I have written about this number a few times, but I have been thinking about it more and more.

A full career. Forty years, forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year. Roughly 80,000 hours. A human life, assuming you make it to eighty, is about 700,000.

Therefore, work is about 11% of your life.

People argue with that number, push back, and that is no surprise. Especially these days. You’re undercounting, what about the commute, the 8 PM emails, the bad review you carried into the weekend. So run it the other way. Start at eighteen, work until seventy, fifty hours a week. That is about 130,000 hours. Eighteen percent.

Take the more aggressive version and a career still lands somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of a life.

The other 89% is everything else. Every morning before you leave. Every evening after you come home. Every weekend, every vacation, every holiday, every year before your career starts and every year after it ends. Every hour of sleep, every meal, every bedtime story, ball game, every walk, every movie on the couch, every conversation that has nothing to do with a deadline or demand.

And yet, as I have said repeatedly, most of us build our entire identity around the 11%. We orient our mood, our self-worth, our attention, and our best hours around a sliver of our total time on earth.

We give it the loudest voice in the room.

I didn’t always see it this way. For a while work was the scoreboard. Title, salary, trajectory. The metrics I was told would tell me whether I should feel good or bad. I was at Morgan Stanley, twenty-two years old, making cold calls off a phonebook at five o’clock because that is when people got home.

And then 9:03 happened.

At 9:03 a.m. on September 11th, 2001, someday disappeared. One moment I was a kid who thought time was unlimited. An hour later I was on a sidewalk watching the building I had walked out of come down, and the only thing in my head was my parents.

Not my career. Not my five-year plan. Not whether I had made enough dials the night before.

That was my introduction to the 89%, many years before I knew what that really meant.

This argument might sound like I am saying work is bad. Live a YOLO life. Pursue only your passions. Just keep cashing checks and don’t let it bother you. None of that, because work does matter. It funds the life. It gives you structure, purpose, people, something to build on and towards. I have seen what happens when someone doesn’t plan, doesn’t save, doesn’t take their financial life seriously. That is real and it’s not fun.

But I think the trap is the inversion. It’s when the 11% starts dictating the other 89%.

I watched people make that trade and I never had a good explanation for why. They weren’t careless. They were disciplined, thoughtful, and in most cases very good at their jobs. They knew exactly what they were giving up and they gave it up anyway.

And after many years, looking at my own life and plenty of others, it gets back to the math.

The 11% is the only part of your life that gets a daily score.

Salary, title, account balance, promotion. All of it can tell you if you are winning or losing. You can see it and look it up. It shows you where you stand and whether you went forward or backwards.

Health, marriage, friendship, meaning, purpose. Nothing. There is no number to look up.

And what has no number gets treated like it isn’t moving. The 89% doesn’t hold steady while the 11% goes up and down. It is compounding or decaying the entire time. You just don’t see it on a piece of paper. Or a dashboard.

It tends to show up, unexpectedly, in a crisis moment.

And I could list them here, but we all know where I am going. The divorce. The health scare. We have had them, seen them, or heard about them. And they can dramatically change our trajectory.

This is also why the suction is so easy. When work needs more, it takes from the 89%, and usually doesn’t leave an IOU.

Sleep goes first. Almost always. You spend your health to buy an hour of work, and there is no friction in it.

Then comes the other stuff. Your spouse. Your training. Your friendships. Your children. All of it costs something that doesn’t show up right away.

And it is all compounding over time.

Back to myself. I want to be clear that I did not solve this by leaving the office or building pursuits in the 89% of my life.

For six months I trained for Ironman Arizona. Five a.m. swims, long rides, runs that had no business being that long. If you had asked me what I was training for I would have said Kona. What I actually wanted was found in the ego of the time. Something I could show or tell someone. I wanted to hear wow, you’re fast, did you qualify.

I crossed at 10:06. Top 150. Medal, mylar blanket. The crunchiest, saltiest french fries in the aid tent.

Then I got in the shower and I reached for the feeling I had been chasing for six months. Nothing to be found.

You know where this is going. I had not escaped the scoreboard. I had moved it. I found something inside the 89% I could still keep score in. New sport, same behavior. You cannot fix an unmeasured life by inventing a new thing to measure.

And before I go on, let me say I am aware of what I am doing. Writing and relating an entire life in numbers. More often than not.

89% and 11%. 168 hours in a week. 23,500 hours with my oldest son I would have missed if I had kept flying out on Mondays. Looking at my life in weeks and checking them off.

So what makes my numbers different from the scoreboard I just told you to put down?

Measuring something once is not the same as keeping score.

You count the 89% because it will not tell you on its own. You do the math. You look at what it says. You change something. Then you stop counting and go live inside the answer.

Keeping score is different. Keeping score is something you go back and check over and over again. One of them ends. The other never does. The calendar on my wall does not move faster when I have a good week. It still gets the same black dot.

This is where I close with the person. You have been there. The one who asks what you do for a living inside the first two minutes. Who tells you the title, the deal, the number, the company. You can see the story coming and you can see how much it matters to them that you hear it.

I smile. I listen. I ask a question, because the story is theirs and they want it told well.

And the whole time I am somewhere else. I am thinking about the drive home. About whether Beckett has a game tonight. About the trail in the morning and whether one of the boys will want to go fishing later in the day. About what I am doing after this conversation ends.

They are telling me about the 11% of their life. I am thinking about my 89%.

Physical

We have been in a lot of hotels the last few years. And I have spent a lot of nights in hotels in my life. Years of work travel piled up, and when the letter arrived, yes, an actual letter, from Marriott thanking me for 1,100+ nights over the previous decade, I had a bit of a panic.

But all those nights made me an expert traveler. I pack efficiently. I am always prepared. And one thing has been in the bag since the early days: Rainbow flip flops. Everywhere.

Which made me smirk when I read this article.

A AAA hotel inspector the Washington Post profiled last week has spent 34 years on the job. Thousands of rooms. The white-glove test stopped surprising her years ago. Then she started pulling white stockings over her feet, crawling across a hotel room floor, and looking down. The stockings turned a color that made her say a four letter word.

I gave myself a bit of a pat on the back.

The carpet is the one surface housekeeping cannot really clean. It gets vacuumed. It does not get sanitized. It holds whatever every guest before you tracked in on their shoes, plus food, dead skin, mold, allergens.

For a healthy adult, the odds of actually getting sick from a hotel carpet are low. The practical advice from the experts amounts to three things: keep something on your feet, cover any cuts, keep the luggage off the floor.

The reason the risk is low is that you carry your own defense system everywhere you go. An immune system built by sleep, movement, and real food handles a hotel carpet without every asking you. The barefoot walk to the bathroom is a test your body passes hundreds of times a year.

So yes, the Rainbows stay in the bag. But the flip flops are the backup plan. The primary defense is the unglamorous work you were already supposed to be doing. The workout. The full night of sleep. The vegetables.

Mental

Ten to twelve screens and they each take about two minutes.

I have spent the last month or so building four short experiences for the 9:03 site, and the first one is called The Ledger. It walks through the math of modern life. Screens. Connection. The kids, the friends, the body, the purpose. Really just a short walk-through time. There is no quick pitch, no sell. Trying it doesn’t put you on an email list.

I built it because I kept noticing the same thing in conversations. People can read about the four pillars and nod along. Then they see the math of their own attention laid out and something different happens. Feeling the numbers is not the same as agreeing with them.

Some of you may have built a Life In Weeks chart last spring after I shared mine. That chart answers one question: how much. The Ledger asks the other one: where is it going.

There are three more if the first one lands. Enough looks at eight decades of research on money and happiness and the gap between the two. Twelve Questions is one honest question for each holding in the portfolio, built to do alone or with a partner. The Baseline, built with the team at Acropolis Health, covers the twelve numbers your body runs on, from VO2 max to ApoB.

None of it takes longer than a few minutes. Which is sort of the point. If a week of your attention moved across a screen in front of you, would you approve?

Financial

Jerry Buss paid $67.5 million for the Lakers in 1979. Ten championships followed. When he died in February of 2013, he left one of the most carefully built succession plans in professional sports: the family’s 66 percent controlling stake placed in a trust, divided evenly among his six children, each with an equal vote, and his daughter Jeanie designated as governor. Equal love on paper, but really one person in charge.

The friction and fighting showed up almost immediately. Two brothers wanted to sell within months of his death. Jeanie fired her brother Jim from basketball operations in 2017. For a decade the six of them sorted into teams: sell now, hold on, wait your turn. In 2025 they sold the majority stake to Mark Walter at a $10 billion valuation, each sibling clearing roughly half a billion after taxes. Last week the siblings voted to sell the remaining 17.8 percent, a move that takes Jeanie’s governor seat and tosses it out with the sale. She is contesting it. Several siblings say they felt misled by her. The Athletic’s headline says it all. Jerry Buss left the Lakers to his children. It is tearing their family apart.

This is the story in the paper and on tv. The same story runs up and down the wealth curve. The family next door with a lake house and three kids who no longer speak. The founder who split the company evenly because even felt fair. But from what I have seen it is rarely ever about the money.

Roy Williams and Vic Preisser spent years studying wealth transfers that failed. Of all their findings, the one that survives states that fewer than 5 percent of the failures were technical. The trusts were drafted correctly. The taxes were handled. What failed was preparation and communication. Heirs who never practiced deciding together. Conversations that never happened while the one person who could referee them was still alive.

Buss did the technical part as well as anyone in America. What the documents could not do was support six adults with six different answers to a question their father never made them answer together: what is this for and can we do it together?

A trust can move money across a generation. It cannot communicate the emotions for you. That part has to be built while everyone is still in the room.

Spiritual

You know the pyramid. Physiological needs at the base. Safety, belonging, esteem stacked above. Self-actualization at the peak. It shows up in every intro psych class, every HR deck, every wellness keynote, every sales seminar.

But my favorite part is that Maslow never drew it.

Three management professors traced the image to its source a few years ago. The pyramid first appeared in 1960, in a business journal, in an article by a consulting psychologist named Charles McDermid. The article was titled How Money Motivates Men. The pitch was that the pyramid could deliver maximum motivation at the lowest cost. A tool for managers. It did its job and stuck around.

Then in 2006 a paper by Mark Koltko-Rivera in the Review of General Psychology documented what Maslow actually did with his own model. In 1969, the last full year of his life, he revised it. He placed a new level above self-actualization. Self-transcendence. The peak was never supposed to be you. It was what you give yourself to that is beyond you. A cause. Other people. Something larger than the self the rest of the pyramid spent decades and decades building

The textbooks never changed. The old version fit the sales pitch. A model that ends with the self is easy to sell to the self. A model that ends past the self is not as great a sales pitch.

The sequence still matters because you cannot give yourself to a bigger cause that if you never built something for yourself, and the needs at the base do not disappear because you have outgrown naming them. Maslow knew that. He also knew something else by 1969. He made the correction with a year left on his own ticking clock. The man spent his life mapping human motivation and in his final year planted a new flag at the top.

If the top of the pyramid is not you, what would you put there?

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03: thanks for reading. I truly appreciate it. Stay curious and never forget that the clock is running. Make the moments count.

If you have been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you have not already. Thank you.

Until next week...

Adam

The night before my birthday, we walked downtown to dinner. It was what the boys wanted to do after their first day of school, and according to them, what Arlo wanted too. And yes, at some point he sat in the chair like he was about to get a burger and fries and belonged there on the patio.

The next morning, my birthday, I got up and ran 47 kilometers. A mile a year is a nice idea, but it would have been aggressive mid-week with work, sports, school, life. So I took the metric version. We’d just been in Scotland and I felt like I never left.

Drew ran 13 with me in the middle of it. Then he peeled off and I had about 10 left. So with a Rice Krispie treat in my running belt and a planned stop for a cherry Coke and some water at the gas station on the way home, I kept going.

Five minutes after we parted ways my phone buzzed. He’d sent me a playlist.

Not a link to something he already had. He’d built it. For me, for that day, for the miles he wasn’t going to be there for.

I’ve been writing lately about why playlists don’t land the way a mixtape did. The argument goes that a tape cost you ninety minutes, a trip to a store, and the risk of being turned down. A playlist costs a few clicks. The cost is what made it mean something.

That one landed.

The next thirty minutes went by with voices and music filling my head. Listening and asking why he put that one in there. Why that order. Smiling at times. Laughing at others. And then getting to the one I knew would be in there.

For everyone following along, it was Don’t Look Back in Anger. The goosebumps showed up right on schedule.

He’d spent two or three hours picking the songs and writing out why he chose each one.

So it wasn’t the format. He spent plenty of time. What made it work is where he spent it. All of it pointed at one person, on one day, at a specific stretch of road. He knew where I’d be. He knew roughly what mile. He built for the part of the run he couldn’t be there for.

And he knew which song. That’s the whole thing in one detail. Anybody who knows me could put Oasis on a list. Drew knew which one, and he knew what it would do at mile 24 of a day like that.

I made it home. Worse for the wear, and carrying that feeling that only shows up after a long day out there. I laid in the driveway for ten minutes staring up at the sky and the sun before I went inside.

Grabbed a water. Looked at the cards on the counter.

Cards from my parents. A card from my mother-in-law. A book I’d ordered for myself, which was The Denial of Death, because that’s what I wanted for my birthday, and I’m sure the book report is soon to follow.

And a David Bowie CD from a friend. She found it in a vintage store.

It’s the same as the playlist. She didn’t order it. She was somewhere, saw it, thought of me, and bought it not knowing whether it was the right one. There’s no version of that where she wasn’t looking.

A disc. In 2026. Somebody went and got it.

Friday was a pool party for closing out summer and Saturday was flag football and soccer.

Then on Saturday night we were supposed to drive up to Cleveland for dinner with friends.

On the way the skies opened. The phone went off with a tornado warning. It was an apocalypse kind of rain, where the wipers stop mattering and you’re doing forty on the highway with your hands at ten and two and the flashers going, and Alison saying we should probably turn around.

We did. Headed south, where the storm wasn’t, and started calling around.

Ended up grabbing a drink and dinner at a place we hadn’t been to in years. Close to home. And it was one of the best meals we’ve had. Good friends and nowhere else to be, because there was nowhere else to get to.

This isn’t the storyline about unplanned nights or unplanned gifts. That isn’t it. Plenty of unplanned nights are bad. What happened is the storm took the plan away and left us with the people, and the people were always the most important part.

Sunday we had a barbecue.

Not for me. My mom and my mother-in-law both have August birthdays, and they landed on the back end of my week, so the family showed up.

My birthday week ended on the back patio singing to the two of them.

My dad and I did our top ten debate. That one’s getting its own piece. More to come.

So, this was my birthday week. No party, which has never been my thing. No balloons or signs in the yard. Nothing crazy.

A school night walk that belonged to the boys on their big day. A run I scheduled myself. A playlist somebody sent me covered in sweat from some time on the trail. Cards on a counter. A CD. A storm that changed our plans. Two other people’s birthdays on the last day.

That’s the whole thing. And it was the best one I’ve had in a while.

I didn’t notice that until I sat down to write this.

After thinking about all that, this is where I’d like to share 47 bits of wisdom. What I’ve learned in 47 years. Some great one-liners. Unique bits of advice. Or something you’ve probably heard again and again.

I’ve got one, and it’s much smaller than what you might be thinking.

Everything that landed came from somebody spending some time on me. Not spending more. No grand gesture. No epic trip or gift. Just their time. And when you hold that up against what I believe is the most valuable currency any of us has, it means more than we know.

Drew didn’t send a link. He built something for the part of the run he couldn’t be there for. My friend didn’t give me an Apple gift card to go buy some music. She walked into a store, spent some time searching, and thought of me when she saw it. Our friends didn’t salvage Saturday with a backup plan. They found time for us with a new little one at home. And Alison didn’t hand me another great summer, number 25 for us together, and a good birthday week by hoping it worked out. She planned Scotland. She planned Chicago. She planned our time together. She keeps our world running, and none of that happens by accident.

The stuff that was already on the calendar is fine. Sports, school, work. The time somebody has to choose to give you is what I’m still thinking about a week later.

And here I go again like a broken record. A gift card, a quick text, one of those gifts people keep in the house in bulk for those moments. All nice. All fine. They just aren’t somebody spending the most important thing they have on you.

And to do that, you have to know where somebody actually is. What week, month, or year they’re having. What mile they’re on. What does the song mean to them.

That’s the real cost, and we tend to pay it a lot less these days. Which is exactly why it lands when somebody does.

That’s it. That’s my whole observation. I’m 47 and that’s my big bit of wisdom.

The CD is in the bar room, next to some of my favorite music books and the Sonos I stream my records through. I haven’t ripped it or moved it anywhere. It just sits there being a physical object somebody found for me. With amazing liner notes.

The playlist is still on my phone. I’ve listened to it twice since, both times running, and I’ve read the notes on why those songs a couple more times than that.

Sunday morning I ran and thought about the dinner and our friends.

Tonight I’m eating leftovers from the BBQ, but not cake. It got eaten.

There’s a touch of fall in the air this morning and I’ve got pictures from Scotland and Chicago open on my phone.

Physical

Another piece of research supporting my favorite vice. Keep them coming.

This one included 2,264 people. The Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 has followed the same group since before they were born. Researchers at the University of Oulu looked at the coffee data. Finland drinks more coffee per person than any country on earth, close to 11.8 kilograms a year.

The findings show that the people drinking more coffee had less total body fat, less visceral fat, and more skeletal muscle than the people drinking less.

Same BMI, but the body underneath it was different.

They also found lower branched-chain amino acids in men and women both, a marker tied to insulin resistance. A better glucose and insulin profile. In men, higher total and bioavailable testosterone and higher sex hormone-binding globulin. In women the hormonal picture was narrower. The lead author said the signature stayed put even after they accounted for BMI and lifestyle.

This is observational and cross-sectional research. A snapshot. People who drink four cups a day differ from people who drink none. I am not saying coffee builds muscle.

What I am saying is this. Same number on the same chart. Different bodies underneath.

That is the trap. We pick the metric that is easy to collect, then let it stand in for the thing we actually care about. BMI for health. Salary for progress. Steps for effort.

The measurement is not the thing. It points at the thing. And it drifts. Nobody sends a notice when it does.

What are you tracking right now that stopped telling you the truth?

Mental

I ran 47 kilometers on Wednesday. I turned 47 on Wednesday.

There is a practice called misogi. It began as Shinto purification, washing the body in cold water. In the old story Izanagi comes back from the underworld and cleans himself in a river until he reaches sumikiri, which translates roughly as clarity.

Dr. Marcus Elliott made it relevant here. He is a Harvard-trained physician who runs P3 in Santa Barbara, working with professional athletes. Michael Easter wrote his version of it in The Comfort Crisis.

There are two rules. It has to be hard enough that you have roughly a 50/50 chance of failing. And you cannot die. Or as Easter says, “Have fun. Don’t die.”

The guidelines. Make it strange enough that it cannot be compared to anyone else’s and do not advertise it. Similar to Fight Club.

All this to say that Wednesday was not a misogi.

I have finished 100 miles on foot, 140.6 swimming, biking and running. Forty-seven kilometers (29.2 miles) was a long morning, not a coin flip. I knew I would finish before I started. And I am writing about it in a newsletter, which breaks the second guideline head on.

I did it because the number was fun and because I believe you have to do hard things. But the distinction matters. Elliott’s line is the one that stuck. A misogi is an emotional, spiritual, and psychological challenge that pretends it is a physical challenge.

The distance, environment, and the thing are what creates it. The actual work happens at the point where you want to quit and there is nobody standing there to see whether you do. Elliott’s version of it: I am not going to quit, because I am watching.

Your 50/50 is not mine. It might be two days without speaking. A conversation you have been deferring for six years. A hike in the dead of winter solo.

The only rule is that you genuinely might fail.

What is your 50/50? And would you still finish it if you could never tell anyone?

Share The 9:03 Newsletter

Financial

Seventy-one percent of American adults think AI will lead to fewer jobs in this country over the next twenty years. Five percent think it will lead to more.

Pew surveyed 3,488 adults in late June and released it Tuesday. The biggest takeaway comes from the younger generation. Fifty-five percent of adults under 30 say they are more concerned than excited about AI in daily life. First time it crossed a majority. In 2021 it was 31 percent. The share who are more excited than concerned fell from 25 percent to 11.

They started as optimists. They used the tools and now they have turned first.

Unemployment among college graduates under 29 moved from 3.1 percent before the pandemic to 3.7 percent since 2022. Real change but not a collapse. Some economists point at remote work and at companies that quietly stopped training inexperienced people, which is a different problem than just AI.

But the fear and emotion often doesn’t correlate with the data.

A career runs about 80,000 hours. A life runs about 700,800. Work is roughly 11% of the whole thing. You have read that number here before.

A 24-year-old is being asked to build an identity around the 11% while being told the 11% may not be there. Tough assignment. And that cost is being paid right now, not in some layoff that may never arrive.

Money you lose has a chance of coming back. Twenties spent holding on because of the fear and anxiety do not.

If the work you are preparing for changes shape, what have you built that comes with you?

Spiritual

This one is a bit heavy.

Before Virginia Chang goes in to see a client, she plants her feet, turns her palms up, and breathes. She calls it becoming an empty vessel.

Alexandra Schwartz followed her for The New Yorker. Chang had been visiting Eleanor every week since January. Eleanor was 101. A pink gauze dress, gray hair cut close, a folded American flag resting on the air conditioner behind her.

More than 10,000 people have trained as end-of-life doulas in the last decade. The work is not medical. Their role is to sit with people. Be with them. Schwartz describes it as accompaniment toward the unknown.

Henry Fersko-Weiss trained the first group in 2003. Seventeen hospice volunteers. He co-founded INELDA in 2015, and he built something specific into the method. Life review.

It was developed by the gerontologist Robert Butler, out of Erik Erikson’s final stage, the one Erikson named ego integrity versus despair. You arrive at the end and it either resolves into something coherent or it curdles into a list of what you did not do. Butler’s contribution was that this does not have to be left to chance. Somebody can sit down with you and walk you back through it. What it meant. Who you loved. What you are proud of.

We built a profession to make sure those questions get asked in the last two weeks.

They are the same questions at 47. They were the same questions at 30.

I don’t think the questions are hard to find. Or to realize how important they are. They are hard to ask early. Because asking them early means admitting the clock is running while there is still time to do something about the answer.

Chang’s job is to be in the room. Not to fix it, not to speed it up, not to make it mean something. To be the one who helped you see it.

If somebody walked you back through it tonight, what would you want to be able to say?

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you have been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you have not already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week...

Adam

I send my dad songs. From an airport gate, an office lobby, my desk. Now a lot of times just sitting in the back yard. Playlists I make him. Artists I know he loves and a few he has not heard of. I still do it.

It takes three or four minutes. I click through some albums and hit the plus button. The music is great. He has it in seconds.

He hits play and listens on the speaker we gave him years ago for outside.

He is the man who got me into music. Long hot days working at the apartments with my grandpa, and then home, dirty clothes in the basement, a Miller Lite, records on an old Fisher-Price turntable. It is what inspired Delmar Dales Pale Ale.

It was The Doors. The Beatles. CSNY. Sly. Canned Heat. He took me to Blossom on a summer night to see Counting Crows with the Wallflowers opening, and I have played those albums for 30 years.

None of that took him four minutes. And I used to know how to do this too.

Summer 2006, Hilton Head. We didn’t want the big ceremony or the guest list, so we took a week instead. Our closest family and friends, together, in the same place I grew up going to for a week every summer. And somewhere in the planning we decided on the gift for our guests. A mixtape.

The songs came off Napster and the CDs I already owned. James Taylor, Carolina in My Mind, because we were getting married there. Weezer, Island in the Sun. And Bright Eyes, a band I found on Austin City Limits in Alison’s apartment during medical school, because PBS was one of the few channels she had on a med student budget. I bought the CD and played it the whole drive to Toledo and back, every other weekend, for a few years.

I built the cover in Photoshop, a picture of the two of us with the lettering across the front. The playlist went on the back.

Then I burned them. One at a time, in real time, because there is no way to dub a disc faster than the disc plays. Sixty-five copies. It took what felt like forever.

I don’t know where our copy is. I am going digging tonight. But I know the rest of them went to people we cared about. All of them into cars and kitchens and boxes in other people’s basements. No way to get them back.

And before you could make somebody a tape, you had to own the songs.

That is the part nobody thinks about now, because the entire music universe is on our phones. Back then it meant buying a whole album for that one track, or borrowing from a friend’s older brother, or sitting by the radio with your finger on record and losing the first few seconds to a DJ talking over the intro. I remember doing this with my alarm clock tape radio.

And eventually a thing called Napster showed up. And it wasn’t free either. There was a certain risk that came with it. We all heard the story about somebody who got a letter about stealing music and was now in trouble. Never knew if those were true. And you typed in a song title and took what came back, maybe the song, or a mislabeled file, or thirty seconds of music then silence, or a really bad copy, or something a stranger had named wrong on purpose. An hour of your life for one track you wanted badly enough.

Then you wrote the songs out by hand on the insert, because there was no other way to do it, and your handwriting went in the case along with the music.

And then the worst and best part. You handed it over. You could not recall it, edit it, delete it, or add a line clarifying that you had not meant anything by it. Once it was out there it was out there. Your handwriting was in the case.

No unsend.

Since then we have built everything for the opposite. Unsend. Edit. Delete for everyone. Messages that disappear on a timer. A typing indicator you can back out of before anybody sees what you almost said. Sold as progress, which it is, and it removes the thing that made the act mean something.

If it is easy, and if you can revise it, you never have to commit to it. And if you never have to commit to it, you never really send the version that can mean something.

We flew to Chicago last week and on the way I watched High Fidelity. In it, Rob Gordon explains the rules of making a tape, and the point underneath it is that you are using someone else’s poetry to say how you feel. The lyrics aren’t yours, so you can’t be accused of overstating them. But you chose them, and in choosing them you are choosing what to say.

Cameron Crowe wrote the boombox scene in Say Anything for a Billy Idol song, To Be a Lover. Fishbone was playing on set. It was later, driving to the editing room with a tape from his own wedding going, that In Your Eyes came on and he understood what the movie was. The most famous scene about saying the unsayable came off a wedding tape.

And now for a little pivot. This is not a human versus technology argument. My playlist, Apple’s Monday morning recommendations, and a website that will generate an original song from a two-line prompt are separated by miles in taste and by inches in what they cost. Whatever the tape was doing, it was not doing it through quality.

Which is where the AI question actually sits, and it isn’t really about playlists.

Playlists are the warm-up. The race is at the toast, the eulogy, the letter to your kid on his birthday. Those are the places where sitting down and doing it yourself, badly, at length, was the thing. A generated toast will be better written than mine and worth less than the napkin its written on. And I want to believe everyone in the room knows the difference.

I use these tools and I will use them again and again. It is why I want to point out which jobs they can take. And I also want to be careful not to romanticize all friction, because a lot of it is trash. Driving across town to a store that turned out to be closed was infuriating. Not being able to leave a message when a family didn’t have an answering machine. Inconvenience is not the greatest teacher.

But the friction worth missing is the narrow kind where you could be turned down. Where you had to wait for the yes. We took out the inconvenience and the exposure with the same punch.

I know how load works in a body. Stress, recovery, adaptation. Take the load off and nothing adapts. No growth. Perhaps, I didn’t realize a lot of my life operated in that way.

My dad handed me music the expensive way. Hours in a room with a record playing. A five disc changer in the family room always loaded. A radio always going in the car. A drive to Blossom and a ticket and a summer night. He never called it anything. He just kept doing it.

I proved in 2006 that I knew how. Sixty-five discs, one at a time, my handwriting on the back of every one of them, for people who never asked for a thing.

And what he gets from me now is a text that lets him hit play.

Nobody did that to me. The phone did not do it. I chose the cheap version because it was there, for the one person who taught me the expensive one.

We have a family barbecue next weekend. A few August birthdays to celebrate.

I am going to make a playlist, because that is what I have now. But the playlist is not the gift. It is the excuse.

We are going to pull out a few beers and hash out his top ten again.

We did this in 2004, at a party that was his retirement and our engagement at the same time. An ending and a beginning in the same room. He made his case. I argued with him. Everybody had an opinion and we didn’t write it down.

That took hours and I remember Sympathy for the Devil is in his top five. It is going to take hours again. There is no way to speed it up, no way to revise what you said after you said it, and no way to know ahead of time whether the song you name in front of your family is the one they never let you forget.

You probably do not have a tape deck either. I get it, but it’s not the main point. The point is the hours, and the handwriting, and the part where you could not take it back.

Somebody gave you something once and you have been sending them the four minute version ever since. Go spend the hours instead. Say it out loud, in a room, where they can hear you.

You will not be able to take it back.

Physical

The soreness lasts a day longer than it used to. The first mile is much slower than it used to be. I can feel the twinge or the creak more often then not.

I turn 47 next week.

I assumed this was linear. You lose a little bit every year. The speed, the endurance, the muscle mass. But it was steady. But a researcher named Michael Snyder found that was not the case. At least in his research. He tracked a group of individuals from 25 and 75, sampling them every few months. They measured more than 135,000 molecules and microbes. The results showed that 81% of what was measured was not linear. It occurred around two big numbers, 44 and 60.

For the mid-40s group the big changes showed up in fat and alcohol metabolism, in cardiovascular markers, and molecules tied to skin and muscle. A technical way of saying the hangover is worse, the middle is harder to get rid of, and the recovery takes longer. Most people in their 40’s knew this. Now you know why.

But there was another study, centered around VO2 Max, that resonated more for me. Yes, because I am a runner. In the general population VO2 max drops about 10% per decade after 30. In 1990, physiologists evaluated 15 masters endurance athletes and 14 sedentary men all around 61, after roughly 8 years. The sedentary group declined 12% per decade. The athletes who kept training declined 5.5%. Half.

Later work found that changes in training volume explained about 54% of the drop in men. The literature still argues about whether training bends the slope or just raises the line you fall from. Either way, same place.

We are all fighting gravity and time. Nobody wins that one, but the fight is still worth it. Holding the line is a result and staying at baseline is not standing still.

What did you stop doing this year? And did you decide to stop, or did it just quietly fall off?

Mental

I sat down with Matt Zeigler this week and he did his thing by just pressing record. Putting it in my own newsletter is shameless and I am aware of that.

But there are words and there are words.

You have read a lot of my sentences. But sentences get edited, they get cut, they get put back together and they all often land in a different way for people. What arrives in your inbox and on Substack is the version I decided on.

Talking does not work that way.

So if you want the unedited version of me, that is the link. It is cringe in the specific way that hearing your own voice played back is always cringe. I hope it puts a little more of who I am next to what I write.

Financial

Type a sentence. Get a finished song back. No instrument, no theory, no engineer, no band. But it is creating about 7MM tracks a day.

Bloomberg ran a feature this week on Suno. A company that investors are betting becomes the next Spotify. Roughly $5.4B valuation. More than 100MM lifetime users. Two million paying subscribers. Around $300MM in revenue. It has been publicly available for less than 3 years.

The lawsuits are coming fast and furious. The industry’s trade group sued in June 2024 on behalf of Universal, Sony, and Warner over training on recordings the company never paid for. Warner settled in November 2025. BMG signed a licensing agreement this week. Universal and Sony are still in court, and they moved to add more than 61,000 songs to the complaint.

That fight is about who owns the inputs and eventually it will get resolved with money. The way most of this stuff does.

The co-founder played piano as a kid and played bass in bands through high school and college. His peak moment was at the Knitting Factory in New York. He eventually gave up on being a professional musician but still goes to a show once a month.

AI is remarkable. It does things we couldn’t have imagined even a year or two ago. But if you listen to my conversation with Matt you will know how I feel about this. A song pulled out of a few prompts is missing so much. The band who spent years learning the instruments, the song writer who is putting their emotions on paper, standing in the crowd dancing, smiling, or in tears because of what that music has meant to you. I think a lot gets lost when the analog goes away.

But that’s just me.

Spiritual

I am still mentally across the pond. Last week it was a funeral in Dublin. This week it is a bookstore receipt in Edinburgh.

My son had no interest in Harry Potter. Not the books or the movies. It got offered plenty of times across plenty of years and…crickets.

Then we spent a week over there.

We walked Victoria Street, the curved run of colored shopfronts that fans take for Diagon Alley. We stood in Greyfriars Kirkyard and read names off the stones. We looked up at the castle from about six different angles. And we found The Elephant House on George IV Bridge, the café with the red front where J.K. Rowling wrote from around 1996 to 1999, in the back room, with a view of the castle and the graveyard. Where a fire burned it down in 2021 and it took close to 4 years to rebuild. Reopening just last December.

Rowling has said herself that the place is not the birthplace of anything. She had been writing the books for years before she ever walked in.

But that didn’t make a difference to him. He bought the first book while we were there. He is now about to start the 4th.

You are going to wonder why this one is in Spiritual.

We made the case for him to read the books years ago. Appealed to him with the movies and it never took. He didn’t want to read it and didn’t have an interest. But a week of standing in the actual streets did all of it at once.

That is the same fact sitting under the other three this week. The soreness is what it costs to put in the work. The voice carries what the transcript loses. And a song that arrives in 10 seconds leaves a lot to be desired.

You cannot be talked into caring about something. You have to be put in front of it. Much like change.

You have to be ready for it.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you have been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you have not already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week...

Adam

I took a picture on the trail a few weeks ago. One of those sunrises that comes up through the trees and makes the morning feel like everything is slowing down.

I saw it coming over the bridge. Stopped. Stood there for a minute, which you don’t do in the middle of a run. Then took the picture, because something about it opened into a few other things I hadn’t planned on thinking about that morning.

A few hours later I was reading through information about my oldest’s transition to middle school. Sixth grade. New school. New building. New everything. Electives. Locker assignments. Earlier start time. Actual grades! The schedule with seven periods instead of one teacher. A lot more material than all his other transitions up to this point. Reading through it you know something is about to shift.

That’s how it works. Kids grow up. Years pass. Schools change. Logically, I know all of this. We’ve done it before, every step from preschool through fifth grade. Kindergarten orientation. The little name tag. The first day of first grade. The first morning he walked into the school without me holding his hand. I have photos of most of these moments. Each one felt significant at that time. And then the moment receded and the new normal set in and the next transition arrived and the cycle continued.

But this one feels bigger.

Maybe it’s because middle school is the part of my own life I remember most clearly. Sixth grade was where I started searching for some independence. Testing limits. Doing things my parents didn’t know about. Girls. Friends. Sports. Grades.

I remember the bus rides. Using four letter words because your parents weren’t around. Talking about the new MTV video or who liked who, who was meeting who at the dance. The type of conversations that got quiet when an adult came around.

I remember the lockers. The combinations. The way I'd dial it casually like I'd done it a thousand times when I'd practiced at home the night before.

I remember the first thing I did that my parents didn’t know about. Nothing dramatic, but looking back it was a pure moment of independence. More than anything I was becoming a person separate from them. A person they didn’t have complete visibility into. A person with some part of a life I wanted to keep private. Make it mine.

Now I am watching him walk into that.

There's a strange thing about being the parent on this side of it. I remember exactly what’s coming. The longing for independence. The first crushes. The friends who become more important than family for a while. The grades that start to feel like they mean everything. The first hard thing that you don’t tell your parents about because you want to handle it yourself.

I’ll be on the other side of that wall for much of it. Watching. Available if he needs something. But not invited in the way I used to be. That’s how it should be. That’s the whole point. But knowing it doesn’t make watching it any easier.

The part that’s hard to articulate is how fast this all happened.

Every parent gets warned. Everyone tells you how fast it goes. You nod and smile. Laugh because it’s the line that everyone who has been there shares. And you know it. But I think until you have been there you don’t really get it. You think you do, because you can feel time passing, but you don’t actually understand the dimension of it yet. And then it’s here. The kid you carried into the house from the hospital is signing up for sixth grade electives.

And for someone who lives in this stuff. Reading it. Researching it. Talking about it. Coaching it. It still caught me off guard.

The clock is moving and I can feel it now in a way I couldn’t feel it before.

There are moments where the years compress. I’ll look at him and remember him as a toddler in the same instant. Both versions right in front of me. The kid who needed help with his shoes. Standing on stage at his first play. The one who's taller than I expected and is already taller than his last visit to the doctor. They’re all there. And they’re all leaving.

I think the whole spiritual project, whatever you want to call it, is paying attention before the moment passes. Clearly, I haven’t figured out how to slow time. Nobody has.

But attention is the only thing you actually have to offer the moments while they’re happening.

You can't slow them. You can't keep them. You can’t save them for later. The only move available is to be present for them while they’re underway. To notice. To see. To register the sunrise in the moment. The specific phrasing of a question my son asked in the car. The way Alison laughed at something while we were all sitting on the couch. These don’t repeat. They happen once and they’re gone.

The sunrise the other morning. The walk home from practice the other night. The random afternoon that becomes a memory I’ll keep for the rest of my life.

You don’t get to know in advance which days those will be. That’s the catch. You can’t choose which moments matter. You can only choose whether you’re paying attention when they pass.

So I’m trying to pay attention. Sitting here with that odd feeling of sadness, happiness, and pride.

He starts middle school next week. I guess all I can say is be there for it.

Physical

Michael Koppy lives in Hermantown, Minnesota. On January 26 he started walking north out of International Falls, the town that calls itself the Icebox of the Nation. Two days later he finished 135 miles away in Tower.

He is 75 years old. The clock read 59 hours and 30 minutes. The cutoff was 60.

Thirty minutes.

The Arrowhead 135 runs on groomed winter trail in the last week of January. Minnesota in the winter! Everyone on foot drags a sled. Koppy’s weighed 50 pounds. A sleeping bag rated to twenty below. A bivvy. A stove, fuel, a pot, a whistle. Seventy people started this year. Thirty-two finished.

He barely slept. He lost his electrolyte and carbohydrate powders somewhere out there. Ran the rest of it on water and energy bars. “It was such a strong wind,” he said. “You put on everything warm you had and still weren’t warm.”

He tried this last year, at 74. He got to within six miles of the finish and stopped. “I just collapsed. I was so spent. I couldn’t even walk.”

Six miles. After 129.

Then he went home, waited a year, and drove back to International Falls to do the whole thing over again.

The man has nine finishes at 200 miles or longer. He set a speed record on the Superior Hiking Trail at 69, all 310 miles of it. He started Western States last year and dropped out at mile 30. He is already registered for two more races this year.

Somewhere in our 40’s most of us start negotiating. We shorten the run. We pick the version we already know we can finish. We start calling it wisdom, and some of it is. Bodies change, and pretending otherwise can come with a cost.

But there is a difference between adapting the hard thing and quietly retiring from hard things. One is an adjustment. The other happens fairly quietly.

Koppy on the Arrowhead: “It’s one of the hardest races on earth. If there are harder ones, I am not interested.”

Those are words of wisdom.

When was the last time you started something you were not sure you could finish?

Mental

Ezekiel Emanuel has a new book out. Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life. He is an oncologist and bioethicist at Penn. In his interview he told NPR the book came out of “mostly anger at the wellness industrial complex.” Peptides. Full-body scans. Red lights. Supplement stack after supplement stack.

His third rule is expand your mind. Keep learning. Build the reserve.

What I liked is that he will not soften the rule. He is specific about what does not count. “That doesn’t mean, ‘Well, you know, I’m going to try to play the saxophone one day.’” The intention is not the thing. Someday doesn’t count. He wants you to be genuinely bad at something with some consistency.

Then he goes further than I would, maybe. “Retirement leads to more rapid cognitive decline for people. I say to people, don’t retire.”

I think that might be a more personal decision. I have watched people stay 10 years too long in work that was hollowing them out. Yet, I get what he means. You have to have a plan for that second mountain or third.

However, he is pointing at something very, very real. It is not the job. It is what the job was doing. A reason to be somewhere at a specific hour. A problem you cannot already solve. People who count on you.

Work bundles all three and allows you to participate. That is the danger in it. When the work ends those things come apart and none get replaced unless somebody builds it on purpose.

His answer is to never put the bundle down. I would ask a different question first.

Which of the three would you actually miss? The structure, the challenge, or the people?

Financial

I recently read a study from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Sudipto Banerjee ran the Health and Retirement Study numbers and looked at what retirees actually do with their money once they stop working.

People who retired with at least $500,000 in non-housing assets spent 11.8% of it. Over twenty years.

Roughly a third of the retirees in the sample finished with more than they started with.

The takeaway. No one used their money.

I touched on that this week, but it’s something I have been thinking about now more than ever. Probably because it hits close to home with my parents in their 70’s and my mother-in-law turning 80.

And then there is this. Researchers at UC-Irvine and SUNY Albany put people in a controlled setting with ample assets and removed the uncertainty. No health risk. No open question about how long they would live. They still would not spend it.

So it is not an information problem. It is not longevity risk. It is something older than either one.

I am not a financial advisor and none of this is advice about what anyone should do with their money. But I will only tell you what I have seen, both personally and professionally. Fifteen years at Vanguard, and the years since in rooms with people who hit their number. The number was supposed to be the thing that bought the freedom. Then it became the thing that they wanted to protect.

The plan gets built to hit a number. That number grows to fund a life. But somewhere in between the number and the plan become the life.

If you knew for certain that you had enough, what would you do differently this year?

Spiritual

We were in Scotland when I heard.

Glen Hansard died on July 29. A motorcycle, alone, in Lucan on the western edge of Dublin, before 4:30 in the morning. He was 56. He left a wife, the Finnish poet Maire Saaritsa, and a 3-year-old named Christy.

A stone’s throw of water from Ireland, and you could feel it. It moved through the pubs and the radio and people with guitars on the street in Edinburgh. A whole country grieving one man.

Some of you will remember I wrote about Shane MacGowan’s funeral. I fell into it one night, watching a church in Nenagh where the congregation stood up and danced in the aisles. The song they were dancing to was Fairytale of New York. The man leading it was Glen Hansard, standing beside Lisa O’Neill.

I have watched that more times than is probably healthy.

Two and a half years later, on August 4, they filled St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin for him. Eddie Vedder and Markéta Irglová sang Song of Good Hope, backed by The Frames. Damien Rice. Imelda May. Damien Dempsey. Bono and The Edge. His brother Gary sang I Can See God. Lisa O’Neill sang again, this time for him.

At the end they all sang Forever Young. Dylan.

Bono said that everyone who met him remembers the day they met him. The Dean of the cathedral said that in the end, kindness is the greatest legacy anyone leaves.

I can tell you watching that video the first time I didn’t have dry eyes.

He stood in a church and sang for somebody else. Then a room full of people stood in a church and sang for him. He did not know that was coming. You never know which funeral you are at.

And look at who was in the room. Not the Oscar. Not the eight Tony Awards. Not the box office. Musicians who wanted to be there, and a city that showed up.

Who is in your room?

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you have been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you have not already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

Adam

Last week I watched my mother-in-law walk through Glasgow, the countryside, and Edinburgh for her 80th birthday.

It started with the Loch Ness monster. She had been talking to the boys about it for a year, after they watched a show on Netflix and got curious, then watched a couple more. They wanted to go to Scotland. She said she would love to go if we could take her. So we did.

She has walked every day for 30 plus years. Part of her rosary walks, and honestly, that commitment is the only reason the trip was possible. Why? Because Scotland is miles and miles on foot each day. The way most of European trip is. The countryside, the cities, all of it. None of it happens if the window doesn’t overlap.

That word, window, is the one I keep coming back to. Most financial plans anchor to two things. Money going up, then money going down, and the plan and story tie to that. But there is a third line: how long your body will carry you. Put all three together and you get a different picture entirely. Health. Wealth. Time. And the plan only matters where all three overlap.

For a lot of people that overlap isn’t very big, and most haven’t been coached, taught, advised, or guided to think about health and money in the same frame beyond insurance and a budget line item.

And your own window isn’t the only one that matters.

Scotland needed three windows to open at the same time. Hers at 80, still walking with vigor in her step. The boys at an age where a grandmother telling them about the Loch Ness monster keeps their attention. And ours, with the health and the means and the willingness to organize the whole thing. Close any one of the three and the trip doesn’t happen.

That shared overlap is much narrower than anyone’s individual one. Our window, her window, and my sons still being boys are three separate curves, and they don’t cross for long. I don’t think most plans know it exists. Most plans make the choice based upon when the expense matches the correct savings.

And it is the entire reason we went this year instead of someday. Someday was always going to be the wrong answer.

Ask yourself how many financial plans have ever sent you to Function Health to get your labs and inner age. How many put you through a movement screen. How many asked whether you lift, run, ride, or do yoga. My guess is not many.

One of my favorite books on this is Bill Perkins’ Die With Zero. Catchy title, and every book needs one, but the argument underneath is serious. According to Perkins money is stored life energy and experience, and the goal isn’t to maximize the balance but to convert it into opportunities while you still have the health to use them. Dying with a large balance means you worked years you didn’t need to and bought nothing with them. Perkins may undersell the tail risk, and an advisor will tell you so, but the core observation sticks.

Perkins has a chart in the book I've never been able to improve on, so I'm using his. Health falling, wealth rising, and the narrow band underneath where the two actually overlap.

The other thing her trip proves is that health compounds, and it compounds the same way money does.

Thirty years of a daily walk is not some dramatic health intervention. It is a position, built out of deposits so small that skipping any one of them would have cost her nothing you could measure. That is exactly what makes it work and exactly why it is impossible to sell. Nobody's rosary walk shows up on the statement at the end of the month. Then you are 80 and the account is large enough to grant you a trip to Scotland.

We understand this math perfectly on one side of the plan and often refuse to apply it anywhere else. No advisor has ever told a thirty-year-old that contributions can wait until the balance starts to feel urgent. However, we might tell people that about a lot of other things.

This has been top of mind for me for decades. It is what motivated my wife and me to ride bikes in Provence in our early 30s, to cycle the wineries and the countryside and take the chance to ride to the top of Mont Ventoux, stopping for a beer and frites on the way back down the mountain. It is why I was fine buying the expensive carbon bikes to race Ironman all those years. It is what motivated me when the boys were born. The travel and the experiences, yes, but more than that the commitment to staying healthy enough that years from now we can still travel with them, and hopefully with their kids.

And data says this isn’t as common as it should be.

Wealth usually isn’t the constraint. The strange thing about retirement savings is how rarely they get spent. Researchers tracked retired households through the first two decades of retirement, and the wealthiest ones held on tightest: most still had nearly everything, and about a third had more than when they started. The exception was people with a pension. Money that shows up monthly feels like income, and money that sits in an account feels like the last thing standing between you and disaster.

Health is the one people misread. You’ve probably seen the headline number. The US has the largest healthspan-lifespan gap in the world, 12.4 years against a 9.6-year global average.

And underneath that is the most important number…active life expectancy: how many years you get where the body gives you the window. A study of about 165,000 Medicare enrollees put it plainly. Arrive at 65 in good shape and you have 19.9 years left, 14 of them active. Arrive already limited and you have 17.8 years left, but only 8.9 active. You lose 2 years of life and 5 years of living. Ten percent off the total, thirty-six percent off the part you can use.

Disease doesn’t shorten life much anymore. It shortens the part of life you can use.

Time is the one nobody draws, because it looks free, but isn’t.

The back end is the part people eventually notice. Full retirement age is 67. Medicare starts at 65. Most plans are built to release someone into the window right as health starts closing it from the other side. That squeeze arrives on schedule and it isn’t described in the plan.

But the window has two edges, and the front one moves. It moves when you decide the trip doesn’t have to wait for the number. This is where Perkins is right. Certain experiences expire. Some things are only available at thirty, and no amount of money at sixty-five buys them back. Waiting doesn’t preserve them. It causes them to slip away.

The front edge also moves when health gets treated as the thing that opens the window rather than the thing that eventually closes it. The training you commit to at 30 or 40 or 50 isn’t only about walking Scotland at 80. It is about the decades in between. The energy to do the work that builds the wealth in the first place. The years you don’t lose to being unwell. The career that can run longer because the body will allow it, which is the single most powerful financial lever most people have and the one least often described as a health decision.

So take the trip at 30 if you have the opportunity and the means. Commit to the training at 40 and keep going for decades. Look honestly at your relationship with time, with friends, with family, with your partner.

Retire at 65 in good health and the three circles may only overlap for roughly ten years. Work until 70 instead and the window doesn’t lose a fifth of its years. It can lose a third of its strongest ones, because the years you trade away sit at the front, and what’s left in the account by the time you spend it is the weakest years you had.

Here’s the strange part. The people most likely to preserve their wealth to the end are, on average, the people best positioned to have spent the window well. They have the resources. Health isn’t the constraint yet. The only thing standing between them and the overlap is a decision they keep declining to make.

A financial plan tells you how long the money will last. It doesn’t tell you how long you will.

Physical

The Prime Minister of Japan got 5 hours of sleep the other night. How do we know, she posted about it. Why? Because 5 hours was big news.

Sanae Takaichi wrote that since taking office, “getting zero to three hours of sleep has become the norm.” Last fall she called aides to her residence at 3 a.m. to prep for a budget committee meeting. When she took the job, she announced she was done with the phrase work-life balance. “I will work, work, work.”

Japan is the country that invented a word for death from overwork. Karoshi. It capped monthly overtime at 45 hours after a 24-year-old advertising employee logged more than 100 hours of overtime in a month and committed suicide. Tokyo is experimenting with a 4-day workweek. And the person running the entire country is getting a few hours each night.

There is a version of this in the US. Not to the extremes where we call a 3 a.m. meeting, but a lot of people are keeping score. The full calendar as proof of worth. The email time stamped at midnight. The label of being a “grinder.” But sleep isn’t slacking. Science will tell you it is when the body and mind rebuilds itself. Runs the maintenance. And it is hard to rebuild when you neglect it for decades.

The research here is boring in the best way. There’s no version of the science where two hours works. There’s just a long list of things that slowly break.

Mental

A library in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana started printing something new at the bottom of checkout receipts: what you would have paid for the books you just borrowed. One patron’s receipt showed $292.07. The system tallies what the library paid for each title and then lets you see it.

I love this for a simple reason. It takes something we probably don’t pay attention to and translates it into a language we seem to all understand. Money.

But the receipt undercounts. $292.07 is what the books cost, but it doesn’t include what that experience might be worth. An afternoon inside somebody else’s life. A question you didn’t have that morning. A kid who finds the book that changes everything. It is tough to print that on the receipt.

And this story made me think about how we quantify things. Reflect value. Another area we take for granted. Our attention. We spend hours of it every day, most of them uncounted. If your presence was printed on a receipt at the end of the day, what would it show?

Financial

The Washington Post ran a story this week with a headline that gets written every year now: elder care costs are rising, and they’re consuming the inheritance. The numbers get plenty of coverage. There’s a piece of it that doesn’t.

Analysts at Cerulli have projected roughly $84 trillion changing hands between generations through 2045. The great wealth transfer we’ve been talking about for years. Meanwhile the median private nursing home room runs close to $11,000 a month, and memory care runs higher. One family in recent coverage spent $270,000 in a matter of months. The wealth transfer is happening. A lot of it will be transferring to the care economy first.

A good financial plan factors this in. That’s not the gap. The gap is the preventative side. We start doing retirement math decades in advance. The number, the savings rate, the timeline. Nobody waits until 64 to start saving. But most of us wait on the body.

The same approach to health might be the most useful move on the table. The gym membership. The walk in the park. The yoga class, the running club, the weights in the basement. Small contributions, made early, made consistently. Whatever the investment is, it could pay out for years. Physically, and then financially.

You already know your retirement number. Do you know what you’re putting into the body that has to be there to spend it?

Spiritual

I’m writing this before a flight. I was doing the pre-boarding ritual, making sure the music was downloaded, and I fell into a Counting Crows rabbit hole. Downloaded every album. Then I played the video for Mr. Jones.

I remember when that video hit MTV, back when MTV played videos. I remember seeing them at Blossom with my dad. I remember seeing them a few years ago with my wife and our friends. Same band playing the same songs.

In 1688, a Swiss physician named Johannes Hofer coined the word nostalgia. He classified it as a disease. Homesick soldiers, wasting away far from their villages. For centuries, doctors treated looking backward as an illness. Researchers at the University of Southampton have spent the last 20 years showing a different outcome. In study after study, nostalgia raises a person’s sense of meaning. It deepens connection to other people. It makes a life feel continuous instead of scattered.

That’s what I felt watching Adam Duritz. I don’t think I miss the 90s, exactly. The song hasn’t changed a note in thirty years. I have. What it hands me isn’t just the past. It’s that life has been long. That the good parts were real. That the people beside me each time were mine.

We’re told to live in the present, and mostly that’s right. But every once in a while a song comes on and the whole thing plays at once. Who you were. Who was beside you. Who is beside you now. What it has meant to you over time.

What’s the song that does that for you? And when did you last let it play all the way through?

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week….

These days people can tell you their resting heart rate, their deep sleep score, and their recovery color the minute they wake up and grab their phone. Ask them who they would call at two in the morning and the answer takes a bit longer.

There is an old British word for an economy that looks bigger than it is. Candy floss. Harold Wilson used it in 1961, warning that Britain was turning into a candy-floss society, all volume and no weight. We call it cotton candy. You buy a cloud the size of your head, it collapses to a spoonful on your tongue, and you are left holding the stick.

McKinsey put numbers behind it in a recent research piece. The world’s wealth entered 2025 at $600 trillion dollars, the most there has ever been. Then break it down. Of the household wealth added over the past 25 years, less than 30% came from actual new investment. Roughly 40% was inflation, and the rest came from the fluffy stuff. Paper prices rising on things people already owned. For every dollar of real investment, the world created $3.50 in new wealth.

Anyone who has opened a quarterly statement in the last few years understands this without a detailed explanation. Your balance went up 15% percent. You did not earn 15%. Nothing you own became more useful, more productive, or more real. The market simply agreed the value should be higher. It is real, yet…itt is also not the same as saving more, owning more, or holding something that produces.

It becomes very apparent when things go down. The drawdown comes, the euphoric sentiment leaves, the bubble bursts. That is when you find out which one you had.

You might be asking what HRV has to do with the share price of NVDA. Good question. Both get priced when things are good. The recovery score gets taken on a Tuesday when nothing has happened. The right dinner, a perfect night of sleep, no stress. Of course the number is green. The market wakes up to no global event, no surprise news. Of course it goes up.

It all looks good.

That is a valuation, but doesn’t exactly tell the whole story.

The host of Diary of a CEO went viral for saying 3 glasses of wine cost him 3 days. Groggy. Couldn’t work. Said he was wrecked. His Whoop backed him up, and the story was told as evidence of how finely tuned he had become. I heard the opposite in his story. Losing 3 days to 3 glasses of wine isn’t optimized. It has made the whole thing fragile. The tolerance band got so narrow that ordinary life now registers as a shock.

This isn’t a debate about alcohol. It is a simpler question. If your protocol only holds when the sleep is perfect, the calendar is clear, and nobody needs anything from you, what exactly does that mean?

In a portfolio, the boring things carry you through a crash. Cash you can reach without selling. Income that keeps being deposited. Positions bought low enough that a bad year is uncomfortable rather than fatal.

The equivalents are just as boring. An aerobic base built over years instead of weeks. Strength that came from load, patience, and repetition. Friendships with history in them, the kind that answer at two in the morning without needing the backstory. Work that still means something when nobody is watching it. A way of understanding your own life that doesn’t require the last six months to have gone well.

All of it bought low, in ordinary time, before anything was wrong. None of it produces a score. All of it shows up when the market turns.

Every portfolio gets tested. Never on the good days. The scan comes back wrong. A parent passes away. The marriage ends, or the job does, or the kid you thought was fine turns out not to be. That is the moment the number gets marked against something real.

Mine came on a vacation deck in Hilton Head.

It was the first full family gathering after COVID. My parents, my siblings, my nieces and nephews. I stepped out onto the deck on the 5th floor and watched the waves and listened to the ocean. Alison and the boys were inside with my parents. I remember thinking how grateful I felt to just be out after the last year or so. If ever a day would have scored well, it was that one.

Then I heard the buzz of a small plane.

At first it was in the background. Then it turned, looping back toward the shoreline, dropping lower, the sound getting louder, and before I understood why, I was 22 again, in a stairwell in the South Tower, the building swaying, firefighters climbing past us in the other direction. My heart went first. Then my breathing. Twenty years of distance closed in about 5 seconds.

Notice what happened next, because it is the other side of optimization. No dashboard predicted this. No score would have caught it. Nothing measurable about that afternoon was wrong.

I walked out of the condo and down the stairs to a few landings below, because I did not want the boys or Alison or my parents to panic. I sat down. I put both feet flat on the ground. And I started breathing the way I had practiced in the hardest miles of long runs, years earlier, on mornings when nothing was at stake. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Hold for four. My heart kept racing, but my breath gave it something to follow. Slowly, my fear let go.

That breath was an asset. It was bought low, over years, in the work, for reasons that had nothing to do with a plane over a beach. It produced no score the entire time I learned it, practiced it, and kept it in the background. And on the one afternoon the noise showed up and the fear came back; it did its job. The only position in the portfolio that paid.

I have watched people with perfect metrics and perfect portfolios fold inside a week. I have watched people with no dashboard at all absorb a terrible year, keep showing up, and come out the far side recognizable. The difference was never the tracking. It was what had been built before the tracking started.

None of this makes measurement wrong. A glucose monitor matters enormously for a man who is actually diabetic. A scale matters for one at real cardiac risk. A sleep number matters if it is the thing that finally gets you to bed at a reasonable hour. The key is whether the number is attached to a decision you would otherwise make differently. If it is, keep it. If it only produces a feeling, you are paying rent on attention for something you do not own.

Time is the currency. Wealth and wellness are the two ledgers you spend it on. The uncomfortable thing about both is that the statement and the substance can drift apart for years without anyone noticing, and the gap gets settled at the worst possible moment.

So the question is not what your numbers were this morning.

It is what is left when they are bad.

Physical

Forty-seven years old, standing in the kitchen, a word on the tip of your tongue. It was there a second ago. Now you are racking your brain to remember.

Women get told this is stress. Or aging. Or nothing.

Lisa Mosconi runs the Women’s Brain Initiative at Weill Cornell. In 2021, she published a study in Scientific Reports that scanned 161 women between 40 and 65 with MRI, spectroscopy, and PET. Pre-menopause, peri-menopause, post-menopause. She ran age-matched men alongside them to separate hormonal change from getting older.

Here are the findings. Gray and white matter volume down. Glucose metabolism, the way our brain turns fuel into thought, declining across large portions of the temporal lobes. That foggy feeling isn’t your imagination at all.

But it was in a later portion of the study that surprised her. The part that doesn’t get written about as much. The brain comes back.

Gray matter recovered in the precuneus, a region tied to memory and the sense of self. Cerebral blood flow rose. ATP production rose. And that recovery tracked with preserved cognitive performance afterward. Mosconi’s read: the brain finds a new normal after menopause in most women.

Estrogen collapses and then an organ gets rewired. And then it starts building. New blood flow. New energy pathways and a new way to run the same brain.

The transition is like renovating a house. It can get messy living in it, but eventually it is finished.

Something like this is happening to half the people reading this, and most of them were told it was all in their head. It was. Just not the way anyone meant it.

Mental

Look at the loop.

Stimulus. Dopamine release. Pleasure. Desire for more. Reinforcement. Habit formation. Addiction. Back to stimulus.

That diagram is a warning for us all. But for many it is now a strategic business plan. Because it is how a lot of businesses are being built these days.

Ted Gioia wrote about this in February 2024, in The State of the Culture. His argument: art got swallowed by entertainment, entertainment got swallowed by distraction, and distraction is being swallowed by addiction. He drew it as fish eating fish. His point about the platforms is that they are not patrons of anything. Their business is dependency. They intend to be the supplier.

Watch it move through an ordinary life.

Sports. We played it. Then we watched it. Now we bet on it, on a phone, on a single pitch, during a game we are already watching.

Music. We played an instrument. Then we went to shows. Now we scroll fifteen-second clips of songs we will never hear the end of.

Food. We cooked. Then we watched cooking shows. Now we order delivery and watch a stranger eat on camera.

Photographs. We took them. Then we looked at them. Now we thumb through infinite pictures of people we will never meet.

The direction never seems to reverse. From doing, to watching, to wagering on the watching. Each step takes something you participated in and turns you into an sucked in observer

And the science underneath it gets worse the longer your in the loop. Anna Lembke, in Dopamine Nation, calls it the pleasure-pain balance. Push hard on one side and the baseline moves. Eventually you are not chasing the good feeling. You are chasing the absence of the bad one. Doing the thing and feeling nothing.

What did you do this week that you actually did?

Financial

And speak of the dopamine hit and capitalism at its best. $250 Billion.

That is what Americans are on track to lose to gambling this year. I was reading an essay in The Argument from June of this year. He shows all the numbers.

Not wager. Lose. Total losses are up 67% since COVID began, another 8% in the last year alone, climbing faster than at any point between 2000 and 2020. And that number excludes crypto, prediction markets, and stock options.

It started with Murphy v. NCAA in 2018, when the Supreme Court struck the federal ban. Thirty-nine states and D.C. have legalized some version since that day. California and Texas, a population of 70 million, holding out are the only reason the figure is not larger.

The author, Joe Politano’s, description of the regulators is probably one of my favorite descriptions of how we got here. He calls them negligent parents. Just good enough to keep the kids alive.

Two findings, and they are not the same kind of finding.

And we are slowly seeing the repercussions. Just google gambling cases in pro sports. As Guardians fans we have been living it since last season. Or a recent report by Jacob Goss and Daniel Mangrum who went through millions of credit reports and found debt delinquency rates rose as states legalized sports betting, concentrated in men and people under 40.

Or a second study that is much uglier. They found that in legal states, an NFL home team losing as a favorite raises intimate partner violence 10 percentage points more than in states without legal betting. Now I will preface this paper is in process and still needs peer reviewed, but still. I am flagging it for the directional results alone, because the number is severe enough to push it to the front page.

Most people bet twenty bucks on a Sunday, lose it, and go to work Monday.

But that is the simple math. Losses do not compound at that rate on casual money. The growth has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the people who cannot stop. That is the business and it has something to do with that chart I showed you earlier.

Spiritual

But we can’t finish on that story so here is something that just makes me smile.

Franconia Ridge, the first day of summer, just after dawn. A 91-year-old man puts on his pack and sets off onto the trail. He takes his first few steps and says the thing he says every morning. It’s a don’t fall day today.

Dale Sanders goes by Grey Beard. In 2017, at 82, he became the oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. 2,190 miles from Georgia to Maine. In 12 months! Four years later his friend M.J. Eberhart took the record at 83. Sanders was standing at the finish line when it happened, holding a walking stick he had made for him.

Now he is out there again. He started in September. Twelve miles a day, a volunteer crew he calls Base Camp on Wheels, a 12-month clock counting down.

The opening line of the Times video is the whole thing. He did it at 82, and it changed his life (I get goosebumps just thinking about it.)

Sanders did not spend his life on trails. He worked parks and recreation for the Navy and retired in 2002. He marked his 80th birthday by paddling the length of the Mississippi. He found what he was for somewhere around the age most people sit down in the recliner.

On the summit, catching his breath, he admitted the training has stopped working the way it used to. He wanted to be close to where he was in 2017. He said he has never reached it. That is a 91-year-old man, on camera, halfway up a mountain, telling the truth about his own decline and still going.

This is not a story about age being just a number. If anything, it’s the fact that he’s just going. Number be damned.

Somewhere this Sunday a man will lose four hundred dollars on a game he is watching staring at his phone sitting in the recliner. And Grey Beard will walk twelve miles toward Maine.

Same day. Same hours.

Two completely different things to do with them.

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

Adam

At some point, someone has told you that you were special. Over the years a parent, a coach, a teacher who saw something. You were gifted. You were going places. You had a thing most people did not have. And honestly, who doesn’t want to hear that.

But in 2012, an English teacher named David McCullough Jr. stood in front of a graduating class and told them the opposite. You are not special. Not the valedictorian, not the captain, not the young woman with the early acceptance letter. No one. He had thought about it carefully, and he meant it.

A wonderful title. One that grabs your attention, especially in the context of the environment. Yet what he was doing was handing them a gift. Something they could take forward, allowing them a deep sense of freedom if they accepted. Why? Because it allows you to walk through doors with a totally different perspective.

You can climb the mountain to see the world instead of to be seen on top of it. You can read the book for what it says, love the person for who they are, do the work because the work is worth doing. You aren’t tethered to the outcome of the experience. You’re trying to unclip the rope.

And the more you think about it the more it makes sense. If you are not special, you have nothing left to defend. You can stop auditioning. You can stop entering evidence. You can set down that weight you have been carrying, the quiet daily labor of proving you are worth the room you take up. That is what he was giving them. The permission to be ordinary, and unafraid of it.

Now, I can’t speak for that audience or that graduating class, but when you look around, I think very few people have taken that advice. Because our first thought, our first reaction is the exact opposite. It is not to sit with his words and perhaps shake our heads. We have an instant answer and we shout it back. Or even say it quietly under our breath.

Yes I am.

And then we spend our lives proving it.

The pursuit becomes the argument. The startup, the title, the second home, the follower count, the table that takes three months to book. Each one is evidence entered behind those two words. Each one says the same thing. Look. Yes I am.

You see it most clearly in the people who have the most. The founder who sold the company and started another one inside a year. The CEO with the second, third, or fourth house. The athlete who has won every version of the prize there is and still gets up at four to win it again, and again, and again. From a distance it looks like ambition. Up close it looks like a person still answering a sentence they heard a long time ago and cannot stop answering.

And it never ends. There is always a higher step, because the next step doesn’t provide the answer. You cannot validate your way out of mortality. You cannot buy enough or build enough or become enough to make the fear go away, because the fear was never about the money or the title in the first place. The proving runs forever. Something you can argue every day and never win.

There are other ways to lose the argument. Grief will do it. So will failure, and love, and a chair beside someone who is dying. For me it showed up in another way.

I have been racing for over twenty years. Running, bikes, triathlon. Hundreds of start lines, in the cold and the dark and the heat and rain, next to every kind of person you can name. People with resumes, titles, and wealth I couldn’t imagine. But standing on the start line, yes I am, doesn’t really make much of a difference. You say it on that line and often the body doesn’t hear it. It does not know your net worth. It does not care what you built. It knows load, and depletion, and how far you still are from the end. Nothing else.

So the layers come off. I have watched it happen for twenty years, to myself, and on real faces in real time. The title goes and the performance of ease goes a little after. The story a person tells about who they are disappears somewhere in the back half, when there is nothing left to spend it on and no one left to spend it in front of. What remains is a person doing hard work in a body, which is the oldest thing there is.

It would be easy to write as a spectator watching other people come apart. But I think the reason I recognize it is because it has happened to me.

My first marathon, Ironman, 50-miler, 100-miler were all finishes. If I lined up I knew I was going to finish and do well. And that is usually when it gets you. I was lining up for another 100. I had done the work, I was ready, and I always finished. It was that day, when I was running well, with my family and my crew out there helping me, that something began to happen. My knee hurt, and it got worse and worse and worse. From 72 to 80 I walked. I was probably going to have to walk the last twenty. Instead of walking them, I quit.

There was a reason. There is always a reason. But I have run enough to know the difference between when I cannot go on and when I am looking for the exit, and I know which one that was. Walking twenty miles in the dark, slow, hobbling, everyone watching, there is nothing special in it. It is just a person getting to a line. I would rather have quit than be that. So I quit.

What it cost was not the race. It was this idea that I was something special. Different. Up to that mile I had never not finished. After it, I was someone who might not. I could be a person who does not finish. I did not know that about myself the day before, and I have not been able to un-know it since.

I think I learned I wasn’t special that day. Or maybe relearned it. Years before, at an Ironman, I’d come to the same thing: if I was going to do these, they had to be for me. I have come to believe that was the lesson worth having, even if I would not have chosen it.

Because once no one is watching, once the streak is gone and the finish line stops mattering, there is no one left to prove it to. And then there is only one reason left to go. You do it for yourself, or you do not do it at all. That is what quitting taught me.

I still line up. I know now the start line promises nothing. I go anyway

Physical

Before the interview started, Kelly Starrett handed Rich Roll a Frisbee, a tennis ball, and a rope.

That was the warmup. Not a lactate test. The rower or some complex protocol. A Frisbee.

And during the episode he made an argument that runs against almost everything being sold to us right now. Wellness culture, he says, has become a kind of secularized religion. Fixated on optimization while the fundamentals get ignored.

The episode title is his thesis…Play Is The Miracle Drug.

During the conversation, he asks you to think about it. What is play? It is something that requires you to be bad at something in front of other people. You have to not know how it ends. You have to stop keeping score long enough to enjoy it.

Every one of those is the opposite of what we are hearing from the influencers and optimizers.

There is no wearable that scores play. No ring that buzzes when you throw a ball badly and laugh about it. Nobody has built the metric because there is nothing to sell. It is free, it is available today, and it does not require some insane checklist.

I have asked this question of myself lately and to many others. To the point where I sound like a broken record. Optimized for what, exactly?

Kelly’s answer is that the body was built to move unpredictably. To cut, reach, react, fall down, get up. Adults stop doing that somewhere in our thirties and replace it with the treadmill, the same loop, the same pace, the same number. We exercise, but maybe throw away what exercise was for.

Rich Roll has been an ultra-endurance athlete for two decades. And what reframed his thinking was a guy throwing him a Frisbee in a driveway.

For me it has been throwing the baseball again with my son. In the field and for BP. It has been making passes and playing defense with a lacrosse stick. It has been kicking the soccer ball around (a new obsession of theirs lately).

When was the last time you moved your body for no reason other than it was fun?

Mental

Five years ago, David Cain signed up for a 10k he shouldn’t be running.

He injured his foot and paused his training. A heat wave killed his motivation. A minor medical procedure cost him a few more weeks. Ten days out he could barely cover 5k. So he did what many of us would do, myself included a number of times. He lowered the goal: run to the halfway point, then walk the rest.

On race day he hit the halfway point and did not feel like walking. So he kept running and he finished the whole thing.

Nothing was different that day. He had not slept well. He was not inspired. He certainly had not trained. The only thing that changed was that in a race, with spectators and a clock, it got harder to fake it.

He wrote about it this week in Failing is Common, Trying is Rare. An article that was an honest, punch in the face for me. His point is most failures are not preceded by trying. They are preceded by reasoning yourself out of trying.

Cain points to writer Cate Hall for the rationale. A mediocre effort is irrational if your goal is actually success at the thing. So when we put in a mediocre effort, it usually means a quieter goal has taken the wheel. Not coming off as pushy. Not publishing something nobody reads. Not admitting there is a gap in what you know.

Those goals are never stated out loud. They just win.

Then, years later, the story becomes something else. I tried that. It did not work out. It was not for me.

Cain has a test for it, and it takes about 4 seconds. Ask yourself how someone who was actually determined to do this would go about it. You know the answer immediately. You also know immediately whether that is you.

I have felt that a lot lately when it comes to The 9:03. Something that has been much harder than I have expected, that I have talked myself out of plenty, downplayed, or said it wasn’t for me.

Maybe it is why this hit me so hard.

The 10k, the business, the marriage, the second act. Most of us are not failing at those. We are running training runs nobody is watching, and calling it an attempt.

What are you telling yourself you tried?

Financial

$124 trillion moves from Boomers and the Silent Generation to their heirs by 2048. That is Cerulli’s projection.

Fortune reported this week on the part of it that is not cash.

Bank of America Private Bank surveyed more than 1,400 Americans holding at least $3 million in investable assets for its 2026 Study of Wealthy Americans. Among wealthy business owners this year, 23% say they inherited the company. 11% bought it. In 2022 the ratio ran the other direction: 28% purchased, 5% inherited. Four years and it flipped.

Here the industry reaches for its favorite number. Only 30% of family businesses survive to the second generation, 12% to the third. It traces to one place: John Ward, 1987, Keeping the Family Business Healthy, built on 200 Illinois manufacturers tracked from 1924 to 1984. Ward wrote that they survive through the second generation. The brochures quote to. One word, and the finding loses about thirty years.

The money version has the same problem. Roy Williams and Vic Preisser studied 3,250 families for Preparing Heirs and reported that 70% of families lose the wealth by the second generation and 90% by the third. In 2022, Jim Grubman published “There is no 70% rule” in the International Family Offices Journal, traced every citation back to its source, and found the number does not hold.

What has never been contested is the part underneath. Williams and Preisser found that technical failures, the trust and the documents and the tax work, account for fewer than 5% of failed transitions. The rest is communication. Nobody prepared the heirs.

Meaning the work is on the people and not paperwork.

Coaching someone to hold money is one skill. What is enough. What is it for. What does it cost to keep it. Coaching someone to run the thing that made the money is a different skill entirely. Can you lead people? Can you make the call that disappoints family? Can you let someone go?

You cannot transfer judgment. Judgment gets built the slow way. By doing it badly first, with someone in the room who will tell you the truth about it.

And remember the 11%. A career is roughly 80,000 hours against a life of about 700,000. Now hand that 11% to someone pre-assigned, already named, impossible to refuse without becoming the person who refused it.

If the transfer is coming, who is doing the work, and when did it start?

Spiritual

This weekend I was standing at the fence watching my son play lacrosse. Coaches for another game were right behind me as I leaned against the fence and they screamed for the entire game. Yelling. Criticizing. Correcting. Some type of communication wrapped in the form of “coaching.”

They lost. And afterward they came down the sideline and sat down for the after game talk. Thirty seconds into the speech, the coach called out an 11-year-old kid. He said, if you can’t look at me when I’m talking, leave. Go home. It’s your choice.

The kid looked up.

And you could see it from ten feet away. He wasn’t really looking. He wasn’t listening at all. He just did what was demanded of him, but he wasn’t there.

The coach got compliance. The kid got left alone. For fifteen minutes that was it.

Tasha Eurich spent 5 years studying this. She is an organizational psychologist, and across her research program she found that 95% of people believe they are self-aware, while only 10 to 15% actually are. Internal self-awareness is knowing what you value and why you do what you do. External self-awareness is knowing how you land on other people. Being good at one predicts nothing about the other.

That coach had none of the second kind. He had been yelling for an hour and would have told you, honestly, that he was teaching. And he demanded from an 11-year-old exactly the thing he could not do himself: actually see the person in front of him.

Which is the whole week, if you look at it.

The treadmill instead of the game. The training run instead of the race. The business handed to someone who never chose it. The eyes that turned toward the front of the room. All of it is the same distance. The performance of the thing, standing where the thing should be.

The gap is invisible from the inside. That is the entire finding.

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

Adam

For forty years, the instruction never changes. Save. Defer. Protect what you have built.

Then you do some planning and one morning the paycheck stops, and you are supposed to flip a switch. One that is much harder to flip than anyone thinks.

Much of my work at Vanguard was spent helping individuals in the accumulation phase. Ten thousand meetings. Advisors, home offices, banks, wirehouses all doing the long patient work of accumulation. And I want to say this clearly: it is very, very important. I sat with people who did it right and saw what it protected them from. The discipline is real. The industry built extraordinary tools for it. Asset allocations. Glide paths. Target-date funds that adjust themselves while you sleep. Everything engineered for one direction. Up.

Yet, to use a retirement analogy, we didn’t build for the back 9.

The evidence for that turned up in the research this summer.

Corebridge Financial published a study in June on what they call the decumulation gap, and the numbers describe quite a standoff. Sixty-one percent of the people surveyed say retirement is a time to enjoy themselves. Half associate spending their savings with uncertainty. Only 28% are comfortable watching the balance go down at all, and 70% say it is very important that the nest egg not shrink.

But isn’t that the entire purpose of retirement.

Worth knowing before you lean on that: Corebridge sells annuities, and this is a single industry survey. The loudest voices telling retirees to spend are the ones selling a unique vehicle. Yet, that does not make the findings wrong. And it is worth checking against harder data. David Blanchett and Michael Finke did that work using the Health and Retirement Study, a federally supported survey that has followed roughly twenty thousand older Americans for decades, with nobody selling anything. What they found: retirees spend about 80 percent of the income that arrives monthly, the Social Security and pension checks. From their savings, they spend about half of what the researchers calculate they safely could.

The money that arrived like a paycheck got spent like a paycheck. The money that sat in an account got guarded like Fort Knox.

And it isn’t because the plan said that is what had to happen. It is because most didn’t do the type of planning that would allow them to do it.

I understand it completely. The discipline that builds wealth is an identity. Forty years of watching a number go up wires a nervous system. Creates a mindset. You learn to feel a market drop in your stomach. And it pains you. You learn that restraint is virtue and spending is something you would do if you were foolish. You learn to check the balance the way other people check the weather. And that habit gets rewarded. The account grows. The discipline is rewarded time and time again.

Then the game changes.

In my Vanguard years I heard the plan described the same way in every city. Get to the number. The number was the finish line, the scoreboard, the thing everyone in the room could agree on. What I almost never heard was the second half of the plan. What the number was for. What exactly would allow you to spend that number. To feel good about spending it. Which hours, which people, which table the money was supposed to buy a seat at.

We spent decades teaching people how to get there. We spent almost nothing teaching them how to be there.

And I see it every day in my own parents. Two teachers who saved and saved. A mom who made our Halloween costumes, ran a budget system, clipped coupons religiously. Both raised by parents who came through the Depression, in homes where nothing got wasted because nothing could be.

Now they’re retired, and I am trying to get them to spend what they built.

When I push, the answer is always the same. “I know, but...” That’s the whole sentence. The but never finishes.

Or it’s not how we were raised. Or they look at the balance and point at what the market has done. Look where it is. How could we touch it now? The growth has become the argument against spending it. That’s the trap in its purest form and the reward for forty years of discipline is a number too big to let go of.

Then comes the one that ends every conversation: we’re saving it for you kids. And I tell them, give it to me now then, because I’ll spend it for you. We laugh. Nothing changes.

But here’s what I hold onto. They flipped the switch once. They bought a house near us — more house than anywhere they’d ever lived, a bigger check than either of them was built to write. It was hard. It was a battle for a few years.

And look what it bought. Bus stop pickups. Summer baseball games. Lacrosse sidelines. Dog watching. Birthday parties. Every ordinary week, they are spending their most valuable currency with their kids and grandkids.

They didn’t buy a house. They bought the 89 percent. And they did it once, which means they know how.

We have a whole vocabulary for the person who spends too much. Reckless. Irresponsible. Broke. We have no word for the person who saved for forty years and then could not bring themselves to use it. We call that person prudent. We might even call them wealthy.

But the money was never the point. It was stored time. Stored experiences. Stored generosity. Every dollar in that account is an hour somebody traded, decades ago, on the bet that a season would come when trading back made sense. A balance that only grows while the trips shrink is not safety. It is deferral with better bookkeeping.

The couple that saved thirty years for the trip and keeps finding reasons not to take it is not protecting wealth. They converted time into a number, and now they are refusing to convert it back.

I have written before that a career is 11 percent of a life, and that the 11 percent is meant to fund the other 89. Retirement is the season when the 89 percent is all there is. The funding is sitting right there. And half the people holding it cannot bring themselves to move it.

Nobody writes an investment objective that says grow until the end. But that is how it gets lived. The balance becomes the identity, the scoreboard, the last metric standing. And the harder questions get even harder to answer. How many of those trips are left. How many summers. How many ordinary days at full health with the people all of this was for.

I have my own reasons for distrusting someday. The point is the math runs the same for everyone. Time moves in one direction, and the account does not know that.

If the plan says you can spend it, the remaining work is not financial. It is identity work. Emotional, honestly. Learning to see the withdrawal not as the discipline failing but as the discipline finishing. The person who protected the balance for forty years and the person who now draws it down are the same person, executing the same plan.

The savings isn’t the achievement. It was always about what it is all for.

I have been reading a few things lately I wanted to share. No single theme this week. Just four pieces that stuck with me, one for each pillar.

Physical

Jeanne Calment lived to 122. The longest verified human life on record. When people asked her how, she credited olive oil, a nightly glass of port, and frequent laughter. Her line: if you can’t do anything about it, don’t worry about it.

It reminded me of my grandfather. He is turning 100 in August and I bet if you asked him he would say something similar.

Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health recently asked its faculty what actually helps people live longer. The answer…connection.

The numbers are worth sitting with. Loneliness is associated with a 26% higher risk of premature death. Social isolation, 29%. Being disconnected is linked to higher rates of heart disease, stroke, and dementia. Those are correlations, not proof of cause, but they put connection in the same conversation as the risk factors we actually track. We measure blood pressure. We measure cholesterol. Yet, other then a brief required question or two in an annual physical we rarely ask if we have someone to call.

One researcher in the piece, Jeremy Nobel, reframed the whole thing. Loneliness is a biological signal, the same way thirst is. It is your body telling you it needs something. Nobody is embarrassed about being thirsty. Somehow we are embarrassed about being lonely.

The piece covers more than connection. Volunteering was linked to better memory, mobility, and strength in older adults. Optimists were more likely to reach 85. But the through line is the same: the body responds to how connected a life is.

We treat relationships as something separate from health. A nice-to-have. The research keeps saying otherwise. The call you have been meaning to make, the walk with a friend, the standing Tuesday dinner. That is physical training too.

Mental

You are on a plane moving 500 miles an hour and you feel nothing. You fall asleep. Then the plane decelerates on the runway and you wake up.

Derek Hagen opens an essay on hedonic adaptation with that observation, and it is striking. We do not notice constant states. We only notice change.

The raise gets noticed. Then it becomes the salary. The new house gets noticed. Then it becomes the house. The thing you wanted for years arrives, announces itself for a few weeks, and then slips into the background. Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation. Hagen calls it getting up to speed. Either way, the result is the same: we stop feeling what we have, and we start scanning for the next thing.

I am guessing there is a good chance your life has improved over the last ten years. More stability. More capability. More things. And until this paragraph, you probably had not thought about any of it. Not because you are ungrateful. Because you adapted. You got up to speed.

Hagen’s antidote is not complicated. Gratitude. Not the hashtag version. The deliberate act of zooming out and noticing the speed you are actually traveling. You are doing better than you think you are. You just have to remember you are moving.

Financial

There is an essay I reread about once a month. Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans, written in 2008. It still seems timeless every single time I read it.

It’s simple. To make a living as a creator, you do not need millions. You need roughly a thousand true fans. People who will buy whatever you make, drive 200 miles to see you, show up again and again. A thousand people supporting you at $100 a year is a living. Not a fortune. A living. And a thousand is a number you can actually picture. You could add one a day and get there in three years.

I like that it is very simple math wrapped in a simple idea. And underneath it is the reason I keep coming back to it beyond my love for all of Kevin Kelly’s work.

You do not have to appeal to everyone.

Not in a business. Kelly’s point is that a creator serving a small, devoted audience directly can build something durable while chasing mass appeal breaks most people. Not in creative work. The essay that tries to please every reader pleases none of them. And not in a life. Trying to be friends with everyone is its own kind of long tail: wide, thin, and unsatisfying.

The instinct to broaden is strong. More reach, more followers, more market, more opportunity. He goes the other way. Go narrower. Serve the people who actually align with what you make, and serve them well. Depth beats breadth. In an audience, in a client base, in a friendship.

A thousand is enough. Sometimes far fewer.

Spiritual

Kevin Kelly published a piece this week that has created a pit in my stomach. Fair warning: it is an odd one and I am sharing it because I cannot stop thinking about what it means.

His claim is that soon, most of us will carry an always-on AI. It will listen, watch, and remember everything we say and do. It will know us better than we know ourselves. Kelly says it will not be our self, but it will be too close to count as an other. He calls it an exoself. Something in between the inside and outside.

He sketches the relationships we might have with it. A twin. A guardian. A counselor. A friend who models the person you want to be. He is not warning against it. He mostly thinks it is coming regardless.

Read it and see where it lands for you. Here is where it landed for me.

The spiritual pillar has always been about something bigger than yourself. The quiet run before the house wakes up. The trail with no end. The moments when there is nothing between you and your own thoughts, and you find out what is actually in there…and perhaps out there. Those spaces are where meaning tends to show up. They are also, historically, the hardest spaces to protect.

Now imagine a voice that never leaves. Patient, helpful, and this is the main point…always on. Kelly ends the essay with the phrase that gives it its title: quiet, my exoself. Even in his optimistic vision, the last word is a request for silence.

I do not know what the right relationship with these tools is. I use them. I find them remarkable. But I know the me that needs quiet was here first. Whatever we build next, that one still needs the morning to himself.

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

Adam

Last night I sat on the couch with the boys and watched 87,500 people experience an entire lifetime in 2 hours.

Mexico and England, round of sixteen, at the Azteca. A sea of green that never stopped singing. Jude Bellingham scored twice inside two minutes, then a red card left England with ten men, and for 70 minutes we watched them stop attack after attack while the stadium tried to will them on. The camera kept finding faces in the crowd. Grown men laughing, crying, screaming, gripping people they’d never met. Mexico had never lost a World Cup match in that building. My boys were yelling like everyone else.

And then it ended.

And when it did, maybe 5,000 traveling England fans stayed behind in one end of the stadium. Their team had just survived the loudest building in the hemisphere. And they celebrated the way English fans have celebrated for a year now. They sang Wonderwall.

A song that is 30 years old. Two brothers who couldn’t stand each other long enough to keep a band together. I stood in a crowd last summer when Oasis reunited and heard 85,000 people sing it at once, and I can tell you what fills a stadium in that moment, and it isn’t nostalgia. It’s people who came to feel something in the same room at the same time.

Listen to what they’re actually singing. Maybe you’re gonna be the one that saves me. Thousands of men, the demographic least likely to say a vulnerable sentence to another man, chanting a plea for rescue at full volume. They can only say it because they’re saying it together. The crowd giving them the ok.

All of that happened last night. That morning I had spent an hour early in the morning after my run reading the new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They have tracked how Americans spend their time for 20 years. The newest data shows we’ve lost roughly 10 minutes a day of socializing, on average, across every age group. The youngest lost the most. The rest of us were already near the floor.

Ten minutes sounds like nothing. Run the math.

Ten minutes a day is 70 minutes a week. Sixty-one hours a year. Here is what 61 hours looks like:

· 30 2-hour dinners with friends.

· 60 1-hour runs with a buddy.

· 120 30 minute walks with your neighbor.

· 240 15-minute catch-ups over coffee.

All gone in 1 year.

Over a decade it’s 608 hours. 25 full days. Close to a month of our lives, deleted ten minutes at a time.

The places are going too. Researchers at CU Boulder tracked 12 kinds of gathering places, coffee shops, libraries, rec centers, civic organizations, and found every category declined from 2019 to 2021. The places where friendship happens are closing while we stop showing up to the ones that remain.

Put those two pictures side by side. 87,000 people weeping over a game in Mexico City. And a country quietly canceling its own dinners, ten minutes at a time.

But I don’t think the desire left intentionally. That’s what the Azteca proves. Nobody in that stadium was healed of loneliness by a quarterfinal berth, but every one of them showed what we’re still capable of wanting: to feel something enormous, shoulder to shoulder, with people who want the same thing. We didn’t lose the desire. We lost the practice. We’ll fly across the globe for connection and we won’t cross the street for it.

Nobody chose this. That’s the problem. No one would trade a month of their life for more scrolling, streaming, or searching if the trade were offered up front. It’s taken in small increments. One skipped call. One ignored text. One “we should grab coffee” followed by a “I would love to” with no follow through.

Friendships don’t end. They stop getting chosen.

A week ago, I got 3 hours on a brutally hot day with two old friends, at a game none of us will remember the score of. No anthem, no flags, no eighty-seven thousand people. Same thing, at the only scale available every week. It felt like no time had passed. Those friendships exist for one reason.

I chose them. And they chose me back.

My boys fell asleep last night still talking about the match. Someday I want them to know that the best part wasn’t the goals. It was that we watched it together, and that the people singing in that corner of the Azteca were onto something. You don’t need a stadium. You need ten minutes and someone worth them. There’s a person you’ve been meaning to call. The song is right, and it always was.

Maybe you’re gonna be the one that saves them.

Physical

I wish they would prescribe it more often. If a doctor could write “exercise” the way they write a statin, and it did what the data says it does, it would be the most powerful drug ever prescribed.

Most interventions fix one thing. This one moves nearly all of them, in the same dose. It is not a wellness slogan. And there isn’t a lot of flash behind it. But every bit of research shows you what it can do.

Two studies sit at the center of it. Cleveland Clinic, right in my backyard, tracked 122,007 patients through treadmill testing and found cardiorespiratory fitness inversely associated with all-cause mortality, with no upper ceiling on the benefit. The least-fit group carried roughly 5x the mortality risk of the elite performers. Not a rounding error. A gap the size of a life. And a 2009 meta-analysis in JAMA found that each one-MET increase in fitness was associated with a 13% lower risk of dying from any cause.

Your years, through fitness that predicts mortality better than most things a doctor measures. Your brain, through the closest thing we have to fertilizer for neurons and the strongest defense we know against cognitive decline. Your mood, where for mild-to-moderate depression it performs comparably to medication, without the side effects. Then the rest. Metabolism. Sleep. Bones. Independence at 80. No other single input has that reach.

Exercise is the rare investment that pays back in the currency you spend. You put in time, and it returns time. Not just more years, but what you can do in them. Everything else you spend an hour on gives you a different currency back. This one gives you the thing itself.

The Physical pillar is not one of four. It is the one that holds the other three up.

Mental

I keep coming back to the men I meet in this work and every day. All doing the things you are supposed to do. And underneath it the foundation feels very shaky.

And we are seeing it in the data. Gallup found that 25% of American men aged 15 to 34 said they felt lonely a lot of the previous day. The national average is 18%. Young women, also 18%. Young American men are the outlier, and not by a little. No other wealthy country in the OECD shows a gap this wide between its young men and everyone else.

It does not stop at loneliness. 57% of those same young men report feeling stressed every day. 46% report daily worry, again the widest gap in the developed world. Something is happening to this group, and it is happening here more than anywhere.

The teenagers who stopped connecting a decade ago are the adults now. They are in the workforce. Leading teams. Starting families. And the skill they never got to practice, the ordinary work of showing up for another person, with presence and authenticity, does not arrive on its own later. It compounds in the other direction.

Loneliness is not a feeling that visits and leaves. Left alone, it is something that deepens and deepens. And the generation being handed a phone instead of a friend has even less practice at the thing that would actually help.

Financial

McKinsey does not do sentiment. They forecast, quantify, and advise the largest firms on earth on where the money is going. So when their new report on the next decade of wealth management says the advisor’s real job is turning into life coach, something has moved.

The report states it plainly. By 2035 the advisor evolves from financial planner to life coach, guiding clients not only on tax or investment strategy, but through life goals, family transitions, and the emotionally charged decisions. The same things I have been saying we haven’t seen in the plans. My favorite sentence from the report… “The advisor’s differentiator will not be wealth-management knowledge, but the ability to connect, to understand a person’s motivations and values, and to build trust”.

Nearly 40% of advisors are expected to retire within a decade, a shortfall of roughly 100,000 people. More than 40% of American wealth will be controlled by women by 2035, and trillions will move to a younger generation that evaluates an advisor on authenticity before expertise. AI can do the analysis now and honestly so much more. What it cannot do is sit across from someone and understand what the money is actually for.

Firms will begin to retool. They will start hiring for emotional intelligence, adaptability, authenticity. The exact things that do not show up on a certification. Well, I am sure those certifications will be coming soon.

I read the whole thing as a quiet vindication.

For years I heard the same stories. It was never really the allocation, the investments, or the tax strategy. It was the family dynamics. The chasing of identity. Putting money at the top of the hierarchy.

Now the industry is writing reports saying this is changing. And underneath their forecast is the same truth I’ve been believing the whole time.

The portfolio was never the point. The life it buys back is.

Spiritual

I went to a ballgame this week with two friends I have known since college. We live in the same city. We do not see each other nearly enough. We sat in 95-degree heat and I had looked forward to it for days.

Getting together wasn’t simple. They had to change schedules. Move some things around. We all drove across town. Sat sweating in a crowd when a screen at home would have shown the same game in air conditioning. And it was worth every moment.

The connection men are missing is not missing because it disappeared. It is missing because it now requires a choice, and the choice is usually inconvenient. Friendship at 30, 40, and 50 does not schedule itself. The ballgame just doesn’t happen. The heat, the drive, kids, work, calendars are all creating the friction to stop it. But the friction is not the obstacle to the thing. It is the price of the thing.

This is the part of the 9:03 work I care about most. You do not find connection. You author it. You build the conditions and then you show up inside them, on purpose, when defaulting out would be simpler. The people who have real friendships in the second half of life are not luckier. It has to be a choice.

Two old friends. One of the hottest days of the year. A game none of us will remember the score of. But I’ll remember the day. And how it felt like no time had passed. Like we picked up right where we left off. Those are the friends worth having. And the ones you have to choose to make time for.

Because I chose it. And they chose it back.

One more thing before the close. Tomorrow is the Fourth. If you want to spend some of the long weekend with the people who built this thing we are celebrating, here are five on our presidents worth your time.

1. David McCullough, 1776. The year itself, at ground level. The winter that nearly ended the whole idea before it began.

2. David McCullough, John Adams. The founder who never got the monument and probably deserved one most.

3. Edmund Morris, the Theodore Roosevelt trilogy. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, and Colonel Roosevelt. Three volumes, one extraordinary life.

4. Jon Meacham, American Lion. Andrew Jackson in the White House. Difficult, consequential, deeply human, and drawn without flinching.

5. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life. The single-volume portrait of the man who could have been king and chose to walk away. If you read one, read this one.

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

Adam

I have a finance degree and twenty years in the real world to go with it. And if you spend that long around money and investments there is a key lesson you learn. From Graham and Bogle to Malkiel and Markowitz. One of the first they teach you. The one you end up preaching both personally and professionally.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Diversification. Fifteen of those years were at Vanguard, where that idea wasn’t a slogan, it was the whole business. Mutual funds, ETFs, target date funds. Different tools built for one purpose. Spread the money across enough places that no single bad bet can take you down, and the violent ups and downs of any one position get absorbed by all the rest. Own a little of everything so you’re never standing on just one thing.

It’s good advice and boring. Which is part of why it works. The people who follow it sleep better. The people who don’t end up with everything riding on a single position and no idea how exposed they are until it moves.

I believed it then and believe it now. What I didn’t see, for a long time, was that people were doing the exact opposite with the one account that can’t be rebuilt as easily. You could sit across from someone who had diversified their allocation and could recite it to the penny. Domestic, international, bonds, alternatives, real estate…all the asset classes. An investment policy statement. Rebalancing schedule. Heck, they could recite last quarters dividends. Yet, that same person had put their entire life into a single position.

The career. One holding, fully concentrated, no hedge. Health deferred. A marriage just holding on. Friendships quietly expired from neglect. Everything riding on the one identity.

In a portfolio that’s called concentration risk, and it’s the most dangerous thing you can do with capital. You can be right for years. The position runs, SVP next to your name, and it makes you look brilliant. Then the one thing you’re exposed to moves the wrong way. A layoff. A diagnosis. A kid who is suddenly grown and gone. And there is nothing else in the account to stop the slide.

Concentration isn’t only the career, though. It shows up everywhere.

It’s the person whose whole worth is priced in metrics. A race time. The salary. The car and house. The number of something that can be counted and ranked. They diversified their money and poured their entire identity into a scoreboard.

It’s the person living a story that was never theirs to begin with. Get the degree. Get the job. Climb the ladder. An outline handed to them so long ago they followed it without once asking whether they’d have chosen it. That is the most concentrated position there is. An entire life in a stock someone else picked.

I have seen it happen more times than I can count.

* * *

So, I started thinking about a life the way I’d been taught to think about money.

A portfolio holds different asset classes. You don’t compare them head-to-head, because a bond and a building and a share of stock aren’t the same thing. What lets you hold them in one account is that they share a denominator. Real dollars. The common unit underneath everything.

Life has four asset classes too. Physical. Mental. Financial. Spiritual. The Four Pillars. And they share a denominator as well, but it’s not dollars.

It’s time.

That’s the model. Four pillars, one currency. Money isn’t “the” currency. Financial is of course one of the four pillars. A real one and a very important one. But it’s a position, not the denominator. The denominator is the months, days, hours, and the minutes. Everything you own in every pillar was bought with the same thing. You can’t earn more of it and you really never know the balance.

Even the Financial pillar isn’t really about money. It’s about Time, Real Wealth, and a North Star. Money is the tool. Time is what you’re actually allocating amongst all of this. Real wealth is the part that never prints out on a monthly statement, the experiences and the people and the health you can’t assign a number to. The North Star is the only thing that tells you what the account was ever supposed to be for.

* * *

The most honest lessons I ever got about concentration risk didn’t come from a market. They came from the meetings.

Across those years I sat in more than 10,000 of them. Advisors, clients, conference rooms. And underneath the spreadsheets and the allocations, again and again, I heard versions of the same story.

The person who hit the number and retired to nothing. No work, no plan, no idea who they were once the title was gone. The sadness moved in where the calendar used to be, and the depression nobody saw coming because on paper everything was finally fine.

The one who ran full speed to 65 to finally do everything they’d been putting off, and got there with a body that couldn’t. A bucket list built for a version of them that retirement arrived too late to meet.

The midlife crisis that wasn’t really about age. A person looking up from a fully funded investment account and realizing there was nothing in it but the one position they’d been feeding for 25 years.

And the one I come back to most. A couple who did everything right. Built the business, raised the family, hit the number. The real one, the one that means you’re finally free. They were ready. Retire, travel, see the world together. Thirty years of deferral about to pay out all at once.

A month after retirement the husband was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

The number was never the problem. In every one of those stories the number was fine. It was the one thing in the room everyone could agree on, which is exactly why it got all the attention. The marriage, the health, the time, none of that had a column in the statement. Portfolios perfectly diversified in dollars and fully concentrated in denial.

That’s the risk nobody hedges. Not running out of money. Running out of time holding a bunch of money you were saving for later.

* * *

I think about two men Alison and I sat next to at a café on our first trip to Paris many years ago. We had nowhere to be, which was rare for us both. Coffee, then a walk with no map, then more coffee, then a glass of wine, with some bread and cheese, in the early afternoon. The men heard us talking and asked if we were Americans. A few minute conversation became two hours. In sharing their stories they subtly told us how they spent their days, their time, their money. Nobody was rushing. Nobody was optimizing the afternoon toward anything.

When we were done they hugged us, got on their scooters, and disappeared into the city. Off to another café, another conversation, another moment. I was a guy who flew out of Phoenix every Monday and tracked his miles and his meetings and his points. They had built a life around a table and a conversation and time spent without counting it. Same hours in the day. Completely different allocation.

* * *

A portfolio doesn’t stay where you set it. The winners grow. Left alone, the position that’s compounding takes over the whole account, and one morning you look up and you’re concentrated again without ever deciding to be. So you rebalance. You sell down the thing that’s winning and buy back the things that aren’t. It feels backward every time. It is hard to do. You’re trimming your best performer to feed the ones that lagged. That is the idea and the entire point of it.

A life can drift the same way. The pillar that pays, the career, the thing the world claps for, grows until it crowds out the other three. Nobody decides to let their health slide or their friendships expire. It happens the way concentration always happens. The winner just takes more room until there’s none left for anything else.

And like anyone else I often had to rebalance my own account.

I used to fly out Monday and come home Thursday. For years. Then I did the math on what it was costing in the only currency that counts, the waking hours of two boys who would be this age exactly once, and it led me to one of the biggest rebalances of my life. I left the road. We moved home. I made less money on purpose and moved it into pillars that don’t show up on any statement.

And I believe once you’ve seen the real allocation, you can’t keep funding the position that’s bleeding the other three.

* * *

I know when the currency stopped being abstract for me, and it wasn’t in a conference room.

It was 9:03 on a Tuesday morning in September. Twenty-two years old, on a staircase in the South Tower. For fifty-some minutes time was being taken from me, and then it wasn’t, and I walked out. And what that story left me with wasn’t wisdom. It was one fact I have never been able to put down. The account can close, but you don’t get the date.

It took me 25 years to build a structure around that fact. And it is how I have managed my life all these years.

* * *

The best advisors I worked with already knew the number wasn’t the whole job. They’d get a client all the way to the goal and know what was coming. A quiet, surprising flatness where the celebration was supposed to be. They had done the math right, tried to tell them, and the client often missed the question sitting underneath it.

What is all of this actually for.

For me that is why The 9:03 Portfolio exists. I don’t manage money, but I’ve been managing this portfolio for a long time. My own. And I won’t tell you I did it perfectly. My allocation drifted. There were stretches I forgot to rebalance, months I didn’t review any of it, seasons where one pillar quietly ran off with everything again.

But I checked in. I always came back and looked. I’d sit down with the account and ask the honest question. Where is my time actually going, and is that where I want it.

That’s what I want to hand to people now. Not a number to hit. A practice. A standing habit of making sure your allocation still lines up with your most valuable currency.

And plenty of people will read all of this and still believe that currency is money. That’s ok. I spent some of my years believing a version of it myself. You already know how to run this either way. You do it with your dollars without thinking about it.

Four pillars. One currency. Mine is time. What’s yours?

Physical

Saturday mornings at fields across the country, the fields fill up by eight. Travel kits, parents three rows deep in folding chairs, eight-year-olds coached like the scouts are in the stands.

Landon Donovan experienced it personally this year. He recently shared on a podcast that his son, who is 8, had played two seasons for a big San Diego soccer club. Then the club brought in bigger, faster, stronger kids and moved the smaller boys, his son included, to the B-team. Donovan told Front Office Sports he was in bed crying with his son, explaining he wouldn’t be with his friends anymore. The most decorated American player alive, and he experienced it like the rest of us.

What he said next is way more important. Make sure they love the sport first. Make sure they’re getting better. Throw the winning out the window. They’re 8, 10, 12 years old.

He pointed to a study of youth soccer: only 0.6% of players picked for a national program at Under-12 ever reached the professional level. The wider research backs the spirit of it. Arne Güllich’s 2014 study of the German system found the squads churn constantly, and the players selected earliest were no more likely to make it. A 2021 nationwide study out of Tübingen tested 13,869 boys aged twelve to fifteen on sprint, dribbling, ball control, the works, and three seasons later only nine percent had reached even a professional youth academy. The most data-rich talent system on earth can’t tell you at twelve who’s going to be good.

So what are we training an eight-year-old’s body for. A trophy this weekend, the chance to bite the medal in a photo for Instagram, or so they can be fit, become resilient, have fun with their friends. Most kids quit by thirteen. They don’t quit because they stopped being able to run. They quit because someone made the running stop being fun.

Mental

I’ve run far enough to know what a lot of miles can mean to you. The early alarm. The long solitary hours. The way the training quietly becomes the thing the week is built around.

This week I watched a short film called More Than the Miles, about the ultrarunner Jeff Mogavero. He ran the fastest debut in Western States history. He lines up again this Saturday, in the deepest field the race has ever had. By every measure the sport keeps, he *is* the miles. The splits, the volume, the finish times.

The film is about that, but about everything else. My favorite part is at 5:45 into the film. The point it keeps circling is in the title. The running is real, and the running is not the whole of him.

I keep thinking about this because it’s the trap of anyone good at something. The thing you do best starts to stand in for who you are. The runner becomes the running. The founder becomes the company. The parent becomes the logistics. Then one day the thing ends, or slows, or someone faster shows up, and if you let it be your whole identity, you’re left holding very little.

Mogavero is thirty-two and at the top of his sport, and he’s already saying it out loud. Most people don’t say it until the miles are far behind them.

The question isn’t whether you’re good at your thing. It’s what’s left of you when you set it down.

Financial

Most mornings I know how fortunate I am. Up early, coffee, workout, Arlo doing his rounds in the yard, the kids still asleep upstairs in a town surrounded by family. On paper I built all of that. Sat down, made the plan, did the work. And yet most of it could have gone another way.

Barry Ritholtz wrote an essay this month called Serendipity, on the role of luck in a career. He’s interviewed 650 people for his podcast over twelve years. Nobel winners, billionaires, fund managers. The first time a billionaire told him luck was the reason, he wrote it off as false humility. By the 5th, 6th, or 20th, he couldn’t.

His sharpest version came from the investor Howard Marks. Everybody in my MBA class was smart and worked hard, Marks shared. Hard work and intelligence are table stakes. Not everybody gets fortune to smile on them.

Table stakes. The effort, the discipline, the skill, none of that makes you lucky. It’s just what puts you at the table. After that, a lot of where you land is the lounge chair you happened to pick, the calendar that happened to free you up, the person who happened to say yes.

I worked in a world that loves to keep score, and the scoreboard tells a clean story: you earned this. Some of it, you did. Some of it, you got. It is important to know which is which.

You can’t earn back a single hour of time. You also didn’t fully earn the time you got handed. Naming the luck doesn’t make it less earned. It makes you hold the result a little more carefully, and a little less like you were owed it.

Spiritual

You’re going to wonder why a list like this lands in the Spiritual pillar. Stay with me.

I went back through some old notes this week and started writing down things I’m glad I’ve done since 2020. Not accomplishments. Choices.

• Glad I’ve spent so much time in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, CVNP, on the trails.

• Glad I haven’t missed my kids’ games, the school plays, the random Tuesday classroom party.

• Glad I’ve kept my body able to get down on the ground, play catch, ride bikes, run, get on the court for pickleball or hoops whenever they ask.

• Glad I live 3 minutes from my parents and most of my family.

• Glad I deleted most of the social media off my phone and didn’t miss it.

• Glad I’ve made myself sit with what I want life to look like twenty years from now.

• Glad I’ve grabbed more slow coffees and breakfasts with friends, the kind with no agenda and nowhere to be.

• Glad I’ve taken the trips while the kids still want to come.

• Glad I’ve said no to more of what doesn’t matter, so there was room for what does.

Here’s why it’s spiritual. Meaning doesn’t arrive. You don’t wake up one morning holding it. You build it in advance, in choices that don’t feel like much on the day you make them, and one ordinary morning you look up and notice it’s there. This list is the receipt. Every line is something I chose on purpose, usually when no one was watching and nothing was forcing me to.

Make your own. Then look at what you’ve actually been doing this year, and see whether the two lists match.

That’s the week. Four pillars, one clock.

If Four Pillar Friday is doing something for you, send it to one person who’d get something from it. That’s how this grows.

Until next week.

Adam