but I remember one book most of all: The Green-Eyed Monster. When Brother Bear got a shiny new bicycle for his birthday, Sister Bear was filled with longing. Not only did she desire what she did not have, but if she couldn’t have it, neither should Brother Bear. That feeling transformed Sister Bear into a Grinch-like creature with green fur and evil eyes.

The green-eyed monster scared me because I imagined it lurking in my closet or beneath my bed. But that childhood fear was misplaced. The true terror of the green-eyed monster was not some clawed creature but corruption from within.

Like a cancer, envy mutates our souls in four stages of increasing destruction.

Stage I: Desire

The Bard coined the term “green-eyed monster” to describe the fatal flaw of Iago, whose desire for power unraveled him. Humans cannot escape desire. We may gaze upon another’s body on TikTok and want their abs, hair, or lips. We see an impressive house on Instagram and want it for our own. These desires are not limited to the material. We yearn for the quick wit of a podcast host or the quiet confidence of an actor. We crave intellect—an author’s attention to detail or a YouTuber’s creative energy. It’s not wrong to desire, as wanting can fuel our ambition.

Like the sun, desire is a source of energy. However, as too much sun can burn our skin, too much exposure to desire can burn our souls. Social media is built upon the idea of influence—of exposing users to alluring products or ideas to fabricate desire. When ensnared in desire, users will pay to satiate it—whether with direct dollars or attention to ads.

Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher, argued that human envy was the fundamental fuel for an economic engine like the U.S. To “keep up with the Joneses,” society must want what each other has, while a political system like democracy ensures nobody can achieve more than anyone else. “Benign envy,” claims Russell, may trick a person to work harder to achieve more status.

A society founded on desire is nothing novel. When Romans built their impressive monuments, they often engraved pro invidia on the cornerstones, meaning “to be envied.” Rome believed that creating something worthy of envy is commendable. Pro invidia is such a powerful force that the semiconductor company powering the growth of AI not only sports a green-eyed logo but calls itself Nvidia.

Eyes are the windows to the soul, and a green eye is the symptom of a deeper problem.

Stage II: Resentment

An influencer may peddle a “limited edition,” so we save money and work hard to attain it. Once achieved, we feel a sense of accomplishment and happiness, but that joy fades as soon as our eye wanders to the next shiny object. We seek to fill the hole in our lives, but the more we pour into it, the deeper the abyss becomes.

When we’re consistently advertised new things without appreciating what we have, desire can mutate. A scarcity mindset takes hold, and our paleolithic brains believe that if someone else has a good thing, we cannot have it. Siblings become rivals for parental affection, and colleagues become competitors for limited promotions. When desire advances to resentment, we do not celebrate the success of loved ones but hate them for threatening us. Our gaze grows green.

The Latin invidia is the root of envy—video is “to see or look,” so when prefixed with in- (“not”), invidia means “to look upon with disdain.” A person afflicted by stage two invidia looks upon others with “biting eyes,” a stare with fangs intent to curse the objects of their gaze. Greco-Romans believed in humorism, the idea that the body was controlled by “humors,” bodily fluids that shaped one’s demeanor. A person with excessive choleric bile could develop a greenish tint indicative of a bitter disposition. Green eyes distort our perception—instead of seeing others’ success as good or neutral, the envious misinterpret another’s fortune as a personal loss.

A society plagued by rampant consumerism allows resentment to fester. When directed at individuals, this resentment can escalate into hate toward groups, poisoning our politics and distorting our collective perspective.

Stage III: Schadenfreude

When we succumb to hate, we start to justify it. We despise the person driving the car of our dreams and assume they are a liar, a cheat, or some entitled jerk. When resentment becomes justified, our minds spawn more evil thoughts. We may imagine the envied losing, experiencing pain, or suffering. But this imagined misfortune is not just a passing thought; it becomes a source of pleasure.

The Germans, of course, have a word for this: schadenfreude—joy at another’s sorrow. Schadenfreude warps our passions. We hear about the coastal elite losing everything in a fire and are tickled with righteousness. We learn about a smug, attractive person getting their face mauled by a leopard and experience utter joy. It’s a spiritual sickness, yet a commonplace feeling.

This flavor of schadenfreude is a new phenomenon. We used to covet our physical neighbors, seeing them daily and comparing ourselves. But now, anyone creating content on the Internet becomes our neighbor, so the surface area for envy expands exponentially. We do not just experience friendly neighborhood envy but schadenfreude on a global scale.

The goddess Invidia was often depicted with a serpent coiled around her breast and biting her heart to signify her self-devouring bitterness. It’s the perfect illustration of stage three invidia. We’re like the goddess, wrapping serpents around our flesh to drip venom into our veins. Like cancer, envy mutates the goodness within us, leaving us incapable of genuine happiness.

At a societal scale, schadenfreude manifests in cancel culture and movements based on harming one’s enemies versus furthering one’s own agenda. When the Right votes to “own the libs” or the Left enacts policies intent on riling up conservatives, schadenfreude is at play. A society that is not interested in building becomes one intent on destroying its enemies, leaving everyone worse off.

Stage IV: Malice

Lucifer became so envious of God’s supremacy that he sought to dismantle creation by bringing sin and death into the world. The fallen angel desired divine rule and became resentful of God when he could not attain it. That resentment led him to find joy in humankind's suffering, and that warped passion led him to grow claws of malice to inflict more suffering.

In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas defines two flavors of sin: venial and mortal. Venial exists in the mind—evil in thought but not in action. Desire, resentment, and schadenfreude are sins of the soul but remain venial, for they do not directly harm others. A mortal sin is when someone deliberately incites the suffering of others. When we succumb to malice, we sabotage those we envy. We commit slander against a colleague to undermine their efforts and spread rumors about friends to tarnish their reputations. Acts of malice are dangerous because they are one-way doors. Once committed, irreparable harm may occur or drive us to act outside the law.

A malicious society acts accordingly. Politicians pit racial groups against each other, create gender wars and class conflicts, and place the blame for societal collapse on older generations to drive children apart from their parents. Narratives like “Eat the Rich,” which speak to the growing wealth gap between the owning class and the rest of society, are based on envy. These narratives may be valid critiques of a broken financial system, but they are steeped in malice that can beget violence.

Envy paints a dismal situation for the individual and society—a world of monsters with green-eyed glares and malice-soaked claws. How might we fight this cancer?

A Cure

The Western virtue of charity, or caritas, is the canonical antidote to envy. However, the first three stages of invidia are an internal problem, and charity implies external action. We can commit acts of charity, but if our hearts still carry envy, a downstream cure will not resolve the root cause. Buddhism offers a more internal solution to this venial sin in the “Four Brahmavihārās,” a set of principles for healing spiritual maladies. One of these is muditā, joy in another’s joy. If we can develop muditā, we might drive envy into remission.

While elegant, developing muditā is easier said than done, especially in a society centered around envy. The path to a cure is somewhat circuitous. We might begin by freeing ourselves from the systems that exacerbate desire with digital minimalism. Quitting social media, installing ad blockers, and reducing online consumption can limit the surface area of influence. Once we minimize desire, we can reverse our resentments by challenging ourselves. In seeking to create something of our own, we may feel less compelled to tear down someone else.

A few years ago, I decided to run a marathon. Before this, I held some ill feelings toward runners—believing (falsely) that they considered themselves superior and looked upon non-runners with snobbery. But after six months of grueling training, I began to admire the people I once admonished. When race day came, and I joined the hundreds of people who elected to torture themselves, I learned what muditā can feel like. For every step of that 26.2 miles, strangers encouraged me. Dozens offered me Gatorade and Gu, cheered me on, and celebrated as I crossed the finish line. The joy I felt was amplified by the joy strangers felt in supporting me.

Envy may afflict our society, divide us, and incite hate for those in a different group. But society is comprised of individuals—we are each a drop in the endless ocean. We cannot change the world overnight, but we might expel the envy from our souls.

I once lived in New Orleans, a city of contrasts: towering churches bordered by voodoo shops, fine dining amid swamps, and a resilient local community bombarded by tourism. My nostrils still remember the distinct abhorrence of party puddles on my morning commute. Last week was Ash Wednesday, and I can picture the Mardi Gras beads and masks that littered Bourbon Street.

You would never know the people cleaning restaurants and riding elevators to their law offices were the same ones running amok in the streets the night prior. But that was the beauty of Mardi Gras—everyone could enjoy the carnival behind a mask. People could mingle, despite their class or standing, and let loose without reservation.

But Mardi Gras isn’t the only time we wear masks. Any nation, company, movement, or person aspiring to be something they are not today can pretend. Whether donning the comedy or tragedy mask, pretending has a price.

Comedy of the Fish

Anyone who has aspired to transcend their limitations is like this fish. And that fish is pretentious. The word carries a negative connotation in popular culture, but do we even know what it means? Beginning with its etymology: the Latin prae, meaning “before,” and tendere, meaning “stretch” or “extend,” combine to mean “extend before.” Dan Fox, a cultural critic and art writer, illustrates it clearly: “Think of [pretension] as holding something in front of you, like actors wearing masks in the ancient Greek theater.”1

Pretending is as old as human culture. In ancient theater, when actors donned masks to become characters and tell stories to the public, they perpetuated ideas that shaped culture and even became the cornerstones of nations. Rome was founded on the legend of Romulus and Remus, but whether these brothers existed did not matter because this story of Rome gave its people a sense of divine destiny. The pretension of living up to this myth manifested in one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. In the U.S., Manifest Destiny was an idea that America could expand through a radical sense of exceptionalism. No facts predicated this belief, and it came at a gruesome cost, but the pretension of early frontiersmen enabled a new nation.

As America became “civilized,” the Manifest Destiny myth transformed into the American Dream—a belief that anyone could invent themselves into whomever they imagined. In contrast to the socially stratified society of 19^th-century Europe, this pretension was intoxicating. F. Scott Fitzgerald captured this desire in the character of Jay Gatsby, a man who transformed from a poor nobody in North Dakota into a man of wealth and esteem through his own means.2 The Great Gatsby was the fish who wished to fly.

Tragedy of the Crab

If our provincial friend starts dressing fancy or an analytical engineer attempts to paint, we label them pretentious. Founded on the belief that authenticity is an a priori good, we claim our actions “defend truth” and guide people back to their “real selves.” Beyond moral policing, we might believe we are altruistic protectors, preventing each other from donning artificial wings and flying too close to the sun. Even though we tell young people that it’s great to dream of flying, we don’t want a precocious kid to fall to an Icarus death.

Beyond moral or altruistic objections to pretension, the real reason we reject it is simpler: people fear what they don’t understand. When something masquerades as reality, it threatens their worldview, so they label it fraud.

Of course, some pretension is fraudulent. When Elizabeth Holmes pretended to be the next Steve Jobs and built Theranos on a lie, she didn’t stretch toward greatness—she faked it entirely, risking lives in the process. But fear of fraud shouldn’t become an excuse for gatekeeping ambition. Not everyone who aspires beyond their station is a con artist.

When Jay Gatsby became a man of means and hosted extravagant parties in West Egg, Tom Buchanan, who owned the shining green light across the bay, would not have it. To Tom, Gatsby’s pretension to become part of the wealthy elite was offensive: how dare this lower-class man see them as equals! To Tom, status was not earned; it was a birthright. And Gatsby, with all his illusions, had no place pretending otherwise. So, Tom made it his mission to expose Gatsby as a fraud.

Crab mentality kicks in when someone attempts to rise above their station, and we steer them back to their lane. Dream big, but don’t go about living it.

The Transformative Mask

Max Beerbohm’s 1897 novel The Happy Hypocrite tells the story of a man who deceives a woman to marry him.3 The protagonist, George, is a degenerate gambler, drinker, and womanizer, but he falls for a sweet woman, Jenny, who rejects him because she will only marry a man with the “face of a saint.” So, skeezy George purchases the mask of a saint and proposes to Jenny, and she accepts. Throughout their engagement, George witnesses his saintly face in reflection and slowly changes his behavior, such as donating to charity instead of gambling. When the mask is finally torn from George, Jenny looks upon the true face of a saint.

Without the mask, George would never have become a virtuous man. Pretension need not lead to fraud; sometimes, the mask may lead to genuine transformation. That power is not restricted to individuals.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, black and white Americans were anything but equal. King could have offered an authentic speech illustrated with sadness and spite; he could have reflected on the past atrocities that afflicted his race, and he could have demanded change—all of which would have been justified. But King pretended the world was better than it was. Even though the words were untrue in 1963, in speaking them, King inspired the actions to make them true. While racial equality has not yet been achieved, King led to the end of explicit segregation in the US.

Without pretension, there can be no class mobility. But pretension does not guarantee transformation. Left to its own devices, humanity will default to a pecking order, for a rigid class structure lends itself to efficiency, clear direction, and scalability. But as history has repeatedly shown, caste systems severely limit individual liberty and lead to corruption and violence. Yet, we seem to have a collective amnesia of those atrocities as we give into the gravitational pull of the status quo.

Gatsby died staring at the green light across the bay. Fixated on a dream that he could not grasp, Gatsby’s tragedy was not his pretension but his inability to see how far he’d come. Unlike the Happy Hypocrite, Gatsby never removed his mask to discover he had become the great man of his dreams.

Pretension may be dangerous, but never daring to wear the mask is cowardly. Without it, we are crabs in a bucket, dragging each other down. But with it, we might fly.

It’s February, and your resolutions are dead.

I made a 2025 resolution to write prose for thirty minutes each day. It’s a modest goal, something I have done before but have gotten lax with, allowing noble alternatives to take place—research, journaling, and planning. Despite my resolution, I delayed work on this essay for several weeks. I knew what to do and had the time to do it, but I didn’t.

I was possessed.

A demon extended its claws, and I willingly accepted its evil embrace.

Early Christian ascetics called this force the Noonday Demon. The demon manifested as a lethargy that overcame monks halfway through their days, tempting them away from prayer with restlessness, excessive appetite, boredom, neglect, and hopelessness—any distraction to their spiritual traction.

Despite its temporal name, the Noonday Demon is not simply a circadian rhythm, for it could strike any time—morning, noon, or night. Nor is it burnout, although I’m sure it could exploit that chink in one’s monastic armor. The Noonday Demon might seem like procrastination, but its force is far more pernicious than a productivity problem. Added over days, years, and decades, the Noonday Demon steers us toward a sin whose name we have long forgotten.

The Name of the Sin

Our words define our thoughts, which influence our actions and shape our souls. In a culture deficient in morally thick language, we are limited in speaking about spirituality, so we overwork vague terms like “vibe” and “aura points.” Like marionettes, we are susceptible to the manipulative tugs of the Noonday Demon because we aren’t aware of the string.

The Seven Deadly Sins offer sloth as the nearest word to describe this demonic force. Sloth is a “disinclination toward exertion,” a tendency toward laziness. Yet, lounging around does not seem particularly sinful, especially alongside greed or wrath. And the puritanical stance of “idle hands are the devil’s playthings” has a cartoonish, judgy quaintness that’s easy to dismiss. So, sloth is an insufficient depiction.

Sloth’s etymology reveals a more interesting concept. Sloth is a translation of the Latin acedia, borrowed from the Greek akḗdeia, based on kêdos, meaning “care,” and the prefix a-, “without.”1 Therefore, acedia means “without care.” This absence of care implies a state of indifference that, when sustained, can beget negligence. Like ennui, where a disinterest in life results in a general malaise, acedia is a sin of inaction that leads to self-pity.

Acedia is spiritual numbness. When we succumb to acedia, we forgo our purpose and neglect our responsibilities as citizens, workers, friends, and family members. We stop showing up to our lives and stunt our souls.

Acedia’s corruptive force is best illustrated by its absence in our language. Acedia faded into sloth, which gave way to laziness. Laziness is hardly sinful since it shares positive connotations of rest and self-care—“lazy Sundays” are an expression of the Biblical Sabbath—in a world obsessed with hustle culture. Each permutation of the concept sheds a layer of its original meaning until it has faded into oblivion. Acedia, the word, is a metaphysical victim of acedia.

The Altar of Pragmatism

The Odyssey is a trove of mythic misadventures: The Blinding of the Cyclops, the Song of the Sirens, and the Land of the Lotus Eaters. When I reread the latter in search of inspiration for this essay, I expected several pages to reflect its significance. Yet, a mere stanza is dedicated to the Lotus Eaters.2

TL; DR: They ate some lotus and did nothing.

Such is a life afflicted by acedia—passivity is bland and unnoteworthy. For the narrative sticking power of the epic, Homer had no choice but to drag Odysseus’s crew back to their ship.

In Dante’s Purgatorio, souls seeking redemption must ascend a mountain of sin.3 On the fourth terrace of Mount Purgatory resides the apathetic souls whose carelessness in life led to eternal sadness. As they slouch in the dirt, the souls must mourn to overcome acedia. Mourning is a deeply emotional process, the unsexy and miserable sister of love. But in mourning, the soul atones for the affection it withheld in life.

Under the spell of acedia, we are shrouded from the light of joy, satisfaction, or fulfillment. To break from this torpor, we need an intense, unbridled burst of energy. We need passion!

While zealous love may have been acceptable in Pre-Renaissance Florence, our culture approaches passion with skepticism. Almost any self-help book worth its merit will claim that “following your passion” is a trap:

“Passion is just an emotion—it won’t pay your bills.”

“Skills create passion, not the other way around.”

“Don’t rely on passion—rely on a system.”

“Find meaning outside of work, not in it.”

The advice is sound. The anti-passion movement intends to steer people toward sensible life choices, what Arthur Brooks calls “resume virtues”4—focusing on skill-building, developing healthy habits, and making prudent financial decisions—to survive in a post-capitalistic society. However, the second-order consequence of anti-passion rhetoric is that people may sacrifice things like purpose and love at the altar of pragmatism.

We know what paves the road to hell. Setting aside practicality's good intentions, we can reconsider passion's place in our lives. Only after Dante embraced chaotic love did he free himself of acedia. Perhaps our skepticism keeps us trapped on the fourth terrace.

Passion as Exorcism

Steven Pressfield, an author who didn’t publish a novel until his early fifties, outlined a strategy for pursuing passion in The War of Art.5 Pressfield began by separating the amateur from the professional. An amateur—from the French, meaning “one who loves”—behaves sporadically and chaotically, for they are at the mercy of their passions. The professional is their stoic foil—showing up daily, engaging in steady and predictable effort. This advice aligns with the anti-passion argument, seemingly promoting the drudgery of a working stiff, but Pressfield’s solution is founded on a critical nuance: Passion is the starting point. The love of something is what inspires work in the first place. Passion is the why, and professionalism—consistency, diligence, discipline—is the how. The force that delays progress on our novels, business plans, marathon training, and that essential but uncomfortable conversation, Pressfield names Resistance. Resistance is acedia.

Acedia sedates us, and passion is the antidote if we take it seriously and put in the work. Passion need not assume the form of a career, artistic endeavor, or romantic pursuit. We can find this love by showing up—at our jobs, in our communities, and within our families. There are endless opportunities to create goodness if we allow ourselves to care. It’s February, the month of love, and it’s time to reinvigorate our passions.

Exorcise the Noonday Demon by resurrecting your resolutions.

After a year hiatus, the turtle emerges from the frozen land of Minnesota with a story.

Last August, I sat on a park bench and tried to focus on breathing.1 But stillness eluded me. The air was hot and sticky, and mosquitos feasted on my blood, which usually boiled with rage over their incessant slurping. Then, for a moment, my hatred was replaced by a thought: The average male mosquito lives for seven days.

Two thousand mosquito generations have passed during my lifetime, and so too would this one. By next week, the micro-vampires on my skin would perish.

Then I considered Earth and how most landmasses have seen 30,000 human generations. A centenarian’s entire existence has passed between a land’s breath.

Earlier that summer, I had moved from Seattle, where I had lived for five years. My existence on that chunk of land was relatively shorter than the time a mosquito spends sucking blood from my leg.

If a mosquito could leave such an impression on my leg, I wondered about my impact on Seattle. But who was Seattle before I met her?

Mother Earth delivered an isthmus of 84 square miles well before concepts like isthmus, miles, and time emerged. This chunk of land didn’t have a name for most of its existence, and it never cared whether it did or what that name could be. Instead, this daughter of Mother Earth defined herself by her siblings: Puget Sound hugged her western edge, and the Cascade Range towered to her east. We now call this isthmus Seattle. Despite the grating glaciers and vomiting volcanoes that plagued them, Seattle and her siblings learned to sit and breathe.

Seattle inhaled, seeing her first people.

The Coast Salish pulled salmon from Puget Sound and built longhouses along the shore to protect their goods from the moody weather. These people divided themselves into the Duwamish and Suquamish, but their leader—Chief Si’ahl, whose name inspired hers—cared more about similarities than differences. Seattle observed these inhabitants, for although their forms differed from hers, their essence did not. They seemed to know of a world beyond hers, so they held this one lightly.

Seattle exhaled, feeling the people, trees, and rocks upon her spine.

Different people arrived, aspiring to transform Seattle into a city. They twisted her trees into structures and built them quicker and closer than those of the previous people but didn’t stop harvesting once the structures were built. Saws buzzed, timbers cracked, and the ground shook as trees rolled down her slopes to the waterfront. As logs floated off Seattle into the Sound, fish were hauled from the Sound into Seattle to feed the growing city. The land was scarred, but she didn’t feel much change. The heat of forest fires returned in 1889, and timber burned as it always had, transforming the new town to ash. But the people brought brick, steel, and other earthly contortions to concoct another city.

Seattle inhaled as her scars began to fade.

Seattle had long defined herself by her topography, but the people of the new city were determined to change that.2 Gold was said to lie in the Klondike, so the people made her a hub for fortune seekers. As “Gateway to the Yukon,” Seattle became home to opportunists who sold inaccurate maps, faulty gear, and dogs that could smell gold. Brothels and bars sprouted overnight to entertain prospectors. The city grew from the promise of gold—larger than it had from logging and fishing. Under this ambition, mankind plowed one of her seven hills into the Sound.

Seattle exhaled, releasing her identification with the hills and shoreline.

A needle rose into space as the city changed, but not only in appearance. Unlike her shifting land, the people held the same shape. Yet, their energy had changed, or at least their ability to express it. In the lead-up to the new millennium, they shared with the outside world their inside one, flitting sensations like anger, fear, and disgust: Grunge, they called it, an expression of truth without polish.

Seattle inhaled, resting with whatever sensations made themselves known.

The people did not remain still. They learned to contort the Earth in new ways—structures now scraped the sky, and servers streamed software in silence. Planes lifted their wheels and disappeared above the clouds, while others emerged like rain. Like the longhouses of the Salish, warehouses labeled Costco and Amazon spread across the land, holding everything but salmon while the fish refilled the Sound. These changes were neither separate from Seattle nor one with her.

Seattle exhaled, unburdened by duality.

My five-year presence in the Ballard neighborhood was hardly a thought bubble to Seattle. Yet, the speed of change I witnessed on her bearded chin was unprecedented. I watched mechanic shops convert to breweries and entire blocks of single-family homes twist into townhouses. A collection of three dozen lawnmowers rusting on the corner morphed into a Cybertruck. I biked uphill in the rain over her extreme topography, oblivious to the scars masked by glass and concrete.

Like a mosquito on my leg, I left no impact on Seattle. But as life-affirming as my blood is to a mosquito, so were the years in Seattle to me. I evolved my career, made friends, endured pandemics, and rode out my twenties. But before Seattle could inhale again, I was gone—another mosquito in passing.

What’s Next?

Expect a new essay from me on the first Wednesday of the month. Compared to articles in 2023, 2025’s newsletters will be less pragmatic and more philosophical. Less direct, more exploratory. Less about work, more about mythology, language, history, and culture. Like Seattle, Turtle’s Pace is a work of perpetual reinvention.

Let’s begin again.

Christmas to New Year’s is my favorite week of the year. Life slows down, and I have time for reflection, resolutions, and planning. As you wrap up your year, here are 23 learnings I hope you’ll find helpful.

1. Default to numbered lists, not bullet points

When writing lists—to-dos, acceptance criteria, or otherwise—use numbers to:

1. Convey order, such as logical sequence or priority.

2. Display the volume of items (i.e., 23 learnings from this year)

3. Label items for easier identification (i.e., refer to #6 for setting resolutions)

2. Read in the morning

Reading is the habit of improving attention span, mind, and soul. Rather than the chaos of news, email, or social media, reading in the morning focuses on one thing and injects your mind with ideas to ponder throughout the day. A mere 15 minutes of either fiction or nonfiction at breakfast has worked wonders for me.

3. Plan the week on Friday

Avoid the Sunday Scaries or Mad Mondays by planning your week on Friday. Friday is perfect for tying up loose ends, reflecting, and plotting how to tackle the coming week. I used to plan on Sunday, but shifting to Friday has given me increased calm as I enter the weekend.

4. Stop eating after 20:00

Studies have proven that daily intermittent fasts of 12+ hours improve numerous health and wellness factors. Plus, ceasing food intake a few hours before bed can also make it easier to fall asleep. A simple rule can accomplish both goals: No food after 20:00 (8:00 PM).

5. Prevent sickness when traveling with immunity blasting

I used to become sick either while or after traveling without fail. I traveled over a dozen times in 2023, both internationally and cross-country, but never fell ill. There’s no definitive science on this, but anecdotally, I drank Vitamin-C supplements for a few days before travel and every day during. If I began to feel sick, I chewed zinc tablets every three hours to ward off illness.

6. Develop new habits that cost 5 to 15 minutes

The classic advice for building new habits is to start small. Before 2023, I interpreted this as microscopically small (i.e., floss one tooth, do one pullup, write one word) to get started. But I’ve learned that some habits can be too small to matter. Instead, aim for attainable habits of meaningful size to signal to yourself that you’re committing to something worthwhile. A good rule of thumb: Aim for a habit that takes 5 to 15 minutes to complete. Jog for 10 minutes, read for 15 minutes, meditate for 5 minutes.

7. Some notes are better than no notes

I struggle to keep consistent book notes. But even logging a few phrases to capture your learnings is invaluable for future reference. Seeking perfect notes will leave you with no notes.

8. Strength and cardio, not strength or cardio

For the past five months, I’ve pursued strength and cardio fitness improvements in parallel. I’ve targeted these seven exercises and tracked performance each month:

1. 300 Meter Sprint

2. 1.5 Mile Run

3. Pushups

4. Pullups

5. Bench Press

6. Squat

7. Deadlift

I follow these general benchmarks.

9. Chew gum in private

Don’t chew gum in a car with passengers. Don’t chew gum on planes. Don’t chew gum in an office. Don’t chew gum at the store. Chomp away from others.

10. Drink one glass of water for every alcoholic beverage

I’ve found that one glass of water for every serving of alcohol can reduce tomorrow’s headaches.

11. Daily stretching enables quicker recovery

I had several bad accidents from skiing, biking, and climbing this year, but I didn’t lose mobility during recovery. I credit this to a simple stretch routine I’ve performed daily for the past year.

12. Use Scandinavian bedding to reduce sleep disruption

During a trip to Iceland in April, I noticed that most beds feature twin comforters side-by-side instead of one queen comforter. This “Scandinavian bedding style” prevents sleep disruption between partners, leading to increased sleep quantity and quality. I made the switch and noticed fewer nightly wakeups (according to my Apple Watch).

13. Aim for a 10:1 fulfilled-to-broken promise ratio

A high say-do ratio is the foundation of a strong reputation. To build trust with others, follow through on ten promises for every broken commitment.

14. How we think matters more than what we think

Tim Urban’s What’s Our Problem? is an enlightening tome on America’s present social challenges. The central idea was the “thinking ladder”—a framework for evaluating the quality of one’s critical thinking skills. Our titular “problem” isn’t what we think but how we think, and my key learning is to take accountability for how we process information and not outsource that thinking to external sources.

15. Develop an inner sense of captaincy

When a ship nearly crashed into a cliff off the coast of the Galapagos islands because of a new and unalert captain, shipmate David Whyte learned a valuable lesson: Develop an inner sense of captaincy. It’s easy to outsource our thinking, safety, and direction to leaders at work, church, or even in our families. But no person is infallible or permanent. We are responsible for captaining our own ships.

16. Happiness has three legs

Happiness is a three-legged stool of purpose, satisfaction, and joy:

1. Purpose: Feeling like our roles and activities have meaning.

2. Satisfaction: Feeling like we are accomplishing a goal.

3. Joy: Experiencing pleasure and fun.

We often don’t feel all three but need this trio to feel happy.

17. But first, actively manage unhappiness

It’s often better to remove alligators than add kittens because the alligators will eat the kittens. Likewise, many of us begin the day with a natural level of unhappiness. Trying to pursue happiness (often joy) without dealing with our unhappiness is a recipe for more misery. For me, a few daily rituals remove my natural unhappiness, so I have a chance at capturing happiness:

1. Reading

2. Journaling

3. Exercising

18. Don’t let pride limit your happiness

We may derive happiness from things we’re embarrassed about (i.e., model trains or talking about tax rates), so we don’t wholly lean into them. We worry about damaging our pride, so we mask these interests to avoid looking “strange” around others. But life is best when we intensely pursue passions, indicators of our purpose. As I read in Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard this year:

19. Look at people in their left eye

When speaking to others, look into their left eye. Since most mothers are right-handed, they hold their children in a way that causes the baby to gaze at its mother from its left eye. The amygdala builds a positive emotional association with attention given to the left eye. So, making eye contact in this way can foster a deeper, more trusting connection with someone.

20. Lightly script one-on-one conversations

Either out of laziness or a fear of coming off as robotic, we tend to under-prepare for one-on-one meetings. However, these meetings allow deep and meaningful conversation, so showing up without a plan disrespects the other person. Instead, list topics you want to cover, write a few sentences to convey an idea, or craft some questions, and you’ll consistently have more productive and enjoyable conversations. I keep a running document for each person I regularly meet with.

21. Avoid clichéd thoughts

Writers grumble about cliches like “boil the ocean” and “open a can of worms” because they signify lazy thinking. I gravitate toward cliches in speech and writing when I have nothing to offer, so I’m better off not saying anything. But when I have a thought to share, I pause to consider the most straightforward way to say it, which often emits a novel expression.

22. Write the first draft longhand

I overcame writer’s block this fall by abandoning my former approach to fiction writing: meticulous planning. Instead, I picked up a paper notebook and handwrote a story’s first draft without resorting to an outline. Writing longhand reinvigorated my joy as I could experience the story's novelty, curiosity fueling my pen.

23. Write many, many drafts to find the essence

I read several books by George Saunders this year, but the best was A Swim in a Pond in the Rain—a close reading of seven Russian short stories. One metaphor that stuck with me was this: Imagine you’re gifted an apartment and a decoration budget. If you decorated it all in one week, the apartment would be some percentage you. But if you decorated it week over week for a year, it would be a significantly higher percentage more you. One or two drafts can convey a point, but several, dozens, or even hundreds of drafts will bring it increasingly closer to its essential form.

Write each draft without fear; you will revise it later.

The Next Chapter

This is my last article for the foreseeable future. Thanks to the 1200 of you who have subscribed to read my articles over the previous three years, we've had a good journey. Turtle’s Pace isn’t going anywhere—you’re always welcome to read the archives—but the turtle is going dormant so I can focus my creative energy elsewhere in 2024.

Without further ado, I’m excited to launch Product Field Guide—a newsletter on how to be an effective product manager! If you work in technology or have an interest in product thinking, you should subscribe 😃

Product Field Guide

Navigating technology to solve problems for people.

By Justin Andersun

Thanks again for reading Turtle’s Pace, and I wish you a Happy New Year!

All ratios are wrong, but some are useful.

I’ve recently started to track my weight, subcutaneous fat percentage, basal metabolic rate, and other body composition metrics. In my research, I quickly discovered that body mass index (BMI)—the ratio of weight to height—is a notoriously poor metric for one’s health, as it doesn’t consider factors like muscle, bone density, and fat composition.

Although I can’t rely on BMI as the single metric of my metabolic health, I still believe that useful ratios exist for other circumstances. Physical health has many quantitative metrics—such as body fat percentage and VO2 max—that we need not rely on simple ratios. But ratios can be helpful in harder-to-quantify domains, like interpersonal relationships.

Conversations, feedback, and vague concepts like “trust” may benefit from simple ratios.

The Conversation Ratio

When conversing with strangers or acquaintances, I err on the side of asking too many questions. I’d like to say this is because I’m curious, but much of this tendency arises because I’m self-conscious that what I’ll say won’t interest the other person. So, I pepper them with questions instead.

While generous on the surface, too many questions can feel like an interrogation. If one’s conversational partner is also a bit insecure, this one-sided questioning can cause discomfort. According to Ramit Sethi, a finance and psychology blogger, a helpful rule of thumb for conversations is question-question-statement.

Of course, we shouldn’t follow this too literally and become a chatbot or simply “check the box” and ask questions without listening. However, erring on the side of curiosity and humility is a good starting point. Ask twice as many questions as statements.

2:1 is a decent ratio of questions to statements.

The Feedback Ratio

Another challenging area of interpersonal relationships is sharing positive and negative feedback. With our spouses and partners, constant criticism can lead to insistent arguments. Yet, only dolling out praise to avoid conflict can lead to deep-seated resentment.

In the workplace, untrained managers gravitate toward an almost satiric approach to delivering criticism to employees: The compliment sandwich. While one good feedback, followed by criticism, followed by another praise, might feel right to the giver, the receiver can experience emotional whiplash and leave the conversation unclear of what they need to fix.

A natural affinity to symmetry may lead us to consider a balanced solution—one positive feedback per negative feedback—but this open-faced compliment sandwich isn’t much better. Psychology studies, such as that conducted by Marcial Losada in 1999, concluded that an imbalanced ratio of praise to criticism can yield the best employee performance.

The study found that 5.6 praises per every criticism is the ideal ratio for delivering feedback. Fewer than five praises can be demoralizing, but more than ten praises per criticism can have adverse effects, such as ego inflation or depriving employees of the constructive criticism needed for growth.

5:1 is a decent ratio of praise to criticism.

The Trust Ratio

Neither conversations nor feedback matter if there’s no trust.

In a world inundated with spam, scams, and identity theft, trust is the new gold.

Trust forms from a strong reputation, a strong reputation emerges from a reliable history, and a reliable history reflects one’s say-do ratio.

Our say-do ratio is how often we do what we say we’ll do. The perfect say-do ratio is 1:1, and it should be the North Star of commitment, but this is very hard for any human to uphold—those who do float above the crowd.

After many hours of research, I struggled to find a good quantification for a reasonable say-do ratio, and most writing on the topic boils down to the standard advice of “under promise and over deliver.” It’s a helpful starting point—certainly better than the alternative of “all talk and no action”—but it’s unsatisfying and doesn’t correlate to trust. For instance, if one says they can complete a task in ten hours, but it only takes one hour, they will undoubtedly have an excellent say-do ratio, but they’re sandbagging, and that habit can erode trust.

I propose a different metric: fulfilled promises to broken promises.

In my experience, even the most reliable people occasionally miss, but those slipups are rare. I’ve found that the ratio of fulfilled to broken promises is much more lopsided than that of conversations or feedback. An acceptable ratio seems to be ten fulfilled promises for every broken promise. In other words, to “undo” one slipup, one must fulfill their following ten commitments to restore trust.

10:1 is a decent ratio of fulfilled to broken promises.

While 100% fulfillment is the gold standard, to err is human, and in the words of Aesop: “After all is said and done, more is said than done.”

Junk Drawer

1. Turn doodles into realistic drawings with TLDraw.

2. Explore a visual history of the Latin Alphabet.

3. Use fairytale story structures for clear communication.

If Thanksgiving were a product, it would have mixed reviews.

Some people love turkey and stuffing. Others hate the heavy food. Some enjoy the parade and football games. Others curse its colonial roots. Some cherish the time with family. Others brace for dinner table arguments. Some treasure the long weekend. Others grumble about chaotic travel. Some appreciate the coming Christmas season. Others bemoan Black Friday.

Thanksgiving garners extreme feelings. When a product draws strong emotion, there’s a signal worth listening to.

Core Product

During my (surprisingly unchaotic!) travel this weekend, I reflected on one of my early lessons about product management. When building a new technology, understanding the primary value is essential because that key benefit is the core product. The core product is often a company’s first and most profitable offering because it defines the essence of the business or—dare I say—the Soul of the Corporation^TM. Oxymoron aside, consider Windows as Microsoft’s core product and Search as Google’s core product. Windows and Search define the public perception of their respective companies and contribute to the lion’s share of revenue.

Like Thanksgiving, Microsoft and Google have skewed public perceptions. Some appreciate their “innovative” spirits and rely heavily on their products, but many loathe their near monopolistic control of the tech sector and influence over society. Yet, their core products—Windows and Search—aren’t the source of derision. We are neutral toward the core product but get heated over their parent companies.

Whole Product

For a product to achieve market success, it must reach mainstream adoption with its target demographic. Geoffrey A. Moore, in his seminal Crossing the Chasm, defines the gap between early adopters and the early majority as the “chasm” that products must cross if they’re going to survive. The key to bridging this gap, states Moore, is offering a whole product.

The whole product is everything surrounding the core product: The look & feel, the packaging, the brand image, the customer support, and “end-user harmony.” This intangible stuff can create more power than the core product alone. Apple repeatedly mastered the whole product experience by creating an aesthetic brand in an otherwise nerdy industry. The iPod was a great core product—a state-of-the-art digital music player—but what made it an industry leader was its whole product experience: iTunes. The massive, easy-to-use music library offered legitimate song purchases in a market saturated with shady rippers and torrents; the whole product experience drove Apple’s success in music-playing hardware.

When we think about Thanksgiving, we think about the whole product: the turkey, the travel, the parade, the problematic pilgrims. Google is more than Search; it’s our email service provider, a privacy predator, and a Big Tech overlord. These other things shape our perception and give us pause.

Total Product

While the core product is the substance—the raw features and value—no one can receive its value without packaging. And no whole product scheme will matter if the core value is missing. The total product crosses the chasm to mainstream adoption.

Thanksgiving is as mainstream of a holiday as it gets in the US, so—in that regard—its total product offering is a success. But whatever our opinions on the whole product, we could use the next two days to reflect on its core product. Before the mashed potatoes and Purina dog show, more glaringly apparent than the Black Friday deals or familial microaggressions, the raw value lies in the name itself. The core product of Thanksgiving is gratitude.

Gratitude is something I don’t consider often or deeply enough, and I’m not alone. When normalized to a high quality of life—consistent electricity, accessible heat, clean water, affordable food, personal safety, job security, physical mobility, and reliable transportation—I take these great things for granted. Compared to our ancestors and even (sadly) members of our own cities, it's truly astonishing how provided for most of us are. Thanksgiving is our annual reminder to acknowledge that.

We may not appreciate the whole product, but the core product is worth respecting.

Junk Drawer

Find data that matches the current clock time.

I started making homemade yogurt. It’s not complicated: mix some starter, vanilla extract, and whole milk and cook it over low heat for eight hours. After letting it cool, add berries and granola, and you’ve got a healthy breakfast. It may sound trite, but this act of yogurt-making was quite profound for me.

A Better Breakfast

The idea of whole milk, quite frankly, makes me gag. I’ve never been a fan of milk, even as a kid, and I struggle to take it seriously. There’s this double-long, stainless-steel milk truck I often saw on the highway last winter, and the concept of milk sloshing around that huge thing amused me to no end. But I digress.

Let me illustrate just how dismal my prior breakfast was to underscore the gravity of my new morning ritual. I’d grab a paper towel (not a plate) and dole out a multivitamin, fish oil pill, granola bar, Greek yogurt, and banana. That was my breakfast for almost a decade, ever since I lived alone for the first time. I designed this “meal” for convenience—easy, fast calories immune to rushed morning commutes and resilient to changing environments, items I could source anywhere and store well.

It turns out that those requirements led to highly processed foods with high sugar, questionable nutritional value, and significant packaging waste. I believed I needed a daily system that could work under any circumstance and thought that if any situation messed it up, my system was worthless.

But now, as I sit down to my jar of yogurt, berries, and granola, I feel a sense of calm satisfaction. I feel gratitude in knowing I’ve started the day with a win on multiple fronts:

• Better Health. The meal is ingredient-based, containing far fewer preservatives and chemicals than processed food.

• Lower Cost. A half-gallon of milk and bulk granola is cheaper than store-bought yogurt and granola bars.

• Less Waste. I’m consuming fewer goods and generating less packaging waste.

• Improved Aesthetics. The glass jars of homemade yogurt are more visually appealing than the processed junk I’d set on a paper towel.

• More Enjoyment. I enjoy the mild empowerment inherent in the DIY ethos of the thing.

Why didn’t I do this sooner?

A Poisonous Pair

Thinking about my thousands of plastic yogurt containers floating around the Pacific Ocean makes me sad. I could have started making yogurt eight years ago, but I didn’t. My eight years of inaction were caused by a poisonous pair: ignorance and patience.

The first problem was ignorance, for I had never considered this. I was unaware that I could make my own yogurt. I was asleep to my present reality and didn’t even think to reconsider the most fundamental aspects of daily life. Until someone at work mentioned they make yogurt in an Instant Pot, I didn’t realize it was an option.

The second problem concerns me most: patience. After hearing about the idea almost six months ago, I didn’t act. The idea intrigued me, but not enough to perform a simple Google search. I wrote it off as a “cool idea for someday sometime.” I was “too busy,” and making yogurt was “too much hassle” when I could get it at the store. If I were to start “DIY stuff,” I’d wait until I had land and could garden, woodwork, and such as a package deal.

While ignorance kept me in the dark for longer, I let patience get the best of me.

Active Impatience

Don’t get me wrong; patience can be a virtue in many activities, such as index-fund investing, career building, and relationship development. But some things could benefit from impatience. It’s an important distinction: A lack of patience is a problem, implying a deficit in something that requires it. But impatience is positive, as it invites action—irritation provokes us to make things happen.

Back to yogurt making. My patience with the status quo fostered stagnation. I tolerated my current reality and was complacent to change. The root of my patience was the belief that I needed a perfect system—a breakfast that could work in any situation. This perfectionism, even over something so silly, created stagnation.

As I sat down the other morning to eat this yogurt, I realized my backward way of thinking had prevented me from achieving many changes I wanted to introduce, both big and small. I never committed to a consistent sleep schedule because I couldn’t keep an early bedtime on weekends. I withheld from entering writing contests because I felt the timing wasn’t right. I didn’t replace the curtains in my rental house, even though they let a flickering streetlight flood my bedroom all night. Back in 2020, I figured I wouldn’t live here for long, yet three years later, here I was.

Patience is a virtue and a crutch—an excuse to remain passive and wait for the perfect timing. While the best time may have been eight years ago, the second-best time is today. The clock is ticking, and that sound should irritate us.

Time to replace those curtains.

In what way are you being too patient?

Leave a comment

Junk Drawer

Use this real-life Pokedex to explore the natural world.

On Friday the Thirteenth, my cousin married a man with a pumpkin on his head. As storms raged outside the unheated barn, I watched the newlywed couple emerge from the box truck they’ll soon call home, smash the pumpkins from their heads, and dance. Spooky season is here, and I couldn’t think of a better inauguration. Halloween occurs once a year, but it contains a lesson about identity that can serve us year-round.

The danger of a single costume

In George Saunders’s “My Chivalric Fiasco,” a janitor at a Medieval theme park witnesses his boss raping a coworker. Since the boss and the coworker want to avoid embarrassment, the boss promotes the janitor to a guard. To fulfill his new responsibilities, he must take a drug called “KnightLyfe,” which causes him to behave like a chivalrous knight. As the drug takes effect, Saunders gradually elevates the prose to match the man’s changing temperament—he begins pondering Grand and Noble matters to doth restore Honour upon thee Ill-Fated Maiden. As the thoughts become increasingly chivalrous, our hero’s thoughts become action, and he announces what happened. Unfortunately, his Spoketh Truth led to only disastrous outcomes: The woman is shamed, and the man is fired.

This story illustrates an unfortunate truth about moral quandaries and the dangers of archetype fulfillment. The janitor becomes a guard and then, via a mind-altering substance, is compelled to enact his role. Albeit less dark, we follow similar patterns in our relationships with others. People like to put us in a box, and we make that box our home. We might be the methodical, data-driven operator at work, not expected to “be creative” and shy away from open-ended discussions. In a family, we might be the funny, disorganized one who isn’t taken seriously, so we don’t step up when serious matters arise.

We conform to our prescribed archetypes for social cohesion. Many resort to code-switching since it’s difficult for people to perceive each other outside simple archetypes. In different contexts, we talk about different things in different ways to different people. I speak with my cousins differently than I do with my coworkers.

But some people dislike seeing us code-switch since it breaks their mental image of us. We may wear our costumes too well and forget that an archetype is only an artifice of a larger identity.

The practice of changing costumes

Imagine roles, personalities, and behaviors as costumes filling the shelves of a pop-up Halloween store. We could wander the aisles and sample them as we please—don an artist's beret to gain creative insights, wear nerd glasses to find math comforting rather than stressful, or slip into a naughty nurse skirt to feel sexy.

Srini Pillay recommends this exercise in Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try to break from cognitive ruts. While dressing like an artist to feel creative might seem corny, temporarily rewriting an identity is profound.

Stuart Turton’s inaugural mystery novel, The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, follows a detective with eight days to solve a murder. Each day repeats itself, but he awakes in the body of a different person each morning. His memory remains, even as he becomes new characters—some are physically strong but intellectual dullards, while others are clever but lack energy. As the detective changes bodies, he learns to leverage their distinct strengths to catch the murderer.

I love the novel’s originality, especially the protagonist’s grappling to exert his will over the host. This dualistic, “costuming” behavior is profound: You are still yourself but embody someone else's spirit. It’s still you with all your memories, experience, and personality, but it’s molding with something else, forming creative tension.

When we change costumes and mindfully embody the spirit of someone we wish to emulate, we can free ourselves from the shackles of our regular archetypes to unlock new insights.

The container affects the content

Underlying Halloweenacy is a belief that the container affects the content. Clean water poured into a rusty bucket can gain an iron taste, while contaminated pond water, sucked through a life straw, emerges drinkable. Put simply: When we don a costume, a part of us is changed. The costumes we wear are not merely surface-level aesthetics but active shapers of our character.

In The Happy Hypocrite (1897), Max Beerbohm tells the story of a conman who longs for a beautiful woman. The woman refuses the conman’s advances, saying she will only marry a man with “the face of a saint.” In his usual scheming fashion, the conman purchases the mask of a saint to deceive the woman into loving him. They get married and live happily until a visitor removes the mask. To the ex-conman’s surprise, his face has molded to the contours of the mask, and the woman falls even deeper in love with him.

We may not be the person we wish to be—we may be lazy, easily angered, unfit—but we are not doomed to our current state. The Happy Hypocrite portrays how behavior change can create character change. Wearing a saintly mask transformed the conman into a virtuous gentleman in both face and character.

This Halloween, we have the opportunity to don a costume. Do we want a short vacation from our daily roles? Or do we try on the identity of someone we aspire to become? If we wear the mask long enough, we might see a new face in the mirror, even after peeling it off.

Junk Drawer

Beware the dark patterns in your software.

A donkey died in the desert. Some say it died of dehydration, yet it was only a stroll to a watering hole. Others say it died of starvation, yet it was a skip away from a field of greens. The donkey had sufficient energy to reach the water or the field, yet it approached neither.

The donkey died of indecision.

I’ve felt like the donkey in several less tragic situations, large and small. Indecision over a career path led to missed opportunities, vacillation between vacation destinations led to no departure, and noncommittal weekend plans led to driftless days. Caught between paths and not making a choice—even a “bad” choice, even the “wrong” choice—can lead to a far worse outcome than indecision.

An Unrefined Gut

To avoid the donkey’s fate, we could overcorrect and make rash choices based on intuition. But our intuition—our “gut”—may be insufficiently refined for the choice ahead, leaving us insecure (or, arguably worse, overconfident) with our decision. A business leader may make bold architectural decisions with limited knowledge of the domain or data to support their choice.

Driven by poor outcomes or insecurity, we might turn to highly structured frameworks for prioritization and decision-making. Product management is littered with models like MoSCoW, RICE, Kano, and Weighted Scoring to provide structure and transparent reasoning for business decisions. While these frameworks can be helpful starting points, they can be misused or incomplete for the use case and aren’t practical for complex life decisions like our careers, who to marry, and where to call home.

We enter a dark mire—we know indecision is dangerous, we distrust our gut, but the tools we know aren’t applicable. Thankfully, our beliefs aren’t fixed, so we aren’t doomed to the fate of the indecisive donkey. Just because we distrust our gut today doesn’t mean we can’t develop a trustworthy intuition.

We build our intuition by layering heuristics and preferences formed over time, like a tower constructed brick by brick. To lay these bricks, we can start by understanding our preferences.

Coloring Preferences

Let’s begin at the most basic, binary level: Yes or No. Red or Green. We can assess preferences by feeling how much positive or negative energy they elicit within us. Without scoffing at the inherent mysticism of that statement, consider a basic example: Do you prefer mountains or beaches? Coffee or tea? These preferences are easy for me: I’m green toward mountains and coffee and red toward beaches and tea.

Small preferences may be simple, but we could extend this to a more meaningful scale, like career categories. Do we like the concept of working in politics, being a doctor, or building a business?

While we may answer some questions using the binary scale, some preferences may remain elusive, and we feel neutral. We can shift to a trinary system, like a traffic light, and assess preferences using red, yellow, and green. We may be green toward business, yellow toward science, and red toward politics.

Then there are things we’re in-between about—things that aren’t entirely yellow, green, or red. We may be neutrally positive or neutrally negative about them, so the color scale evolves into a quinary system: red, orange, yellow, lime, and green.

A five-point scale gives us a broad understanding of our preferences—we prefer X to Y. To use another building metaphor, this initial level of preferential awareness is like carving something from a wood block. We get the rough shape by shaving away some corners and edges, but what we’re carving is still unclear. While most preferences may cluster in the neutral zone, we may have several in green and red. But which rises (or descends) more than the rest? Our scale evolves to burgundy, red, orange, yellow, lime, green, and emerald.

Plotting our preferences on a nuanced scale can help refine our intuition, but the gut instinct this affords isn’t helpful unless we act on it. Returning to a work context: An antipattern I’ve observed on many product backlogs is a proliferation of “P0” items, many emeralds to which the team is partial. They may have rational reasons—removing tech debt is critical, and several opportunities could have positive ROI—but if everything is urgent and essential, nothing is.

Priority is a Pyramid

I’ve written before about the bastardization of “priority” in corporate talk and how it betrays its etymological Latin root of “one.” Likewise, the distribution of our preferences is critical to make them actionable. We cannot have emerald-grade preferences for several things in a domain—roadmap items, career aspirations, partners—often, we can only have one. Our preference scale grows a new dimension.

By the nature of one priority, all other preferences become competitors. One burgundy-grade distaste isn’t enough. Developing an aversion to those other preferences breathes life into the emeralds we’ve selected. Warren Buffet famously kept two lists of everything he wanted to do. One short list became his focus, and the second, longer list became his set of anti-priorities to manage against actively so they don’t sabotage list one. Get comfortable with saying no. Push the things that aren’t emerald down the pyramid.

Junk Drawer

1. Learn a language with the Language Reactor.

2. Understand the growing Epidemic of Loneliness in this visual essay.

3. Play a game of cutting things in half.

The Bear is a television series that follows an award-winning chef who returns to Chicago to run his family’s sandwich shop. In the second season, Richie, one of the restaurant employees—an obnoxious man-child but a loyal friend—alienated his coworkers with his terrible attitude. The chef believed Richie had potential but lacked purpose, so he sent Richie to work at a Michelin-starred restaurant for a week instead of firing him. There, the restaurant manager put Richie to work polishing forks.

At first, Richie approached the task with his signature sloppiness—hastily drying utensils and tossing them into a tub. After a few days of nothing but cleaning forks, the boredom (and a little inspiration from the high-end restaurant) transpired a change. Richie started to respect the work. He improved his process—polishing every tine on every fork and lining them neatly in the drying rack.

This small behavior change toggled a domino effect for Richie. He organized his apartment, dressed better, reduced his swearing, and treated his coworkers with dignity. He eventually found his calling: Providing excellent customer service.

I love this series, and this “Forks” episode is my favorite because it illustrates the power of developing self-respect through incremental habit change.

Boredom as a Blessing

I have been fortunate enough to experience a similar transformation in my work. Four years ago, I was notorious for botching product releases. My sloppiness put serious bugs into production and caused customer issues, and I screwed up not once but several times. Instead of firing me, the product leader gave me the Richie treatment. He took away all my responsibilities except one thing: Ensuring quality data ingestions.

At first, my ego took a hit, as I was embarrassed to lose so much scope and get relegated to “boring work.” It wasn’t until a year later that I realized the gift this was. I learned about graph databases, the complexities of data normalization, and how to make a positive difference for customers. The narrow scope allowed me to dig deep into the product and excel at something.

While Richie and I were lucky enough to get a second chance, not everyone gets this work experience. However, I believe the principle of fork polishing is accessible to everyone and broadly applicable to any endeavor.

Fork in the Stone

We can’t accomplish anything if we can’t manage ourselves, and we can’t manage ourselves if we bite off more than we can chew. Sometimes, we aren’t aware of the ambitious bites we take or the distractions we invite, and this lack of awareness can silently stall our progress. To overcome this, we need a stable foundation.

We may believe that a stable foundation should be relevant to our goals. For example, if we want to be professional golfers, we might think we need good swinging habits. Counterintuitively, we’re better off forming an exercise habit unrelated to golf. Establishing routines that are too relevant won’t build the stable foundation we need.

If we build a narrow foundation—practicing daily golf swings—we create a fragile base. If we throw out our shoulders, we lose the stability that habit provided. Similarly, our baseline habits are useless if we change our goals (i.e., to become a competitive bike-packer).

Instead, we’re better off building a foundation with three general-purpose habits because once we develop self-discipline, we’ll have a better framework to mold our pursuits.

Imagine a magic fork stuck in a stone, like King Arthur’s sword. This fork in the stone is our key to self-respect. But, to withdraw the fork, we must unlock its three tines.

When we’re not sure where to start, I recommend three daily habits:

1. Exercise

2. Reading

3. Journaling

The Three Tines

Begin with exercise and aim for something with a high probability of daily success, such as ten minutes of jogging or twenty push-ups and sit-ups. On a calendar or in a notebook, start marking days as successes or failures based on this habit. Do this for a week. After seven days, evaluate whether it was too easy, too complicated, or too repetitive and tweak it (i.e., increase the jog to fifteen minutes, decrease the push-ups to ten, or add variety).

As we enter the second week, adopt a second habit: reading. Pick any enjoyable book and read it for a set number of minutes daily. Ten minutes is a good starting point because it’s not too overwhelming but can add up quickly. Read for seven days straight and record success or failure alongside the exercise habit.

In week three, begin the final keystone habit: journaling. Acquire a paper notebook or basic note app and reflect each day. Again, start small: set a five-minute timer, write a few lines, or list ten bullet points. It’s okay to write stream-of-consciousness about anything—what we did yesterday, a recent workout, or what we read. Over time, this habit will become a critical component of self-awareness.

Withdrawing the Fork

If we do all three habits every day for a month, we’ll find the proverbial fork of self-respect sliding from the stone. We’ve allowed the “boredom” of measuring only three things to deepen our quality and establish a high baseline. We might take on more strenuous workouts, read more challenging books, or journal about topics we were once afraid to broach.

Like Richie polishing forks, these three habits provide general-purpose self-respect. They are worthy table stakes for any future goal because they keep our bodies healthy, our minds open to new insights, and a line of communication open with ourselves.

Want a better life? Go polish some forks.

Junk Drawer

1. Play with these optical toys, such as the “Disappearing Bicyclist.”

2. Look out a random window anywhere on Earth.

3. Read about a wooden, hand-crafted computer that's truly personal.

Let’s play product designer for a moment.

Imagine this user story:

As a corporate employee

I want to increase my 401K contributions

So that I can eventually retire and leave this place.

Like any designer, we map the user journey, and our first pass may look like this:

1. The user opens her company-issued laptop.

2. She navigates to the benefits portal.

3. She selects the 401K Contribution option.

4. She updates the monthly contribution percentage field.

5. She presses save.

6. She receives an email confirmation about her update.

When this is our conceptual understanding, we might gravitate toward enhancing the experience—maybe we can update the contribution percentage field to a dropdown or change the color scheme for accessibility.

But if we’re good designers, we’ll perform user research and discover that the actual experience differs from our conceptual understanding. The reality is much more dismal:

1. The user opens her company-issued laptop.

2. She enters her username and password and accepts a terms & conditions pop-up.

3. Once logged in, she selects the VPN icon to join the company network.

4. She opens an authenticator app on her phone, scans her face to get a one-time passcode, and enters it before it expires in 28 seconds.

5. She opens her browser and selects a bookmark to the benefits site.

6. The link is broken.

7. She opens the chat app, but it has software updates and needs to restart.

8. Once it reloads, the user messages her colleagues requesting the link.

9. After a few minutes, someone gets back to her with the correct link.

10. But she must use a different browser because the previous one wasn’t compatible.

11. She waits ten seconds for the page to load and enters her username and password.

12. She navigates through six dropdown menus until she finds 401K contributions.

13. She learns she must contact HR to make the update.

14. The user navigates to the HR portal and reads how to contact HR via the chatbot.

15. She selects the friendly-looking icon in the bottom right.

16. She asks about 401K elections, and the chatbot shares a “self-service” article.

17. The user clicks the link and arrives at the article that led her here.

18. The user smashes her laptop, spewing the alphabet across her desk.

Multi-factor authentication, high latency, poor internet connectivity, legacy tools, and clunky workflows are all papercuts that transform a simple user experience into a nightmare.

Lingchi is the ancient art of Japanese torture, in which tormentors slowly slice away portions of a victim’s body until they die. This lovely art is the etymological root of “death by a thousand cuts” and inspires the design of the many systems we use in our jobs. The 401K contribution update described above is a milder form of torture knowledge workers endure today. Sadly, our fictitious user did not end her journey by smashing her laptop—she likely endured another seven hours of operational papercuts in her day job.

A Culture of Callused Complacency

A single papercut is never fatal—neither literally to our bodies nor figuratively to our spirits—but we can die by a thousand cuts. Many knowledge workers are lacerated by operational papercuts daily in almost every task, even logging into their laptops. One must adopt a certain level of complacency to persist in a place of perpetual papercuts. Like developing a callus, workers build up a tolerance for papercuts so they don’t bleed to death.

When a work culture lets these calluses form, it breeds complacency that spreads like cancer. The impact on the workforce and society could be a thesis of its own, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. On a personal level, the ambition of our spirits—and I believe most of our souls have a purpose beyond an Epicurean existence—can go dark. Ambition dampens because the effort to achieve the most minuscule tasks is immense. We become bored and sluggish.

When we become complacent with papercuts in one aspect of life, that complacency can permeate our creativity. When papercuts—like products with bugs or writing with grammatical errors—plague the things we make, they’re unlikely to succeed.

I offer a six-part solution.

I. Become a Tenderfoot

After my backpacking trip in Montana, where I spent a few days in wet boots, my feet began to peel. Walking became labored as the calluses lifted, exposing the tender skin below. My feet regained a sensitivity, so every rock perturbed me when I waded into a lake the other week. Although painful, it made me aware of something I had grown numb to.

Sometimes, we need to peel back the calluses in our work.

We can gain awareness of operational papercuts with an audit of our workflows. By slowing down to document each step of a familiar process—such as writing a status report—we can uncover the pain points we’ve grown numb to—copy-pasting text from three different screens, changing font colors, and remembering to CC the right people. Or maybe it’s a workout habit we’ve struggled to stick with. We intend to exercise four days a week but only achieve one because we’re subconsciously avoiding the papercuts of packing a bag, driving twenty minutes to a crowded gym, waiting around for equipment, and not knowing if we’re doing the right exercises. When we let ourselves re-feel that pain, we can understand how friction withholds success.

II: Abandon the High-Hanging Fruit

With our calluses removed and the papercuts exposed, we can ask ourselves if we want to pursue what we’re chasing. Do we know the value these high-friction tasks are driving?

We may discover that friction exists for a reason. If we’re struggling to motivate ourselves to run five miles two days per week, maybe we could spend that motivational energy elsewhere. We might enjoy biking, and if we weren’t depleting our willpower on attempting to run, we could get in three or four bike rides each week and realize better long-term health.

Unlike the low-hanging fruits, which have good rewards for little effort, some pursuits are high-hanging fruits—low rewards for a lot of effort. Unless we have a good reason to pursue these things, we’re better off abandoning them.

III: Flow like a River

We could consider a less painful approach if the high-hanging fruit is too good to abandon. There’s a principle of jiu-jitsu that acknowledges the wisdom of a river. When a river encounters a rock, it does not try to go through it; the river simply flows around it. To mix metaphors: When pursuing the high-hanging fruit, do we need to climb through gnarly branches, or could we use a ladder? When too much friction blocks our path, consider a new route.

IV: Take Care of the Ounces

Backpackers have a little aphorism: Take care of the ounces, and the pounds will take care of themselves (or, for our non-imperial audience: Take care of the grams, and the kilos will take care of themselves). Don’t neglect the little things. Each rock the river encounters and moves around is a win, and when several of these friction points disappear, the overall going gets easier.

V: Embrace the Grind

At this point, we’ve abandoned pursuits that aren’t worth the effort, found new ways to overcome obstacles, and stacked process improvements to reduce friction. But some things are just plain hard: summiting a mountain, writing a book, rearing a child, or launching a business. We can take care of many ounces, but a ton of raw effort remains. We’ll embrace the grind and persevere if we want something enough.

VI: Recognize Barriers

Persevering on hard things is even more challenging when we don’t understand the root cause of the hardship. For instance, why is it so hard to publish a novel with a reputable publisher?

There are a lot of friction points—establishing a portfolio of work unrelated to the novel, querying an agent, generating a solid draft, and convincing the publisher. Given this cumbersome and archaic process, companies began to offer self-publishing services. I’ve used several self-publishing platforms and can confirm they’re relatively painless. Unfortunately, that lack of friction—democratizing the means of production—creates a crowded marketplace that’s harder to compete in.

Traditional publishing continues to have a better path toward commercial success because it uses friction to maintain a quality bar. Every step along the way was designed to turn away low-quality work. So, enduring this friction-heavy process offers an opportunity to improve.

We can apply this understanding to other systems, like warranty returns, immigration, or customer support queues. When demand exceeds the supply, the papercuts of bureaucracy can trim down the excess. It’s a dark design pattern, but it’s an unfortunate reality.

Anything worth doing will have friction because we’re pushing against complacency—the natural order of things. Since we only have so much energy, we must prevent papercuts wherever possible to persevere on the things that matter most.

Junk Drawer

1. View these ancient pictures of the Mediterranean Sea.

2. Peruse the Design Archives for graphic design inspiration.

3. Read my interview with Johanna Renoth about slowness.

Saxophonists create magic with improv jazz—their free-flowing harmony knowing no rules yet delighting the ear. Like any magician, jazz musicians need practice. Not on stage, on a street corner, or even before their immediate family; the best jazz artists practice in a woodshed.

Woodshedding is when an artist practices new material in private—sometimes in an actual shed—before taking their creative work to a public forum. ‘Shedding, according to the jazz crowd, lets them learn, tinker, and experiment without fear.

Shedding Conventions

In 2021, I saw David Sedaris perform at the Seattle Opera House. Sedaris is a world-renowned essayist known for his live readings, yet he shared a personal insight that he once rewrote chapters of The Great Gatsby to “know what it feels like to write something beautiful.” He wasn’t the first writer to perform this literary equivalent of woodshedding. Even the best artists need private time to refine their craft.

Woodshedding is nothing new, simply an execution of the conventional wisdom “practice makes perfect.” But conventional wisdom is conventional for a reason, right? A few years ago, I felt inspired by all the novelists who had “shed” Fitzgerald that I honored the Lindy Effect and rewrote Stephen King’s “Premium Harmony” from memory.

I didn’t feel awestruck. Quite the opposite: I became uninspired. What was the point of copying someone else’s work to keep it in a dusty notebook?

Perhaps the woodshed isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe there’s a reason so many creators are opting to “build in public.”

To learn more about this trend, I asked entrepreneur Johanna Renoth of Bye, Social Media! for her advice. Johanna shares my philosophy of slowness, and her weekly articles have taught me refreshing marketing strategies that don’t rely on unsustainable growth tactics and social media.

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Now, let’s hear from Johanna:

Building in Public

If you’re building any type of tech product, you’ve heard of building in public. It’s a great way to build community with other founders, generate support for your product before launch, and get on the radar of investors.

Despite all its advantages, building in public is not an automatic yes for every founder.

Let’s explore!

Be honest about whether you want to do it

Building in public sounds like a great idea. It has many benefits, and many other entrepreneurs have succeeded with it. As with all advice in entrepreneurship, just because it’s worked for other people doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for you.

To not get sucked into the hype of this or other tactics, ask yourself if you want to do it. Building in public, as with any other marketing activity, requires consistency. Is this something you can see yourself doing for months, even years?

Most importantly, do you even want to do it? There’s a huge difference between talking yourself into something and wanting to take it on. We can manage our emotions, but we can’t entirely override them.

If you’re not sure, is there a way you can share the work of building in public with somebody else?

Get clear on your purpose for building in public

Aside from deciding whether you want to do it, get clear on your purpose for building in public. Randomly posting and sharing updates without rhyme or reason doesn’t work long-term. Worse, it’s a distraction.

Before you embark on building in public, reflect on your purpose.

1. Community. Building in public can help you find support and a like-minded community. Creating something can be isolating, so it’s great to be in touch with other builders and connect with them for input and advice.

2. Pre-Launch Support. From a marketing perspective, this is smart because you won’t start from zero on launch day. But this aspect of building in public works best when you’re clear about who your product will serve. If you play your cards right, you can acquire your first customers pre-launch.

3. Signal to Investors. Investors are always looking for deal flow. Building a presence around what you do and an audience or community for your product can signal to investors that there are customers for your product.

Own your platform

I help businesses and solopreneurs become independent from social media and algorithms. Given this is my work, I want to share a word of caution: I see too many entrepreneurs build their brands on algorithmically curated platforms where they don’t own their audiences. This is a huge risk because you have no control over how your audience interacts with your content and your longevity on the platform. To put yourself on firmer footing, drive your audience to a medium you own, like a newsletter.

There’s no need to overload yourself with creating content when you do that. A weekly or bi-weekly recap of what you’ve been doing or learning is a good start. The earlier you build a community around what you do on an independent platform, the better.

In and Out of the Woodshed

Joanna’s advice applies to anyone who creates—writers, artists, entrepreneurs, and jazz musicians.

Earlier this year, I attended an Amherst Style writing group, the fiction equivalent of “building in public.” Writers create something original on the spot, read it to the group, and receive only positive feedback. Although I was cynical about the excessive optimism, I left feeling more inspired than I had in a long time. And something I wrote in that workshop led to a published story later this year.

I had spent too long in the woodshed before this writing group—tinkering away on long stories that were making no progress. “Building in public” taught me a valuable lesson: Don’t let a perfectionist tendency delay sharing what we create. Woodshedding can keep us on localhost and delay getting real-world feedback.

But building in public cannot come at the cost of doing our work. While coming out of my metaphorical woodshed with writing led to a positive community and a published story, staying public for too long could degrade quality. The compulsion for consistent sharing can promote underdeveloped ideas lacking creative depth. A supportive community can become an echo chamber that protects us from the criticism needed to improve. Conversely, exposing a delicate new concept to the “wild” could lead to debilitating denunciation that destroys our motivation.

Returning to the woodshed is essential for any creator. The woodshed protects our egos and shelters fledgling ideas until they’re ready to fly. We might scribble journal entries for our minds alone, sketch horrid things for nobody to see, or type buggy code never to leave our laptops.

But, after some time, we must leave our private places and share our creations.

Perhaps the woodshed needs a revolving door.

Junk Drawer

1. Uncover the psychological depths of rock, paper, scissors.

2. Inspect these funny notes about the alphabet.

3. Set a password with increasingly absurd requirements.

I have this arbitrary goal to climb the highest point in each of the fifty United States, and enough other people share this arbitrary goal that it has a name: Highpointing. For the last ten years, highpointing’s taken me to all corners of the country—from a boulder in someone’s backyard to the tops of frozen volcanos—and, most recently, to a grizzly-infested mountain range.

Granite Peak towers 12,799 feet in the remote Beartooth Mountains and is the highest point in Montana. Two weeks ago, I ventured in with my dad for a three-day backpacking trip, hoping to snag my 43^rd state highpoint. The climb is notorious among the highpointing community, as the standard route is a grueling 22-mile trek, spanning the windswept Froze-to-Death plateau, treacherous snow bridge crossings, and a Class 4 climb over exposed granite to the peak. Carrying an extra twenty pounds of climbing gear didn’t appeal to us, so we opted for the trail less traveled.

To the south, a lesser-known route twisted along alpine lakes to a rock scramble up Granite’s southwest face. AllTrails didn’t have a map for this, so we drew one, marking the waypoints—places to camp, notes on the technical sections, and lakes for drinking water. While the elevation, mileage, and positioning of the lakes were correct, our experience in the wilderness was considerably more complex.

All maps are wrong

Whenever we do something new—start a job, cook a recipe, or summit a mountain—we rely on proxies to augment our knowledge gaps. All proxies are incomplete representations of reality, as they are simplified illustrations of a complex system. A company’s org chart is a simple map of reporting structures. It doesn’t convey all the interconnections, power dynamics, and centers of gravity that shape the working environment. A system diagram doesn’t depict every dimension of architecture and is often outdated.

Earlier in my product career, I relied heavily on mental models to make decisions. The RICE prioritization framework gave me the training wheels to prioritize features for my backlog. Still, it was never a perfect solution as it couldn’t capture the nuances of the space.

But some are useful

Although proxies of reality are limited and “wrong” because they aren’t perfect representations, some are helpful. Using the RICE prioritization framework wasn’t perfect, but the template was much better than prioritizing features on “gut instinct.” Likewise, the first attempt at a dish might taste meh, but a recipe could teach us the basics and produce a better meal than PB&J.

Frameworks and mental models are training wheels that provide enough knowledge to get us rolling.

The map is not the territory

On Granite, the terrain was varied—snow, scree, and boulders covered the trail, raging creek crossings flooded our boots, mosquitoes feasted on open skin, and mountain goats stalked us for our salt. Cell service was nonexistent, afternoon thunderstorms rained golf-ball-sized hail, and the final summit push required Class 5 climbing over wet granite. By some miracle, I managed to reach the peak.

As any climber knows, the adventure is only half over at the summit. After this selfie, I downclimbed and hiked a dozen miles back over snow and rock to the car. And the car sat at the end of the gnarliest dirt road we’d ever driven—which, of course, had looked perfectly smooth on the map.

The value of a guide

After a few years in the corporate world, I brimmed with sophomoric confidence. I job-hopped, didn’t heed the generous wisdom of more tenured peers, and learned too many lessons the hard way. My eagerness led me to gobble up documents and develop an inflated sense of competence.

People with experience know the territory—where the skeletons are, the pitfalls, and how reality compares to concepts. They can get things done quickly and guide new folks who are smart enough to listen.

As I drove along the dark and twisty Beartooth Highway late that night, I reflected on the difficulty of Granite compared to other climbs. Denali is objectively leagues harder than any other, but highpointers often argue about the second hardest: Rainier, Gannett, or Granite. I haven’t climbed Gannett, but I have thoughts on the others.

Although Rainier had more vertical gain, higher elevation, and scaling glaciers was technically challenging; I followed a guide. The seasoned mountaineer had led expeditions to the tops of Aconcagua and Everest, and not once did I fear the knife-edge walks between crevasses under his instruction.

Granite was a less technical endeavor. It featured rugged terrain, a dangerous rock climb, and necessitated bear spray to ward off grizzlies, but the elevation was less intense. However, we were on our own—following the opaque traces of a back-country trail and solving problems as we discovered them. More thinking and bravery were required because we only knew the map, not the territory.

Updating the map

Last year, I published the Highpoint Guide to help fellow highpointers reach the summits. I thought I could write guides for highpoints I hadn’t visited because I could synthesize logs from other climbers. But, as I sorely learned on Granite, my maps were insufficient without experiencing the terrain. Updates are coming soon.

Never trust a climber with clean boots.

Junk Drawer

1. Try to accept these terrible terms and conditions.

2. Play an oddly addicting blob game.

3. Read about other mental models on my latest web project, Model Garden.

In a rural Chinese village, Wu Yulu builds robots from scrap metal. One of his walking, talking robots with rubbery lips pulls the farmer around in a rickshaw. Yulu’s contraptions also pour tea, light cigarettes, and walk across the ceiling with magnetic feet. All these creations, which Yulu lovingly calls his “children,” are products of his mind alone. No formal education influenced him, for his knowledge of robotics was hard-won through self-education and tinkering in the 1980s—long before YouTube. Yet, scrolling through comments on a video about Yulu, we find statements like, “Imagine if he had formal schooling!” Yulu is a brilliant man, so did he invent such truly original robots despite no formal education or because of no formal education?

Yulu’s unique robots emerged outside the walls of academia, isolated from the corpus of robotics research. Just as I admire Yulu’s robots, biologists fawn over the faunal freakshow of the Galapagos Islands. Six-hundred miles off the Pacific Coast of Ecuador, the Galapagos is famous for its bizarre biodiversity. Since the islands are so isolated from other landmasses, their plants and animals evolved independently, untouched by mainland species and forces. The boobies, lava gulls, and giant tortoises all inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution and have captivated the imagination of humans worldwide. Given its reputation for isolation-induced originality, a principle bears its name: Galápagosization.

Island Mentality

Over the past 25 years, Japanese companies developed a reputation for creating technology products that didn’t scale to a global market. An early adopter of 3G, Japan was the first nation to introduce mobile phones with specialized features like calculators, photos, and GPS. Although the phones were more advanced than others on the market, they were incompatible with non-Japanese networks, limiting them from worldwide growth. Following the trend of Galápagosization, Japan’s digital payments, cars, and retail products met a similar fate—a secluded start to a secluded end.

Economists bemoan Galápagosization, claiming that Japan will struggle to compete in a future global marketplace. Since businesspeople continue to speak Japanese in the office and have little interest in moving abroad, globalists state that Japan will struggle to “break free from its conventional wisdom” and accept international trends. While globalization advocates criticize this island mentality, they might overlook Galápagosization as an innovative advantage.

An Isolated Advantage

Kurt Vonnegut explored the upsides of isolation in his satire Galapagos (1985). In the novel, a motley crew shipwrecks on a remote island in the Galapagos. As the rest of humanity proceeds to nuke each other on the mainland, the shipwrecked people evolve into a simpler form of human, less burdened by the defects of a “big brain.” Vonnegut expresses a truth—that maybe some things can find a uniquely beautiful path without the influence of convention.

Like a tailor-made suit, these Japanese products snugly fit the population they were designed for. The isolation from which they emerged imbued a cultural flavor uninfluenced by outside forces—a distinctive quality in a world becoming increasingly same-y.

The Shroud of Influence

Conventional wisdom tells us, “Don’t reinvent the wheel,” while modern literature on creativity tells us, “Everything is a remix” and that “Great artists steal.” A uniquely American ethos is present in all these pithy remarks, harkening back to the melting pot mentality of cultural assimilation. Speaking in a plain tongue, serving bland food, and seeking scale through efficiency have bled throughout America and into our global culture. These little beliefs shape a collective mindset that puts stock in influence and little credence to originality. Too many people don’t have enough things to say, so they regurgitate others, letting influence shroud their strange and special spirits.

During our age of influencers and global connectedness, celebrating individuality and the countless sub-cultures and diversity of thought it can provide—a Galapagos way of thinking—can be refreshing. Yulu carved a path of genuine creativity and rode down it on a robot-powered rickshaw, so what’s stopping us?

Go on, reinvent the wheel.

Junk Drawer

1. Play with multiple image-generation tools using one prompt.

2. Need inspiration? Learn about seven ways to reinvent the wheel.

3. Read Lemon Lime Lady, my latest short story published in Quillkeeper’s Press.

Hercules underwent twelve labors, and his second labor was iconic: slaying the Lernaean Hydra. A reptilian creature with twelve venom-spewing heads preyed upon nearby villagers, and any attempt to kill the beast only made it grow stronger, for slicing off one head made two new heads grow in its place. More heads meant more appetite, more appetite meant more growth, and more growth meant more venom, so no man who fought the beast lived to tell the tale.

The Accountability Hydra

In a less epic context, a sociological monster preys upon knowledge workers: The Accountability Hydra. The beast emerges when an issue arises, often a small nuisance that rapidly grows into a menace.

Knowledge work environments are complex systems with dispersed knowledge and ownership, so groups tend to play accountability hot potato. If a software application breaks, nobody wants to be caught holding the hot potato, so they quickly toss the blame on someone else—the developer who pushed a change, the manager who pressured folks to forgo testing, or the user who pressed the wrong button.

The Accountability Hydra feasts upon these potatoes.

The monster smells the potato and quickly consumes the accountability nobody wants. It grows larger with each accusation, and this cycle of blame wreaks havoc upon a team’s culture. The cascading effect of no ownership causes everyone to feel shame and anger and become defensive, hoping the Hydra will feed upon someone else instead.

Blame passing ruins psychological safety because people fear the heads that’ll snap at them and the stain of failure upon their reputations. They are bystanders at best and blame-casters at worst, but they unwittingly exacerbate the problem through avoidance.

When a problem has grown this bad from a vacuum of ownership, a hero must rise.

The Directly Responsible Individual

Being a hero sounds glamorous, but it won’t feel like it. To defeat the Accountability Hydra, one must shoulder responsibility for the failure and become the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI). They’ll face backlash from colleagues, get lectures from leadership, and, depending on the issue’s severity, take a hit to their reputation. But unlike the Hydra, the DRI will have one neck to choke.

That’s the price of ownership.

Diagnosing accountability problems can feel like a Herculean effort. We focus on one person to discover a team has missed the mark. But maybe that team is subject to processes that set them up for failure—deepening the problem.

Each chopped head grows two more, and each failure point reveals another tangle of failure points. So, we must first understand how big the problem is.

Start with an objective search for the truth. Catalog everything in a retrospective document: recreate the timeline, answer the five whys, and quantify the impact. Ask questions of the people involved to depict the problem accurately.

After each decapitation from Hercules, his nephew Iolaus cauterized the Hydra’s neck with a torch to prevent more heads from sprouting. Similarly, once we understand the small issues that led to the big problem, we should address them individually. For each, assign one individual a clear action item and give them a specific date to complete it.

Overcome the bystander effect by pointing to one person in a crowd and assigning them a task. The direct request makes the person feel directly responsible.

When each item is assigned an owner and a date, we sear the issue. After completing each action, we defeat the Hydra.

The Antifragile Opportunity

To prevent future Hydras, create a culture of ownership. One way is to assign DRIs to key projects so there’s always a “hero” appointed to jump in when something goes wrong. This person should understand the role’s responsibility to know the goals, status, and key components better than anyone else.

But DRIs will not work unless they have psychological safety. The model will collapse if they fear the repercussions of failure—like retaliation or personal criticism. They’ll cover up risks and little setbacks, creating the space for Hydras to grow.

No matter how careful we are, problems are bound to arise. Rather than avoiding problems, we can cultivate a mindset to rebound from them.

Sun Tzu advises us to know our enemies better than they know themselves. The best way to defeat a Hydra, other than hacking and burning its heads, is to adopt the principle that makes them so strong: antifragility.

The Hydra thrives off adversity and pain, for it does not mourn the loss of a severed head but seizes the opportunity to grow two more. Likewise, we can turn issues into opportunities.

People love stories of a hero defeating a monster, overcoming a low to reach a high. The “hero’s journey” of the Hercules myth is still relevant today, so take advantage of this plotline!

When something goes wrong—and it inevitably will—own it and over-deliver on the resolution. Nobody remembers efforts to maintain the status quo. But if we fail and recover with vigor, we’ll stand out as a hero overcoming a monster.

It’s like a game:

• Never create a problem: 0 points.

• Create a problem: -5 points.

• Solve the problem: +2 points.

• Overdeliver on the solution: +10 points.

Don’t avoid problems; seize them as opportunities.

Junk Drawer

1. Peruse this library of visual frameworks for explainer pieces.

2. See how this AI learns to write by reading only one author.

3. Visualize how fraudsters recreate your digital identity.