We know it’s a thing, but we don’t want to talk about it. So we don’t.

Let’s call plans what they are at their heart: comfort.

I ditched plans because... life experience, asking questions, and I became addicted to a simple life.

If you make plans because you don’t want to admit you don’t truly have one... let’s chat. I’ve got some perspective for you.

I. The pizza

Strolling through my kitchen, thinking about this essay, an image of a pizza came into my mind.

If you’re ambitious, you’re obsessed with leveling up, delusional about your capability... talking to yourself more than most.

Where this becomes a burden rather than exciting is when we stick to the prescribed way of life. Leveling up, by default, means possessing more.

Knowledge, material, connections.

Toppings on a pizza.

Too many toppings though, and the pizza dough gets weighed down, soggy as hell, soup.

Through years and years of operating this way, I wondered why I could never hold the thing I desired in my hands.

The first rule of leveling up is ditching the prescription... it’s not, in the end, about more.

You’ve got to strike a balance. This requires one key ingredient... knowing what enough means to you.

Most don’t ask. Or they do, don’t have a clue what the answer is, and then don’t pick it up again.

Stay in the shit long enough to realize what enough means.

For me, it didn’t mean acquiring more for more’s sake... that’s a cancer cell’s mentality. Let me grow because I can!

No.

It transitioned what was truly valuable. Not more... but less.

So if you still think leveling up is more possessions, I’m flicking you behind your ear.

It’s recognition of value... and tuning your senses to see what’s valuable to you and only you.

This is how we get out of the endless game thrust at us.

Most place their self-worth in their ability to earn. But think... You can go level up and make a bunch of money, but unless that money is enough to serve you for the rest of your life, you’re going to have to go and make more money.

Know what the money means, eh?

II. Look back at the staircase

Plans are really good at adding toppings on the pizza.

When I talk to people, it’s odd that I’m the only one saying, look backwards. It’s the whole staircase methodology.

You’re sitting on this stair. The next stair means your next level. Obviously you’ve never been there before so you have no idea how to get there.

You want it really bad.

But you don’t get what you want because you want it. It’s deeper than that. And I find looking for depth forward is harder than looking for depth backward.

Simple really. You’re not on the bottom stair. You’re somewhere in between the top and bottom. So, what’s that tell you?

You’ve. Done. This. Before.

You didn’t know how to get to the next stair in your past either. But you found a way.

And it wasn’t from a plan.

It was curiosity.

Soon, I learned that I could start leveling up quicker not from the perfect step-by-step plan, but from the understanding that I’d ascend regardless.

And so, I focused on making it fun. When you’re having fun, you’ll stop needing every detail. You won’t look ahead that much. The present is too enjoyable.

And all of the sudden, you’re on the next stair, having no true clue how you got there and it was fun the majority of the way.

III. What the plan was protecting me from

The last big plan I made was right before I shut down my community.

I’d seen the best coach in the game’s system, I liked the visual, I was inspired.

I created a perfect Venn Diagram soon after. My clients loved it. It looked cool.

Complex as hell but cool. And when it came time to start executing it, I had to lean on meaning.

There wasn’t much. I created it because I could take a seed of someone else’s idea, craft it into my own and execute like hell. But execution without fun, meaning, desire... well this fancy diagram I created was no different than a grocery list on the fridge.

So this high-executed plan protected me from something...

Original thought connected to meaning.

I’d volunteered to be a zoo animal. Having my trainer — the outside world — tell me how to do step one, then two, then three.

I ditched this in March. I’d finally seen the light. I was a really good student of the game benefitting from other people’s systems, but it had no meaning to me and no truly original, courageous thought from me.

And I realized, even if I became the best student possible, my best result could be second best. The originator would hold top spot.

I’m no silver medalist.

Plans then might make you a very good student of the game and not a good student at living your own life... and that’s the only one you got.

IV. The core variable

This is the most important bit. If you’re reading this far down, congrats, you’re one of the few who gives a shit about your own life.

Hear — without needing to understand right away — the truth:

You’re the core variable.

Much of your confusion, distrust, scarcity, lack, or any other emotion you’re not loving comes from this.

The core variable is you every time. And you don’t want to think about it, so you remove that from the equation and place all the emphasis and power on the plan.

It’s why people have to-do lists of 30, 40, 100 things on it and they can’t look at a single one and say, I care about that. It’s easier to check a box than to look at the whole list and ask if there’s a point to any of it. Because if the answer is no, the next question is, what should I be doing? Or where’s my value? Or am I lazy? And now guilt starts coming in.

This is a trust breakdown.

Someone who trusts themselves the most does not really feel guilty about anything. If you feel guilt, it’s another indicator that you have more trust to give yourself.

But let’s flip this on its head... if you don’t trust yourself, how can you trust the plan you’re putting so much effort into?

V. Where a plan earns its place

I’m not anti-plan. I think people are too pro specifics.

When in life have you ever created a plan for something you’ve never done where every single step went exactly as you expected?

It’s not the plan. It’s you. The core variable.

Plans are not as powerful as simply being the person who can be in the moment and handle whatever happens... like when the plan goes off the rails.

This then becomes the true meaning. Can I trust myself no matter what happens?

To be content in discomfort. Because plans are comfort, budgets are comfort, iteneraries are comfort.

This doesn’t mean don’t have them, it means understand that comforts are all they are.

VI. I’m living it right now

The exact path I’m on has never been done before. Content in the discomfort, I aim to be the voice on trust. When you think of self-trust, you’ll see my face, hear my words.

Guess what? I have no clue how I’m going to make this happen.

Creating a plan for the never-done is speculation. So, I put all my energy into the commitment of the thing, not how the thing is done.

This is what self-trust affords you. I know that my intuition will guide me from one first step to the next first step. There is no series of steps until they’ve been completed and you connect the dots looking backwards.

Seeing every step as a new first step has eliminated the mental load of trying to tie things together before I can explain them.

I call this having an empty container.

When the container is full of half-truths — plans, expectations, hopes — your listening is faulty.

How could you hear yourself calculating so much?

So, I empty the container to always be in tune when my intuition speaks to me.

VII. Empty the container

This happens in expression for me; private expression.

No matter the level of stress, fog, overwhelm, confusion... I know that I’ll empty the container and soon I’ll have my next first step.

So, I write, start recording a voice memo, press record on my iPhone and start going.

This is the simple act of getting it out. Label it if you want. Call it venting. Call it journaling. Call it ranting. But it’s private, so why spend time labeling it at all?

The point is a space doesn’t remain truly empty.

When you begin it’s filled with muck. So you empty.

Then, from a place of purity, listening, receptiveness... you don’t solve anything. You simply empty until something pure jumps in.

This is the next first step.

And it’s a crucial point. Don’t figure out why it jumped out at you. There’s only a short amount of time to create action around your intuition.

Act first. This creates evidence that informs future questions.

If you start questioning your intuition before you begin acting, you’re just creating a new plan in a more philosophical way.

Just move. Your inner voice already knows the plan. Don’t ask it to tell you specifics.

TIP: Double down on movement. This is where pressing record while taking a walk — outside or inside, like I was pacing around my kitchen when ideating this piece — really introduces flow. Flow benefits from movement. It’s the opposite of staring at your computer waiting for inspiration.

VIII. Try this before you close the tab (how to)

Two options. Pick which one most aligns with you.

Option 1: Press record on your phone and start walking around your house. No agenda, just start speaking and don’t stop. Talk about what you see. Talk about what happened yesterday. Just get your mouth moving. The longer you go, the more your next move takes form. When you feel your intuition is speaking a specific thing to you, stop and begin with it.

Option 2: Something I do with clients who are overwhelmed a lot is looking at their biggest source of overwhelm — their calendar, to-do list, email inbox. Instead of do what they normally do, which is look at the whole thing and try to solve the puzzle with some masterstroke, I ask them this... “What’s the one thing among all of these that if it isn’t done, the rest of the stuff doesn’t really matter?” You can do this in seconds. Look at the list, find the break point... if this isn’t done, who cares about all the other stuff... and start. Don’t solve. Just start on that. Pretend the rest of them don’t exist. I’ve seen clients who put something off for weeks do this in 30 seconds and message me two hours later and say, “I finished the whole thing.”

Focus is a heck of a thing.

IX. That’s the end (optional favor)

I hope this has helped you. You can do option 1 and option 2 in very little time, and I’m confident it’ll result in your happiest day this week.

Don’t overthink it.

Just like I didn’t overthink this assessment. I created it, launched it, and now I’m collecting feedback.

The goal of this? Start murdering your self-doubt.

Have self-doubt? This helps you start removing it from your life.

Give it a spin (takes 60-90 seconds) and then do me a favor and drop a comment or shoot me an email telling me what you think.

It’s the 1.0 version I’m hoping to build into something substantial to help you trust yourself more and more every day. Your feedback will help me get there quicker.

◬

P.S. I’m buying the first person who takes this for a spin and messages sends me a photo of their archetype a free coffee gift card. No questions. No strings. Just thanks for reading this, doing the thing, and helping me out.

You can watch the accompanying video here.

A philosopher in the 1960s, a man alone in a cabin by a pond in the 1840s, and a mystic in the 1940s all landed on the same thing.

What you see is made by you.

Every bit of it.

And almost nobody lives by it, because living by it means giving up the one thing everybody is fighting for. Being right.

I’ll be honest up front. I don’t have the final word on God, or the universe, or why any of us are here. I’m still asking. But on this one thing, I’m certain. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I. My son asked me who God is

William is six. A few nights ago, lights off, blanket up to his chin, he asked me who God is.

There’s an easy answer. All the things you see were created by Him. Goodnight.

I didn’t give him that one. I went deeper into his question. “Tell me more about where that question comes from.”

I don’t want to influence a six-year-old on his belief system. I can just demonstrate my own. And a question like his is a little hand reaching into the dark. I’d rather reward the reaching than slap an answer on it and shut the door.

I’m the same as him. A grown man with three kids, still reaching into the same dark, asking the same question.

Two of us in that room, seeking.

The difference is I’ve found one thing I’m sure of. It’s where this whole essay goes.

II. Two people can read the same page and see two different things

“Things have no reality other than in consciousness. Therefore, get the consciousness first, and the thing is compelled to appear.”

Neville Goddard

Hand two people the same page of text. They walk away with two different meanings.

Sit two people through the same dinner. They leave with two different dinners.

You’ve lived this. Your sister remembers the holiday as warm. You remember it as tense. Same house. Same table. Same turkey. Two holidays.

So who is creating that which you see?

It’s pretty hard to argue it’s anyone but you.

Now, I don’t want to go metaphysical on you and say nothing is real. The table is real. Your spouse is real. Your sister is real. What I’m saying is this: what you see as real is real to you and you alone. We’re all part of the same vibration. We just see that vibration through our own lens.

And almost all of that seeing happens in silence. Nobody walks up to a coworker and says, “Hey, here’s how I perceive you.” It’s a private interaction. It happens all day, thousands of times, and you never once say it out loud.

Neville spent his life teaching that consciousness comes first, and the world follows. Most people hear that and think it’s woo-woo stuff. Then they spend Thanksgiving arguing about whose version of the holiday is the real one.

III. Nobody will ever see through your eyes (and that’s the best news you’ll get)

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”

Alan Watts

You will never be able to see it 100% from someone else’s eyes. They will never be able to see it 100% from yours.

Most people would call that a problem. It’s where loneliness lives. It’s where every misunderstanding starts.

I think it’s the largest advantage possible. Because what does it open?

Grace.

Look around. It seems like everyone is spending a ton of energy trying to be right. But right is only objective to the self. So you’ve got two roads. You accept that, and maybe even enjoy it as an endearing part of being human together. Or you fight it. And fighting it only ever ends one way. Conflict.

Picture two kids lying in the grass. One sees a dragon in the cloud. The other sees a dog. Neither is wrong. The cloud doesn’t care. The fight only starts when one of them needs the other to see the dragon.

Watts called each of us an aperture. A little opening the universe looks through. So every person is a different window in the same house. Nobody gets mad at a window for facing east.

Here’s why almost nobody lives by this. It costs you the argument. You have to let the other person keep their reality. Every time. Even when you’re sure.

What you get back is worth more. You don’t need to compare what you see to that which others see.

Accept the relief of that.

IV. The same three years can be a wound or a gift

I was talking with a man recently. Years back, he’d hired someone and worked with them for three years. It ended badly. He believed that person ruined his life.

I told him he should be messaging that person and saying thank you.

He looked at me like I’d lost it. So I explained.

“This person, whether it felt good or not, is the clearest demonstration in your recent history of what you are able to handle. Here you are, talking to me, air in your lungs. Your neurons are firing. You haven’t given up.”

Then I asked him, “Isn’t it kind of cool that you didn’t actually know you could handle this much?”

Same three years. He saw a wound. I saw evidence.

Not one fact moved an inch. Same person, same contract, same ending. And by the end of that call, he was thinking differently about all of it. He had zero plans for that conversation to turn into that. It turned out that way because I had a different perspective of the exact same thing.

This is the missing piece for most people. They believe the facts decide what they see. The facts just sit there.

If your seeing can change while the facts stay exactly where they are, your seeing was never fixed. It was yours the whole time.

V. Your thoughts are smoke. What you do with them is fire.

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

So how do you create what you see? Picture a campfire.

The smoke is your subconscious. It takes in everything your eyes, ears, and body take in, and it reacts. It creates little figments you can latch onto and put words to. But it isn’t a dialogue. It’s a puff of smoke. It’s passive. It’s a partner, and you can’t control it.

The flame is your inner voice. It picks up the smoke and starts asking. Why did I think this thought? What does this thought mean? What would I like to do with it? That’s the move from monologue into dialogue. Puffs of smoke into a fire. Something that warms you. Something that becomes fuel.

The light is your imagination. It’s how far the flame reaches. How much of the woods around the fire gets warm. When people say “she has such an imagination,” what they mean is her fire lights up more of the woods than most. She thinks past the usual bounds.

The flame and the light are partners. They sit on the same level. A flame with no reach warms nobody. Reach with no flame is just a dark forest.

Now you might be thinking, “So I should follow every little thought that pops into my head?”

No. Every little thought is smoke. Any little thought that comes into your head is your subconscious behaving accordingly. Smoke goes wherever the wind blows it.

The inner voice is the filter. It questions the smoke until the answer is so obvious it shows up on its own. Then it’s a choice. Made in faith, or not.

Thoreau sat in a cabin he built with his own hands and wrote that public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with your private opinion. He was right. Everyone’s busy fighting the crowd. The real throne is the little fire in your own head.

VI. God, as far as I can tell, lives in here

Back to William’s question. Who is God?

I’m still working on it. I’ll tell you where I’ve landed so far.

I don’t know exactly how I was placed where I am now placed. But I do know that I didn’t create it, and that it was given to me.

A gift.

So think about a gift. When you receive one, what’s the obvious thing to do with it? You admire it, and you use it. Even a painting on the wall gets used. It pleases you. It starts a conversation. It deepens the one already going on in your head.

Your body and mind are the most powerful gift ever conceived.

And the more I seek, the less I find to argue against God living within every person, and the more I find to argue against God living somewhere outside them.

For a long time I believed in an outside rulebook. Here’s what it cost me. A lot of confusion. Walking around all day going, I hope I’m doing it right. I hope I’m doing it right. Like a man on a casino floor in Vegas, rolling the dice and hoping.

And here’s the thing. That rulebook is read by people. Remember the page from earlier? Two readers, two meanings. So the “right” everyone’s working so hard to do turns subjective all over again.

When I let it go, I immediately felt peace. And something else. An insane amount of power within me that I can access through more seeking, rather than trying to please.

If your faith gives you peace, keep it. I’m not here to take anybody’s God away. I’m telling you where I found mine.

And I don’t want you to agree with me. That would be outsourcing all over again. I want you to hear this, sit with it, and ask what you think. God lives in you too. You’ve just received new information. What do you make of it?

VII. The two smartest objections, and why I let them stand

Whenever I share this, two objections come up.

“So if I decide murder is right, I should go do it?”

My answer is a question. Do you want to murder someone?

Everyone already knows how. Are we really saying the only reason people haven’t murdered somebody is because they don’t trust themselves?

Come on.

I’d rather you focus on why you struggle to talk to your spouse. Or why you wake up every day with a huge burden on your shoulders. That’s where self-trust actually lives.

“Nothing is up to us. It’s all already written.”

This one has real weight behind it. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford, wrote a whole book called Determined, arguing that free will doesn’t exist. And he argues you can live that way without it leading to pointlessness.

Fair. Maybe at the level of everything that’s already happened, it’s all written. Look backward, and every domino falls exactly where it had to.

But I don’t live backward. I live in today. And in this day, what you choose comes down to how much you trust yourself.

Take the assessment for free here.

Neville actually makes the two friends. If imagination is what creates, the future can already be written and still be yours, because you’re the one who desired it.

For me? If I’m a puppet and someone else is pulling the strings, then what’s the point? That’s my reality, and I’m keeping it. If yours gives you comfort in the way you live, then who am I to say?

VIII. Try this before you close the tab

This takes under a minute.

1. Picture your most recent disagreement. Big or small.

2. Step out of yourself and into their view, knowing you’ll never fully get there. What feels objectively true to them?

3. Say their version out loud in one sentence. Or write it down.

4. Chew on it like gum. Notice how it changes the longer you chew.

5. Then ask yourself one question: Did I create an objective truth for all of existence (them), or just for me?

You already know the answer.

A mystic said it from a lecture stage in New York. A philosopher said it on the radio in California. A man said it from a cabin by Walden Pond. I’m saying it from a blue chair at 5 AM, with a six-year-old asleep down the hall who still wants to know who God is.

What feels objective is your reality, and yours alone. Which means you made it.

You are literally the creator.

So what else do you want to create?

◬

Watch here for a bit more depth ↓

And you’ve been carrying around a burden, heavy as hell, for years and years.

The belief you’re supposed to know how.

By the end of this piece, you’ll be released from this burden.

It’s simple. Child’s activity book simple. And it’ll change your life.

The Burden

We’re obsessed (and wasting our fucking time) trying to figure out how to level up.

The how is the waste. The waste is the reason it takes so long.

We’re constantly looking forward and saying, “How? How do I solve this puzzle? How do I grow?”

It’s absurd. Here’s why.

When you think about it, you (the person who has no clue how) are obsessing over the thing you’ve never done.

Two steps, and the burden of how to level up is released:

[1] See yourself on a staircase and look backward.

Every single time you leveled up, passed a trial, were victorious, what did you have when you did these things? Nothing. The same feeling you have now. You had no clue how you were going to solve it, yet you’re here, and you did. And I guarantee you, you didn’t solve it with the strategy or a plan you mapped beforehand — precisely carried out step-by-step. No. You started, but what made it happen was…

[2] Being curious.

You moved in the mist. Then, something hopped out. A path was revealed. You didn’t know for sure, but you walked down the path. Or you talked to the thing that hopped out. This is questioning. “Where could this go?” And when you were in the moment, you dropped your need, and you went. You started wondering more deeply.

You started trusting. Curiosity leading. Desperate want left behind, looking at the flowers on the side of the path.

And what no one is realizing when they feel stuck is that you can switch into this mode immediately if you want to.

And that starts with faith—step 1.

Instead of trying to manufacture faith or hope you’re faithful to your growth, that’s overcomplicating it.

You only have to look backward. You look backward, and you find a trying moment and start thinking about how the resolution came about.

You see one of the stairs below you and travel back to it spiritually and have a conversation with it like it’s your six-year-old self and ask all about how they were feeling.

And in this, you get to know yourself truly.

Once transported to this stair as you now, speaking to you then. Listen as a comforting parent would. Delicately hearing about the child’s hard day.

Don’t wait for your turn to speak. Listen. You already know you hold the secret: the experience of how to help that child because you’ve been through it already.

You are one with yourself, and you are holding yourself. You are forgiving of yourself, and you are providing the best gift to your current self.

Through the power of reflection, you may release yourself of the burden of the how.

You do not have to know how because you are not supposed to. You know in your heart of hearts that it’s absurd to plan for something you’ve never done. You know that if you plant the seed of your desire, you will not allow it to grow if every hour you dig it up and check to see if it’s working.

You plant it. Leave it alone. Allow yourself to discover what the seed was meant to be.

This is faith, and faith can be acquired, not bestowed. You beget yourself through reflection of your past self.

The self two stairs down who, in the linear past, felt as terrible as you do now, not feeling they’ll ever figure it out. And you, the omnipotent being, wrapping your arm around their shoulders and saying, “It is already done.”

In a conversation with someone recently, they were in such a place. They had a financial fear. After having success for many years, the last three had been difficult. They’d made a choice they wish they’d not made. And the confidence they once had when building a business that built a life… was gone. Every move now was questioned: “If I was wrong then, might I be wrong now?” It was an hourly torture of this man’s mind.

I told him about the stairs. That it was already done, he said the words, “It has always worked out for me,” soon after. But this was not the revelation.

For what had happened to him in the last three years was that he made a decision out of escape. He had transformed from a life he was good at to a life he wished to choose—a change of scenery. Yet, the origin of his trouble was obvious. He transitioned to this new challenge out of disgust. He was no longer interested in what he’d built and wished it to feel different. But instead of being curious about what that could become — planting the seed and witnessing its potential — he’d already decided this move as a way to run away from the old. And therein lay his problem.

When we make decisions based on escape, we abandon curiosity. This is looking in the past, not as a staircase of evidence, but as historical fiction. It is assessing the past through the lens of a fairy tale.

It made him the explainer. The author of events that seemed ironclad in his mind, which, with the slightest blow of outside perspective, would topple the entire belief system. This was evidenced in our conversation. He’d used this escape mentality to outsource his purpose to another person. This person gave all the classic signs this was not worth their time, and this man was well aware — he consulted his other entrepreneurial friends, laying out the broad strokes of his daily misery, to which his friends said, “Cut bait!” — but no. See, he’d already planned this. He’d already explained how it would go in his mind. He’d told himself when he left his past life and invested in this new one, “This will be it because I say so!” and so he was planning for a future he’d never done. Architecting his life based on a fantasy of the past.

Our meeting was the reality. He told me what he’d told others. And as I’ve already told you, curiosity is all you need. I had no advice for him. I surrendered to questions.

When you do so, fantasy becomes what it is… an absurdity of the mind. Entertaining but false.

Truth steps in, and it does so without ego. So when the right question was asked, I told him plainly. “Aren’t you glad this person failed you?” Of course, this was the first time he’d heard this perspective. So he asked me what I meant. To which I reframed his story, utilizing only the truth, not the fantasy. “Everything you’ve told me tells me you got exactly what you needed out of this.”

Moments before, he said he felt he was complaining more than he did when I first met him three years ago. I disagreed. He was not complaining; he was realizing. He was seeing. And through the questions and curiosity… he was, whether he liked it or not, becoming.

Which made the last three years of his life exactly what he needed to understand the only person he spends every second of his life with.

And before the conversation ended, he understood the stakes. The staircase revealed that plans, the how, the strategy… were abstractions that prevented growth.

Before we ended, he told me about his ambition. It is a global ambition to help countless lives. Yet, he thought he hadn’t done it yet because he didn’t know how. I told him, “But you do. You do know how. You can’t see it because you don’t trust yourself to find it.” Like the acorn doesn’t need to be told how to grow into an oak tree, you don’t need to be told how to accomplish your mission.

You need to trust yourself. The person who does tells no fantasies. They need no validation. They see plans for what they are… absurd.

The person who trusts themselves second-guesses nothing, laments nothing, hopes for nothing.

They think very little about anything. What do they do?

They listen.

They take their spirit down their staircase, speak to their former self like they’re telling the best secret they could tell a child, and whisper to them… stop trying. Just listen. You’ve already done it.

And this is likely where your current feeling of being lost originates.

It could be that you had a trial in your past that still haunts you. It could be that your life seems perfectly fine on the outside — maybe even impressive — but there’s a missing piece on the inside. So, because the world has hardwired you as a person who desires to grow this way… you buy the frameworks, read the books, watch the videos, trust the coach’s system.

You place the truth on the shelf and go seeking the fantasy.

And that isn’t your fault. Because we may convince ourselves we’re OK with discomfort, but that’s a fantasy too.

It’s just easier and less painful to explore something new and external than it is to ask scary questions of ourselves.

But that is The Way.

One cannot know themselves if they withhold the most important questions for fear of the answers.

I see this weekly. The reason those I grab coffee with or the clients I serve keep my teachings in their minds long after the session is over is that it isn’t something I implanted in them.

They already know it. Everything I say, everything of mine you’ve read, may read like a different perspective, but it’s rooted in a truth you’re already aware of.

This is why I say everyone has the answer they’re seeking inside them right now. It’s just behind a locked door buried under two inches of dirt.

My job isn’t to give you the key. I don’t have it. You do.

My job is to sweep away the dirt. I do this naturally because I know the secret.

But I’m telling you…

So

Do

You.

The secret to a life you choose with a day you love is clear:

Trust yourself more than anything else, and you’ll get everything you want.

That’s not theory. A promise. Marketing speech. Or mystical hooey.

It’s the truth. You know it’s true. And now you can’t avoid it.

Because you’ve read the words, and had a reaction, and you’re damn welcome that this piece has introduced a turning point in your life you cannot avoid.

You see, there are only two options for you now.

You have a fight on your hands either way.

You can choose to fight these words and spend the rest of your life looking for how to get what you want.

Or you can embrace them and start listening to yourself and trusting what your Self has to say.

One’s a seeker. One’s a receiver.

So choose. Doesn’t have to be in this moment.

Take a walk. Call your mom. Walk outside, take your shoes off and wiggle your toes in the grass.

But know that it is done.

You will seek, or you will receive.

You will need and plan.

Or you will surrender and understand.

One architects an explained existence. One experiences life.

A beautiful, unexplainable, bangin’ life.

A life chosen through trust, with a day you love… over and over and over.

Yours.

◬

If you’re reading this in email, it’s too long to fit, so you have to view it in a browser or in the app. I consider this the best thing I’ve yet written so I don’t want you to miss it for a technical detail. Enjoy! -C

The farmer plants a seed and does not kneel beside the earth every hour to dig into the soil and see whether life has begun.

Checking would not prove faithfulness. It would disturb the process.

The acorn contains the pattern of the oak. It doesn’t need you to tell it how to become a tree.

This is the root philosophy of your desires, illustrated by the planted seed.

This may sound familiar, as this idea has been utilized in things like manifestation, affirmation, and the like.

Today, I’m going deeper into why we dig. The human who needs to check. The human who lacks faith that the seed will know what to do.

Let’s talk about that.

Someone digs up the seed not because they don’t understand how to plant it in the first place.

Knowing your desires, creating goals, the pull toward reaching your potential… these are innate.

It’s the nurturing that’s the problem. And because there’s a self-trust epidemic on this globe of ours, well… it’s a trust thing.

You don’t trust you planted the right thing (second-guessing).

You don’t trust you can handle what comes up through the dirt (challenge).

Every quiet check, every dive of the shovel… it’s a lack of faith.

So, let’s get objective, because this made me laugh when I heard myself say it out loud.

How could you plan for something you’ve never done?

Read more

By January 2024, I’d put eight and a half years into a marketing agency. Bootstrapped it to Top 1000 in the world. Six-figure take-home. On the path to $5M a year with a team of eight. I’d finally achieved the semi-dream of removing myself from day-to-day operations, spending all that extra time grabbing coffee with hundreds of cool people.

I’d taken 13 years to run the plan as it’s prescribed. I was winning.

Eight months later, I didn’t have any of them.

I didn’t lose them. I let them go.

You’re supposed to fake it til you make it. But what happens if you make it, then start faking it?

I’d created a dirty habit of performance without belief.

By January 2024, I knew I no longer wanted to participate. But I was scared. So I stayed eight more months, on calls pretending to give a shit about marketing, the deliverables, the complaints my clients would give me about other team members because they trusted me implicitly. I was motivating people to do a job I wasn’t motivated in.

You do these things, you say, because you’re not a quitter. You have something to prove. You do these things… well, you don’t really know why, because you never asked yourself a deeper question.

You asked, “What do I need?” and then you stopped.

It’s funny how when we set a goal, we don’t meditate much on what it’ll mean to possess it. We don’t calculate the trade-offs.

And you’re terrified of the other side. The desire for stillness, peace, to make a guilt-free decision. Silence feels like failure. Stillness feels like selfishness. You must look up to be something.

But noise felt like success. The full calendar. The client calls. From the outside, it all looked like winning. And it was all noise that protected me from the question I couldn’t ask yet.

The question started bubbling up. Involuntary. Suppressed in the name of the goal.

“Can you reach your full potential here?”

The answer was no. Immediately. But I disguised my fear as practicality. We had 4-month-old twins. I’d put in so much work. We were on pace to hit $5M in the next 2-3 years. I was only working 8 hours a week.

I couldn’t leave.

So I ignored the question. But it kept bubbling up. A couple of times a week. Then a couple of times per day. By May, it was behind every task, every action. Transitioning from “Can you reach your full potential here?” to “If you know the answer, what are you still doing here?”

My body had been telling me for a long time.

I’d had my first kid in 2020 and worked so hard I can’t remember the first 18 months of his life.

April 2022, my heart stopped beating on an airplane. Obviously, it came back to life.

In December 2022, lying in bed after sending a 93-minute voice note to my business partner, I looked up at the ceiling and said, “I don’t think I’ll wake up tomorrow.”

It was a paradox. I didn’t play it safe. I’d made a series of strategic, risky moves throughout my career. I’d gone for it. The results were there. With every move I made, I convinced myself I was doing it for me, that I was the master architect of my vision.

Big risks feel like that in the moment.

But zoom out a ways, and soon you’ll realize you didn’t make these moves based on your vision. You found someone else’s. I’d signed up for someone else’s race. A race I’d never win.

This is where “I guess I never wanted it” deepens. I was courageous—repeatedly in the wrong direction.

I often joke with people that twins are the most amazing thing in the world, and I wouldn’t wish them on anybody.

Economically, having twins is a nightmare. I say that because what I did between May and August of 2024 was, on paper, objectively stupid.

With a mortgage, student loans, and a bit of credit card debt, I calculated my run-rate. If I made zero money, maxed every credit card, and pulled every single dollar from investments, how long could we last before we went full nuclear?

22.5 months.

I remembered something my mom told me when I was thinking of proposing to my then girlfriend: “You’re never fully ready.”

So when I saw the 22.5 months, with no plan at all for how I was going to make even $1, I gave my notice and walked away on August 30, 2024.

As I write this, I’ve survived 25 months and moved to a new state. Sold the house. Sold the car. Credit Karma sent me a notification yesterday telling me we’d paid off 83% of our debt in the last six months.

It wasn’t the result that told me the risk was worth it. 25 months ago, August 31, my first day unemployed, I felt peace.

Building the agency, fighting tooth and nail to do it the right way, it never felt like enough. The moment I left, no financial backing, some debt, zero plan for how to make cash, just a 22.5-month runway to mushroom cloud death… it felt like more than enough.

Before any of the cash came in, with a single decision, I’d lost:

• Being tied to normal working hours

• Motivating people to do the basics

• Client frustrations about colleagues

• Looking at a dashboard full of tasks and meetings

• Pretending I cared about the work

I’d gained:

• Silence

• An empty calendar

• A task list that only ever had one item on it, chosen by me

• Messaging people who were happy to hear from me

• The beauty of discovering joy in the work again

One decision.

Soon, I started shaping what I call A Bangin’ Life—the life you choose, with a day you want to repeat.

I could write and have coffee in the morning. Help a dope person and read in the afternoon. Coffee, write, read, help—the cardinal four of a great day for me.

And a great life is just stacking a bunch of great days.

For the first time, with $0 in earnings, I’d figured out what enough meant to me. It was true freedom.

Imprisonment was having all the right moves in my locker, looking around, and still needing more.

Freedom was realizing I was given everything I needed: air in my lungs, a discerning mind, movement.

Life started feeling blissfully simple.

I’d spent months journaling, recording rants while driving in my shitty Dodge Caravan with the squeaky brakes. Voice notes. Endless pages. No solution in sight. Just getting it out.

And then, after months and months, a calm came over me. A lightning-bolt moment struck my toes and shot up through my legs and torso, to the tips of my eyebrows, and nestled like a halo on my head.

From that moment forward, I made this statement my life’s mantra:

Never look back on a decision you make and ask, “Where was your courage?”

Death is what makes that mantra operational. If you’re going to die, the faces around you don’t matter. The external judgment doesn’t matter. Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s waiting for you to trip. The voices in your head don’t exist in the real world.

You stop asking whether the move looks right from the outside. You stop caring about perception. You just go.

I’m the only person I spend every second of my life with. I wanted to look at that person, with no other faces in the room, and say, “Damn! That person is cool as hell. I’d buy them a coffee. I’d spend a week in a tiny cabin with them just to be nourished by their presence.”

You do that, and I can tell you, you’ve won. There is no other feeling like it.

There’s a reason I say, “You have the answer inside of you; it’s just behind a locked door buried under two inches of dirt” about 30 times a week.

I grabbed coffee with someone who resonated with one of my posts. Within seconds, he was trusting me with deep, vulnerable information, which I’m amazed and honored to hold every time.

He’d told himself he had to do it the “right” way. I asked why he thought it was right. Then I asked why again. And again.

He was days away from investing $50K+ in something he didn’t believe in. 45 minutes later, he saved the cash and did it his way.

I guess he never wanted it.

You’re sitting there making a lot of the right moves. Right for whom?

I’m not telling you to jump ship. I walked away from 9 years, with twins, with debt, with no plan. On paper, stupid. But I had to make it.

And I’d make it again.

This question helped me. I hope it helps you.

Which of the milestones you’re chasing did you actually choose?

Or differently.

If there were no faces or external judgments, what would you choose with your whole mind, body, and soul?

I’m guessing something comes up pretty quickly.

So then it gets really simple.

Why not now?

If you want to watch this essay on YouTube, head here.

You’ve heard, “just be yourself online.” What terribly right advice that gets you fuck all.

Like telling a depressed person to cheer up, “You think we don’t know we should be ourselves?” you shout into the void.

I’m not going to tell you how to be you. I’m going to tell you that there’s a cost to hesitating.

And I’d love to tell you that you can get by without having to give it all. With the right recipe and ingredients, you can save yourself from a few of the nastier bits.

But sorry, Chief, you’re cooked.

You may be wondering what this looks like, or you may already know but need a reminder.

Let’s call this out.

If you’re not semi-shitting yourself before you press publish, you’re outsourcing your expression.

Here’s what outsourcing looks like (there are three versions of this plague):

First, copying someone else’s system. I know this one because I lived it. A creator with a 1M+ audience. An ads wizard who made you shut up and pay. A woo-woo master. A deca-millionaire leveraging YouTube. Copied ‘em all. Never for long. Ditched every one because, from day one, it felt like I was doing someone else’s version of life. They weren’t wrong to suggest them. The stuff they said was valuable. But I took it as a blueprint, not inspiration. I was trying to do it “right” by their standard instead of what felt “right” by mine.

The second: writing in a voice that isn’t yours. Performing authority you haven’t earned, in a register you don’t speak in, about ideas you haven’t tested. This is the coaching-industry default. Frameworks. Systems. Seven steps. The voice of someone who’s already reached every conclusion before the reader started reading.

The third: only saying what you think will perform. ROI-thinking. “I do this so you can give me this.” Every post is a transaction. Every word is engineered for engagement. The person doing this is transacting, not expressing.

Ew.

…

That ew isn’t rooted in judgment, you know that. It’s that we feel icky doing it, but we gotta make a living, and we somehow justify it as OK because if someone else is doing it, there’s our permission slip.

The most common form of despair is not knowing who you are. — Kierkegaard.

So, I was talking about cost…

When you withhold or outsource, you’re paying the ultimate penalty:

It’s called voluntary despair.

You may write in a journal, speak to AI, or voice memo into the ether (I do all three, by the way), but without a reflection back, it’s yearning whispers banking on the universe to reward you for wanting it enough.

It’s not, and never will be, enough.

You gotta take a risk.

Here’s what not taking a risk looks like:

You never put your own voice out where reality can reflect it. The stories in your head stay untested. You convince yourself you’re misunderstood, or invisible, or not capable of helping anyone. Those stories sit there, unchallenged, because you never gave the world a chance to confirm or break them.

This, my friend, is voluntary despair.

You chose it.

Every time you sanitized your opinion into nothing, every time you copied someone else’s format instead of inventing your own, every time you rewrote a post until it sounded like it could have come from any account with a profile picture and a course to sell, you chose it.

Or, worst of all, you kept the damn thing to yourself, and it never saw the light of day.

If you are posting through the lens of voluntary despair and it’s not hitting… well, that’s really the best-case scenario.

At least you don’t have to double down on a character you never wanted to be.

You can stay your melancholy self behind the scenes. Pour your heart into your journals. Ache for the corner of the pub where you fantasized about that girl you met in the coffee shop and never learned her name, but still think about twice a week and get lost in when drunk.

That’s a life. A real one. But it’s a life you’re living alone, with the curtains drawn. And the problem isn’t that no one can see you. The problem is that YOU can’t see you. The reality you create is your imagination expressed. If you only ever express based on other people’s points of view, their beliefs, their systems, you never see yourself. You only see their reflection.

In life, nothing is condemned. All is expressed.

Life does not care whether you call yourself rich or poor; strong or weak. It will eternally reward you with that which you claim as true of yourself. — Neville

The fear of true expression — your deep desires, your potential, your North Star, your conviction, your “What if?” — is what’s holding you back.

It’s not social media, the algorithm, or the ability to post that should be considered when expressing yourself.

That’s too complicated.

Choose your motivation for changing course, stop signing up for voluntary despair, and see what you’re made of.

Course #1 (the positive one):

You’re gonna die anyway. Never look back on your life and ask where your courage was.

Course #2 (the scary one):

Knowing that if you don’t express yourself publicly, you’ll only ever reinforce the stories in your head. The stories you’ve convinced yourself are true but have no basis for. They may be true. They may not be. How would you know without the expression?

And the internet is full of “never be afraid of the blank page” or the “blinking cursor,” but that’s too shallow.

You’re complex, and you’re thinking beyond it.

The fear is of people’s response, or worse, the lack of one.

You think you’ll be misunderstood (“I’m different, no one gets it”) or nonexistent (“I’m worthless, a speck floating in space”).

Here’s the liberating sentence you need to hear: Nobody cares (including you).

Over coffee, I talked with my son’s principal about the old days.

Neither of us misses high school, but we used to play each other in sports. Trading names, moments, talking about high school reunions we’d gone to and not gone to, where people still want to refer to you as the football star or basketball star.

And he expressed that feeling we all have as teens… the spotlight is on us.

Everyone is watching.

Speaking of imaginary stories we tell ourselves…

If you were sitting in the room with me right now and I asked what you had for lunch last Tuesday, you’d have no damn clue.

This is your benefit.

You don’t even care that much.

No one cares about you. Specifically, personally, individually. No one is waiting to cancel you. No one is lying in bed thinking about your post.

And if you have a core belief strong enough to say the thing that goes against the grain, there are always two sides to every story, and you will have enough support from the people who believe what you believe.

If you’re afraid some people will disagree, good!

No one ever hit their potential by hanging out in the middle.

If you believe it, say it. Don’t hold it.

You’re someone with the skills to help people, desperately wanting to, but held up by a fear of reprisal that is highly unlikely to come.

You’re keeping yourself from what you’re truly meant to do. If you don’t take the risk, who will?

But here’s the other side of “no one cares.”

No one cares about you specifically. But expression matters enormously to the collective.

When everyone is performing, the culture is dictated by something as fair-weather as the daily wind. No moral compass. No deeper drive. No clear reason for any of it.

Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell. If we perform for the sake of performance or reward, we are transacting.

Doesn’t that feel hollow just to read?

When one person stops performing and speaks from their actual self, something breaks open.

They’re not giving anyone permission. You need no permission at all.

That’s the mindset of the waiter (think time, not food).

It says: “What have you to lose?”

And if you feel misunderstood, understand yourself first, and tell others how to understand you.

For God’s sake, don’t conform to something you already don’t feel resonant with.

You’re not for everyone. That’s the point.

Courage can be taught. This essay can be a light switch to get started.

If you need a step… model what your future self would be proud of.

Would that person sit here and wait? Would they transact? Would they fucking care how much money was in the account or who disliked them if they had 5 more hours on this earth?

It’s not about “out there.” It’s about “in here.”

Think of yourself as the most important audience member for anything you produce, much like a journal. You know it’s for no one but yourself, but you still want to look back and read old entries.

Why?

Because you can find fascination in the pages. Be fascinated with your own life, and with what life has to offer.

Then talk about it.

Through time, your life experience will create your philosophy.

The exercise itself is valuable in its own right because you’ll have discovered yourself.

And that is the only person that matters when it comes to living a full life.

A bangin’ life.

Those who know others are intelligent;
those who know themselves are truly wise.

— Tao Te Ching

I bring this up over and over and over again in conversations, essays, and videos because it terrifies the hell out of me.

Bronnie Ware spent years caring for people in their last weeks of life. She asked them about their regrets. The number one regret, more than any other, was this: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

The regret was courage. The regret was that they never found out who they were when they stopped performing for other people’s expectations.

Every path is now a gamble. The only question is whose judgment you’re wagering on—the rulebook’s, or yours.

You can outsource your expression and stay safe. Copy the systems. Perform the authority. Transact for the engagement. And you will die with the same regret as every person who ever lay in a bed and realized they never tested the stories they told themselves about who they were.

You will die not knowing what you were capable of.

Or you can express.

Badly, at first. In a voice that’s still finding itself. With posts that don’t perform because they’re yours and not someone else’s. And you will be alive in a way that most people, including possibly the version of you reading this right now, are not.

This doesn’t mean you don’t ever get better. Quite the opposite, actually, and here’s my own very real example.

I went pro on September 7.

I spent $500+ on a tool called Eden. I’d been feeling for a while that I needed to take posting seriously but still felt like I didn’t have the tools to do it well.

I’d thought about Eden for some time and, as often happens, you think of something and then all of a sudden it feels like it drops in your lap.

I pulled the trigger and spent the money as my final act of not taking it seriously.

From that moment, I was all in.

Before that, I treated my expression like a wishy-washy thing.

I scoffed at playing the social media game for so long. Telling my editor the algorithm won’t dictate what I do. Fuck it, etc.

But I realize how immature it was to think, “just post whatever,” when there are clearly opportunities to do it better and help more people.

If you’re not improving, you’re not giving your philosophy the best chance to get found. It only helps people if they can find it.

I have a long way to go before I’m a good pro. But I stopped pretending it didn’t matter. It does matter. It’s what I owe myself. To get better so I can help more people.

Every post I’ve done in the last 60 days, I thought to myself: that’s my voice, I believe that, I hope it does well, but I don’t need it to. Then I learn and get better with each piece. I’m my own audience, and my philosophy’s depth is my master. Everything else is bonus and lessons. With this approach, I do more, help more, and try my absolute fucking best with no distractions. Because if even one person outside of me can find value in it, that feels like turning metal into gold. It’s alchemy.

↑

^{Sent this quick demo to some people I met on a networking call. This is a very high-level overview of Eden.}

Were you expecting black or white? That you post a raw journal entry and not care? You can. But are you serious about your power?

We’ve made marketing God. We’ve made systems God. We treat workshop notes like scripture, productivity frameworks like commandments, and social media strategies like the only path to salvation.

They’re information, nothing more. Your discernment. Your choice. That’s God.

Your ability to know what’s for you and what’s not for you is God.

We treat information as the holy of holies. We should treat it as material that helps us become the holy of holies more deeply. Information serves you, not the other way around.

This is why copying systems fails. The systems aren’t bad. The problem is you’ve given the system too much power.

You’ve outsourced your discernment to someone else’s framework. You’ve decided that their “right” is more authoritative than yours.

And every time you do that, you move one step further from finding out who you actually are.

That’s why the Bronnie Ware thing terrifies the hell outta me.

To see your current situation as real is to deny all things are possible.

I’m no different than you.

Look at my social media. It’s not one banger after another of viral blessings.

But I’ll tell you something…

Every damn time I’m about to press publish, I get nervous.

Then I do it anyway.

That’s the only difference between us. The ONLY difference.

So, if you want my take on where to start, it’s this…

You’ve got a journal. Read back. Or if something is already popping in your mind that you’re nervous to share, that’s the place to begin.

The thing you’re afraid to express. The thing that fucking matters. The thing that, if you gave it the breath, would make you feel alive.

Express it.

It doesn’t have to be a Substack article or online at all. Put it in front of someone you trust. Or go all in and actually write it and publish it.

Get it out because it’ll prove something to you.

And this is my promise: you’ll feel more capable. You’ll feel more alive. You’ll understand that fear is mostly a story and not a terminal disease.

Express it. And realize you’re capable of far more than you’re allowing.

And understand that when you do, you’ll have to do it again—every day until you die.

It’s more debt than liberation.

But it’s chosen debt.

Sounds better than voluntary despair.

◬

-Colby

Watch the commentary on this essay here.

↓

He’d just moved to a new city. In this city, he had a friend he’d stayed in touch with all through the years of being hundreds of miles apart.

He was excited to reconnect. Both felt the reward of keeping a relationship alive when distance made it easy to let it drift.

They’re planners. Within short order, they’d planned a bike ride together.

Early morning, 14 miles through rolling hills and cricket quiet. They set the plan to get rolling a week later.

All week, my friend told new acquaintances and old how excited he was to do this again. He tuned up the bike. Pumped up the tires. Checked water bottle cages and looked at the route.

Less than 12 hours before the ride was kicking off, his buddy messaged.

“I can’t bring myself to do it.”

He had the typical reasons…

• Life’s busy

• Behind at work

• House is a mess

Do any excuses outside of health or some act of God actually suffice?

No.

He flaked. But it wasn’t last-minute.

We think it is, and that’s wrong.

As a former flake myself, I can tell you the problem isn’t that.

The true problem is the Reflexive Yes.

The Reflexive Yes: What is it?

Flaking doesn’t happen at the last minute.

Whether you’re getting stood up on a date or seeing plans you made months in advance get a last-minute message that it’s not happening because something came up…

Nothing came up.

It happened in the beginning.

The Reflexive Yes is what we do because it’s easy.

Like water, we’ll flow through the path of least resistance.

Simply put, these are dopamine decisions.

Over years of grabbing coffee with hundreds of people, you can spot dopamine deciders quickly.

On the tail end, they’ll say things like…

“I tried it, but it didn’t work.”

“I wish I’d had more time.”

“I needed a better plan.”

These are smokescreens for the true problem:

When you say yes in the moment, you haven’t thought it through.

So, let’s think. My friend made plans with his buddy for this bike ride. Plans are exciting. Easy. “Let’s do it!”

But there’s a reason for that. The conversation is the entry point to work. And people don’t like work.

I was like this in my past life. I’d say yes to things that felt like opportunities.

Being in the business world, that looked like:

• Take on this new marketing strategy

• Create a new offer

• Start a podcast

• Partner up

Easy and exciting dopamine decisions.

But much like a small impulse purchase can lead to buyer’s remorse in as little as 30 minutes, once the luster of the exciting decision wears off, we’re left with the work.

A Reflexive Yes lives in the immediate excitement, not that forecasted expense.

Subscribe now

What it looks like

So, we say yes right away. We put it on our calendars. We keep up with the messages.

Behind the scenes, we’re talking to ourselves. We begin working out scenarios in our heads.

We have full-on conversations with ourselves about how we can back out of it and still feel like the good guy.

In my 20s, I expended a lot of mental energy in this space.

I’d say yes to something that sounded exciting—often a party or project.

Then, the conversation would end, and I’d walk away. The person who was in the dopamine environment could get along with it. Still, when I left that environment and became my natural introverted self, I’d think about all the things I’d not want to experience.

Going to a party meant talking to people, figuring out what to wear, deciding whether I should arrive on time or fashionably late, messaging around to see who else was going, and figuring out whether I’d have to spend what little money I had to fit in…

Mental death by 1000 cuts.

The Hollow Flake

This is a very human pattern.

We’re reflective and regretful beings. Ordering something on the menu that sounds good and feeling like we should have chosen something after the fact.

But this makes sense. Social media has trained us to avoid conflict and friction.

Don’t like this post? Scroll on by.

Don’t vibe with this person’s message anymore? Unfollow in a single click.

Feeling like your business needs more leads? The algorithm will catch on in minutes and start feeding you systems, coaches, and downloads ready to buy on the dopamine high… then leave them sitting in your inbox for months, untouched.

It’s so easy.

During the pandemic, because we were all bored and had no idea what we wanted to do with our lives — we also craved connection hard — hundreds of thousands of podcasts got started.

Over 5 years later, very few of them still exist.

The same impulse that makes your bored mind say, “Let’s start a podcast!” makes it easy to say yes when someone invites you to grab coffee… and minutes later you’re dreading the commute and the expense, and realizing you’d rather spend your time differently.

So you flake.

We’ll justify it. I always did. And somehow we convince ourselves that we’re not the bad guy when we do.

But we are.

And here’s why:

When you commit to something, you’re telling the other person this matters to you. “My time is important, and I’m presuming yours is too. When I say yes, I’m saying yes to you.”

When you flake, you’re telling them that how you spend your time today matters more than what you committed to.

Trust is earned in drips and lost in buckets.

When you flake, you lose a bucketful of trust.

Years ago, living in Minnesota, I’d make plans with people all the time. As someone from out of state, I craved to create a friend group.

But too often, after making plans, I’d get ditched at the last minute because their high school friends wanted to hang instead.

A perfect example of subtly telling someone: “I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

The Real Cost

The external cost is the relationship eroding.

Each flake moves the relationship further from guest and closer to stranger. The temperature drops, and it doesn’t come back up.

You look inward and wonder what you did wrong. You get plain annoyed at the other person—or both.

There are no winners.

The internal cost is worse. Every hollow yes trains you to be someone whose word doesn’t hold. You start justifying. “The day got away from me.” “Something came up.” “I’ll make it next time.”

Slowly, you become a person people don’t rely on.

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But the Reflexive Yes isn’t just surrender to any whim that flies in front of your face.

Mostly, it’s a failure of self-trust.

We have FOMO. We convince ourselves that if we don’t jump at the opportunity in the moment, we’ll miss it for good.

I lived like that for decades, then switched to what I’m about to tell you. I can’t say I’ve had any less opportunity since making that change.

You need to pause.

I’ll tell you how in just a sec, but here’s why you don’t do it:

You don’t trust yourself to survive the discomfort of pausing. You don’t trust yourself to say “not right now” and believe the relationship will hold.

So you say yes to avoid the friction, then you flake because the yes was hollow.

It’s a loop.

You can’t trust yourself to pause, so you say yes.

The yes is hollow, so you flake.

The flake erodes trust, yours and theirs.

Now you trust yourself less.

So the next yes comes faster, and it’s hollower…

The loop is the trap.

We’ll fix the trap because the cost of not fixing it is real.

If you’re the one flaking, you’re training yourself to be someone people don’t trust.

If you’re the one being flaked on and saying nothing, you’re training other people to see your time as negotiable.

Both roads lead to the same place: hollow commitments and eroded trust. But the fix is different depending on which side you’re on.

If you’re the flaker, the fix is simple. Stop making commitments you can’t keep. Before you say yes, ask: do I actually want to do this? Will I actually follow through? Is this a yes I can honor, or a yes I’ll regret?

If you’re the one being flaked on, the fix is harder. You have to tell the truth.

That’s what happened after the bike ride. My friend talked to his buddy. He didn’t accuse. He didn’t vent. He spoke from his own boundary: I was really excited about this. I was looking forward to it. I don’t want to get to a point in our friendship where I second-guess whether plans will actually happen. I’m fine if you take more time. I’m fine if you say no. I need to know the commitment is real.

That’s respect. Respect for yourself, because your time matters. Respect for the friendship, because you care enough to tell the truth instead of letting it rot.

Being immediately nice and being long-term nice are different skills. Most people optimize for the first one. The second one is what holds relationships together.

So what do you do when someone asks you to commit, and you’re not sure?

The Mechanism

Cal Newport has a method in his book Slow Productivity. When someone asks you to do something, you don’t say yes. You don’t say no. You say:

Thank you for thinking of me. Let me look at my schedule, and I’ll get back to you within 24 to 48 hours.

Then you actually look at your schedule. And you come back with the truth:

I’d really love to commit to this. Here’s what’s currently on my plate. That means I can’t do this for six weeks.

The pause is the mechanism. It converts a reflexive yes into a scrutinized one.

It’s far better to pay a peace-of-mind tax than a bottleneck tax.

The 24-hour pause is a peace-of-mind tax. Small, upfront, deliberate. Ten seconds of mild discomfort in the moment.

The last-minute flake is a bottleneck tax. Downstream, compounding, relational. It costs the friendship.

You pay either way.

One costs minutes of honesty. The other costs a relationship.

The pause gives them clarity. Clarity is respect. And trust is built on respect.

Move from a Reflexive Yes to a Scrutinized Yes, and you’ll compound positives, not negatives.

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You have to trust yourself enough not to give somebody exactly what they want in the moment, and still be okay. The relationship can hold. You can say “not right now” from a place of respect. You can be honest about your plate without being a dick.

The pause is the warmest thing you can do because it means when you finally say yes, you mean it.

Your word is the one thing you can’t reschedule. Yet, that’s usually the first thing people sacrifice.

The fire at work can wait an hour. You can’t rebuild the bike ride once it’s gone.

The friendship can’t return to its previous temperature once trust has been eroded.

It’s simply not worth the sacrifice.

If you’re going to pay a tax — and we’ve established you will — pay it in up-front scrutiny, not dopamine that leads to erosion.

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I wanted it, and at the same time I have three children under the age of seven, run a lifestyle business, and this week had a sick child who ruined all my routine.

The message reaching you from all parts of the internet is this: true focus means giving up your life.

Here’s what that message does to someone with an actual life.

It creates a binary. Either you disappear, which is impossible, or you don’t, which means you give up on focused work entirely.

Most people with kids, mortgages, and school pickups land on option two. They conclude they’re not disciplined enough for monk mode. So they stop trying to protect focused work at all.

The whole thing feels like a stacked deck where survival is the only attainable option.

Sad.

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The big cost

Here’s what happens when you don’t have protected flow.

You pour your energy into everything.

Picture a cup full to the brim. Now pour a little into seven other cups.

Result? None of them are full.

We do this in our daily lives:

• Code-switching

• Handling fires like a champ

• Researching and going wild on self-improvement

• Optimizing everything... calories, workouts, sleep... the whole damn thing

In it, we feel like we’re doing a lot.

Really, you’re quarter-assing everything. None of it gets high enough to matter on any timeline you want.

Months pass. Nothing has jumped.

You feel busy but stagnant.

You convinced yourself you were being productive because the day was full, but full and productive are different words for a reason.

Like that full cup at the beginning, you’ve only got so much energy to burn. Stretching it out in multiple places doesn’t mean they won’t hit. It does mean that you’ll have to wait longer to see visible progress.

This is why people go monk.

They aren’t just managing the same problems from some cabin in the hills.

They go dark to focus on one thing without distraction.

It doesn’t take long to reach a flow state.

You can do this in your normal life. You’ll have to make some hard choices, but they’re worth it.

Let me explain how I came to this conclusion.

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How I Got Here

I spent 16 years building a career without ever optimizing for flow.

Less money. More burnout. The money I did make was unfulfilling because I was living out of alignment.

The quicker you realize you can make good money and still feel like you’re performing for an audience you never auditioned for, the quicker you can reverse it.

I wanted to redesign, but I had no model for what that would look like. Every productivity system I found was built for someone with a different life. It felt inaccessible.

So I stayed in the status quo and did little things to reduce the anxiety:

• Meditation

• Walking

• Earlier bedtime

• Less screen time

Then I left my agency after 9 years of building it. No plan.

But that risk gave me something I’d wish for anyone: a clean slate.

Within 8 months, I rebuilt everything around flow. Four hours a day became achievable and required.

It was always accessible to me. I’d just never believed I could pull it off.

But before I explain the ins and outs, let’s get a disclaimer out so you can decide whether you want to keep learning.

This only works if you want to build your life around flow. That means trading off the automaton approach. No massive team or constant busy work as your default mode. This is self-selecting control over set periods of time. Some people thrive in the always-on, always-available, meeting-heavy model. If that’s you, this is just information, not something you’d be ready to use. The rest of this essay is for the person who looks at that kind of model and feels something die inside them.

Micro Monk Mode

Focus was always the point.

Disappearing was just one way to get there. And for most people with actual lives, it’s the worst one, because it creates a binary you can’t win.

I could retreat to a cabin for a week and feel OK about it. I spend six months there, and I’m a shit dad and spouse — no matter how much cash and safety that time would provide for my family.

So let’s create a very important distinction.

A retreat means leaving your life to find focus. A ritual means finding focus inside your life.

Monk Mode is a retreat. Micro Monk Mode is a ritual.

Same intensity, a different (and more accessible) delivery mechanism.

My Micro Monk Mode looks like this:

My window: 8 to noon, every day. No busy work during that block. No calls I don’t want to take. The only exception is an international call I genuinely want.

The type of work can change. Research, reading, writing, recording videos.

What doesn’t change: meaningful work only, never admin. Admin is what happens after noon.

The unbendable principle: energy over hours. It contradicts every other productivity system on the internet.

If your energy doesn’t match the flow, you stop. You don’t force it.

This is imperative.

Forced flow is contaminated product. It’s like cooking with ingredients that have gone off. The recipe doesn’t matter. The technique doesn’t matter. The output is compromised at the ingredient level. You can’t fix it with more time in the kitchen.

I learned this the hard way. I used to fill every available hour. Seven hours free between dad duties? Use all seven.

Time is precious. But making time the master instead of output quality is a failure.

If the energy isn’t there, the work suffers, and you produce something that looks done but isn’t.

Optimizing this way means the system doesn’t break if you lose a day. It doesn’t break if you lose a week, as long as you’ve been doing it long enough.

Tuesday I was sick. In bed all day. Nothing happened, and that’s the point.

The Proof

Here’s what protected flow actually produces. Take this however you want.

17 months. Nearly 200 coffee chats with total strangers. Zero ghosts.

The system handles the follow-up so flow time is never broken by admin. I built this once, and it’s run without changes for this long.

I built an entire typeface and website in a day. I built an email series I’ll run for a long time in three days. Connected everything in a couple of hours. Built once, and it stays built.

I work with a part-time video editor.

Flow has allowed me to create a schedule where we batch.

I record in flow, riding the wave of creation until I’m exhausted. Then I ship the work in the afternoon, during admin time, and he operates on his schedule.

He has freedom through structure and so do I. Both sides win.

The Trade-offs

Every other monk mode post ignores the cost or frames it as virtue.

The detox people say suffering is the point.

The disappear-for-months people don’t mention the downside.

Here’s the honest version of the trade-offs I make.

I’m a notoriously bad text responder. I’ll leave messages unread for up to 10 days. I always respond. But on my timeline, not yours.

My phone is face down or in another room when I’m in flow. I might miss a call from daycare. I accept this. If my not responding immediately doesn’t result in someone’s death, it will be fine. Inconvenient, but fine.

My partner is annoyed. She’s also adapted. Our love goes deeper than my response times.

I get fewer messages now. The ones I keep are enriching and worth both people’s time. Surface-level chat is gone, and that’s a gain. “Hey, how’s work?” “Great.” “Good weather by you?” That conversation wastes both our lives. I’d rather not have it at all.

These are deliberate, known costs of a system that produces results I can’t get any other way. I’d make every trade-off listed here again.

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I Know What You’re Thinking

“Four hours a day? That’s not available to me.”

It wasn’t available to me either. That’s the whole point.

I accepted the design I was in for 16 years. The question is whether you want to redesign. If you don’t, that’s a valid choice. But “I can’t” usually means “I haven’t.”

The first step is deciding whether you even want four hours of flow.

“Great for you, you run your own business.”

True. But the principle transfers. Your window might be 90 minutes instead of 4 hours. The principle is the same: protect one block of pure flow inside your life, whatever size your life allows.

No matter how small the amount of time is, do one whole ass thing in that time.

I genuinely get more done in the first 90 minutes of my 4-hour flow time than I did in entire days in the previous 16 years.

“Isn’t this just time blocking with a fancy name?”

No. Time blocking organizes your whole day into categories. Micro Monk Mode protects one window at maximum intensity and lets the rest of the day be whatever it needs to be. It’s a rifle, not a schedule.

This is why I block the morning. My energy is highest then. I go until it runs out, step away for an hour, then do some admin to wrap the day or nothing at all.

“What if I block the time and I’m exhausted?”

Then stop. Energy over hours. This principle makes the system honest where others are dogmatic. The gurus say push through. I say: forced flow produces contaminated work. Come back tomorrow.

What Works For Me

This isn’t a step-by-step. It’s the combination I’ve perfected through months and months of iteration. Take what’s useful. Leave what isn’t. The principle is the thing.

It took me six weeks of trying this redesign before I felt consistently in flow. Accept that there will be an uncomfortable learning period. Internally commit to the process first, not immediate results.

This is tool agnostic. You could do this with a pen and a notebook. You could do it with your phone and a voice memo. You could do it by going for a walk and thinking. Flow has no boundaries in execution. What matters is the state, not the setup.

Don’t dilute this with tool recommendations. A coffee and a quiet environment are the floor. Test that first. Then add where it makes sense.

In other words, avoid needing a perfect environment to get into flow. It’s not about the environment first; it’s a state of mind first. You’ll learn as you go what aspects of your environment heighten your flow state.

The path of least resistance to achieve flow

The digital environment. Spartan. Basic needs, nothing extra. This applies to your room and your screen. One application open. One tab. Even if you have the self-control not to look at your inbox, remove it from view.

Zero notifications on your computer. Messages siloed to your phone only, and the phone app hidden behind the search bar so you have to type “phone” to see calls.

No banner notifications, ever. You see emails when you want to. Messages when you want to see them. Your computer is a protected space.

The physical environment. No specific workspace needed. I work from home with my dog on the couch. Door open or closed. Sometimes I use noise-canceling headphones with calming ambient music when my mind is busy.

There’s a YouTube channel called Oneness that plays these Tibetan-style sounds. That helps when the mind is loud—but it's not required.

Coffee is the only anchor. Sometimes the first sip starts the flow. Sometimes the whole cup is gone before I begin. Sometimes flow happens at a coffee shop surrounded by people. The ritual is simple: you’re alone, and you have coffee.

The on-ramp. There isn’t one. I’ve been doing this for 18 months. The body learns the state. Flow becomes automatic. Coffee, quiet, one tab, go. At first it takes effort. Eventually it’s instant, if the energy’s there.

The ritual compounds over time. Trust the process, yeah?

Boundaries. You don’t announce it. You start. People who don’t like it drop off. The messages you keep are worth both people’s time. You only work with people who match your energy. Clients who trust you respect the window. The friction lasts as long as you let it.

This is the hardest boundary to hold.

The afternoon. Whatever you want. Video games. More work if the energy is there. Admin. Parent mode. No guilt.

You put in a shift. If you did real flow for even an hour, you got more done than most people get done in a day. The afternoon is the reward for protecting the morning, not a continuation of the work just because hours are available.

Time will keep ticking whether you can produce excellent work or not. You gotta listen to your body and mind’s signals.

Don’t watch the clock. Get lost in flow.

Example: I’m writing this at 8:44 PM because the energy showed up. Some days the best work happens after the kids are in bed. The system doesn’t care when.

Your mirror

Here’s what I think actually happens. You watch the videos. You read the essays. You feel the pull to go monk.

And then you look at your life: the kids, the job, the calendar that doesn’t have a blank six months in it anywhere. And you think: not possible for me.

Then you do something worse than giving up. You make peace with it. “It is what it is.” You settle into the design you’re in. You tell yourself you’re being realistic.

You fill your days with busy work and call it being responsible. You pour the cup into eight tasks and wonder why nothing fills.

And you outsource the possibility of focused work to the people whose lives allow for it, as if that’s a life requirement and not a design choice.

That’s bullshit. I’m living proof.

Three kids under seven. Lifestyle business. Every school drop-off is mine. Sick kid this week. Can’t disappear for six months. And I produce more in four hours of protected flow than I used to in a full day of fragmented work.

I’m not special.

I committed to redesigning and didn’t let the trade-offs stop me from creating something that aligned with the work I wanted to do.

You have to believe you’re the best person to design your own system.

Not a guru. Not a CEO. You. Because you’re the only one who knows your life.

Picking up a productivity book or watching a video is like saying, “Give me the answer!” without knowing the question.

This takes faith.

You have to believe showing up is enough, even when you can’t guarantee you'll have the energy. The ritual, practiced enough, delivers you to the state. That’s 18 months of evidence talking.

And you have to trust that you’ll handle whatever comes. Sick kid on Tuesday? You handle it. The system doesn’t break. Missing a day doesn’t undo months of practice.

Somewhere in there, you stop looking for the next protocol. The videos stop calling to you. You stop outsourcing your schedule to people who don’t live your life.

That’s conviction. It starts with you. And it’s the only thing that was ever going to work.

The system you trust is the system you’ll run.

The system you run changes your life.

You can’t disappear. So don’t. Build something inside your life that works.

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But let’s go back to when I was six.

I’m sitting at the table. Ham steak, potatoes, and peas. My mom asks, “Colby, would you like some peas?”

“No, thank you.” I despised the bastards.

“They’re good for you,” she says, and plops a spoonful on my plate.

We had a rule: clean plates required. Whatever’s there, you finish it. My parents grew up with parents shaped by the Great Depression. I get it.

Everyone else finishes. No issue with peas for them. Me? An hour later, still sitting there. I asked for a glass of water. Permission granted. I dump the little green globules into the icy water and try to down it in one gulp.

Gag reflex. Peas all over the floor and tabletop.

The only time I escaped the clean plate club.

Now, fast forward to my house. Three kids under 7. Meal time is the main event.

Whining. Negotiating. Getting up from the table with no words. Bringing a toy back. Fighting over the toy. My wife and I trying to hold on with constant policing, watching food get wasted like an assembly line for the useless. Little dollar signs flying into the trash or my dog’s mouth.

I understand why my parents ran a dictatorship at meal time. I just don’t do it. Times change.

But I still haven’t accepted it. I’m not weak and everything is figure-out-able, right?

Here’s what I’ve done in the past:

• Go to a parenting book

• Watch a video

• Ask my wife what she’s been researching

Outsourcing the problem to an expert in the field of getting your kids to just eat the damn food.

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We’ve done that every handful of months for years. The techniques aren’t bad. They’d work for a day. Then the novelty would wear off. My oldest kid could spot the costume before I recognized I was wearing one. Soon, I’d be walking to the bathroom to apply some clown paint and cry.

Parenting books and videos are no enemy. But on the grand spectrum they skew more towards propaganda than utility. Every kid is different. Context matters a lot, and a book won’t have it for ya.

And it’s a cycle.

If you keep outsourcing to a “better” system, and that system doesn’t work, you’ll do it again. “It must not have been the right system,” you tell yourself.

It was never the system. There’s no failure in trying to do the best for the kids. The failure lies in the idea that looking outward is the best play.

But meal time’s been pretty bangin’ the last two weeks.

And it didn’t take me long to realize I’d pulled from my existing knowledge to make it happen. From an unlikely place: how I used to onboard clients.

Turns out 14 years in marketing, nine of them running a globally recognized agency, 1,200 clients, and a client retention rate 11X the industry average could teach me how to tell the circus to leave town and restore some peace to my life.

What I’ll share for the rest of this essay works for kids, but it applies to any interaction where you need a clear path to a result in the simplest fashion.

Remember 90/8/2

Over that 14-year career, I’ve come up with my own ratio on what creates long-term trust and success between individuals, regardless of their personalities.

90% of any result comes from nailing the basics.

8% comes from collaboration. You can suggest, but both parties have to agree and believe.

2% comes from spontaneous magic. Only available if you’ve done the other 98% first.

The 90%: A Visual Model

I was so tired of endlessly policing. And the more I policed, the more I felt like I was repeating the cycle I experienced as a kid. An autocratic state that required clean plates. (Love ya, Mom and Dad. Zero shade. I get the approach.)

My kids are six and three. Every day of their lives they’re encountering visual models. Colors are the easiest ones.

So I told my wife, “I’m thinking like a traffic light system. Let’s make meal time 60 minutes of free will with boundaries.”

She picked up on this half-brained idea quickly. Five minutes later, as all super moms do, she acted, cutting out green, yellow, and red circles about the size of a softball.

“Let’s add orange,” I said.

Ten minutes later, we’d taped up a green circle on the cupboard with the number 60 on it.

Yellow would be 30. Orange 15. Red meant the kitchen was closed.

We’ve all heard a picture is worth 1,000 words. This little traffic light system was the foundation stone for the whole thing.

Where there’s friction in your life or business, is there an absence of a visual model? No complex maps or Miro Boards. Keep it to 4 items or less.

When you add a visual model, you’ve removed every barrier to understanding. That’s the goal.

The 90%: Setting Expectations

There’s a reason I was able to keep clients a lot longer than anyone I was competing with. And it sure as hell wasn’t because I was smarter or more talented. I was in marketing for over a decade and to this day see myself as a pretty damn average marketer.

But what I’m a master at has served me in every facet of life: setting expectations.

Here are my rules:

• Be honest, not clever.

• Get as elementary in language as you can when expressing them.

• Say them over and over and over (one expectation said hundreds of ways).

• Demonstrate them often (What does “good” look like? What does “not good” look like?)

• When you need to correct, frame it back to something solid (a contract... or in my case with the kids: a stoplight). This is why the visual model does so much heavy lifting for you.

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The 8%: Collaboration

Expectations and a visual model can still lean autocratic. There’s gotta be meaning behind why they should agree to the expectations or it all falls apart.

Our expectation for the kids looked like this: “The kitchen is open for 60 minutes. These lights tell you how much longer it’s open for.”

Then, a direct incentive: “While the kitchen is open, you are free to come and go as you please. Two rules:

1. Do one thing (when you’re eating, you’re eating. When you’re playing, you’re playing.)

2. If the kitchen closes before your food is done, your consequence is being hungry.”

Freedom with bumpers. Two simple rules, a visual model, and constant reinforcement of the expectation.

They were gifted agency and autonomy. “Your time is your own. But the kitchen is only open for 60 minutes.”

And I got my wife on the same page. “Our job is to establish the boundary and enforce it. Their job is to push against it. Let’s just do our job well.“

We’ve been in the trenches long enough to know it’s easier to say these things than execute them. We gotta be allies.

Then, indirect incentivizing.

I told them they didn’t have to focus on the time. That’s my job. Every time we switch a color from green to yellow or yellow to orange, I grab my announcer voice: “The kitchen is closed in X minutes! If you don’t want to go hungry, you have X minutes to finish your food.”

And then I stacked: if everyone finishes with time left, you get to choose a bonus. Of course, they choose TV. Requirement: everyone has a clean plate.

As the days progressed, I whispered in their ears 1:1, “Hey, I’m so proud of you for taking your health seriously. It’s amazing you already finished with 40 minutes left! You can keep playing, but if you want a bonus, go cheer on your brother/sister to finish too! Then everyone gets some well-earned TV time.”

Food’s been getting devoured. Whining is going down. Policing transformed into simple time checks and nudges.

Peace, at last.

When you’re dealing with other people, are your friction moments coming from too much structure or too much freedom?

If they don’t feel like they have a say, they’ll rebel more. Freedom is a must. Just add some bumpers to avoid anarchy.

The 2%: Spontaneous Magic

Three days in, my son — who would negotiate everything and make me and my wife feel like short-order cooks — had a clean plate in the first 20 minutes. He heard the “15 minutes til the kitchen is closed!” time-check and asked for more food.

He’s six. Dude wants sugar all the time.

This time, he asked for an apple.

“I know I should have healthy food during mealtime,” he said.

That’s the 2%. The spontaneous magic that only shows up after you’ve done the other 98% first.

Instead of forcing peas down someone’s throat, we’re choosing apples willingly in 2026.

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P.S. If you want to watch the YouTube video that goes deeper on this concept, you can find it here:

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