Seek Meaning Over Influence

“If you care too much about being praised, in the end you will not accomplish anything serious…Let the judgments of others be the consequence of your deeds, not their purpose.”

— Leo Tolstoy

Six months after reaching space aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor, Mae Jemison announced her resignation from NASA. Her childhood dream was fulfilled. And while she wasn’t done with space exploration, she wanted to apply her knowledge, skills, and experience in new ways that would have otherwise been limited by the specialized training of the astronaut corps at NASA.

Many people considered her foolish to leave NASA—why walk away from the pinnacle of human exploration? But she trusted herself and knew it was time to focus on the next thing she found meaning in. This wasn’t the first time she made a decision that challenged the status quo in favor of an opportunity that was meaningful to her.

At 20 years old, after graduating from Stanford with a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering and Afro-American Studies, Jemison enrolled in medical school at Cornell. In between semesters, she traveled and found a real sense of purpose in providing primary medical care in developing countries. These experiences taught her more about herself and helped her feel more connected to the world. She immediately knew she wanted a deeper experience in this environment after finishing medical school.

Going against the grain

But the expectation at Cornell—an elite medical school—was that their graduates pursue a prestigious residency after graduation. Jemison simply wasn’t interested. She planned to complete a brief one-year internship at the Los Angeles County/University of Southern California Medical Center. She would then return to work in the developing world to help in whatever capacity she could.

The deans at Cornell weren’t thrilled about her plan. One afternoon, they called Jemison in for a meeting and asked her to reconsider. She explained her reasoning, but they interrupted and claimed she was making a mistake. They outlined the consequences—she would fall behind her peers over the next decade and feel less accomplished. She followed her decision anyway.

After completing her internship, Jemison joined the Peace Corps as a Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia. She was responsible for the health of all Peace Corps volunteers, staff members, and embassy personnel. She acted as a primary care physician and managed a medical office, laboratory, and pharmacy.

While in West Africa, she navigated environments with insufficient equipment, medication, and supplies. But she honed her resourcefulness, pulling knowledge across different disciplines to navigate challenging situations.

Early in her tenure, one of the Peace Corps volunteers became sick with what Jemison thought could be meningitis with life-threatening complications. She worked to stabilize his condition through the night. But his condition worsened, and she knew she had to act.

Jemison called the U.S. Embassy to secure a military medical evacuation. They questioned whether she had the authority to give that type of order. She calmly explained the situation and that she didn’t need anyone’s permission. The Embassy conceded. By the time Jemison and the volunteer reached the Air Force hospital in Germany, Jemison had been up for 56 hours. But she had saved his life.

These types of experiences would prove invaluable and set her apart when, on her return to the U.S. in 1987, when she applied to NASA’s astronaut training program. Out of 2,000 applicants, Jemison was one of the fifteen accepted.

Almost ten years from the day that the deans at Cornell told her that she was setting herself back in her career by taking a non-traditional approach and that she would regret it, Jemison was orbiting Earth as the first black woman in space.

What type of person are you?

Rather than prioritizing influence or prestige, Jemison was operating from a different place. She was focused on who she was and what she found meaning in. It wasn’t a position that she wanted to define her life. It was the type of person she was.

Jemison found meaning in creativity, exploration, and being helpful. She found meaning in engineering, art, dance, medicine, exploring space, exploring other countries, and exploring new ideas. Above all, she wanted to help and make a difference in the world through the skills and interests that defined her. She channeled this into her work and the opportunities she pursued at each step.

If you focus on work that matters to you and discover significance in yourself, you put yourself in a position to build something that strikes a deeper chord with others.

Influence wasn’t Jemison’s end goal. She approached it with indifference and chalked it up as nice to have but non-essential. Instead, she focused on her character, investing her time in what she found meaningful. She sought meaning over influence at each step of her life.

The desire for influence, like the desire to belong, is human nature. Many people allow this to dictate the course of their lives, often unconsciously. But acting deliberately and purposefully requires a deeper sense of awareness.

If influence acts as your guiding principle, you dull your sense of authenticity and compromise the quality of your work. How effective can your work be if you sacrifice your integrity and sense of meaning along the way?

People gravitate toward those who have discovered a sense of meaning in their work. It just hits differently.

Start with meaning

By focusing on meaning first, there’s a greater chance your life and work will resonate and make a measurable difference in the world. And even if it doesn’t, it remains valuable because it meant something to you. There’s a fundamental beauty in that.

Influence is far more likely to follow if you build something you believe in. And irrelevance is all but guaranteed if you continue to wander the path of least resistance, looking for a quick hit of attention or praise.

Your work must resonate with you before you can expect it to resonate with anyone else. You must fight like hell to ensure your work feels true before you release anything of your own into the wild.

Meaning starts with something that’s all your own. By prioritizing meaning over influence, you build the courage to speak from a place that resonates with you rather than following what other people have deemed important.

It’s a dangerous game to tie your sense of meaning and self-worth to external conditions. You introduce dependencies that can drop you into a state of anxiety, envy, or despair without warning. You allow yourself to be pulled along at the whims of others.

Regardless of the expectations or paths others had followed, Jemison made decisions that optimized for meaning over influence. She trusted her internal compass over any sort of fleeting recognition, status, or prestige.

After NASA, Jemison launched her own company. One of her first projects was to create an international science camp—The Earth We Share—that promoted critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Jemison also started teaching environmental studies at Dartmouth. Eventually, this led her to found 100 Year Starship, an initiative to establish capabilities for human interstellar travel within the next 100 years.

It’s a rare thing in this world to seek significance in yourself and build the courage to create something that resonates with you.

Seek meaning first, and authenticity and influence will follow.

Seek influence first, and you’ll risk losing yourself along the way.

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Sources:

1. Black History Bootcamp, Day 21, Mae Jemison

2. We Regret to Inform You: Rejecting Dr. Mae Jemison

3. StarTalk Radio: A Conversation with Dr. Mae Jemison

4. Jon Talks With Dr. Mae Jemison: The First Black Woman in Space

5. Find Where the Wind Goes, 2nd edition by Dr. Mae Jemison

6. Shooting Star: Former Astronaut Mae Jemison Brings her Message Down to Earth

Find Your Flow

“The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody. You know how to do it better because you love it, and no one can compete with you.”

— Naval Ravikant

It was a humid summer afternoon in 1978 and Jay-Z was on his way home to the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn after a Little League game. As he wandered the maze of concrete paths, he noticed a group of kids huddled, rocking back and forth in a circle. Jay-Z shouldered his way toward the middle to see what was going on.

When he got through the crowd, he found an older kid named Slate freestyling and rhyming at the center. Slate threw out lyrics off the top of his head, rhyme after rhyme like he was possessed. He carried on like this for 30 minutes without pausing to stop. 

Jay-Z was captivated. He had never seen anything like it. And he immediately thought, I want to do that…no, I know I can do that.

As soon as Jay-Z got home, he grabbed a spiral notebook and started filling it with his own rhymes. He covered every crevice on the page with lyrics—horizontally, vertically, writing as small as he could. He pounded beats on the kitchen table. He scoured dictionaries for new words. From the time he woke up in the morning until he went to sleep, he practiced. He lived and breathed rapping, writing lyrics, and composing rhymes. 

Poetry came naturally. And he didn’t view the hours he spent practicing as painstaking work. It was something he loved to do.

Even when Jay-Z was out running around town with his friends, if a rhyme came to him, he would stop what he was doing, grab a brown paper bag from the corner store, and spread it on a mailbox to write down the idea to get it out of his head. His mind was constantly working, turning things over. Nothing was more important than writing rhymes. 

As Jay-Z got older, another rapper named Jaz-O took him under his wing to teach him the fundamentals. They locked themselves in a room to hone their craft together—trying new flows and pushing themselves to improve their speed, delivery, composition, and structure. At school, Jay-Z practiced to beats in the cafeteria during lunch. 

Eventually, Jay-Z talked his way onto the tour of a successful rapper named Big Daddy Kane. He spent four months touring with Kane, unpaid, sleeping on the bus floor. During intermissions in the show, Jay-Z would get on stage and practice his freestyle—sharpening his lyrics and delivery. 

He studied Kane on stage, watching his breath control, his wordplay, and the way he stacked rhymes. Jay-Z was a student first, enamored by the craft.

Jay-Z had found his flow—a sacred place where time seemed to melt away while focused on the task at hand. Rapping came naturally to him, and he combined this with dead-serious discipline. He could outwork anyone. Because he loved it. As he immersed himself in writing lyrics, performing, and practicing the fundamentals, he tapped into a flow state. 

Find the intersection of what you love doing and what you’re good at

Your own flow state will guide you to what you should spend more time doing. It points to the intersection of what you love doing and what you’re good at. When you identify this, you can outwork just about anyone. Because you’re immersed in something deeply rewarding to you—no matter how hard it is. It’s a competitive advantage that leads toward something you are uniquely positioned to create. 

Ask yourself, what activity are you engaged in when hours seem to pass by in the blink of an eye? What feels like work to other people that feels like play to you? What type of work invites you into a state of relaxed concentration where you feel like you’re in the zone?

You’re not going to win or create your best work by pursuing something that feels mundane or uninspiring. It’s impossible to keep up with someone who truly loves their craft—they are just willing to give more than you are capable of. When you’re not invested in what you’re doing, you give up on creating anything worthwhile. Life becomes an exercise in watching the hours pass, living for the weekend, jumping from one distraction to the next. 

When you find your flow state, it’s not that work stops being hard. It will still feel challenging. But it will feel worth it because you’re engaged in what you’re doing. When the work you’re doing resonates with you on a deeper level, you can persevere through almost anything. You can push through endless agitations and tireless hours of practice. The work is the reward. You don’t need the same level of external validation that dictates other people’s lives because the act of doing is what’s fulfilling. 

It will take years of hard work to create something meaningful—to bring the best version of your work to life. There are no shortcuts. If you want to be able to persevere long enough to create your best work, you have to find where your flow lives.

Jay-Z loved rhyming for the sake of rhyming. He immersed himself in practice—challenging himself to stack his rhymes and structure his songs in the most compelling way possible. He experimented with moving around couplets and triplets, speed rapping, and adding multiple layers of meaning. It was all he could think about. It’s what helped him make sense of the world and channel his energy. 

It takes years of honing your craft before it starts to pay dividends. And honing your craft requires thousands of hours of effort and practice. That’s why it’s paramount to identify the work that energizes you and pulls you into a flow state. Leaning into that type of work will allow you to sustain the engagement over the years and decades required to become exceptional at what you do. 

Magic is the product of relentless effort

After 14 years of practice, Jay-Z stepped into the beginning of his professional career. Clark Kent, an A&R representative at Atlantic Records, pushed Jay-Z to lay down a song with another rapper, Sauce Money. Patrick Lawrence, the producer in charge of booking studio time, set the date and brought the two rappers together to record. 

Jay-Z and Sauce sat there laughing and telling stories for the first three hours. As the night wore on, Lawrence grew agitated. Finally, he told Jay-Z that he had to record his lines. They were running out of time.

Jay-Z asked to hear the song, so Lawrence played the track. Jay-Z began mumbling to himself over the track. He picked up a notebook and seemed to write a few things. He continued pacing, muttering words, appearing to scribble on the pages. After a few minutes, he placed the notebook on a table and told Lawrence he was ready. 

Jay-Z stepped into the sound booth to record his part, and Lawrence picked up the notebook to see what he had written. The pages were completely blank. Not a single word. It was all an act. With over a decade of constant practice, Jay-Z had developed the ability to memorize all his verses instead of writing everything down. What appeared like magic to everyone else was the product of relentless effort. 

But to get to that point where it looks like magic to everyone else, it requires you first to identify what immerses you in your own state of flow. That’s the work you should invest more of yourself in. 

Your flow state is the clearest indicator you will get in this life. Whether it’s building, coding, cooking, leading, performing, writing—whatever provides your shortcut to a state of mind where time melts by and you’re completely immersed in your work is a signal worth following. 

There’s no better indicator of who you are than the work you lose yourself in

The question you must ask yourself is, what part of your life triggers this for you? You must answer this with precision. What are you focused on when you feel like you’ve stepped into a flow state? You must constantly come back to and find a way to harness this.

I have reflected on this question more times than I can count throughout my life. I use it as a checkpoint to bring myself back into focus. 

But the first time I gave it the attention it deserved, I was wandering through my mid-twenties. As I dug for my answer, I remembered how much joy writing brought me when I was growing up. It always felt natural to me and I excelled at writing assignments with less effort than my peers. I loved the puzzle of crafting and structuring a compelling story.

One afternoon I walked over to a coffee shop in Nashville near my crumbling duplex on Grandview Drive to attempt writing again. I put on my headphones, opened a word document, and started writing—whatever random thoughts came to mind. As I wrote, a great sense of relief came over me. This was my thing.

Once I found it, I was all in. I returned to that coffee shop every weeknight, like clockwork at 5:00 PM, and spent four uninterrupted hours writing. I didn’t have some grand plan to get rich off my writing. I just loved the act of writing. And I still do. That’s my craft. It’s where I go to find or lose myself. It’s how I make sense of the world. 

If you’re unsure what your thing is, experiment with as many different ideas as possible. Before I realized with precision where I found my flow state, I tried returning to academia, recording music, producing music videos, pursuing medical school, working in marketing, running triathlons, and waiting tables at a Tex-Mex restaurant. It wasn’t always pretty, but each attempt taught me something new. It allowed me to cross something else off the list. And ultimately, this discovery period led back to where I found my flow state—in writing. 

As long as you continue to spend your time somewhere where every hour feels like an eternity, you’ll be marginally effective. But once you identify and lean into what brings you into your flow state, you alter your trajectory. You shift the playing field in your favor. No one is going to outwork you. And there’s no better indicator of who you are than the work you lose yourself in. 

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Sources:

1. Decoded by Jay-Z

2. Empire State of Mind by Zack O’Malley Greenburg

3. Three Kings by Zack O’Malley Greenburg

4. My Next Guest with David Letterman, Season 1, Jay-Z

5. Founders Podcast, #238 Jay-Z: Decoded

6. Oprah’s Master Class Podcast: Jay-Z

Subtract To Get To Your Truth

“Knowledge is subtractive, not additive—what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).”

— Nassim Taleb

On August 6th, 1986, Bob Dylan walked off the stage at Paso Robles State Fairgrounds alongside Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers and he knew he was done. Dylan had one more stretch of shows lined up with Petty the following year—The Temples in Flames Tour—but after that, it was time to hang it up.

It had been 25 years since an unassuming kid from Hibbing, Minnesota showed up in Greenwich Village to immerse himself alongside his heroes in the folk-music community. And it was a legendary run. But Dylan acknowledged the reality of what his fans, critics, and peers had already voiced, his best days were behind him.

Dylan could no longer fill stadiums on his own and had to rely on big names like Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers or The Grateful Dead to draw crowds. He struggled to write new material—not that he had much desire to do so. And despite the hundreds of songs he had written over the course of his career, there were only a handful he would consider playing. 

During the Summer tour in 1986, Benmont Tench, the keyboardist in Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, often pleaded with Dylan to include different songs in the set, like “Spanish Harlem Incident” or “Chimes of Freedom.” Dylan would muster up some excuse or play it off until he was able to divert the attention away from himself. 

The reality is that he could no longer remember where most of the songs he wrote came from. He couldn’t relate to or understand how he might even attempt to bring those songs back to life. They were a mystery lost to the past. 

Dylan’s plan was to coast through the final tour with the same 20 songs and try to come out unscathed before he went into hiding. That was the deal he made with himself to get through one more run.

The next year before kicking off his final tour with Petty, Dylan was scheduled to play a few shows with The Grateful Dead. He traveled to San Rafael, California to rehearse with The Dead at their studio. After an hour of rehearsal, it was clear that the strategy he used with Petty wasn’t going to work. The Dead were adamant about playing different songs from the depths of Dylan’s catalog. Material he could barely recall. 

He sat panicked and knew he had to get out. The Dead were asking for someone he felt no longer existed. During a lull in the rehearsal, Dylan falsely claimed he left something at the hotel. He stepped out of the studio and onto Front Street to plan his escape.

After wandering for a few blocks, Dylan heard music coming from the door of a small bar and figured that was as good of a place to hide out as any. Only a few patrons stood inside and the walls were baked in cigarette smoke. Towards the back of the bar, a jazz quartet rattled off old ballads like “Time On My Hands.” Dylan ordered a drink and studied the singer—an older man in a suit and tie. As the singer navigated the songs, it was relaxed, not forceful. He eased into them with natural power and instinct. 

As Dylan listened on, there was something familiar in the way the old jazz singer approached the songs. It wasn’t in his voice, it was in the song itself. Suddenly, it brought Dylan back to himself and something he once knew but had lost over the years—a way back to his songs. 

Earlier in his career, Dylan wasn’t worried about the image that others projected upon him, the expectations, or the fame. All he cared about was connecting with the song and doing it the justice it deserved. He was there to bring the words to life—a conduit of sorts. The old jazz singer had reminded him of this simple truth and where to pull from.

Returning to The Grateful Dead’s rehearsal hall, Dylan picked up where he left off like nothing happened. He was rusty and it would take years for him to truly get back to form, but he settled back into a state of relaxed concentration by returning to his principles that were buried underneath all the success, failure, praise, and criticism.

As he continued the final tour with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, over the first four shows Dylan played 80 different songs, never repeating a single one, just to see if he could do it. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t always pretty. But he was starting to tap back into himself and knew how to reach the music again. 

Where am I?

In our own lives, we inevitably reach moments where we feel like we’ve lost ourselves along the way. Where am I? How did I get here? What am I even trying to do? We feel like fragments of our former selves. Exhausted rather than energized by the challenges we face. 

Dylan is not alone in his experience. When we lose the connection to ourselves, our work, careers, and lives grow stagnant. We can’t create anything meaningful if we’re absently going through the motions. Gradually, then suddenly we become strangers to ourselves. 

As the emptiness creeps in, there’s a temptation to go into hiding. We fixate on our faults and let that feeling wash over us. We lose ourselves in the darkness. And when we get stuck here, we compromise our own integrity and the integrity of our work.

Life is deceptive in this way. We overcomplicate things. We inflate the importance of things that don’t really matter. We lose track of what brings us to life—the things we find deeper meaning in. We let our guiding principles fall out of focus. 

In the messiness of life, we make small compromises that add up over time. We say yes to the wrong things and no to the right ones. Things start to pile up. And the more we stack on top of ourselves, the deeper we bury our own priorities. Eventually, the weight of it all drags us down and obscures our vision. 

At this point, we can continue adding more, doing more, always saying yes, never saying no, breaking ourselves to meet the expectations cast upon us. We can continue floundering and creating more distance from ourselves. Or we can step back and ask, is this still serving me? What do I need to shed to come back to myself? What’s at my foundation?

Finding our way back

Sometimes the way back to yourself is through subtraction. 

This starts with peeling back the layers that have built up over the years.

What’s hidden underneath it all? 
What was your original motivation in your work? 
What got you here in the first place? 
What did you know then that you’ve since forgotten? 
What about this once brought you joy?

Finding a way to return to the simple truths we once knew can help us realign ourselves. Our foundation reminds us of what we set out for.

Far too often we attribute our identities to things that are beyond our control. We get caught up chasing what’s external to us because we trick ourselves into believing that’s what makes us who we are. But we are not our jobs, companies, titles, or paychecks. We are not the criticism, praise, accolades, or rejection we face. We exist beyond that. 

When we are just starting out, we instinctively understand this. We focus on internals and creating from what we know to be true about ourselves. We build from what inspires us. And that is enough. Because that’s all we really know. 

As Dylan faced this struggle, inspiration from an unlikely source brought him back to a beginner’s mindset and the principles he understood early in his career before everything got so carried away. Performing was about reaching for the truth within the song and putting that front and center. 

This mindset allowed him to tap back into himself. He was able to once again find meaning in his songs and remember why he was doing what he was doing. He embraced his responsibility to perform each song to the best of his ability. 

From this point on, Dylan focused on playing smaller theaters and more intimate shows—drawing songs from every stage of his career, reinterpretations, new songs, and rarities. Returning to the basic truths he lost along the way led to his resurgence as an artist. Rather than signaling the end of his career, The Temples in Flames Tour helped Dylan uncover the start of something new.

Letting go to remember

Connecting back to yourself starts with cutting away the nonessentials and reminding yourself how you found your way here in the first place. Subtract to get to the truth of things. 

In the process of letting go, you start to remember who you are and what you find meaning in. 

This doesn’t mean you should try to recreate the past. You can’t go back in time. Dylan wasn’t trying to bring a younger version of himself back to life. He was just returning to the principles that set everything in motion and rebuilding from there.

A beginner’s mindset can help you distill the real parts of yourself—the anchors that give you substance and depth. By paring down to what’s real and what’s within your control, you tap back into what sustains you. And as you sift through the rock, dirt, and debris, you free yourself to move with conviction towards bringing your best work to life. 

Do the Work

In May of 2011, I graduated from Indiana University and joined a workforce that was still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis. Finding a job wasn’t easy. I was an entitled kid who thought the world owed me something because I graduated with honors. I could not have been more wrong. And with a four-year degree, I went back to waiting tables at Don Pablo’s, a Tex-Mex restaurant in Westfield, Indiana to learn this lesson the hard way. 

School is not a substitute for doing the work. Far too many times over the past decade I’ve heard something along the lines of, “I didn’t go back to get my (insert degree here) to settle for this title or that salary.” But the degree you’re able to afford isn’t a replacement for the work. 

There’s nothing wrong with pursuing degrees if that’s your way of learning or certain qualifications are required for your career. But classrooms and case studies are not the same as creating something of your own in dynamic environments with second-order consequences. There’s far more ambiguity when you’re navigating the world in real time. 

As author, Austin Kleon, observes, “Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb.” Your degree is not the verb. Your job title is not the verb. The verb is the work. And this demands resilience—you have to show up and put yourself out there. But if you’re after substance and original experiences, this is the only path forward. 

“Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb.”

— Austin Kleon

The fraud, the novice, and the critic

The risk in setting out with a mindset to get by with minimal effort or expecting things to be handed to you is that it bleeds between chapters of your life. And over the long run, it becomes impossible to sustain or cover up indefinitely. 

You see this with managers who want to dictate decisions without ever having built something of their own or having put themselves out there in their own work. When they speak, their words are empty. Everything’s theoretical. They lack a deeper understanding of the concepts they’re talking about and they can’t inspire a group of individual contributors because they’ve never done the actions they’re advocating.

If you want to lead, you need experiences to pull from where you’ve built something of your own. That doesn’t mean floating by on privilege. And that doesn’t mean managing. That means battling alongside your team and knowing how to step in and take action. 

Your words carry far greater weight when you’ve actually done the thing you’re speaking about. Nothing kills morale faster than someone in a leadership position who has never put themselves on the line or taken risks in their own work. 

You also see this with speakers or writers who want to explain to others how to live a meaningful life without having done it themselves. Without your own set of experiences to pull from, your words will forever feel hollow. 

I learned this firsthand when I started writing in my early twenties. Above all, I desperately wanted my words and ideas to matter. And this got me nowhere. 

But the moment I quit worrying about being so damned important, I freed myself up to pursue real experiences, take chances in my work, and connect with others in a way that would lend far more significance to what I had to say down the line. Instead of forcing what I was writing about to matter to everyone else, I just set out to live and speak from that place instead. 

There’s no difference between the critic, the novice of a writer who lacks experiences of their own to speak from, and the fraud of a manager who floats by on the work of others without putting themselves out there. They’re all the same face disguised behind a different mask. 

“The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.”

— Nassim Taleb

The key to sustaining near the summit

It’s easier to sit back and allow someone else to take the risk. But it puts you in a fragile place where you become dependent on external factors to go your way. When things get difficult, you don’t have the option to lean on yourself and focus on what’s within your control. Rather than a healthy level of self-sufficiency and resilience, all you have is dependencies. And you can’t expect to sustain something where you don’t have much of a direct impact on the outcome.

Doing the work is difficult. It means putting yourself in a position of vulnerability. It means opening yourself up to struggle and failure. It means reaching not for what’s within your immediate grasp, but what’s just beyond. By doing the work, you add depth to your life that few achieve and set yourself up to sustain at that level indefinitely, no matter the external circumstances. 

Legendary San Francisco 49ers coach, Bill Walsh, knew his team wouldn’t win the Super Bowl every year. There were too many external factors with injuries, weather, scheduling, and luck. But he focused himself and his team on what they could control—putting in the work. Their goal was to “establish a near-permanent base camp near the summit, consistently close to the top, within striking distance.” The only way to sustain at this level was by showing up, each day, and never allowing themselves to believe they were above the grind. The result was three Super Bowl titles in eight years. 

Like Walsh’s teams, those who are able to sustain indefinitely near the summit and rebuild when the circumstances require, know how to put in the work. They have a wealth of experience to pull from and the resilience to match. There’s no room for excuses, entitlement, or major dependencies. 

If you’re the one creating, building, and executing, you’re the one who knows how to make it happen. No matter who takes the credit or adds their name to your work, you will always be able to create your next thing because you’re the one who has trained and performed in the past. You’ve built up both the ability and grit to bring your ideas to life.

The same cannot be said for the critics and coasters who are dependent on the work of others and would otherwise leave the world void of both originality and progress. 

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

The verb matters more than the noun

The world doesn’t owe you anything. If you want people to listen and you want to lead, you can’t be above the work. And if you want the ideas you’re communicating to have an impact, don’t speak from someone else’s life. Speak from your own.

Your voice carries far greater weight when you’re able to speak from the work you’ve done and your own experiences rather than your theories as a bystander. 

It’s far more admirable to try and fail—knowing that you’ve done the best with what you have—than it is to live through someone else’s experiences and explaining things you’ve never attempted and don’t actually understand. This is what separates the great leaders, writers, and artists. They’ve put in the work. They’ve taken the risks. They speak and create from their own experiences. 

When you look back at your life, you want to be able to say that you were a builder, a doer, a creator. You actually did the things you’re telling stories about. You navigated the discomfort and challenges of growth with composure. Rather than cowering and letting someone else do the work so you wouldn’t have to struggle against your own limits and risk coming up short. 

But to live admirably is to risk, to strive towards creating meaningful work, and to grow. To live admirably is to understand that the verb is more meaningful than the noun.

Environment Is Your Force Multiplier

Over the course of his life, Benjamin Franklin’s (1706-1790) contributions to the world were nothing short of astonishing. Franklin taught himself the fundamentals of writing, science, engineering, and diplomacy. He sought practical applications of what he learned each step of the way—emulating his favorite authors and developing his own writing style, running a successful printing business, advancing our understanding of electricity, and positioning himself as an accomplished diplomat with a vital role in the American Revolution.

Franklin’s list of accomplishments is impressive. But equally impressive was his ability to thrive in a range of environments, from printing halls and makeshift laboratories to foreign cities and diplomatic congregations.

Each step of the way, Franklin maintained a deliberate focus on his environment, orchestrating the conditions that were within his control. His environment was fundamental to all of his accomplishments and allowed him to give more back to the world around him.

An Apprentice in the Printing Shop

Franklin’s ability to adapt and maneuver across environments was evident from an early age. Almost as soon as Franklin’s formal education began, it was over. At eight years old his father sent him to Boston Latin School to prepare for a path towards Harvard. Franklin excelled, jumping a grade in his first year, but due to either financial constraints or his father’s recognition that Franklin’s personality was not particularly suited to a life in academia, he was pulled out.

Franklin enrolled for one more year at a writing and arithmetic academy near his family home. After that, with just two years of formal schooling under his belt, he left to work full time at his father’s candle and soap shop. 

But Franklin’s defining characteristic, his insatiable curiosity, endured. What he lacked in academic opportunities, he made up for with his voracious reading habits.

When he turned twelve he became an apprentice under his brother, James, in the printing business. For the next five years, he gained direct access to hundreds of articles, books, and essays being printed. He would strike deals with other apprentices under booksellers so he could borrow early copies, as long as he returned them in good condition. At night he would rewrite his favorite passages, honing his own writing style and testing his ability to form logical arguments. 

While he poured over everything he could get his hands on, practical subjects resonated strongest with Franklin. He demonstrated a particular interest in books on science, history, politics, writing, and business skills. He had little patience for memorizing abstract concepts, isolated facts or learning for learning’s sake.

It was thanks to his brother’s printing shop in Boston that he began honing his own writing skills and digging into practical subjects. This was the environment that set the stage for the rest of Franklin’s remarkable life. The print shop was a catalyst for Franklin—a place where he could channel his wide-ranging curiosity and explore his own multidisciplinary approach to life.

An Escape to Philadelphia

After five years alongside his brother, Franklin’s time in Boston came to an abrupt halt. James discovered that Franklin was behind the popular, anonymous submissions to the paper written under the pen name, “Silence Dogood.” As his brother lashed out in retaliation, Franklin took off for Philadelphia to escape the remaining terms of his apprenticeship. At seventeen, he officially set out to create something of his own. Philadelphia would become his lifelong home. 

Upon arriving in Philadelphia, the skills that Franklin honed in his brother’s printing shop, allowed him to find a job in the same space. As he began establishing himself in this new city, he was approached by the governor of the colony of Pennsylvania, William Keith. Keith urged Franklin to start his own printing shop and assist in his efforts to transform Philadelphia into a cultural center. 

Keith promised to lend Franklin the money for the machines and materials required to get things off the ground, but Franklin would need to head to London to secure them. Franklin saw this as terrific news, so he quit and bought a ticket for his passage to London. Keith assured him that the required letters of credit would be waiting for him upon arrival.

But when Franklin reached the shores of England, there were no letters of credit to be found. He discovered that Keith was full of empty promises. Franklin was now alone, halfway across the world, without enough money for a return ticket. 

Stranded in London

After allowing a brief moment for self-pity, Franklin set back out, determined to make his own way. He went to work at a large-scale printing shop in London. During this time he developed an even more extensive understanding of the printing business—learning new manufacturing methods and the importance of developing relationships with key customers and merchants.

After a year and a half in London, Franklin had finally saved the money for his return journey to Philadelphia. Upon his return, he leveraged the experiences and resourcefulness that he honed in these early environments to finally launch his own printing business. In short time, Franklin would become one of the most successful newspaper publishers and authors in the colonies. And this was all before he turned thirty.

If you study Franklin’s life, you see this time and time again. Franklin was a master at orchestrating the right environment for himself at each point in time—or making the most of it, as was the case when he was stranded in London in 1724. 

Whether his brother’s printing shop, the opportunity of a fresh start in Philadelphia, or setting up America’s first foreign embassy on the outskirts of Paris in 1776 to help negotiate a critical alliance during the American Revolution, Franklin was deliberate about his environment and putting himself in a position to learn and contribute the most he was capable of.

The Constitutional Convention

The importance of environment was something he never lost sight of. Even well into his later years, at eighty-one, Franklin positioned himself to play a significant role in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 where delegates from thirteen states set out to improve the Articles of Confederation. 

In those halls, Franklin established himself as the voice of reason. He was more receptive to the needs of each state and open to the diversity of opinions. His wide-ranging knowledge across subject matter, professions, and geographies helped him find common ground between delegates and resolve key issues facing a young country.

Many of the other delegates felt their integrity was tied to winning arguments and the accuracy of their initial opinions. Franklin stepped in multiple times to urge humility and an open mind, “For, having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

Despite heated debates and slow progress for the first two months, over time he imbued these qualities in the rest of the delegates. Franklin advocated for compromise and deemed the Convention a success because they were willing to concede they might be wrong and did not expect the new government to be without faults. The end result was the Constitution of the United States. 

Each step of the way, Franklin’s environment was a catalyst for his greatest work. 

And as his life demonstrates so well, the environment that resonates with you and challenges you to grow will evolve over time. Franklin held a strong sense of which environment was right for him at each moment in time. And it all started back in his brother’s printing shop in Boston.

Songwriting, Evolution, and Exploration

Franklin, though, is not alone in how he sought out the environments he found meaning in and the importance they played in his life. 

For Bob Dylan, it was moving to New York City and immersing himself in the folk-music scene of Greenwich Village during his formative years. It was here that he found his community, built confidence, and honed his craft. In the decades since, Dylan allowed his environment and influences to evolve. He’s explored different genres, different sounds, and different sources of inspiration to stay in touch with his own sense of authenticity. Even when it went against what his audiences expected.

For Charles Darwin (1809-1882) it was setting out on the HMS Beagle and sticking it out for five years despite treacherous seas and becoming deeply homesick. During this time, Darwin turned his attention to subtle observations of surrounding natural environments and the tiny details he found meaning in. This was the starting place for what would become the theory of evolution. 

But Darwin wouldn’t publish his theory of evolution until twenty-four years after his visit to the Galapagos Islands. During that time, he speculated on diversity in the natural world through experimentation and careful observation—breeding pigeons, studying barnacles, and soaking seeds in saltwater to see how long they survived. What tied together these seemingly unrelated experiments—across natural landscapes and laboratories—was working to understand the nature of life.

For one of Darwin’s greatest influences, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), a Prussian naturalist and explorer, it was his three-year expedition across South America that served as the spark for the rest of his life. While he didn’t set off on his voyage until he turned thirty-years-old, those three years of exploration opened up a whole new world of possibilities. 

Upon returning to Europe in 1804, despite his desire, he would never have the opportunity to return to South America. But he found meaning in new environments which made him come alive in different ways. One such example being the auditoriums in Berlin where he fascinated crowds by weaving together art, science, and poetry, bringing distant landscapes to life. We can imagine Humboldt’s series of lectures as a 19th-century precursor to Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos.

Environment was critical to each of these people—Franklin, Dylan, Darwin, Humboldt—at pivotal moments in their lives. And while they didn’t always find themselves in a perfect situation, when they were afforded the opportunity they were deliberate about which environment they chose to immerse themselves in. The end result helped each person find their footing so they were able to contribute the most they were capable of.

The Nashville Years

One of the most important moments in my own life, which set the trajectory for the past seven years, was when I decided to leave my hometown of Indianapolis in December of 2013. I was twenty-five when I packed up a moving truck and set off for Nashville, Tennessee. I found a cramped one-bedroom duplex that had seen better days. But rent was cheap and that was my best option to get down there. 

Although it wasn’t my job that led me back to Nashville. I interned there in college and fell in love with the city. In fact, I negotiated to keep my job in Indianapolis and work remotely from Nashville—that’s how committed I was. 

At the time, I was trying to figure myself out and felt drawn towards the creative community in Nashville. A new city allowed me to escape the narrative I locked myself into in Indianapolis growing up. Nashville presented an opportunity to struggle through what I wanted to do with my life and push the boundaries of my comfort zone.

In the early days, this wasn’t easy. I missed home. I missed routine and familiar surroundings. But as I struggled through this period, eventually I found my way back to writing, launching my own startup, and learning how to stack the skills that set me apart. I started to believe in myself, building confidence in what I wanted to do with my life and how I wanted to spend my time. 

By giving myself space to explore in Nashville, I returned to two of the most important outlets for learning and creativity than I lost years earlier—reading and writing. It’s hard for me to overstate the importance that these have played in my own growth—personally and professionally.

Reading offered me lifetimes of wisdom to find the way forward. Writing provided me room to reflect on these lessons. Together these allowed me to challenge myself, explore questions, channel curiosity, and find kindred spirits. Nashville was the space I needed to step back and reevaluate what mattered to me. 

Ultimately, seeking an environment with room to explore led me back to not only an outlet for creative expression in writing, but also towards a career that fit me. As I honed my own multidisciplinary approach and considered what I was naturally drawn towards, I found my way into product management. 

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t terrified when I drove away from Indianapolis—my home for the past two decades—towards Nashville on that cold December morning. But the easiest path is rarely the most fulfilling. A deliberate decision to seek out the environment that resonated with me at that point in time had a profound impact on the course of my life.

But just as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated so well, you can’t expect your environment to remain the same throughout your entire life. And after seven amazing years in Nashville, we recently relocated to Denver. This time it was for a job opportunity and a new community, as I’ve found my niche and an opportunity to grow my career. 

Leaving Nashville was just as difficult as it was leaving Indianapolis over seven years ago. But we felt like it was the right thing. This new opportunity presented an amazing chance to grow, face new challenges, and push ourselves. 

For me, Nashville was the single most important environment I found during my twenties. It helped me rediscover a creative outlet and led me to a new career. It introduced me to a community of beautiful, deeply talented people who challenged me to discover myself, push forward, and trust in those things. I’m better for having grown up there. Everything about Nashville—the community of creatives, the distance from home, and opportunities it presented—made me a better person.

Environment Is Your Force Multiplier

Much of our lives hinge on finding the right environment. This might mean surrounding ourselves with the right community, finding somewhere that feels like home, being in the right place at the right time, or seeking out challenges that we find meaning in. And this evolves over time. Whether community, geography, or opportunity, we value different environments at different points in our lives. 

Decisions about your environment should be deliberate. And you can’t cling to the same environment for the rest of your life. Things change. You change. The best you can hope for is to remain in harmony with the motion that defines life. 

By seeking out an environment that resonates with you, you can accelerate the rate at which you grow and create room to have a far greater impact. Environment is a force multiplier. You still have to put in the effort. But paired with the right place, it goes significantly further. 

In the words of Nassim Taleb, “You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.” Think of your environment as the wind. Pair this with the fire within and that’s how you catch hold of life—giving the most to yourself and the people around you.

How to Time Your Leaps and Set Yourself Apart

Using the Sigmoid Curve to reinvent yourself, take risks, and accelerate growth

In January 1961, a nineteen-year-old, unassuming kid from Minnesota hitched a ride and headed eastbound for New York to pursue a career in music. He wanted to get closer to the heart of the folk music in Greenwich Village and see if he could cross paths with his idol, Woody Guthrie. Over the next three years, he would release four critically acclaimed albums and become widely regarded as “the voice of a generation.”

The world would soon know that kid as Bob Dylan. And it was precisely that moment in time — after four successful albums — when he decided to completely change his sound from his acoustic roots and “go electric.” As he defied expectations, he threw the folk community into a fit of rage.

The obvious thing would have been to stick with what was working and fallen in line with his audience’s expectations. But validation was never Dylan’s primary motivation. He cared more about his own growth as an artist, seeking meaning over influence at each step of his career. As a result, he achieved exactly that — lifelong influence.

Dylan resonates with people because his songwriting tracks his own development as a human being. Each album reflects who he was — his observations, experiences, and imagination — and who he refused to be at each point in time. Dylan’s life is a master class in embracing the impermanence of identity and authenticity.

In the almost six-decades since, he’s altered his voice and bridged different genres. Beginning in folk, moving towards rock, and experimenting with country and Christian albums along the way. His entire career demonstrates a remarkable ability to shift strategies and reinvent himself.

But Dylan is not alone in this. Most top performers are obsessively focused on reinventing themselves and changing strategies as they near the top. It’s what gives them their edge and helps them lock into a “learn + grow” pattern while circumventing the decline.

Houston Rockets guard James Harden works tirelessly during the NBA off-season to experiment with new shots and develop new moves. But it’s not like his existing repertoire stopped working during the previous season. This is just how he challenges himself to stay engaged and push the limitations of his own game. Harden never confines himself exclusively to the things that have worked in the past. He’s always looking ahead, focused on accelerating his own growth.

As a result, Harden is able to suspend his opponents in a cloud of confusion — they never know what to expect and rarely have time to adapt. Harden’s ability to reinvent himself creates a walking nightmare for other teams on the court. The best they can often hope for is that he’s having an off night.

The same mentality applies to Tiger Woods changing his golf swing at the top of his game. And it’s the reason companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google have been able to sustain success over decades.

This is not to say that you’ll never miss. Bob Dylan’s released albums and experimented with sounds he would likely laugh at today. James Harden’s had his share of flops that didn’t quite work out. And Apple’s launched failed products — some you’ve heard of and others that have died before ever making it to market.

But it’s much easier to recover if you’re out there taking risks, looking forward, and committed to a growth mindset.

The Sigmoid Curve

Growth comes from allowing yourself, your strategy, and your sense of authenticity to evolve. At a certain point in time, the strategy that worked for you up until now will falter. That’s part of life.

One way to adapt is to think of personal growth as a sigmoid curve — an S-shaped curve that follows learning, growth, and decline. The goal is to maintain an upward trajectory. This means hijacking the curve and your experiences, as best you’re able to, when you reach the peak of a growth curve.

In the early days, growth is nonlinear. Outcomes rarely match input. Think about starting a new job — for the first six months you’re just trying to keep your head above the water. Eventually, things start to come together and you reach an accelerated period of growth where you begin to realize some of the rewards and outcomes you set out for.

But you likely won’t get through life on a single strategy without it growing stale or ineffective. 

Remember, life is motion. You will evolve. Obstacles will evolve. Context will evolve. That’s why it’s important to shift strategies when you’re at the top of your game. Otherwise, you often end up giving back the gains you’ve made.

If you want to keep moving forward and reinvent yourself, you have to outwit the inevitability of the sigmoid curve. As James Kerr suggests in his book, Legacy, “The key, of course, is when we’re on top of our game, to change our game; to exit relationships, recruit new talent, alter tactics, reassess strategy.”

Bob Dylan, James Harden, and every top performer who has sustained success over the course of decades demonstrate a fundamental understanding of this principle. They seldom give back the gains they’ve made. Instead, they build upon them. They remain insatiable in their desire to learn and grow. Even when it comes at the expense of personal comfort and opens them up to outside criticism.

Close to six decades later we can step back and admire someone like Bob Dylan’s trajectory — how he pushed himself to grow, defy expectations, and channel that into his art. Time makes this seem inevitable, as if all he had to do was fall in line with destiny. But that fails to take into account the years of criticism, outrage, and uncertainty he faced.

Staring Down the Criticism

The real challenge is that when you reinvent yourself and shift strategies, you’re sure to be criticized. People hate change. And people are convinced they know what’s best for you. Pair these and you’re guaranteed to face a barrage of commentary from those without skin in the game. Critics will be quick to point out that you should have stuck with what was working instead of taking what appears to be a step back into a learning phase.

Dylan was shredded by the folk community when he went electric. Harden gets ridiculed by the press every time he goes a few games and struggles against his own limits with a new shot.

Reinventing yourself is not for the faint of heart. But it’s a risk that pales in comparison to remaining still and failing to evolve.

If you listen to outside advice and never switch things up, you all but guarantee a life void of meaning and a spiral towards irrelevance. By clinging to the same strategy, tactics, or identity for too long, you fall out of harmony with the motion that defines life.

And this is how you wake up to John Daly, Sugar Ray or Blockbuster staring back at you in the mirror. The same people who told you to stay the same have abandoned you because you’ve abandoned yourself.

Timing Your Leaps

Above all else, you have to allow yourself and your own sense of authenticity to evolve. That’s the only path towards peak performance, and it demands occasional discomfort.

To outwit the sigmoid curve, you have to make a series of carefully timed leaps. The trick is knowing when to make those leaps.

When you feel like you’re nearing the top of your growth curve, that’s when it’s time to start thinking about what you can switch up. This might mean testing a new strategy or taking on more responsibility. Or it might mean pursuing a new career path or an outside learning opportunity. Or perhaps it’s just switching to a new team to preserve your sense of engagement and continue challenging yourself.

A shift in strategy doesn’t always need to be drastic. But it does need to be deliberate.

Otherwise, things become too easy and too familiar within the confines of your comfort zone. And when you become trapped in a decline, it’s all too easy to cling to an expired identity and give away the progress you’ve made.

Much of life is knowing when to shift strategies — when to call it quits, when to stick it out, when to evolve your approach. If you can perfect this, you can bypass the decline phase altogether, and jump from one “learn + grow” period to the next. And this is what sets apart the top performers in every discipline.

It’s difficult to realize when you’re nearing the end of a growth phase. It requires first developing a deep sense of self-awareness and prioritizing room for reflection. This should be paired with experience — both personal and vicarious.

The usual signs are when you start to notice a decline in personal engagement and the meaning you find in the work. This signals that it’s time for a new approach.

Remember, you’re a human being. Emotion is an inherent part of your decisions. The best you can do is pause and create space for reflection. The more dispassionate you are in coming to a decision, the more you should trust it.

For example, when you’re pissed off at a manager, that’s not the time to make abrupt decisions. Create space. Allow yourself to be upset for a few hours. After a week, when you’re less entrenched in that moment, you can see things for what they are and make a more rational decision.

When I feel a calm sense of it is what it is, I’m not upset, but I accept it’s time for a change that’s when I know it’s time to switch things up and test a new strategy. When I’m in an emotional state — especially when I’m upset and playing through imaginary conversations in my head — that’s when I know I need to pause before making a decision on a potential leap.

Allow Yourself to Evolve

It’s easy to get locked into a rigid thought process with a single strategy if you stick to the map without ever looking up. But when you stop reaching for absolutes, you’re able to embrace the motion inherent to life. Everything is fluid.

The best thing you can hope to do is remain in harmony with your own sense of authenticity and the motion that defines life. By embracing this, you’re able to better challenge yourself, embrace a growth mindset, and create meaning.

If you want to create your best work and make a meaningful difference in the world, you’re going to have to grow to get there. This comes from timing your leaps and finding the courage to reinvent yourself — especially when it feels uncomfortable, counterintuitive, and the world least expects it.

Bob Dylan’s determination to evolve as an artist and his refusal to accept what people expected of him helped him grow into one of the greatest songwriters of our era.

James Harden’s ability to reinvent himself every NBA off-season is what allowed him to go from the sixth man behind Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook is his early days with the Oklahoma City Thunder to an MVP and the cornerstone of a franchise.

In visualizing the sigmoid curve, you’re trying to jump at the precipice of growth and catch hold of another learning curve one layer above — just as Dylan and Harden demonstrated. This is how you lock yourself into a “learn + grow” mindset.

Strategies are tools that you can use to take thoughtful action and connect your guiding principles with your day-to-day. Put them to use for you. Blend them. Change them. And always be willing to shift directions when something’s become stale or no longer works for you.

Above all else, allow yourself to evolve. Growth is born from a willingness to leap before you feel ready.

How to Overcome Your Fear of Falling Behind

The secret of discovery periods, stacking skills, and accelerating your growth curve

Early in my career, I was constantly worried about falling behind. I had this idea of a growth curve in my head, but in comparison to both my peers and my imagined potential, I felt like I was falling behind. There seemed to be a perpetual gap between where I was and where I thought I should be.

I would often tell myself, “I wish I wanted the same things as everyone else.” But what I’ve discovered is that when you provide yourself with a discovery period and allow yourself room to explore early in life, you always come out ahead. You just have to expand your perspective of time. 

The trouble is that at the start of your career, you only have a tiny corner of the map for reference. But the older you get and the more experience you gain, the more obvious this becomes. 

Those who start their careers without any level of introspection or sense of a discovery period might land a safe job, a decent signing bonus, and jump out to an early lead. But that type of growth follows a linear path which is incremental at best. Exponential growth is what you’re really after. 

“Not all who wander are lost”

For me, the first six years out of college were a discovery period. And from the outside looking in, the first twelve months probably seemed like a train wreck. 

I went from working on the set of major music videos, to considering medical school, signing up for pre-med undergraduate courses I missed the first time around, dropping out, waiting tables at a Tex-Mex restaurant, and taking a job in communications at a healthcare startup.

From there I worked my way into product management, as I discovered a gap between our sales team and our engineers. When I first assumed a product role, it was without knowing that product management was even a thing or potential career path. It just aligned with my natural interests – blending business, design, and technology. And the more I learned about product, the more I dug in. 

A few years later, I furthered that skill set by launching my own startup to connect people with local farmers markets and food sources. Alongside a talented engineer from my first job, we built FarmScout from the ground up. A few years later, it was acquired by another entrepreneur based in Portland. 

Out of all the early experiences I had, this was the most important in terms of a discovery period. If you want to accelerate your growth, determine what you’re good at and identify your gaps, try creating something from nothing. 

Around this same time, I also found my way back to writing. The formulaic essays from school had turned me away from the craft. But at 25, I decided to spend a random Saturday evening putting some thoughts on paper at The Well, a local Nashville coffee shop. I ended up writing for three hours. Before I knew it, I was there five nights each week, rekindling my love for writing – something I find meaning, clarity, and a deep sense of fulfillment in. Months later, I launched an early iteration of this blog from that exact spot. 

Growth is nonlinear

This period of six years was full of other ups and down – traveling internationally, exploring philosophy, building perspective. But around age 28 things finally came together.

By that point, I found my niche in product management, something I feel uniquely suited to do. I rediscovered writing and moved it back into a focal point of my life. I dedicated more of my time to the things and the people I cared about most. I began to stack the skills that made me, me. 

While I didn’t know it at the time, looking back, this is when my dedication to a discovery period began to pay off. My trajectory completely shifted. 

When setting off on a discovery period, you need to understand that input rarely matches results early on. Growth is nonlinear. You have to stick with something long enough to get through the plateau before you reach a breakthrough moment. It often takes months, if not years, to see the results. That’s why it’s so important to find the things you can sustain indefinitely and stick with those.

While I don’t presume to have it all figured out, I feel like I have a stronger sense of who I am and what’s important to me because of the discovery period I was able to carve out for myself. My hope in explaining the past decade of my life is that I’m able to provide you with a real example that you can pull from and relate to. 

History is also full of similar examples. Every influential historical figure in my latest ebook, 7 Strategies to Navigate the Noise, faced similar challenges early in their life during their attempts to figure things out. From Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin to Queen Elizabeth and Caterina Sforza, each person faced a discovery period where they felt like they were falling behind as they searched for something different than the lives neatly prescribed to them. But as they came to understand, what matters most is the trajectory you’re setting yourself up for. 

Those who follow a neat and orderly path might be a few steps ahead early on. But if you expand your perspective of time, it’s those who have explored and followed their natural inclinations that come out ahead. This is how you find real meaning and engagement. And both act as force multipliers. 

In the early days, you just have to remain patient and allow yourself to sit in the gray area between the two growth curves.

Focus on getting the conditions right, seek opportunities that allow you room to explore, and it’s only a matter of time before you catch your break. 

Stacking the right skills

During this discovery period, what you’re really after is determining what matters to you and how to stack the skills that set you apart. These will help move you closer to your guiding principle – what you find meaning in and your fundamental goals. 

Stacking the right skills is what allows you to hit this exponential growth. If you attempt to specialize in a single skill, it might work out if you’re a prodigy or operating in a rare field that has a neatly defined set of rules. 

But when facing the ambiguity inherent to the majority of life and work, this demands creativity and resourcefulness. If you’re only competing with a single skill at your disposal, it’s difficult to be creative and even more of a challenge to set yourself apart. 

But when you stack skills, layering one on top of the other, you begin carving out your own niche. From here you can create your own playing field and accelerate your own trajectory.

I’m not in the top ten percent when it comes to design or technology. But when I stack those alongside business, communication, storytelling, strategy, and a fierce sense of focus, that’s when I’m able to set myself apart. By wielding each of these skills, I put myself in a position to be more creative and resourceful. And this is the path towards authenticity and creating work that matters.

Tech
Design
Business
Storytelling
Communication
Strategy
Focus

The same lesson holds true for something like machine learning (ML). It’s incredibly difficult to establish yourself at the top of that field in its purest form. But if you stack skills in music composition, programming, analytics, and ML, it’s a rare group of people whose natural interests align and are able to combine those skills. And suddenly instead of competing against 50,000 industry experts, there are only 20 people who even remotely overlap.

Learning which skills to stack is about coming into your own. What makes you unique? What are your natural inclinations? What comes easy to you that other people find difficult or impossible? What can you sustain indefinitely? A discovery period allows you to begin uncovering answers to these questions. 

Law of the hammer

The added benefit of stacking skills is that you’re able to begin mastering a multidisciplinary approach. This is how you outthink and outmaneuver people. And it helps guard you from becoming trapped in a one-track mindset where you attempt to apply a single approach to every problem you face.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A multidisciplinary approach is the antithesis of the law of the hammer. It helps you avoid the cognitive bias that is the over-reliance on a single model. 

The more mental models you possess, the stronger your cognitive ability, and the greater your capacity to grow. Remember, when you only have a single model to work with, growth is often incremental at best.

If machine learning is the only interest and skill you’ve developed, chances are that every problem you face is going to look like an ML problem. But when you’ve armed yourself with a multidisciplinary approach and you’ve stacked the skills that set you apart, you can see problems and opportunities for what they are. From here, you’re able to determine a more effective course of action.

Be loyal to the best opportunities for growth

Early in your career, the most important thing you can look for is opportunities that allow you room to explore.

If you’re in technology, this could mean working somewhere that provides exposure to different programming languages, frameworks, technologies, and products. Or it might mean seeking out an opportunity on a diverse, cross-functional team that provides you with exposure to a range of disciplines and perspectives. 

Whatever you do and wherever you are, remain loyal to the best opportunities for growth. 

Don’t allow yourself to get locked into an isolated career early on. It might seem like a head start for the first few years, but you’ll pay dearly later on in your own growth and sense of engagement. Prioritizing short-term gratification over learning and growth is how you end up in a dead-end career with regrets.

Give yourself time to figure yourself out. Allow yourself room to explore. Prioritize the places and people who appreciate this need. 

By creating space and pursuing opportunities that reward a discovery period, you can start figuring out how to stack the skills that set you apart. This is how you develop yourself, accelerate your own growth, and avoid the traps that most people find themselves lured into. 

Channel what makes you, you. With this mindset and room to explore, you’ll run laps around your younger self and make it impossible for others to keep pace. By committing to the long game, you unlock the power of compound interest and exponential growth. And this is how you accelerate your trajectory and create real meaning. 

How I Used Improv as a Growth Hack to Become a Better Public Speaker

A few months ago I shadowed an acting class focused on scene work. And you might be wondering what the hell I was doing. I thought the same thing. I’m not an actor. I have zero natural talent. And the last acting experience I had was in the prestigious role of a truffula tree in a first-grade rendition of The Lorax. 

My intent, besides self-induced humiliation, was to discover a nontraditional approach to help improve my public speaking skills. I considered standard business speaking courses and groups like Toastmasters, but I felt like those were too formulaic and lacked room for individuality. What I needed practice with was being horribly uncomfortable in front of people and expressing myself. 

The scene-study acting class didn’t stick for me. It was more focused on developing the craft, getting comfortable in front of the camera, and immersion into different characters. I wanted to be more comfortable letting loose and being myself. But it led me to test another angle, improvisation. So I found a local comedy club and signed up for an eight-week beginner’s class.

When I walked into the class, I had no idea what I was getting into. I struggle with forced interaction and workshop-type events. I was expecting the three-hour class to drag by. But time flew by and it turned out to be one of the most important experiences I’ve had this year. 

The first class started with “dancing to yes.” It’s a warm-up exercise where one person starts dancing in the middle of a circle (don’t worry, there’s music) and the rest of the group mirrors their dance moves. Once the person in the middle is ready to move out, they make eye contact with someone else, dance over to them, and jump up at the same time to yell “YES!” before that person takes over. It’s just as traumatizing as it sounds. 

The rest of the class followed a series of exercises around active listening, mirroring body language, committing to your first idea, building on other people’s ideas, and getting comfortable on stage. Each offered important lessons in their own way. And as the weeks progressed we dug into more specifics of the craft. But the bulk of the benefit, for me, was during warmups – a point of emphasis in earlier classes. 

While I’m still improving two months later, I can say I’m a more confident, comfortable public speaker for having taken an introductory improv course. This experience provided an opportunity for accelerated growth that I would have been hard-pressed to find anywhere else. Here are the key lessons I uncovered along the way.

Lesson 1) Embrace your inner dumbass

The thing about improv is that it’s so uncomfortable it’s almost unbearable. But at that point you have to make a decision to either walk out or embrace the fact that you’re going to look like a dumbass and there’s no way around it. 

If you’re too worried about how you look on stage, you’ll freeze up and it’s impossible to cope. You might as well accept it and do your best. Besides, if you can get on stage and play make-believe with other adults, you can do anything on stage – whether a presentation at work or a TED Talk. The only thing more challenging is likely standup. 

Consider how much easier presentations or speeches become when you’re talking about something you actually know, as opposed to making up material on the spot.

But even if you’re a subject matter expert, improv will teach you to let go of your quest for perfection. It’s about trusting yourself and doing your best given the circumstances and the person you are at this moment in time. Besides, imperfection is the very thing that defines live performances.

Most of the time, attempts at perfection just end up fueling your nerves. And it’s impossible to perform your best or encourage yourself to take new risks if you’re a nervous wreck. A more effective, albeit counterintuitive, approach is to tell yourself “who cares” before taking the leap. Improv is a useful practice ground to immerse yourself in this mindset.

The “who-cares” mindset isn’t about apathy, it’s about a relaxed state of concentration. It’s a strangely empowering self-talk that helps navigate fears of judgment, failure, or general anxiety about drawing attention to yourself. It helps lower the stakes before taking a new risk.

Improv will teach you to let go and trust yourself. Once you’re on stage, there’s no other option. The same goes for presentations. Quiet your nerves by accepting the inevitable imperfections.

Lesson 2) Get out of your own head

If you want to be successful in improv, you have to focus the entirety of your attention outside of yourself. One of the best things about improv is that it forces you out of your own head. This is another powerful tool for navigating stage fright.

In everyday encounters, you can predict with relative accuracy which direction most conversations are heading. But this doesn’t work in improv. You can’t rely on cognitive patterns and only listen with part of your attention because you can’t possibly predict the crazy shit that someone is going to say next. 

The unpredictability inherent to improv demands that you listen with every ounce of energy you have. Otherwise you’ll fall on your face and make life miserable for the person next to you. If nothing else, improv will train you to be a better active listener. 

While it might sound counterintuitive, by projecting more attention outside of yourself, you’re able to avoid overthinking and settle in. If I fixate on my internal state (nerves), I only make matters worse. And this is one of the most important concepts that translates from improv to public speaking. 

When leading discussions, I channel more energy outside of myself to concentrate on really understanding what other people are saying. When giving presentations I focus on the expressions and non-verbals of individuals in the audience. These are the tactics I use to the avoid internal spirals that come from projecting too far ahead and becoming tangled in my own thoughts. 

Lesson 3) Create a bias towards action

In my day-to-day, whether writing a new article or building products, the behaviors that create the greatest ROI are reflection and calculated action. Due to the nature of the work I gravitate towards, I rarely get an opportunity to cut loose and do more impulsive activities that improv encourages. 

The discomfort you face in improv forces you to use new paths and explore new connections that have grown rusty or never been used. It rattles your routine and forces you into unfamiliar situations. It’s a far cry from the structured routine of everyday life. And that’s what makes it so beneficial for public speaking – both are unfamiliar environments that you don’t face on a regular basis. 

Improv won’t guarantee you’ll stop being nervous on stage. I doubt this ever goes away. But it does help build a greater familiarity with that feeling. It creates a bias towards immediate action so you’re able to overcome nerves and jump in anyway.

This also translates to the content of your presentation. Rather than sitting back and providing a backstory, improv teaches you to dive straight into the action. That means not just talking about the fire that started at the barn across town, but instead detailing what it was like to be in that barn or holding the firehose trying to put out the flames.

Start in the middle. People crave compelling stories. Don’t bore them with the trivial details that aren’t relevant to your core message. Improv helps train this muscle. But it also translates to how your approach speaking engagements – action first.

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There’s a certain beauty in making yourself that vulnerable in extreme moments of discomfort. This mindset creates a shift in how you view presentations or public speaking. It’s about being authentic and embracing the imperfections in your delivery. It’s far more effective to give a presentation with a few stumbles that’s honest and real, rather than give something polished that never gets below surface level.

I recently fueled all these lessons into a presentation I gave at Georgia Tech to students in the College of Computing. And it was the best presentation I’ve ever given. It wasn’t perfect and I still have quite a few things to practice. But it was real. I let go, focused on the students, and jumped into stories to illustrate ideas that would resonate with that audience.

During improv a few weeks earlier, I was acting like a grizzly bear trying to track down a toucan than escaped from the zoo. I reminded myself of this experience before getting in front of the room. I knew if I could do that, I could talk about the products I’m building at work and the key lessons I’ve learned in my own career. These were things I actually knew and believed in. 

If you want to get better at crafting logical arguments, try Toastmasters or a public speaking course. But if you want practice facing uncomfortable situations on stage and channeling your individuality, improv is the way to go. It will help accelerate your own skills and provide an unconventional angle that few consider. 

15 Lessons I Learned Before Turning 31

31 feels slightly less monumental than 30. Last year, I reflected on the most important lessons learned over the course of my 20s. But there are no off-years in life. If you’re doing it right, each one offers new experiences and opportunities to grow.

Every year I create checkpoints to consider lessons learned, challenges I’ve faced, and progress I’ve made. Birthdays are one of those triggers to step back and administer a healthy dose of perspective. 

I’ve found that the true test of how much I’ve learned in the previous year is considering myself at that same point in time 365 days ago. If I laugh at how stupid I was, that’s a good sign. Investor, Ray Dalio, shares a similar sentiment, “It seems to me that if you look back on yourself a year ago and aren't shocked by how stupid you were, you haven't learned much.”

The years I’ve been able to look back and contemplate how much I’ve learned, despite laughing at the expense of my younger self, have been the most rewarding.

This year was an important one for me. Although it’s not as big of a milestone as 30, this year was full of little victories, failures, and lessons. I’ve learned as much as I ever have in a single year. Here are some of the most important lessons that have stuck with me.

1) What matters most is the ability to bounce back

There will be times you fail to rise to the occasion. What matters most is the ability to bounce back. It’s one of the most critical skills you can build in life.

I’ve learned this time and time again in my career. You can’t expect perfect conditions each step of the way. Things are going to break, you’re going to run into ignorant people, and there will be times that you face an onslaught of obstacles with no end in sight. What matters is that you find a way to come back with a fresh perspective each day, ready to try again. 

The best teams I know embrace imperfections beyond their control and contribute something meaningful anyway. The worst teams self-destruct because they’re too busy obsessing over inconveniences. 

2) Experiences can still surprise you

I’ve been fortunate enough to have traveled to dozens of beautiful places across the world. I believe the more you travel, the more perspective you build – an invaluable gift in life. But the catch is that the more you travel, the more you seem to lose the novelty of first-time experiences. 

I will never have the same feeling that I did the first time I went dogsledding in the arctic circle, kayaking in the Milford Sound, or camping in the Vietnamese jungle inside Hang En cave.

But this year, I went to South Africa and was surprised to discover that elusive feeling in the raw experience of a safari and in the bliss of the beautiful countryside of Babylonstoren, one of the oldest Cape Dutch farms. If you keep an open mind and maintain an appreciation for life in all its forms, experiences will never cease to amaze you.

3) Convenience is worth paying for

Five years ago, “frugal” would have been one of the best adjectives to describe me. Over the past few years I’ve let that go in favor of convenience. And this comes from learning to value my time properly. 

My routine for years has been to write at a coffee shop on Saturday afternoons. But I would always cut that short to head across town to pick up groceries, an absolute nightmare on weekends. This year, instead of interrupting myself during this time, I’ve started using a grocery delivery service. 

On average, I save two hours of uninterrupted focus time. And it only costs me five extra dollars. At a certain point, you have to learn that time is the most valuable thing you have. 

4) Reversibility matters more than certainty in your decisions 

Time is far more valuable than a marginally better solution. To help make faster decisions, I’ve started asking myself, “How reversible is this decision?” If it’s easily reversible, I make it right there. Assessing decisions based on reversibility, rather than certainty of the potential outcome, has improved my decision making significantly. 

Slow, deliberate decision-making can be a significant advantage in avoiding massive mistakes. But the reality is that most decisions you make on a daily basis aren’t permanent in nature. There’s a time and place to use this level of deep thought and consideration. Not when it comes to picking a restaurant for dinner or testing a new layout for the landing page of your website. 

5) Success doesn’t come from preventing things from falling through the cracks

This is about building a systems mentality. In other words, developing the ability to step back and consider the interconnected whole – the structures, patterns, and cycles – instead of being blinded by a single event or moment in time. This frees you to focus your limited time and energy on what matters most. Success doesn’t come from being better at preventing things from falling through the cracks. It comes from knowing what to let fall through. 

You can identify those who have failed to build a systems mentality by how overwhelmed they get by minutiae – especially when the stakes are at their highest. They become fixated on insignificant things, gripping for control in their foolish quest for perfection. They’re unable to let the little things go.

6) Four things separate you from the top of your field

When I started my career in product, those above me seemed almost lightyears ahead in terms of their intelligence and abilities. I wouldn’t put myself anywhere close to the same category. But the more interactions I have with executives and senior leaders, the more I’m convinced that they aren’t infinitely smarter. The real difference is in their risk-taking, network, growth mindset, and a healthy dose of luck. It’s a good reminder that you’re not that far off. 

7) Don’t get pulled into races that you’re not willing to run

If I don’t create room for reflection, I often find myself getting pulled into other people’s aspirations and playing stupid games for stupid prizes – struggling to position myself on the corporate ladder, equating meetings with productivity, or seeking validation through arbitrary certifications and recognition. 

This is one of the most difficult skills to develop, sorting through the noise and determining what’s your own. As a human being, you are highly impressionable. This is great when it comes to social cohesion, but terrible when it comes to realizing your own aspirations. It’s okay if you don’t want the same things as everyone else. Just make sure you aren’t getting pulled into races that you’re not willing to run.

8) People are amazingly consistent in their behaviors

Another way of saying this is that everyone gets what’s coming to them – for better or worse. It’s just a matter of time. Habits and behaviors projected over the course of years dictate future conditions and outcomes. The trouble is that when you’re young and could use this advice the most, your perspective of time is too shallow to really grasp the lesson.

I see examples of talented, hardworking people catching breaks every month. I also see examples of grown adults clinging to the same identity they had in college who are paying dearly for short-sighted decisions in their careers, health, and relationships.

Use this as motivation to focus on getting the conditions right, developing better habits, and playing the long game. With this mindset, it’s just a matter of time before you start catching breaks. 

9) Compound interest from reading is no joke

After five years of reading 50+ nonfiction books each year, it’s only within the past few months that I’ve felt like I’ve been able to make seamless connections and pull relevant stories on demand. Once you form these connections, you propel yourself forward with a wealth of vicarious experience. 

This is critical to so many areas of life – mastering a multidisciplinary approach, identifying your guiding principles, outthinking misguided people. Without reading, you have to learn this all from direct experience. But books provide you with lifetimes of experience and perspective that you can call upon at will. 

10) Stories > instructions

Stop telling people what to do. Unless you’re running a laboratory, people don’t give a shit about instructions. Stories are the best way to communicate. If you let people interpret things for themselves, you get better results. Especially in fields that demand creative thinking. 

Of course, there are obvious exceptions and integrity matters. But you see the power of this in presentations. Speakers who use stories are able to capture the imagination of their audience. That’s what resonates with people. The same thing goes for brainstorming, design sprints, whiteboarding, and every meeting you have.

Everyone craves stories because that’s how we make sense of the world and piece together our own ideas.

11) Improv makes you a better human

I signed up for improv classes to help improve my public speaking skills. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I wanted to take a non-traditional approach. Fortunately, this has been one of the most profound experiences of my entire year. There are so many positive takeaways and important lessons that I’m planning to write a full article on the experience. 

The short version is that improv will get you out of your own head, train you to be a better listener, and wreck your comfort zone. 

If you aren’t listening with every ounce of your being, you will fail. You can’t fall back on normal cognitive patterns and predictions that you use in everyday conversations. And the constant discomfort during class forces you to embrace and accept the fact that you’re going to look like a dumbass on stage. There’s no way around it. It’s an empowering realization. I’ve since given up my attempts at perfection during presentations, which has helped me relax and improve my delivery.

12) Routine is essential to creativity

The more automatic my habits and routine become, the more energy I can pour into being creative. Ever since I carved out dedicated time and space for writing, my craft has improved significantly. Most mornings I start writing at 6:30 AM. Since I’ve built this habit over years, when I sit down at my desk in the morning I’m able to shift into a creative mindset without a colossal effort.

I often think of this quote from Gustav Flaubert, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” With that being said, there is a golden mean. I have to challenge this routine on occasion to make sure it’s still working for me and I’m not becoming too rigid in my approach.

13) Drawdown periods matter

I’m excited to release my first e-book next month. But it was no small undertaking. It required five months of sustained effort. Before jumping off I had to make room for a drawdown period where I was able to prepare, rest, and reflect before starting. I knew I would need every ounce of energy I had if I wanted to get my thinking clean and bring the best version of the idea to life. 

This drawdown period was essential in helping me create a buffer where I was able to piece together and discover my own thoughts on the subject. It was an escape from being bombarded by influences and outside noise. The bigger the project, the more important it has been for me to settle my mind leading up to it. 

14) Time your vacations to avoid burnout

Over the past few years, I’ve kept track of when I start to feel like I'm burning out in a given year. And I've noticed it always occurs around the same time. So this year, I planned vacations and weekend getaways to avoid falling into the same pattern – February, May, July, August, and November.

As ridiculous as it sounds, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to take five vacations. It was a way to self enforce breaks when I would otherwise attempt to be a hero and power through things. This has made a huge difference in my wellbeing, the quality of my work, and overcoming the burnout I’ve faced in recent years. 

15) Purpose starts with meaning

Over the past year, I’ve had conversations with many people struggling with purpose. I love being able to share these deep conversations and I sympathize. That was the first ten years of my adult life – forever tiptoeing on the edge of an existential crisis. Some days I still wonder what the hell I’m doing. Purpose is such an overwhelming thing. 

But what I’ve learned, and what I try to share in these conversations, is that purpose is just the series of pieces you find meaning in. Look for where you find meaning in your day to day. By doing more of those things, you move purpose within reach. And if the quest for purpose ever becomes too much, settle for doing meaningful things instead. 

What’s Really Behind Our Obsession with Failure

In recent years, there’s been a growing obsession with failure. The “fail fast, fail often” mentality is polarizing. Many take it at face value and use it to romanticize their own failures. Others reject this as bad advice that’s intended only to soothe us in our shortcomings.

But regardless of where you stand, there remains an important lesson at the core of this mindset. And it’s not about failure, it’s about reach. If you’re willing to risk failure, you’re able to take more chances and reach further beyond your current ability level.

The goal is never failure itself. And that’s what most people get wrong. The goal is extending your reach and accelerating growth. This requires pursuing opportunities where failure is a potential outcome. Progress is difficult to come by when you limit yourself to situations where success and participation trophies are guaranteed outcomes.

“There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn.”

— Robert Greene

Avoiding contests that you’re not capable of winning makes sense in high-stakes situations. You want to eliminate risk and play the odds. But in modern life, success is rarely a matter of life and death. Most decisions aren’t catastrophic or irreversible.

It’s still important to choose the right opportunities where you have a competitive advantage in terms of your natural abilities or interests. But if you want to accelerate growth in these areas, you have to seek out challenges that test your limits and push you to the brink of your ability level. 

Aiming 4% beyond your current abilities

Habit expert and best-selling author, James Clear, suggests a good rule of thumb is to aim 4% beyond your current ability level. This is where deliberate practice takes place and you’re able to achieve a state of flow. 

Don’t get too hung up on the exact percentage, this is just a system to calculate risk and accelerate growth. If you’re aiming 4% beyond your current ability level, failure is a potential outcome. But it’s not the only available outcome – success is still within reach. This allows you to take advantage of inflection points and make bigger leaps – in your career, your art, or personal qualities you’re focused on improving. 

Ramit Sethi, best-selling finance author, has a similar approach where he keeps a tag in Gmail for “failures” and aims to reach four failures each month. But that doesn’t mean he’s taking stupid risks. He’s making calculated moves to extend his reach and give himself a chance. Sethi knows failure is a natural part of growing and trying new things. This mindset is key to the sustained growth of his business, helping him reach 400,000 newsletter subscribers and launch dozens of successful (and failed) products. 

Discovering the terrain

Both success and failure offer an equal sense of the terrain. Each reveals what to do more of, less of, and which direction might be worth exploring. When you’re just starting out, the map is obscured with certain parts missing. With each success and each failure, you learn a little more and reveal another piece of the map.

“The only way to win is to learn faster than everyone else.”

— Wade Shearer

Knowing what not to do can be just as powerful as knowing what to do. If you can avoid repeating small mistakes more than once, and avoid the colossal ones altogether, you can bring the full picture into focus, faster. Reflection on your own experiences, paired with vicarious learning (e.g., books or podcasts), helps commit experience into knowledge, shedding light on new corners of the map.

Learning fast, learning often

The driving force behind this fascination with failure is learning, which leads to growth. “Learn fast, learn often” is a more accurate but less buzzworthy rallying cry. Failure is just a mask that learning wears on occasion. 

Learning is what you’re really after. Figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and piecing together your understanding of life. With this you can build momentum in the areas you’ve prioritized. 

The “fail fast” mentality is about making calculated efforts to push your limits. But failure itself is not the goal. The goal is to push your limits, extend your reach, and develop yourself. Growth requires putting yourself in challenging situations that test your abilities. 

If nothing else, the romanticized advice surrounding failure should serve as a reminder that you’re the one who has to go out and live. Books, podcasts, and articles can provide you with strategies, systems, and kindred souls. But at the end of the day, if you want to grow, you have to test these ideas for yourself, risk failure, and fine-tune your own strategy along the way.