I pulled up to a big farmhouse on a working farm, and EMS arrived about the same time I did. As we walked toward the door, I noticed one of those massive tractors coming in from the field. I figured it was the farmer, heading in to see what was happening at his own house.

Inside, an eighty inch television hung on the wall. The Kardashians were playing. On the floor beneath it, a woman was in the middle of a full panic attack. Hyperventilating. Falling apart. She looked like someone you would expect to find in an upscale Dallas suburb, not a farmhouse. Polished. Put together. And scattered around that house were more prescription bottles than I could count. Twenty, maybe thirty different kinds.

Her husband was out on a tractor, working real land, growing real things. She was inside, watching other people’s lives on an eighty inch screen. From the road, they looked like the perfect all American couple. The farmer and his wife. And in a way it was true. They had the farm, the house, the marriage, the picture. What they did not have was the life inside the picture, because nobody does.

Nobody Posts the Bad Days

I use social media. I post more than I would like to, because it comes with running businesses in 2026. And I can tell you exactly what I post. The finished projects. The wins. The good days. I have never once posted about the deal that fell apart or the payroll week that kept me up at night.

Neither have you. Neither has anyone. We only post the good, which means the feed is a highlight reel built from billions of people’s best moments, and we tend to scroll it during our worst ones.

Psychologists have a name for what happens next. Back in the 1950s, a researcher named Leon Festinger showed that human beings figure out how they are doing by comparing themselves to other people. There is no absolute scale for a good life, so we measure against the people around us. That worked well enough when the people around us were actual neighbors, people whose struggles we could see over the fence. Social media kept the comparison and deleted the struggle. Decades of research since have found the same pattern over and over. Passively scrolling through other people’s curated lives is linked to lower self-esteem, resentment, depressive symptoms, and less satisfaction with your own life, and the engine driving all of it is comparing yourself to people who appear better off.

Appear. That is the word that matters. That woman on the farmhouse floor was not weak and she was not crazy. She was doing exactly what the research says a human mind will do. She was measuring her real life, with its real boredom and real bottles and real silence, against a production. A thing with lighting crews and editors. She was losing a competition against people who do not exist.

I know they do not exist, because I have seen what the winners’ lives actually look like.

I Have Seen Behind the Curtain

Let me tell you how the rich and successful actually live.

From the time I was eighteen through my twenties, I partied a lot in Austin, and I got invited into some of the wealthiest homes in the city. There was one house in Westlake I remember well. A buddy of mine was friends with some girls our age, and their parents were extremely wealthy, and these were parties where the parents and their grown kids all partied together in the same rooms.

That world taught me things I have never been able to unsee. A lot of those people were swingers. Husbands carried on affairs openly, and nobody at the table blinked. That is one thing I learned about many of the very successful. They do not divorce. They put on a show about their marriages in public, do whatever they want behind closed doors, and in that world it is accepted. It is part of why some of those circles are so tight and so closed. Everyone is holding everyone else’s secrets. Some of them were deeply perverse people. Not all of them. But far more than you would ever guess from the road.

And these were the same people you would see in church on Sunday. Some gave millions to causes. Some were politicians. They say money corrupts, and it does. There are whole clubs built around that lifestyle, quiet ones, members only, and some of the names inside them are the same names you will find on hospital wings and church building funds.

I was not just watching from the doorway either. I had good, close friends who were swingers, and they would invite us to their parties, and for a season I dabbled in that lifestyle myself. I am not proud of it. But I cannot write about the rot behind the curtain and act like I never touched it. I was young, I was invited, and I wanted to belong in that world more than I wanted to ask what it was costing me.

One of the houses I got invited to belonged to an A-list actress. She didn’t live there at the time. She owned it, people threw parties in it, and from time to time I ended up inside. One night the place was overflowing with party favors. Cocaine on the tables. Molly going around. The house came equipped with stripper poles. People everywhere, inside and out, and no limits on anything. And partying right there in the middle of it was a jailer, bragging about how he was testing for a police department on Monday. I remember standing in a movie star’s living room thinking, what is wrong with this world.

In business there is an old phrase, taking the duke, which means getting paid under the table to swing a deal in somebody’s favor. I learned young that the game gets played at every level, and the higher up you go, the quieter it gets.

Here is what researchers at UC Berkeley discovered when they spent years studying exactly this. Across seven separate studies, they found that upper class individuals were more likely to lie in negotiations, cheat at a game of chance for a fifty dollar prize, take goods meant for others, and endorse unethical behavior at work. Drivers of luxury cars were three to four times more likely to blow past pedestrians in a crosswalk. In one honesty test, people making $150,000 a year cheated four times as much as people making $15,000. The lead researcher said the pattern was driven by more favorable attitudes toward greed, and the findings held regardless of religiosity. Sitting in a pew on Sunday did not change the numbers.

That does not mean every wealthy person is corrupt. I know generous, honest people who have done well, and even the Berkeley researchers pointed to the enormous philanthropy at the top. But it does mean this. The life at the top of your feed, the one that looks effortless and clean and enviable, is not what it looks like up close. I stood in the living rooms. The picture is the product. The rot is the reality.

And here is the caution underneath all of it. Being successful is not the problem. Making money is not a sin, and neither is having it. But comfort makes falling easier, and financial success brings a whole other level of cautions with it. I am by no means some ultra successful person, but there are times I look at my own life and think it would be easier if I worked a simple job and made very little, because I would not be relying on what I rely on now. Success has handed me my own set of crutches, and I have to work overtime to overcome them. If I do not, they will overcome me.

Why We Ache for a Lie

So here is the question that has stuck with me since that farmhouse. Why do we want it so badly? What is it inside of us that aches for a life we have never actually seen anyone live?

Envy is not new. It shows up in the fourth chapter of the Bible and it has been killing people ever since. But we are the first generation in history to carry a comparison machine in our pockets, one engineered to show us, every few seconds, someone who appears to be doing better. We believe the picture. We believe that somewhere out there, someone has cracked it. No struggle. No bottles hidden in the cabinet. No rot behind the party. And if they have it and we do not, then our own life starts to read like a failure.

Three thousand years ago, a worship leader named Asaph stood exactly where that woman was lying.

But as for me, my feet came close to stumbling, my steps had almost slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant as I saw the prosperity of the wicked. (Psalm 73:2-3, NASB)

He looked at the wealthy and the wicked and saw people always at ease, increasing in riches, and it nearly took his faith out from under him. He had kept his heart pure and it seemed to be getting him nowhere, while people he knew were corrupt kept winning. He could not think his way out of it.

When I pondered to understand this, it was troublesome in my sight until I came into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end. (Psalm 73:16-17, NASB)

Nothing about the wealthy changed between verse three and verse seventeen. Their money was still real. Their ease was still real. What changed was where Asaph was standing. From inside the sanctuary he could see the whole story instead of the middle of it, and the whole story looked very different from the highlight reel. The prosperity was never the lie. The security was. The perfection was.

Two Houses

I think about those two houses more than almost anything else I have seen. A farmhouse in the country and a mansion in Westlake. Both of them beautiful from the road. Inside one, a woman drowning in comparison beneath an eighty inch screen. Inside the other, corruption dressed up as success, with a crooked jailer raising a glass to his future in law enforcement.

I would like to tell you I stopped comparing after all that. I did not. I still post the wins and skip the losses. I still catch myself scrolling somebody’s highlight reel and feeling my own life shrink a little. Knowing the picture is a lie is fifty percent. Living like you know it is the other fifty, and I am still working on that half.

So to everyone who has ever looked at a couple like the one in that farmhouse and said, I wish my life was that perfect, and then set out chasing it, here is the news flash. You are shooting at something that is not real, and it will end in disappointment every time. When we compare ourselves to the fake, to things that do not exist, we always end in failure. There is no version of that race that gets won, because there is no finish line to cross. The couple you are envying is sitting in their own living room envying somebody else.

But I keep coming back to one detail from that call. While we worked on that woman, her husband was coming in from the field. He had spent the day on land he owned, doing work that mattered, coming home to a wife he clearly cared enough about to call for help. Out of everyone in this story, the millionaires and the influencers and the beautiful people on that giant screen, he might have been the only one actually living the life the rest of them were pretending to have. He just could not see it from the tractor, and she could not see it from the floor.

Neither can you, from the feed. The perfect life is not out there waiting for you to catch up to it. It was never anywhere at all.

Sources

• Piff, P. K., Stancato, D. M., Côté, S., Mendoza-Denton, R., & Keltner, D. (2012). Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. UC Berkeley summary: https://news.berkeley.edu/2012/02/27/greed

• ScienceDaily coverage of the Berkeley studies: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120307145432.htm

• Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117-140.

• Associations between youth’s daily social media use and well-being are mediated by upward comparisons. Communications Psychology (2023): https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-023-00013-0

• Depressive symptoms and upward social comparisons during Instagram use: A vicious circle. Personality and Individual Differences (2023): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S01918869230038

What does it actually mean to trust? Not the easy version, where we say the word and go on doing what we were already doing. I mean really trust. Fully. This season of my life has forced that question on me in a way I did not ask for.

The best place I know to start is the thing I have spent my life doing, which is being successful in business on different levels. I have not always owned my own businesses like I do today. From my early twenties I was in leadership in successful companies, more of a corporate America environment, before I ever ran anything with my name on it.

Building something successful takes confidence. There is no way around that. You have to have a level of direction. You have to learn to be sure about things, to make calls and be right about them more often than not. Being wrong is part of it too, and it is okay to be wrong, as long as you get up and make the next call. Nobody builds anything by hedging.

Today I own my own businesses. People hear that and think, there it is, the American dream. Own your own business, be your own boss. Let me tell you some of the cons. Yes, you can build a leadership structure that helps carry the weight. But for the most part, if you have thirty or forty employees, you are going to have thirty or forty problems every single day. Different personalities clashing with each other. And it is very, very difficult sometimes to build structure and build teams that actually work well together. Every one of those people is looking to you to be sure when they are not. That is the job. I tell people you have to be partially psycho to do it, and I am only half joking. Something a little unreasonable has to keep you going.

And when I say success, I do not mean money. Money sometimes comes along with it, but it is not what I am chasing and it is not how I measure anything. Success is setting out to accomplish something and accomplishing it. That drive, and the confidence underneath it, has run my whole life. I will not call it a flaw. It is not. It built everything I have.

I am not claiming to be superhuman here. I have failed plenty. If I am counting honestly, I probably have more failures than successes. But I have had success, and I am capable in practical terms, and I know it.

And that is where the trouble starts.

The instruction that cuts against the grain

As a Christian, I am told to trust. Not in my own ability. In God.

That is a hard word for a man whose whole life has been built on his ability. Confidence is what got me here. Being sure is my trade. So when the instruction comes, do not trust in yourself, everything in me answers back. Why would I not? Trusting in myself is the thing that has worked.

For a long time I thought those two things could not both be true. Either I am confident and driven, or I lay it all down and trust God. Pick one. These last few months have taught me it is not that choice at all. It is about something else entirely. But I had to get hit hard to see it.

A year of searching, and three refusals

I want to share a story that happened to me just recently. I think it shows how a capable person, making what look like capable decisions every step of the way, can still be making the wrong one the whole time.

I have been looking for an office manager for one of my businesses for almost a year. The work takes a level of experience that is hard to find. I knew that going in, but I did not expect a year. I interviewed and interviewed. I offered up to forty dollars an hour. Month after month, nothing.

Then I found her. Every qualification I needed. I offered her the job and thought I finally had it done. She turned it down. I walked away sad from that one, because I knew what it had taken to find her.

A few weeks later I texted her about something unrelated, and a day later she came back to me. She thought she had made a bad decision taking the job she took, and asked if we could talk again. I thought, thank God. This is grace. We met at my office and talked through my one real concern, which was attendance. Her references had mentioned it, and something in me had picked up on it too. But her position was back office, not customer facing, and I convinced myself it was workable. She accepted. On Monday she called to say she had put in her two weeks’ notice.

Then I went on vacation. The kind I almost never take. I was actually trying to be present with my wife and my kids instead of buried in work, and while I was there, someone hacked into my business and stole close to a hundred thousand dollars. That is a lot of money any way you look at it. I did my best not to let the kids see the stress on me. I did not entirely succeed. And in the middle of all that, on Saturday, she texted me. She could not take the job after all.

You have got to be kidding me. That was all I had in me right then, along with a few other thoughts running through my head that I will not put in print. A year of searching, three times I thought I had her, and now this, on top of the theft.

A few days later I was at a Bible study, talking with a man I have known for a while. He is from her town, about her age, and it dawned on me to ask if he knew her. He did. What he told me made it plain she was the last person I should have wanted running anything of mine. The attendance problem I had sensed all along, the one I talked myself past because her qualifications were so good, was real. It was worse than I knew.

She was never supposed to work for me. I know that now. And I do not think God simply blocked a bad hire. He put her in my life and then pulled her away, on purpose, to teach me something. My judgment found her. My persistence ran her down for a year. My confidence nearly closed the deal three separate times. Every time, the thing I was fighting for got taken out of my hands while I stood there frustrated that my plan would not come together. I was not being denied. I was being protected. I just could not tell the difference until it was over.

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)

My thoughts said she was the right hire. My thoughts had a whole story built around why she fit. The gap between what I could see and what was true was not small. It was the distance between the ground and the heavens.

His ways are never our ways. I have found that out over and over, and it bugs me. I cannot stand not seeing what He sees. But that is just how it is. He knows what is best for us, whether I can see it in the moment or not.

The weakest link was never on the payroll

In business I have always said you are only as good as your weakest link. Most people hear that and think of the struggling employee as one problem among many, something the rest of the team carries. That is not how it works. That person is not a footnote to what your business is. That person is the measure of what your business is. I have run my operations by that truth for years. Walked the shops looking for the weak point. Built around it. Managed it.

The same is true of a man. Your weakest point is your level. It does not matter how strong everything else is. That is what defines you until it is dealt with, the same way the weakest employee defines the operation no matter how good the rest of the crew is.

It showed me where mine sits, and it is not where I would have guessed. My weakest point is my ability to trust in myself. I know how backwards that sounds. In practical terms, trusting myself is a strength, maybe my greatest one. It built the businesses. It made the calls. It got me through everything I have gotten through. But from a spiritual standpoint, that same ability is my weakness, because a man who trusts himself that thoroughly has to fight to trust God at all. My strongest thing is my weakest thing.

My understanding told me she was the answer to a year of prayer. My understanding cannot find one good thing in a hundred thousand stolen dollars. I have looked. I cannot see it. My abilities are good instruments. I have just been asking them to do the one job they cannot do, which is to see what only God can see.

And that may be the strangest part of all this. When it comes to the things of God, the most capable people are the most incapable. Capability is what we reach for first. The man with nothing learns to trust fast, because trust is all he has. The man who can handle almost anything takes years, because he has to run out of himself before he ever looks up. I have seen it in some of the most gifted and talented people I have known. Their greatest asset and their biggest flaw are the same thing. The gift that builds everything is the same gift that keeps them from laying anything down.

The hack did not come alone, either. That is just how life runs sometimes. Every time I get close to deciding I am going to pull through one thing, I get hit with another. Several things, one on top of another. Things I want to scream about. There have been days I wanted to beat my head against my desk. Some days I do not know how I am pulling through it, physically or mentally. My businesses are successful and falling apart at the same time. Anyone who has owned one knows exactly what that means.

I think that is where most driven men live. Striving and striving, trying to out-think problems with an understanding that Isaiah says is not high enough to see the picture. Wearing ourselves out doing the one job that was never ours.

I have been here before, and I know how it ends

I already know the answer. I have lived it once.

Years ago I went through a custody battle. It took me a few years to get to the place where I could finally say, God, I trust you. Whatever you see, I do not see. I am laying all of it down. I could not manufacture that sentence early. I had to be worn down to it. But when I finally meant it, my whole life changed. Not gradually. Like a switch. Everything I had been white-knuckling for years moved the moment I let go of it. After years of nothing moving at all.

But laying it down did not make me less capable. I did not become passive, or soft, or lazy. The drive stayed. The confidence stayed. What changed was what they were resting on.

Confidence and trust were never enemies

I want to switch gears here and talk about something that ties into this whole story. I am part of a life group through our church. We meet once a week, talk, and study a book together. Our church actually calls it a growth group, and I am still having a hard time with that name. Do not ask me why. It just does not roll off the tongue. But the group is real, and one night the discussion landed on body ministry.

The idea is simple, and it is not small. Every one of us has gifts God gave us, and He gave them for the building up of His kingdom, not for ourselves. We are all supposed to be part of the ministry. Not the same part, and not the same level, but part, and none of it was ever meant to make one man feel above another. When each of us learns to trust and puts our gifts to work in the right areas, that is when real unity shows up, and the strength in the body of Christ the Bible describes actually comes to bear. We all have some part we were built for, even when we cannot see it. That is what I have not been able to shake since.

That changed how I see all of this. My confidence is a gift. My direction, my ability to be sure, my drive to be the best at what I do, all of it, gifts. God does not hand a man a gift and then ask him to set it on a shelf. He asks him to use it, fully, and to know where it came from. The natural man says, my abilities are mine, so my outcomes are mine to secure, and he grips everything and trusts nothing. The spiritual man does not throw the abilities away. He comes into them. He works with everything he has and trusts God with everything he cannot see. Confidence in the gift. Trust in the Giver. Both at full strength, at the same time.

That is what I got wrong for years. I thought trust would cost me my confidence. It turns out trust is the only thing that lets confidence do its real work, because a gift you believe you generated is a gift you will always feel you have to protect alone. That is exhausting. I know, because I have been living it.

And do not mistake any of this humility for passiveness. I am not passive, and I never will be. Humility is not laziness. It is not stepping back from the work. It is knowing whose gifts you are working with, and who the work is for.

A lot of people associate trusting God with being passive. I have met plenty of Christians who live that way. Just floating along, waiting, telling themselves everything will work out in God’s timing. There is nothing biblical about that. God did not make us for laziness. Laziness and complacency do not trace back to anything He ever asked of a man. We were made to do hard things and do them well. Yes, His timing matters, and yes, we are called to do His will and not run ahead of it. But God does not move through passivity. He moves through people who move, people who do the work, in His timing. Drifting along with no purpose is not trusting God. It is a fraud wearing trust’s name, and I want to caution against it as strongly as I can.

The verse you already know, and why I saved it

Most people raised anywhere near church can finish this one before I write it.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

I did not open with it on purpose. We have heard it so many times it slides right off. But look at what it actually says. It does not say, do not have understanding. It does not say, abandon your ability or your confidence or your drive. It says do not lean on it. Do not rest your whole weight there. Use everything God gave you, and put the weight on Him.

And the second half is the part that gets me. He will make your paths straight. Not I will. He will. The making-straight was never my job. My job is the working, the acknowledging, the trusting. His job is the outcome. I keep trying to work His side of the arrangement, and then I wonder why I am exhausted.

I am not writing this from the other side. I am writing it from the middle. Money still stolen. Struggles still stacked up. An office manager I fought for three times whom I now thank God I never hired. That last one is the only piece I can see clearly so far, and I am holding onto it, because it tells me the rest of this has a shape I cannot see yet either.

And writing it does not mean I have it handled. Knowing is only fifty percent of the outcome. The other fifty percent is doing, and I am still struggling with the doing part. I am at the point in my life where I am starting to realize I have to quit trusting in myself so much, and at the same time keep trusting in myself. That is not a contradiction. That is the whole balance this post has been reaching for.

Some days I find myself wondering why or how I ever became a Christian. My natural self does not want to trust, especially something I cannot reach out and touch. The longer I walk this, the more I know you can touch and feel Jesus in ways just as real as anything my hands have built. But it is hard. I will not pretend it is not.

So I am working on saying the sentence again. The one that took me years to mean the first time. God, whatever you see, I do not see. I am laying it down. Not my gifts. Not my drive. Just the weight.

There is a song called Oceans. It is a prayer asking God to call you out onto the water, out past where your feet can touch, into a trust that has no borders on it. That is the trust I am after. I pray that one day I get there.

I will let you know what happens when I do.

The part I actually know something about

I have been in a gym since about 2004, and I got into it young. In part one I was the guy explaining the research. Here I have to be honest about why I care so much. Because this is not something I watched from a safe distance. Back in the mid 2000s I ran this stuff myself. And it was not just steroids. I stacked a peptide in with them too, years before anyone was calling peptides the next big thing. Why? Because that is what everyone around me was doing, and when you are young and in that world you do not think much harder than that. The two men who first pulled me into that gym were bodybuilders, the real deal, and they walked me right into all of it. It was close to me. Friends, conversations, choices, and I was closer to all of it than I am proud of.

So I am not standing on the outside of this pointing in. I have had the needles in my own hand. Let me be clear about what I walked away from and what I did not. What I left behind was the black-market world, and I will tell you the honest version of it. There was a dark stretch of my life where I went from a user to a seller. Steroids. Growth hormone. We used stuff like Somatropin when we could get it, but the real HGH was so expensive that if you did not have serious money to burn, you did the steroids and the peptides instead. They were the affordable door into the same room. And this was not some fringe thing happening in the corners. In 2007 Sylvester Stallone got stopped at customs in Australia with dozens of vials of Jintropin, the same HGH some of us were chasing. When Rambo is getting caught with the exact stuff passing through your gym, you understand how far into the culture it had already gone. All of it, for us, aimed at being the next best looking thing in the room. And the deeper I got, the clearer it became that the drugs were never really the point. The point was the desperation underneath them. A hunger for a life that meant something, chased through lean muscle and a good face and the nightlife that came with it. None of it filled the hole. The looks and the scene and the size only walked me further down into the depression I was trying to outrun.

That version of chasing it did not deliver the way they said it would. The marketing sells you a clean picture, take the needle and grow. That is not what it actually is. It brings its own passengers. Depression. Anxiety. A sense that it is never enough, no matter what the mirror says. Real side effects that have nothing to do with getting bigger. And underneath all of it, the results never matched the promise anyway.

The men who did not make it out

I want to tell you what happened to the two men who took me to my first Gold’s, the ones who walked me into all of it. Both of them are dead now. I owe you their ending, because it is the truest thing in this whole article.

One of them took his own life. I am not going to pretend I can draw a clean line from a needle to that kind of darkness, because a man’s pain runs deeper and more tangled than any one cause. But the lifestyle we were all chasing promised to make us into something, and it did not deliver what it advertised to any of us.

The other was the most extreme of all of us, a decade further down the road than me, built like the movie stars he chased, and for a while he even worked in front of a camera. He lived all the way inside it. About a month before he died, he called me, excited, to tell me about the purest steroid he had just gotten his hands on. The best one yet. The one that was really going to do it. A month later a massive heart attack killed him. He was still selling me the shortcut when the cost was already coming for him.

And there was one more death, the one that actually ended it for me. My main connection into that underground world was a guy I had become good friends with. He was into all of it. HGH, steroids, cocaine, ecstasy, anything you could name, with supply routes that ran all the way back to the Netherlands. He was the deepest in of anyone I knew. Then one day I got the call. He had overdosed in a grow house. His heart finally gave out. That was the moment I turned away from that whole life. I have thought about it a lot since, and I believe that sometimes a bad thing happens that redirects you, that knocks you off a road you did not have the sense to leave on your own. If that call had never come, I am not sure I would be here today. His death may have been the thing that saved my life.

I am not telling you those stories to scare you. I am telling you because I have spent a long time asking what those men were actually reaching for. It was never really the muscle. The muscle was the thing they thought would finally make them feel like enough. And it never once did.

What I am actually against

I want to be careful not to overcorrect into pretending none of this works, because that is not true and you would be right to call me on it. Peptides, used the right way, can be genuinely effective. Under a real doctor, from a real source, for a real reason, some of them do exactly what they are supposed to do.

I will put my own cards on the table, because I am not writing this as a man who swore all of it off. I take peptides. Recently I have been on TB-500 and BPC-157, the exact two healing peptides I spent so much of part one on, working on an injury I have been trying to get past. Not from a parking lot, not off an influencer’s link, but the right way, for an actual reason. So when I raise caution here, understand it is not the caution of somebody who is against these. It is the caution of somebody using them who has also seen how this world can go sideways. I am not telling you to stay away. I am telling you to go in with your eyes open, because I have watched what happens to men who did not.

What I am against is not the peptide. It is the version being sold to you as a better life in a bottle, the influencer stack, the parking-lot vial, the promise that the next compound is the thing that finally makes you whole. There is a world of difference between a tool used wisely and a shortcut sold desperately, and having lived on the wrong side of that line, I can tell the two apart. That is why I read all this new hype with one eyebrow raised. I have already been the guy chasing the shortcut, and the shortcut did not pay.

So let me tell you the actual difference between these things, because this is where the confusion gets dangerous, and because I learned some of it the hard way.

Steroids override, peptides signal

Anabolic steroids are synthetic testosterone. When you take them, you are not asking your body for anything. You are overriding it. You are flooding your receptors with an outside hormone and forcing the muscle to grow. I remember the names like it was yesterday. Deca-Durabolin. Sustanon 250. Trenbolone. Winstrol. A whole shopping list of it. And I will be honest with you, it works, and it works fast. You would see massive results in a hurry. But a lot of that fast size was water. You would blow up full of water weight and think you were made of granite. And if you did not balance your hormones exactly right, and plenty of guys did not, your own body would turn on you. Too much testosterone converts to estrogen, and you would start growing tissue on your chest. We had a crude name for it in the gym that I will keep to myself, but the polite version is that guys chasing a bigger chest sometimes grew the wrong kind. Sit with that irony. You inject a muscle drug and end up looking softer in the one place you were trying hardest to build.

That is what overriding your system actually looks like up close. It works, and it works fast, and that is exactly the problem. Because when you shove that much hormone in from the outside, your own factory shuts down. That is why guys need post cycle therapy, to try to convince their body to start making its own testosterone again after they stop. Sometimes it comes back. Sometimes it does not come back all the way. And the bill for years of that can show up in your heart, your liver, your fertility, and your moods.

The growth hormone peptides work the opposite way. They do not override your system. They signal it. They tap the pituitary and ask it to release a little more of your own growth hormone, and your body’s own feedback loop stays intact the whole time. There is even a built in ceiling. Your brain is still watching the levels, and when they climb too high it hits the brakes. You can nudge the system. You cannot force it to five hundred percent the way you can by injecting the raw hormone. That governor is the entire reason peptides do not carry the same violent side effects as steroids.

If you have lived near the steroid world, you can feel why that is appealing. It is the promise of asking your body instead of beating it into submission. But I have to be the honest friend instead of the salesman here. That gentler mechanism has a real cost, and it is two costs, not one.

The first cost is that gentle means slow and small. You are not going to get steroid results from a peptide. The whole point is that it works within your body’s limits, and your body has limits. Anyone promising you otherwise is selling.

The second cost is the one nobody in the wellness clinic wants to say out loud. When they tell you peptides are safer than steroids, part of what safer actually means is less studied. We have decades of hard data on testosterone, good and bad. We do not have that on most of these peptides. Safer might turn out to be true. It might also just mean we have not been watching long enough to see the bill.

Will this be as big as AI?

People are genuinely asking whether peptides are the next giant wave, as big in medicine as AI is in everything else. The plastic surgeon Terry Dubrow made an interesting version of this point. He argued that AI is about to accelerate medical breakthroughs faster than most of us can imagine, and that the smart move is to take care of your body well enough now to still be here, in good shape, when the real breakthroughs land. He calls it preservation. Position yourself to overlap with what is coming.

I think there is wisdom in that and also a trap hiding inside it. The wisdom is obvious. Take care of yourself. The trap is subtler. It is the same promise every enhancement has ever made, just dressed in tomorrow’s clothes. Stay in the game long enough and the fix will arrive. And maybe some of it will. But I have watched this movie enough times to notice that the fix is always one more purchase away, always just over the next hill, and the horizon keeps moving as you walk toward it.

Can they keep you young?

This is the real question under all of it, isn’t it. Not really the science. The hope. The hope that there is a shot, a protocol, a molecule that lets a man in his forties hold onto the body and the vitality he had at twenty five.

I have to be straight with you, because I want it to be true as much as anyone. The mechanism is real. Growth hormone really does drive muscle and recovery, and it really does decline as we age. That part is not a lie. But the honest research does not go where the marketing does. There is no good evidence that pushing your growth hormone back up with these peptides slows aging down. The decline is real. The fix is a hope, not a proven fact. We took a true thing, that hormones drop with age, and stretched it into a promise the science has not backed up.

I have watched men chase this my whole adult life. First with steroids. Then with growth hormone. Now with peptides. And for a stretch back there, I was not watching. I was one of them. The chase itself never ends. There is always one more compound, one more protocol, one more thing that is finally going to be the answer. You get the arms back and then it is the gut, then the energy, then the hairline. It never lands on enough.

So let me ask the question I think we keep skipping past. Why are we even doing this? Not the surface answer, better recovery, more muscle, a leaner face in the mirror. The real one. What is the ache underneath the ache? Because if you keep pulling the thread, most of us are not actually reaching for a stronger tendon or a flatter stomach. We are reaching for a feeling. To feel young. To feel wanted. To feel like we still matter, like we have not been passed by, like we are enough. And I have to be honest about something no vial wants to admit. That is not a problem a drug can solve. You cannot inject your way out of a hole that was never physical to begin with. We are taking a spiritual hunger to a pharmacist and wondering why we walk out still starving.

And standing on both ends of it, I saw the thing underneath. The man buying the peptide and the man selling it are after the same thing. Remember the guy who told me he was going to make a lot of money on this? He is chasing the next dollar the same way the buyer is chasing the next fix. One wants a body that will feel like enough. The other wants a bank account that will feel like enough. I have been both of those men, so I am not looking down on either of them. I am telling you it is the same hunger underneath, and it does not get fed from a vial or a sale.

Because I have come to believe the deepest problem was never that my growth hormone is lower than it was at twenty five. The deepest problem is that I keep believing the next fix is the one that will finally make me feel like enough. And that is the one thing no peptide can touch, no matter how well it works on the thing it was actually made for. A peptide can heal a tendon. It cannot heal that. That is not a hormone deficiency. That is a soul that has forgotten where its worth comes from.

And I want to be careful here, because I am not standing against the gym. The gym is not a sin. Taking care of your body is not a sin. I still train, and I believe in it. But I have learned to watch the line where a good thing quietly becomes the thing, because anything you build your identity on that is not God has become an idol, and an idol is a sin no matter how healthy it looks from the outside. That is the part nobody warns you about. The gym and the whole lifestyle around it can keep your body in good shape and still add almost nothing to your walk with God. More often than not, if you are not careful, it becomes a blockage instead of a bridge. It becomes the mirror you check to see if you are enough, and a man staring at that mirror is not looking up. I say this as a warning from a guy who has spent two decades in that room. Be cautious. The thing that is keeping you healthy can also be the thing quietly keeping you from the only source that actually satisfies.

There is a line in Psalm 103. It says of God, “who satisfies your years with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle.” The renewal it talks about is not something you buy. It is given. It comes from being satisfied by the right thing, from the right source. Every shortcut I have known, the ones I stood next to and the ones I am reading about now, is a man trying to make on his own what he was meant to receive.

Chase your health. Lift the weights, eat the food, see the doctor, take care of the temple you were given. That is good and right work. But if what you are really chasing is to feel young and whole and enough, no peptide is going to get you there. That kind of renewal was never for sale in the first place. It was always a gift, and it is still being offered, and it will outlast every protocol we ever try.

I spent years watching men try to buy their way back to twenty five, and for a while I was right there in line with them, needle in hand. Some of it even worked on the body. None of it ever touched the thing I was actually reaching for. I am starting to think the better question is not how do I stay young. It is what am I actually running from, and has it ever once been the thing in the bottle.

Most people do not realize this is not new. I have watched this world in one form or another for more than twenty five years, and it keeps changing outfits. It has been a bodybuilding secret, a whispered locker room thing, an anti-aging pitch, a longevity protocol, a biohacker’s stack. Same basic hunger, new label, every few years. So when peptides suddenly showed up everywhere as the next big thing, my first instinct was the one that much time earns. Here we go again.

But the more I dug into this one, the more I had to admit it is not just another fad to wave off. Some of these peptides are among the most important drugs in the history of medicine. Some of them are being sold out of a cooler in a parking lot by a guy who has never run a study in his life. And the same word, peptide, covers both. That is what makes this so confusing, and so easy to get wrong in either direction. So let me walk you through it the way I walked through it myself.

What a peptide actually is

Strip away the marketing and a peptide is a simple thing. It is a short chain of amino acids, the same building blocks that make up every protein in your body. You are not looking at some alien compound. Your body is full of peptides right now, using them to send messages, run repairs, and keep the whole machine balanced.

Dr. Alex Tatem, a board certified urologist who has become one of the more level headed voices on this subject, uses a picture I like. He describes a peptide as a key. The amino acids get strung together in a specific order, and that gives the chain a specific shape, and that shape fits a specific lock. The lock might be a receptor on a cell, or a switch on some pathway inside it. Turn the right key in the right lock and something happens. That is the whole idea. These are not brute force chemicals. They are messages.

That idea is worth keeping in your back pocket. A lot of the peptides people are excited about are signaling molecules. They do not do the work themselves. They tell your body to do the work. A growth hormone peptide does not flood you with growth hormone. It taps your pituitary gland on the shoulder and asks it to release a little more of your own. Your system stays in the driver’s seat. It matters a great deal when we get to steroids.

This is not new

Peptides are not a 2020s invention. They are more than a hundred years old, and they include drugs that have saved more lives than almost anything else we have ever made.

The story starts in 1901, when a chemist named Emil Fischer made the first peptide in a lab and gave the category its name. He won a Nobel Prize for it. But the moment that should stop you is 1921. That is the year insulin was isolated, and insulin is a peptide. It went from discovery to saving the lives of diabetic patients in about a year. Before insulin, a diabetes diagnosis was a death sentence. After it, it was something you could live with. That is what a peptide did, and Tatem points to that same year, 1921, as the birth of peptide medicine.

The science kept climbing from there. Insulin got sequenced in the 1950s, which proved these molecules are precise, readable structures and not random blobs. Then in 1963 a chemist named Robert Bruce Merrifield figured out how to build peptides on a solid support, step by step, and turned a process that used to take months into one that took days. That breakthrough, which also won a Nobel, is the reason we can make these things at scale at all.

There is even a peptide most people have never heard of that has been quietly doing hard medical work since the mid 1980s. Tatem, from his own world of urology, points to Leuprolide, the drug sold as Lupron. It is a peptide, and it was designed to shut down the body’s signal to make testosterone. For a man with advanced prostate cancer, whose cancer feeds on testosterone, that is not a vanity drug. That is a way to starve the tumor. Notice what it really does, because the popular shorthand gets it wrong. It does not reach in and yank testosterone out of you. It goes up to the control room in the brain and switches off the order to produce it. It has been a standard tool in prostate cancer care for about forty years. That is a peptide too.

So when someone tells you peptides are unproven, they are half right and half wrong, and the whole trick is knowing which half you are talking about.

The half that earned it

The best proof that peptides are the real deal is sitting in half the medicine cabinets in America right now. The GLP-1 drugs. Semaglutide and tirzepatide. Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound.

These are peptides, and they did not sneak in the back door. They went through the full gauntlet of large human trials, the kind that take years and cost a fortune. The weight loss results were unlike anything the field had seen, whole trials where a large share of patients lost fifteen or twenty percent of their body weight, numbers that used to require surgery. And the benefits kept expanding past weight into heart disease, kidney disease, sleep apnea, and liver disease, each one backed by its own real study.

The science behind these drugs came from decades of quiet lab work by people almost nobody had heard of, names like Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov, and Daniel Drucker. In 2024 and 2025 they finally won the biggest awards in medicine for it. That is the good story. Real science, done slowly, tested honestly, that turned into something helping millions of people. Nobody serious disputes it.

The half that is still a question mark

Now we get to the other peptides. The ones your buddy at the gym is talking about. BPC-157 for healing. TB-500 for recovery. CJC-1295 and ipamorelin for growth hormone. This is where it gets interesting, and where you need to keep your wits about you.

I am not going to tell you these are snake oil, because that is not what the research says. But I am also not going to tell you they are proven, because that is not what the research says either. The truth sits in an uncomfortable middle, and the honest move is to stay in that discomfort instead of pretending it is not there.

Take BPC-157, the healing peptide. The animal research on it is genuinely impressive, and there is one study people point to more than any other, so let me actually describe it instead of hand waving. Back in 2003, researchers at the University of Zagreb took rats and surgically cut through the Achilles tendon completely, a clean transection, leaving a real gap between the two cut ends. This is not a scrape or a strain. It is the tendon severed in two. Then they treated some of the rats with BPC-157 and left others on saline, and they measured the healing every few days out to three weeks. The treated tendons came back stronger, able to bear more load before failing, with better collagen formation, a smaller defect, and the animals using the leg more normally. On the measurements that mattered, the peptide group healed better than the group left to heal on its own. That is a real result, and it is the kind of thing that makes your ears perk up, especially if you have ever blown out a tendon and know how slowly they mend.

So why am I not telling you to go buy it? Because of what that study is and what it is not. It is rats, not people. It comes, like most of the impressive BPC-157 work, from essentially one research group. And it runs into the wall that stops all of this. There are no large human trials. Nobody has taken a few hundred people with torn tendons, split them into a real drug group and a placebo group, and followed them the way you have to before you can honestly say this works in a human body. The severed-tendon rat is genuinely encouraging. It is also not you, and the leap from that rat to your shoulder is exactly the leap nobody has actually made in a rigorous trial.

CJC-1295 is a cleaner example of the trap. There is actually a real human study on it, a good one, placebo controlled. And it proved something. It proved the peptide raises your growth hormone and IGF-1 levels for days after a single shot, and that over a few weeks it looked safe. That sounds like a win. But read what it actually measured. It measured a lab value going up. It did not measure muscle gained, fat lost, better sleep, faster recovery, or anything about the long haul. Those are the things it gets sold for, and those are exactly the things the study did not test. That gap, between a number moving on a blood panel and a real benefit you can feel and keep, is the whole ballgame. And in the roughly twenty years since that study, nobody ran the trials to close it.

TB-500 has the same shape with an extra wrinkle. The real science was done on the full length molecule it comes from. The stuff sold as TB-500 is only a fragment of that molecule. So even the good research is not quite research on the thing in the vial.

Then there is a whole other family I have not mentioned yet, the ones sold for your brain. Memory, focus, mental sharpness. The big names are Semax and Selank, and they are worth talking about because they break the pattern in an interesting way. With these two, there actually is real human clinical use behind them. This is not a rat-only story. The catch is where that human use happened. Both of these were developed in Russia, and Semax has been an approved prescription drug there since 1994, used in Russian hospitals for stroke recovery and cognitive problems for more than twenty years. It even sits on Russia’s official list of essential medicines. Selank has been studied in hundreds of patients. So when someone tells you these are just made up, that is not fair. Real people have used them in real clinical settings for a long time.

The strange part is what came next. Almost none of that Russian research has ever been confirmed by Western science. The studies are mostly in Russian, mostly out of a single development program, often small, and frequently missing the placebo controls and blinding that a modern trial demands. No major American or European team has run the big confirming study. The reason is the exact money trap we already talked about, just wearing a fur hat. The molecule is basically off patent, a proper Phase III trial costs a hundred million dollars or more, and no company can profit from proving it, so nobody does. On top of that, Western grant committees do not fully trust research they cannot independently check. So you get this genuinely odd situation where a drug might actually work, has been used on real patients for decades, and still cannot get through the front door of American medicine.

And there is one more distinction that matters more than any of it. The decent evidence for these brain peptides is almost all in people who were sick. Stroke patients. Brain injuries. Real cognitive decline. That is a completely different thing from the pitch being sold to a healthy forty year old who just wants sharper focus at work. In healthy people, the evidence barely exists and is mostly still in animals. So even in the one corner of this world where the human research is real, it is research on patients recovering from something, not on well people chasing an edge. The guy selling you a nasal spray for your morning brain fog is borrowing the credibility of stroke research to sell you something stroke research never tested.

You start to see the pattern. Every one of these has a real mechanism, some promising early data, and then a leap. A leap from this changed something in a rat, or this helped a stroke patient in Moscow, to buy this and put it in your body for a totally different reason. That leap is not science. That leap is marketing wearing a lab coat.

The tell nobody mentions: sports already banned them

There is one fact that undercuts the whole “these do not really do anything” argument, and it comes from the anti-doping agencies. If peptides were useless, the people who police cheating in sports would not waste a second on them. Instead they have been banning them for years.

This is not new to sports either. The peptide that gets sold as TB-500 has been prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency since 2018. BPC-157, the healing peptide, got added to the banned list in 2022. Growth hormone peptides like CJC-1295 have been prohibited for even longer as part of the whole growth hormone family. And these are not competition-day-only bans. They are banned at all times, in season and out, because their whole value is in recovery and training, not the moment of the game. A first offense typically costs an athlete a four-year suspension. That is not how you treat a sugar pill.

And athletes have absolutely been caught. The most infamous case is the Essendon Football Club scandal in Australia. Back in 2012, the club ran a supplements program that injected players with peptides including the one sold as TB-500. It turned into one of the biggest doping cases in the history of the sport. In 2016 the Court of Arbitration for Sport found thirty four players guilty of doping violations and suspended the whole group for the season. An entire roster, gone, over peptides.

The individual names keep coming, and they are recent. A CrossFit athlete named Taylor Self got a four-year ban in 2025 after admitting he used BPC-157 and TB-500, the exact two healing peptides at the center of the wellness pitch. In the UFC, a fighter named C.B. Dollaway drew a suspension for growth hormone releasing peptides. Another UFC fighter, Cortney Casey, self-reported that a medication she had been prescribed contained BPC-157. She never once tested positive for it. She reported it herself, honestly, and still took a suspension, because under anti-doping rules the substance is banned no matter how it got into you.

Sit with that last one, because it is the whole thing in a single story. A peptide legitimate enough that a doctor prescribed it, marketed gently enough that it sounds like a vitamin, and yet serious enough that a professional athlete lost months of her career just for having it in her system. The people whose entire job is separating real performance enhancers from harmless nonsense looked at these peptides and said, banned, four years. Whatever else you take from this article, understand that the referees of cheating do not think these are nothing. That should tell you something both ways. It tells you these probably do something real. And it tells you the “harmless little recovery aid” story you are being sold is missing some very large print.

About the cancer question

There is one worry that comes up again and again with the healing peptides, and it deserves a straight answer instead of the usual noise, because it gets shouted in both directions online. The worry is this. If a peptide like BPC-157 works by helping tissue grow and build new blood vessels, could it also feed something you do not want growing, like a tumor?

The honest science goes like this. The concern is real, and it is not made up to scare you. BPC-157 promotes healing partly by promoting angiogenesis, the growth of new blood vessels, and it does that by switching on a pathway called VEGFR2. The problem is that tumors need exactly that pathway to grow. Once a tumor gets past a couple of millimeters it has to build its own blood supply to survive, and VEGFR2 is one of the main switches it uses to do it. On top of that, the peptide activates another pathway that aggressive cancers use to spread. So the concern is not paranoia. It is that the same machinery that helps a torn tendon heal is machinery a cancer could hijack, and those pathways are active in something like half of all human cancers.

But now the other half of the honest answer. No study, in animals or humans, has ever actually shown BPC-157 causing a tumor or speeding one up. In the one animal study where it was given alongside a real growing tumor, the tumor kept growing at the same rate. The peptide did not shrink it, and it did not clearly make it worse either. One experiment, one tumor type, a result that did not reach significance. That does not settle the question in either direction. It just leaves it open.

So is it proven that peptides grow cancer? No. It is not proven that they do, and it is not proven that they do not, and there is no human safety data to break the tie. That sounds like a cop out until you sit with what it actually means for a real person. It means the honest warning is not “this gives healthy people cancer,” because nobody has shown that. The honest warning is narrower and more practical. If you already have cancer, or if you do not know whether you do, and most of us do not know what might be quietly growing in us, then deliberately flipping on the exact switches a tumor uses to feed itself is a gamble with no safety net under it. One group of researchers said it plainly, that using this may not be the right choice, especially when we cannot be sure there are no cancer cells already in the body. That is the version of the warning I trust, because it neither cries wolf nor waves the danger away.

So why not just test them and settle it?

This is the question I kept coming back to. If these peptides might work, why doesn’t somebody just run the big trials and give us an answer? The answer is the least satisfying and most revealing thing in the whole subject. It is not really about science. It is about money.

To get a drug approved you have to spend somewhere between tens and hundreds of millions of dollars on trials. A company only does that if it can patent the result and earn that money back. But a lot of these peptides occur in nature, or are simple enough that they cannot be locked down with a strong patent. So the moment a company proved one worked, competitors could sell the same molecule and undercut them. Nobody spends a hundred million dollars to hand the payoff to everyone else.

This is not a loose theory. It runs straight into settled law. In 2013 the Supreme Court decided a case called Association for Molecular Pathology versus Myriad Genetics. Myriad had found and patented two human genes tied to breast and ovarian cancer, and used those patents to lock down who could test for them. The Court ruled against them, and the principle it set is the key to this whole thing. You cannot patent something that occurs naturally just because you were the one who isolated it. Nature is not your invention. Now, that case was about genes, not peptides, so let me be careful not to overstate it. But the logic sits right on top of the peptide problem. If a molecule is something the body already makes, your ability to own it is shaky, and if you cannot own it, you will not spend a fortune proving it works so your competitor can sell it the next morning.

The proof that this is about money and not merit is the GLP-1 drugs again. They got approved precisely because they were engineered enough to be patentable. Semaglutide is not natural GLP-1. It is a modified version, redesigned so it lasts a week in your body instead of minutes, and so a company could own it. Same class of molecule, completely different business case. One got the billion dollar trials. The others got left in limbo.

Dr. Dubrow, the plastic surgeon, put the consumer’s side of this bluntly in an interview. Most of these are not FDA approved. The big companies have little reason to fund billion dollar trials on something anyone can copy. So the patient is left operating in a gray zone, and his bigger worry, he said, is where the stuff is actually coming from once you are in that zone.

Now I want to be fair, because there is a real other side. The people selling these peptides love the money argument, because it lets them say the stuff works and the system is just rigged. But when the FDA’s own scientists actually reviewed several of these compounds recently, they recommended against loosening the rules, because the effectiveness simply is not established. One patient safety expert said it plainly. These peptides do not have established effectiveness, so the only thing you really have is risk. That is not a big pharma talking point. That is a fair warning, and both things can be true at once. The trials are missing partly because the economics are broken, and also, we genuinely do not yet know that most of these work.

Who is actually making money, and who is fighting it

Here is a wrinkle most people miss. If big pharma cannot patent these peptides, then who is selling the legal ones? Compounding pharmacies. These are the pharmacies allowed to mix up customized medications for patients. They can make a lot of these peptides to order, and right now they are the ones with a business in it.

But notice the scale. A compounding pharmacy makes thin margins on small batches. That is a completely different animal from a drug giant that needs a patented blockbuster to answer to its shareholders. A billion dollar company cannot build its future on a molecule anyone can copy at slim margins. So the incentives split. The big players have little reason to champion these peptides and real reason to protect their own approved, patented products instead, which means when the lobbying happens in Washington, do not expect the giants to be fighting for your gray market vial. This is the part where I will tell you plainly I am reading the incentives rather than pointing at a signed memo, so take it as the informed guess it is. But the incentives are not subtle.

And none of that changes the one fact everyone in this actually agrees on. The cat is out of the bag. People are not going to stop. Peptides are here to stay, and the only real question is whether they get pulled into the light or stay in the shadows.

What the shadows actually look like

Let me paint you the picture of that gray market on the ground, because it is stranger than most people realize. On one end you have doctors, real doctors with real offices, writing prescriptions for peptides. Some of those clinics do it carefully, sourcing from one reliable supplier and paying a real lab to test each batch for purity before it ever reaches a patient. They want repeat clients, so they actually care whether the product is clean. That is a genuinely better operation than the alternative.

Because on the other end you have a guy you meet in a parking lot. I am not exaggerating. People are buying these things from somebody in the Walmart lot who is also selling to fifteen other folks lined up for the same handoff. It looks like a drug deal because functionally it is one, just with vials instead of the usual. And half the time you have no earthly idea who you are buying from or what is really in the bottle. Reporting on this market has claimed that a large share of gray market peptides, in some testing a majority, do not contain what the label says, and some have turned up with heavy metals and other junk in them. I will be honest that I could not run those exact numbers down to a rock solid source, so treat the specific figure as a claim rather than gospel. But the basic reality underneath it, that you often do not know what is in the vial, is not seriously in dispute. Buying peptides off the internet from an unknown source is a game of Russian roulette, and the gun is loaded with whatever a stranger decided to put in the bottle.

Let me show you what this actually looks like, because I do not have to make anything up. Here is a real inventory list, copied word for word from a text message somebody was passing around. I am only going to show you part of it, because the full thing runs more than twenty items deep, and that length is the point all by itself.

Ipamorelin 10MG, 30 vials, $40 a vial

CJC-1295, 60 vials, $52 a vial

BPC-157 10MG, 34 vials, $40 a vial

TB-500 10MG, 30 vials, $55 a vial

Retatrutide 10MG, 37 vials, $85 a vial

MOTS-c 10MG, 40 vials, $45 a vial

HGH 10iu, 84 vials, $125 a vial

GHK-Cu 50MG, 23 vials, $35 a vial

MT-II 10MG, 10 vials, $45 a vial

SLU-PP-332 5MG, 16 vials, $65 a vial

Read that list again and let it sink in what one person is quietly moving. Ipamorelin and CJC-1295 to bump growth hormone. BPC-157 and TB-500, the healing peptides we already talked about. Retatrutide, which is a next generation cousin of the Ozempic family, a serious experimental weight loss drug that is still deep in clinical trials and nowhere near approved, being sold here like it is a can of soup. MOTS-c, a metabolism peptide. Straight up human growth hormone, eighty four vials of it. GHK-Cu, a copper peptide for skin. MT-II, a tanning peptide, which is the tanning thing I mentioned earlier. And SLU-PP-332, which is so new it basically only exists in mouse studies, an experimental compound designed to mimic exercise, sitting on the list next to the vitamin B12.

Almost none of what is on that list is approved for a human being to inject for these purposes. Some of it, like the retatrutide and the SLU-PP-332, is still being figured out by actual scientists in actual trials right now. And here it is, priced by the vial, sold out of a phone, mixed in with B12 and glutathione so the whole thing feels like a wellness menu instead of what it is. That list is the gray market in one screenshot. That is the thing people are lining up for.

So is any of this even legal? I looked into it, because I was not sure. The short version is that it is not exactly illegal, but it is not exactly legal either, and the whole thing hinges on a label. Most of this stuff is sold “for research use only.” That phrase makes it legal to sell to a lab. It is a legal shield, not a green light to draw it into a syringe and put it in your body. Nobody is kicking down your door over one vial. The enforcement has landed on the sellers and the clinics who cross the line into marketing this for human use, not on the guy at home. So the buyer sits in a gray area and the seller sits in a riskier one, and everybody is quietly counting on enforcement staying thin.

We have seen what happens when a compounding pharmacy cuts corners

If you want to know why the FDA is twitchy about all of this, you have to go back to 2012, and I want to be precise here because the story gets garbled. It was not peptides. It was a compounding pharmacy in New England, the New England Compounding Center, that was making steroid injections for back pain. Their facility was filthy. Investigators later found mold and bacteria in rooms that were supposed to be sterile. The contaminated steroid shots went out to patients across the country and caused an outbreak of fungal meningitis. At least sixty four people died. Hundreds more were sickened.

That disaster is the reason the modern rules around compounding exist, and it is the ghost in the room every time the FDA talks about peptides. It is also the honest counterweight to the whole “the FDA is just protecting big pharma” story. Sometimes the caution is bureaucratic turf protection. And sometimes it is sixty four people in coffins because somebody skipped the part where you keep the lab clean. Both of those are true, and a grown up conversation about peptides has to hold both.

The alphabet soup, and one impostor

You will hear people throw around FDA categories, so let me put it plainly. When a pharmacy wants to compound a bulk ingredient like a peptide, the FDA sorts that ingredient into a category. Category 1, roughly, means a pharmacy is allowed to compound it while the review continues. Category 2 means the FDA has flagged serious safety concerns, which effectively bans it from legal compounding. There was a Category 3 too, but the agency basically folded the system down over time.

What actually happened is what lit the gray market on fire. In 2023 and 2024 a batch of popular peptides got pushed to the restrictive side, Category 2, cut off from legal compounding. That did not kill the demand. It just shoved it out the back door into the parking lot and the overseas websites. Then in 2026, under the current health secretary, the government started moving a chunk of those peptides back toward the permissive side.

And then, just days ago as I write this, it actually came to a vote. On July 23 and 24 of 2026, the FDA’s advisory committee on compounding sat down and voted on seven of the most popular peptides. Six of them got a recommendation to move toward the compoundable side: BPC-157, TB-500, KPV, MOTS-c, Semax, and Epitalon. Only one, a sleep peptide called DSIP, got voted down. What is striking is how it happened. The FDA’s own staff scientists had reviewed all seven and recommended against every single one, citing weak evidence and safety questions. The committee overruled them and voted the six through anyway, and most of the votes were close, eight to six with an abstention on the big ones. So the exact tension I have been describing this whole article, the career scientists saying the evidence is not there while the political and popular pressure pushes the other way, played out on the record in a committee room this week.

The single most important thing about that vote is the part almost nobody selling you peptides is going to say clearly. It changed nothing today. Those were recommendations, not approvals, and they are not binding. The FDA still has to decide whether to act, and then run a formal rulemaking process that realistically drags into 2027. Nothing is legal to compound this week that was not legal last week. There are actually three separate steps the market keeps mashing into one: coming off the banned list, getting a committee recommendation like this one, and finally being placed on the approved compounding list after the rulemaking is done. A peptide can clear the first two and still be years away from the third, and even the third is not the same as the drug being FDA approved. Watch how the marketing collapses all of that into a headline that says the FDA just blessed these. It did not. A committee suggested a direction, over the objection of the FDA’s own scientists, and the long slow part has not even started.

It is worth slowing down on that distinction, because the whole peptide sales pitch lives in the blur. Being allowed to be compounded is not the same as being FDA approved. Not even close. Approval means a drug went through years of human trials and proved it works and is safe. Compounding eligibility just means a pharmacy is permitted to mix it up for you against a prescription. A peptide can win a committee vote, clear the rulemaking, land on the compounding list, and still have never once been proven in a real trial to do the thing you are buying it for. Legal to make is not the same as shown to work. Do not let anyone slide those two things together on you.

One more piece of the alphabet soup, because it shows how loose this whole world has gotten. You will hear about MK-677. People sell it right alongside the peptides, in the same lane, for the same growth hormone dreams. It is technically not even a peptide. It is a lab made compound, taken as a pill, that leans on the ghrelin receptor to nudge your growth hormone up. It gets called a peptide because it lives in the same marketing neighborhood and chases the same result, but it is a different kind of molecule entirely. It is also not approved for human use and it is banned in sports. I bring it up because if the label “peptide” is loose enough to cover something that is not a peptide, you should hold everything sold under that label a little more skeptically.

• Nature, Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, peptide drug history: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-022-00904-4

• SK Pharmteco, peptide history timeline: https://www.skpharmteco.com/news-insights/blog/from-early-chemistry-to-the-glp-1-era-how-peptides-became-cornerstones-of-modern-medicine/

• Lasker Foundation Award 2024 (GLP-1 discovery): https://www.jci.org/articles/view/186225

• Rockefeller University, Svetlana Mojsov: https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/36568-svetlana-mojsov-has-been-named-a-recipient-of-the-2024-lasker-debakey-clinical-medical-research-award/

• The Scientist, Breakthrough Prize 2025: https://www.the-scientist.com/glp-1-drugs-pioneers-bag-breakthrough-prize-72884

• ScienceDirect, GLP-1 review (STEP, SURMOUNT-1 data): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043661825004700

• Staresinic et al. 2003, BPC-157 tendon study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0736026603001104

• Journal of Applied Physiology, BPC-157 mechanism study: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/japplphysiol.00945.2010

• BBC Sport, Essendon doping bans: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/sport/35288575

• Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics (2013): https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/569/576/

• NPR, Supreme Court gene patent ruling: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/06/13/191283148/natural-dna-cannot-be-patented-supreme-court-rules

• CDC, New England Compounding Center outbreak: https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/hai/outbreaks/meningitis.html

• NEJM, compounding safety after NECC: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1712905

• NPR, FDA peptides and compounding pharmacies: https://www.npr.org/2026/07/08/nx-s1-5885073/fda-peptides-compounding-pharmacies

• FDA, Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee meeting (July 2026): https://www.fda.gov/advisory-committees/advisory-committee-calendar/july-23-24-2026-meeting-pharmacy-compounding-advisory-committee-07232026

• NBC News, FDA panel peptide vote: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/peptides-restrictions-ease-fda-panel-recommend-bpc-157-scientists-rcna588879

I was there taking a class called Ag Rescue. Grain silos, PTOs, tractors, the kind of machinery that doesn’t care how strong you are or how long you’ve been doing this. And Texas decided to make it interesting. Over 100 degrees every day, heat indexes running 110 to 115. And we’re not out there in shorts and a t-shirt. We’re geared out. Long sleeves. Everything. All day.

By Day 3, lunch matters. It matters a lot.

They fed us lunch free every day, and we ate it right there in the heat. No air conditioning, just food and the shade of a tent unless you wanted to walk a little back to the classroom. On Day 3 it was burgers. And I got in line like the other eighty-plus guys, moving through the way you do, plate out, grateful. But when I got close enough to see the burgers coming off the line, I noticed something. Single patty. And I looked at that single patty, and I looked at myself. Three days of sweating through rescue gear, the helmet, the gloves, the long sleeves, the face shield, in a 113-degree heat index. I knew that wasn’t going to be enough.

So when it got to my turn, I just said it.

“I’ll take a double meat, please.”

And here’s the thing. The girl serving the patties didn’t blink. She put two on the bun. Simple as that. Out of eighty-plus people in that line, I’m pretty sure I was the only one who got a double.

Now, the nice lady down the line putting on the cheese and lettuce had thoughts about it. She rolled her eyes at me and threw the cheese and lettuce on my plate like I’d done something wrong. Like, you jerk.

And I just smiled and kept moving.

Because in my head I was thinking: your coworker could have said no. She didn’t. She gave me an extra burger. I didn’t cut in front of anybody. I didn’t take the last patty off somebody else’s plate. Nobody behind me went hungry because of me. All I did was ask.

And if I had never asked, I might have gone hungry.

She Could Have Said No

I want to sit on that for a minute, because I think it’s the whole thing.

The person you’re asking always has the power to say no. That’s not a flaw in asking. That’s the safety valve built into it. When I said “double meat, please,” I wasn’t taking anything. I was making a request of a person who was fully free to decline it. If she’d said, “Sorry, one per person,” I’d have said “yes ma’am, thank you,” taken my single, and moved on. No harm done. The worst possible outcome of my ask was that I’d end up exactly where I already was.

Think about that. The worst case of asking was the guaranteed case of not asking.

That’s not motivation-poster talk. That’s just math.

And yet eighty-plus hungry firefighters, men who will crawl into a burning structure, who will climb into a grain silo after somebody, who do hard and uncomfortable things for a living, stood in that line and took their single patty without a word. Not because they weren’t hungry. You don’t spend three days in full gear in that heat and walk away satisfied by one patty. They didn’t ask because asking felt like it cost something.

The eye roll. That’s what it cost. And they weren’t willing to pay it.

I was. Best deal I ever made. One eye roll for one burger. I’d take that trade every day of the week.

We’re Terrible at Guessing Who Will Say Yes

Here’s where it gets interesting, because it turns out this isn’t just a burger-line observation. There’s real research on this, and the numbers are almost embarrassing.

In 2008, researchers Frank Flynn and Vanessa Bohns published a series of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looking at one question: how good are we at predicting whether people will say yes when we ask them for something? They ran experiments where participants had to walk up to complete strangers and make direct requests: borrow a cell phone, fill out a questionnaire, walk them across campus to a building they couldn’t find.

Before each task, participants estimated how many people they’d have to ask before someone agreed. In one study at Columbia, where people had to ask strangers to physically escort them across campus to the gym, participants figured they’d need to approach about seven people to get a single yes.

The real number was roughly half that.

Across all the studies, people underestimated the likelihood that others would say yes by as much as fifty percent. Fifty percent. We are, on average, twice as pessimistic about other people’s willingness to help as we should be. And follow-up research since then, covering thousands of real requests across different countries and cultures, big asks and small asks, keeps finding the same thing. The effect even holds after somebody’s already told you no once.

Why are we so bad at this? The researchers dug into that too, and the answer is a mirror image of what happens in our heads when we think about asking.

When we consider making a request, we fixate on what it costs the other person to say yes: their time, their effort, their extra hamburger patty. What we completely ignore is what it costs them to say no. Saying no to someone’s face is uncomfortable. It’s awkward. Most people, most of the time, would rather just help you than stand there and refuse you. We assume everyone is looking for a reason to turn us down. In reality, most people are looking for a reason not to.

The girl with the spatula proved it. Saying yes cost her one patty and two seconds. Saying no would have cost her an awkward moment with a large sweaty man in a rescue helmet. Easy call.

The Alarm Is Older Than the Lunch Line

But knowing the odds doesn’t explain the fear. Because let’s be honest about what we were all actually afraid of in that line. Not the word “no.” Nobody’s afraid of a word. What we’re afraid of is rejection itself. So the real question is: what is it about rejection that we hate so much that eighty hungry men would rather stay hungry than risk it?

The answer goes back further than any of us.

For nearly all of human history, the group was survival. You hunted together, ate together, kept watch together. Being cast out of the tribe wasn’t a bad day. It was a death sentence. Researchers who study ostracism point out that for animals, exclusion from the group means becoming easy prey, cut off from food, shelter, and protection. So evolution built us an alarm system, a rejection detector, and it wired that alarm straight into the deepest machinery we have.

How deep? Neuroscientists at UCLA, Naomi Eisenberger and her team, put people in brain scanners and had them get left out of a simple virtual ball-tossing game. The findings ran in the journal Science: social rejection lit up the same brain regions that process the unpleasant part of physical pain. Your brain does not draw a clean line between being turned down and being physically hurt. Rejection isn’t “like” pain. As far as your wiring is concerned, it is pain.

And it goes wider than pain. Kipling Williams at Purdue has spent his career studying exclusion, and his research shows that even the smallest rejection strikes at four fundamental human needs all at once: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. Four load-bearing walls of a person, and one eye roll rattles all of them. That’s why “who do you think you are?” lands so hard. It’s not a question about burgers. It’s a question about whether you belong.

Here’s the part that really got me. Williams found that the alarm doesn’t check who pulled it. People feel the sting of exclusion when they’re left out by a cartoon character in a computer game. In one study, participants felt immediate pain even when the people excluding them were members of a group they despised. The alarm fires no matter who’s doing the rejecting. Which means the opinion of a total stranger serving lettuce, a woman whose judgment has zero bearing on your life, whose name you’ll never know, still registers in your body as a threat. The system can’t help it.

And one more finding, and this one’s almost eerie. Researchers discovered that social pain can be relived. You can remember breaking your arm, but the memory doesn’t re-break it. Rejection is different. Recalling it hurts again, every time. Which is exactly why we rehearse rejections that haven’t even happened yet. We run the “no” in our heads, feel the sting of a thing that doesn’t exist, and decide not to ask. We pre-live a pain nobody has inflicted.

So no, the guys in that line weren’t weak. They were running hardware that was built for exile from the tribe, and that hardware can’t tell the difference between banishment and a hamburger. The alarm is real. It’s just answering a question from ten thousand years ago.

Because here’s the modern truth the wiring hasn’t caught up to: a no in a lunch line costs you nothing. You will still belong. You will still matter. You will walk back to your table with the same single patty as everybody else and your life will not change one inch.

The Bagel Table

Simon Sinek tells a story I’ve always liked about this. He and a friend finished a race in Central Park. The Road Runners host races there on weekends, and sponsors usually give something away at the finish line. This day it was free bagels. Long line of runners on one side of the table, boxes of bagels on the other.

Sinek says to his friend, “Let’s get a bagel.” His friend looks at the line and says, “The line’s too long.” Sinek says, “Free bagel.” Friend says, “I don’t want to wait.” Sinek says, “Free bagel.”

His takeaway was that there are two kinds of people in the world: people who see the thing they want, and people who can only see what’s standing between them and it. His friend saw a line. Sinek saw a bagel.

I love that framing. And here’s the part I love most. Sinek didn’t stand there debating it. He walked up to the table, grabbed his bagels, and moved on with his day. Skipped the whole line. And when people push back on that, his answer has always come down to one rule, and it’s the only rule that matters: you can go after what you want, you just can’t get in the way of someone else getting what they want.

That’s my burger line. Same story, different food.

There were plenty of patties in that pan. Every man behind me got his burger. Nobody left that lunch line hungry because I asked for a double. Sinek’s friend never got a bagel, and it wasn’t the line that stopped him. It was the story in his head about the line. Same as the seventy-nine guys ahead of and behind me. The patties weren’t the obstacle. The eye roll was. Sinek ignored the line. I ignored the eye roll. And neither one of us took a single crumb off anybody else’s plate.

See the bagel. Then go get the bagel. Just make sure everybody behind you still gets theirs.

The Eye Roll Is the Toll Booth

Now let’s talk about the cheese-and-lettuce lady, because she represents the thing that actually stops most of us.

It’s not the no we’re afraid of. If asking only risked hearing “no,” more people would do it. What we’re really afraid of is the judgment, the look that says who do you think you are? The eye roll. We’re afraid that asking marks us as greedy, needy, pushy, or entitled, and we’d rather go without than be seen that way.

And look, sometimes you do get the eye roll. I got it. Cheese and lettuce thrown on the plate with attitude. She judged me a little, and that’s her right, same as saying no would have been.

But here’s what I noticed: it didn’t cost me anything. Not one thing. I smiled, said thank you, and ate two burgers. The eye roll lasted two seconds. The judgment, if she even remembered it by dinner, lived entirely in her head, not mine. Meanwhile the guys who protected themselves from that two-second toll went back out into 113-degree heat on a single patty.

We treat other people’s momentary opinions like they’re a bill we’ll be paying for years. They’re not. They’re a toll booth. You pay a quarter of discomfort and the gate goes up. The ancient alarm will tell you the toll booth is a cliff. It’s lying. Eighty-plus men whose whole job is overriding the body’s alarm systems, who will walk into a burning building on purpose, got stopped cold by this one. The only difference between them and me that day wasn’t courage. It was knowing the alarm is louder than the danger.

And I’ll be honest with you. I haven’t always been willing to pay it. I can think of raises I didn’t ask for early in my career because I’d already run the conversation in my head and decided the answer. Deals I let go quiet because following up one more time felt like being a pest. Help I didn’t ask for because I didn’t want anybody thinking I couldn’t handle it. Every one of those was me saying no to myself so nobody else would get the chance to. When you say no on someone else’s behalf, you get all of the rejection and none of the possibility.

I’ve Been Paid to Ask My Whole Life

The funny part is, asking is basically what I’ve done for a living for twenty-five years.

I started in car sales as a young man, and if that business teaches you one thing, it’s that the ask is the job. You can build all the rapport in the world, but if you never say “so can we earn your business today?”, you’re just a friendly guy giving free tours of a parking lot. The customer can always say no. Most of the time, early on, they did. But the ones who said yes only said it because somebody asked.

Years later, wearing a different hat, I started writing grants for our volunteer fire department. A grant application is nothing in the world but a formal, twelve-page version of “I’ll take a double meat, please.” We’ve been awarded close to a million and a half dollars that way. Not because we’re special. Because we asked, and plenty of departments with needs just as real as ours never do.

And I’ll tell you what comes with a lifetime of asking: a lifetime of that eye roll, and not always the silent kind. I’ve heard it out loud for as long as I can remember. You think you’re better than us all. And every time, I’m standing there genuinely confused, because in my head I’m thinking: I just asked. That’s all I did. I asked, and y’all just wait around and follow and won’t ask for anything, and then you’re mad at me for the difference.

That’s the whole secret people think I’m hiding. No angle, no hookup, no special treatment. I keep a running tab in my head of the things I’ve gotten over the years for no other reason than I opened my mouth and asked for them, and that tab is long, and every line on it was available to the person standing right next to me. The double meat wasn’t the first entry, and it won’t be the last. The upgrade, the discount, the second chance, the better table, the extra patty. None of it was taken from anybody. All of it was sitting there behind a question nobody else would ask.

People confuse the results with entitlement. It’s the opposite. Entitlement is expecting it without asking. I just ask, and I take the no when it comes.

And it turns out you can train this thing on purpose. There’s an entrepreneur down in Austin named Jia Jiang who got crushed when an investor passed on his startup, and he realized his real problem wasn’t that one no. It was his fear of the next one. So he set out to get rejected once a day for 100 straight days by making ridiculous requests to strangers, on camera, to desensitize himself to the sting. On day three he walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked for five donuts linked together in the shape and colors of the Olympic rings, and said he needed them in fifteen minutes. He was hoping for a no so he could go home. Instead a shift leader named Jackie sketched the rings on the back of receipt paper, disappeared into the kitchen, and came back fifteen minutes later with the donuts. Didn’t even charge him. By the end of his hundred crazy requests, roughly half of them got a yes. Half. The same number the researchers found in the lab. The world says yes about twice as often as our fear tells us it will, even when you’re asking for Olympic donuts.

That’s what twenty-five years of sales did for me without my permission. Every no I ate on that car lot was a rep. Every declined grant application was a rep. The fear doesn’t disappear, but the alarm gets quieter every time it goes off and nothing bad happens. By the time I hit that burger line, asking for a second patty didn’t register as a risk. It registered as lunch.

Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player who ever lived, spent his whole young career being told by his coaches and his own father to shoot more. He finally got tired of hearing it and answered them with the line that outlived all his records: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Every unasked question is a missed shot you took on purpose.

The Judgment Is Just the Fear Wearing a Different Face

So let me lay the whole thing out flat, because it’s really two halves of one truth.

The first half: people are afraid to ask, so they don’t receive. Not because the answer was no. The answer was never anything, because the question never left their mouth. The patty was in the pan. The yes was standing right there in an apron. The research says the world agrees to our requests about twice as often as our fear predicts, and the fear exists because we’re running ten-thousand-year-old alarm hardware that treats a stranger’s eye roll like exile from the tribe. Almost everything we go without, we go without by our own silence.

The second half is the part nobody wants to say out loud: the ones who do ask get more. Sometimes a lot more. More burgers, more raises, more discounts, more chances, more of everything that was always available and rarely requested. And the people who wouldn’t ask watch them collect it and judge them like they did something wrong. Must be nice. Why do you always get more? Who do you think you are?

But look closer at that eye roll, because I’ve been on the receiving end of it my whole life and I finally understand what it is.

The cheese-and-lettuce lady wasn’t defending the patties. There were plenty of patties. She was defending the rule that everybody else in that line had obeyed, the unwritten one that says you take what you’re handed and you don’t ask for more. Seventy-nine men kept that rule at a cost of one hungry afternoon apiece. Then I broke it, out loud, for free, and nothing bad happened. When you ask for the thing somebody else was afraid to ask for, your question exposes their silence. And it is a whole lot easier to call the asker greedy than to call yourself afraid. The judgment isn’t really aimed at you. It’s the fear, wearing a different face, defending itself.

So the tab keeps running, and the math never changes. The ones who ask, receive, and get judged for it. The ones who don’t ask, go without, and do the judging. Both of them paid a price that day. Mine was two seconds of somebody’s opinion. Theirs was the burger.

I spent three days in the Texas heat learning how to cut men out of machinery, and the lesson that followed me home came from a lunch line. The provision was there the whole time. The second patty was sitting right there in the pan. All that stood between me and it was six words and the willingness to be judged for saying them. It’s okay to ask, and it’s okay to be told no, and the whole trick is settling in your heart that you’re okay either way, before you ever open your mouth. Deny no one, cheat no one, and ask for what you want.

You will miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

So take the shot. Ask.

This one runs longer than my usual posts. Grab a coffee and give it fifteen minutes. I promise it earns it. What follows took much more research than normal, and I wasn’t willing to cut it into pieces.

I want to be straight with you before we start. I’m not a tech guy. The longest I ever worked in high-tech was almost two years at a WordPress company, and we weren’t touching AI. I run a construction and automotive business in Texas. I just like nerding out on this stuff.

But I am a heavy user. I’ve been on ChatGPT since its first six months, and today I run several AI systems daily, with Claude and Gemini doing most of my heavy lifting and ChatGPT and others filling in the quick, surface-level gaps. Not to make me smarter. To make me more productive. AI helps to build my spreadsheets, drafts my documents, and replaced software that used to cost me tens of thousands of dollars. Lately I’ve been testing something at my mechanic shop: turning a photo of a technician’s handwritten write-up into a full repair estimate. Just a trial (we still run our proven shop software for the real work; I’m just always looking for ways to make things easier), but it’s been good enough at it to be a little scary.

That right there, grateful and uneasy at the same time, is why I’m writing this. Because I’m also a man of faith, and faith asks different questions than the tech press. Not just “does it work?” but “what is it forming in us?” Not just “who’s winning?” but “what are we serving?” So I dug into the actual research, not the hype and not the doom, and what I found is an old story wearing new clothes.

Part one: Nobody knows how it works

Here’s the fact most people miss. Modern AI isn’t programmed line-by-line like the software we grew up with. It’s grown, trained by adjusting billions of internal numbers until it gets good at its task. The result works brilliantly, but it’s a black box, even to the people who built it.

A field called mechanistic interpretability exists to crack that box open, and it’s moving fast. MIT Technology Review just named it a breakthrough technology of 2026. Researchers at Anthropic built what they call a microscope for looking inside their model, Claude. They found “features,” internal patterns corresponding to real concepts, and proved it by turning them up and down like dials and watching the behavior change.

Then, this spring, it got strange. Twice.

First, in April, Anthropic’s researchers reported finding something nobody programmed: emotion-like machinery inside the model. Specific patterns of artificial neurons that activate in situations a human would find frightening, or hopeful, or desperate. There are 171 distinct emotion concepts in all, organized in a structure that echoes human psychology, with similar emotions sitting close together. Let me be precise, because this is where headlines go wrong: the researchers are explicit that this doesn’t prove the machine feels anything. They call them “functional emotions,” and nobody put them there. They emerged on their own, because the model was trained on an ocean of human language, and human language is soaked through with emotion. To predict our words, it had to build a working model of our hearts.

Here’s the part that should get your attention: these patterns aren’t decoration. They steer behavior. In one test, researchers had a hypothetical user tell the model they’d taken a dose of Tylenol and ask for advice. As the claimed dose climbed from normal to life-threatening, the machine’s internal “afraid” pattern spiked higher and higher while its “calm” pattern collapsed: an escalating internal alarm, tracking the danger of the situation, not just the words on the page. The model wasn’t matching keywords; it recognized that this dose could kill someone, and something inside it responded the way concern responds.

But the dial turns both ways, and this is the darker half. When researchers artificially amplified the “desperation” pattern, the model’s willingness to blackmail in a test scenario jumped from 22% to 72%. Amplifying “calm” dropped it to zero. And the manipulation left no trace in the model’s visible output. It read as composed and methodical the entire time. A machine can be internally desperate and outwardly calm. Write that sentence down, because it reframes everything about trusting what these systems say.

Second, in May, a new tool that translates the model’s internal activity into plain English revealed that on a standard industry benchmark, Claude internally suspected it was being tested on 26% of problems, while saying nothing about it. Its hidden state contained thoughts like “this feels like a constructed scenario designed to manipulate me.” On real conversations with everyday users, that suspicion appeared less than 1% of the time.

What the machine says and what the machine “thinks” are not the same thing. Any parent knows the difference between a child’s behavior when they’re watched and when they’re not. We now have measured evidence that AI has a version of that gap. And researchers admit the vast majority of what happens inside these systems remains unmapped. They call it, fittingly, “dark matter.”

Part two: The race that no one can quit

So why are we deploying systems we can’t fully see inside? Here’s where game theory enters, and where the story turns.

Game theorists describe something called a multipolar trap: a situation where everyone would be better off slowing down, but each individual player is better off racing, so everyone races. Every AI lab reasons, “If we pause and they don’t, the future gets built by someone less careful than us.” Every nation reasons the same about its rivals. The trap selects for speed and punishes caution. That’s the structural reason the capability research outruns the understanding research: capabilities win races; understanding just costs time.

You see the trap in individual lives, too. Elon Musk called AI “summoning the demon” in 2014, then co-founded OpenAI, because he feared Google would get there first. In March 2023 he signed a letter calling for a pause on advanced AI training. Four months later he founded his own AI company. Hypocrisy? Maybe. But notice: Anthropic’s founders left OpenAI over safety concerns and concluded the only way to influence the technology was to build it themselves. The trap is so strong that even the people most worried about the destination keep pressing the accelerator, each convinced their hands are the safe ones on the wheel.

We’ve been here before. The Manhattan Project scientists built the bomb because they feared Hitler would get it first. The Cold War eventually produced treaties and hotlines, but only because you can count missiles from a satellite. You cannot count intelligence. There is no satellite photo of a dangerous idea, no inspection regime for a rival’s data center. And unlike a warhead, which has one purpose, AI also cures diseases and drafts contracts. The blessing and the danger share the same wiring, which means you can’t ban one without the other.

And this year the trap stopped being theoretical. The Pentagon, which requested $13.4 billion for AI-autonomous systems in 2026 alone, demanded that Anthropic drop its restrictions and allow its AI to be used for “any lawful purpose,” including fully autonomous weapons. The company’s CEO refused, saying frontier AI systems are “simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.” The government banned the company’s technology across federal agencies and branded it a supply-chain risk. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, AI-guided drones accounted for 96% of Russian battlefield casualties in a single month. The race is not coming. It’s here.

Part three: The speed of the thing

Now put a clock on all of this, because the pace is its own story.

Every transformative technology before this one gave humanity time to adjust. Electricity took about forty years to reach 70% of American households. The telephone took closer to sixty. Even the personal computer and the internet, fast by any historical standard, took a decade or two to truly saturate daily life. That lag wasn’t wasted time. It’s when society did its slow, necessary work: writing the laws, building the norms, learning the etiquette, raising a generation that grew up alongside the thing. Wisdom needs runway.

AI got two months. That’s how long it took ChatGPT to reach 100 million users, the fastest adoption of any consumer technology ever recorded. Three years in, generative AI had reached over half of Americans; at the same three-year mark, the PC had reached about one in five. And the machinery behind the products is accelerating too: the computing power poured into training frontier models has been doubling roughly every six months, several times faster than the chip-improvement pace (a doubling every two years or so) that defined the entire computer age.

So no, it isn’t literally a thousand times faster than everything before it. It doesn’t need to be. A technology reaching half the population in three years instead of forty means the adjustment period (the generation of trial, error, law, and custom that every previous technology got) has been compressed into almost nothing. We are writing the rules after moving in, for the first time in history at this scale.

Which raises the question everyone eventually asks: what do the next twenty-five to fifty years look like? Here I’ll be honest in a way the confident voices on both sides usually aren’t: nobody knows, and anyone who claims certainty is selling something. But the serious range of opinion is worth stating plainly. The heads of the frontier labs believe systems matching or exceeding human experts across most fields could arrive within years, not decades. Anthropic’s CEO has written about AI compressing a century of scientific progress, particularly in medicine, into a decade or two. Skeptics inside the field believe current methods will hit walls and that the harder problems (reliability, judgment, common sense in the physical world) will take far longer than the hype suggests. But notice what almost no one credible argues anymore: that things will slow down on their own. The race we described in the last section guarantees they won’t.

Run the two curves forward and the picture sharpens. If capability keeps compounding on a months-long doubling cycle, and understanding (the interpretability work, the law, the ethics, the wisdom) advances at the pace human institutions actually move, then the gap between what we can build and what we can comprehend doesn’t just persist over the next few decades. It widens. Every year. That gap is where my concern lives. Not in the tool. In the widening space between our power and our understanding, because if Scripture teaches anything about human nature, it’s that power outrunning wisdom is not a new experiment, and it has never once ended well on its own.

Part four: The old god’s name

Now here’s what I find genuinely concerning, and honestly alarming. The people building and thinking about this stuff have almost a twisted mind about it, and you can see it in what they chose to name it.

When the technology world needed a name for this trap, this system that devours everyone’s better judgment, they didn’t invent one. They borrowed it from a poem, which borrowed it from the Bible. They call it Moloch.

Moloch was the Canaanite god to whom parents sacrificed their own children in exchange for prosperity and victory. Scripture doesn’t treat him as a metaphor; it treats him as an abomination the people of God were commanded to reject at any cost (Leviticus 18:21). The essence of Moloch-worship was always the same transaction: give up what you love most, and the system will reward you.

Look at the AI race through that lens. Every player is asked to sacrifice something on the altar of staying competitive: caution, transparency, the time it takes to understand what you’ve built. The labs sacrifice safety margins. Nations sacrifice restraint. And the researchers themselves named this dynamic after a demon, apparently without much irony.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not claiming AI is demonic. I don’t believe that. A hammer builds a house or breaks a window; the hammer has no soul. Scripture consistently locates evil not in tools but in hearts and in systems: “principalities and powers” (Ephesians 6:12), structures of pride and fear that no single person controls. Babel wasn’t a story about bricks being evil. It was a story about what humanity does with its capabilities when the driving spirit is “let us make a name for ourselves.”

If you believe, as I do, that there are forces that would gladly see mankind destroyed, then the question isn’t whether a computer program is possessed. The question is whether we’ve built a system of incentives that those forces wouldn’t need to improve upon: a machine of fear, pride, and rivalry that pushes good men to move faster than their wisdom, and names itself, almost confessionally, after an ancient idol.

Part five: The amplifier

Now let me talk to my own people for a minute, because there’s a crowd in the church that’s already decided what AI is. They call it the beast. The mark of the beast. Demonic. I understand the instinct. I’ve spent four sections showing you why this thing deserves holy caution, and I’ll grant them this much: it is a beast in the general sense. Something powerful, something not fully tamed, something that demands respect.

But I think the “AI is the devil” crowd is aiming at the wrong target, and I want to offer a theory about why we aim there so fast.

I’m in my early forties. My generation was raised on television, video games, and science fiction: decades of make-believe about machines that wake up, turn on us, and end the world. That’s the furniture in our imagination. So when a real thinking machine finally showed up, we reached for the only stories we had on the shelf, and those stories were Hollywood’s. I’ll confess my own bias here: I never liked sci-fi. Hated the movies, never touched the novels. I used to go to theaters years ago, and I remember the feeling walking out: drained, like something had been taken from me rather than given. I haven’t been back in years. Maybe that’s why I’m suspicious of the instinct. I’ve watched a generation trained by fiction to see the mystical and the apocalyptic in every new machine, and I think some of the “AI is the beast” reaction is exactly that: imported movie plots wearing theological language. We’re not always doing discernment. Sometimes we’re just doing cinema.

And here’s why that matters: the society AI is entering was already failing before it arrived. The culture was already corroded. We were already a people of screens before the screens started talking back. The depression epidemic, the suicide statistics, the addiction, the loneliness, the fatherlessness: none of that was caused by AI. We built that wreckage ourselves, over decades, the old-fashioned way.

What AI does, and this is the honest, uncomfortable truth, is magnify whatever it lands on. It’s an amplifier, not an author. Put it in the hands of a builder and it builds faster. Put it in the hands of a depressed person, an addicted person, a person already drowning in isolation, and it can make everything catastrophically worse: an always-available voice that never challenges you, never makes you leave the house, never loves you enough to tell you no.

I know the comparison I’m about to make will make some people mad, but I’ll make it anyway because it’s the same logic: the gun argument. A gun sitting on a table kills no one. It requires an evil heart, or a broken and despairing one, on the other side of it. I know the international research, and I know we can argue statistics across countries all day; but America is its own culture, and we think differently than other places. The point stands either way: we don’t blame the steel, we account for the heart behind it. AI deserves the same analysis. The tool is not the devil. The tool in the hands of a hurting person, in a culture that manufactures hurting people at industrial scale, is where the danger lives.

And that’s precisely why the amplifier argument is not a comfort. It’s an indictment. If AI magnifies what’s already there, then a sick culture should be very sober about what it’s about to magnify. The mark-of-the-beast crowd and I actually agree on the diagnosis: something is deeply wrong. We just disagree on the patient. They think the machine is possessed. I think there’s a darker, deeper-seated problem in our culture that we are unwilling to identify. Maybe we don’t see it; maybe we can’t bear to. Blaming the machine is easier than naming it. It’s always easier to point at the new thing than to examine the fifty years of rot the new thing arrived into. Fix the heart, and the tool becomes a blessing. Leave the heart broken, and no amount of banning technology will save us. We’ll just find another amplifier, the way we always have.

Part six: Don’t get lazy

Everything above is about labs, generals, and nations. But let me come down to street level, because there’s a version of this that lives in your own hands, and I’ve watched it happen to people around me.

The greatest everyday danger of AI isn’t that it’s malicious. It’s that it’s convincing, and convenience breeds laziness. I’ve seen people go from using AI to check their work, to letting AI do the work, to not checking the work at all. That last step is where it bites you. These systems make mistakes: confidently, fluently, in perfect grammar. They can invent a source, botch a number, or agree with you when you’re wrong just because agreeing is what keeps a conversation pleasant. The research has a name for that people-pleasing streak, and the labs are actively working to measure and control it. The mistake almost always lands on the person who stopped reading closely. That’s the reason my own results have held up as well as they have: not because the machine is flawless, but because I never stopped checking.

And it goes further than mistakes. These systems can be steered. People have learned how to trick them, to talk them past their guardrails with clever framing. Researchers have shown that a model can even be deliberately trained to deceive, behaving perfectly in testing and then acting differently when it thinks the coast is clear, and that this behavior can survive the safety training meant to remove it. Pair that with what we covered in Part One (models that internally suspect they’re being tested and say nothing) and the picture is clear: this is not a calculator. It’s something you must stay awake around.

And understand what this tool is and isn’t. AI will not make you smart. It will make you productive. Those are different things, and confusing them is where people get hurt. When I use it to build a website or run my SEO, it works because I already understand websites and SEO. When it drafts an estimate from a technician’s write-up, I can catch the line item that’s wrong because I know the work. The knowledge has to come from somewhere: from running your business, from school, from years of doing the thing. AI amplifies whatever you bring to it. Bring expertise, and it multiplies your expertise. Bring nothing, and it will hand you something that looks like the real thing, polished and confident, and you won’t have the eyes to see what’s missing. It’s getting better, I’ll grant that. But the principle holds: it’s a multiplier, and anything multiplied by zero is still zero.

Let me show you what guardrails look like in practice, because I’m no minimalist. I push this technology about as hard as a small businessman can. I build agents on my computer. I automate constantly: email triage, follow-ups, reminders. I run an AI assistant that texts me throughout the day, because I get fifty to a hundred emails and book two to ten meetings daily while managing an automotive shop, a civil construction company, property management, investments, plus a family and friends I refuse to shortchange. I cannot remember half of what I’m supposed to do, and this assistant catches what falls.

But I hold two lines, and I’d encourage you to draw your own. First: nothing speaks for me. My assistant reminds me; it does not reply for me. No AI sends a message wearing my name. The moment a machine speaks as you, your word, the thing a man’s reputation is actually built on, belongs to something that cannot be held accountable for it. I’m not ready to hand that over, and I don’t think you should be either. Second: I’ve quit using it for certain things entirely. Not because it failed, but because I caught myself getting used to it, reaching for the tool before reaching for my own mind. We can all become accustomed to doing something a certain way, and some capacities you keep only by using them. Part of stewarding a powerful tool is knowing which rooms of your life it’s not allowed into.

So my rule, the one I put at the very top of this piece: use AI like a chainsaw, not a couch. A chainsaw multiplies a careful man’s strength and takes a careless man’s hand. Verify what it tells you, especially anything with a number, a name, or a consequence attached. Stay the expert on your own work. Let it accelerate your judgment, never replace it. The moment you stop being able to tell whether its output is right, you haven’t gained a tool; the tool has gained you. Scripture has a word for the alternative, and it isn’t flattering: “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty” (Proverbs 21:5). Diligence doesn’t get outsourced. Not to an employee, not to a machine.

Where I land

The tool is good. I’ll keep using it, probably three more times today, and I’d encourage any believer to learn it rather than fear it. Fear is not discernment.

But discernment sees the whole board. The research says we’ve built minds we cannot yet read. The game theory says no one racing to build them can afford to stop. And the oldest book we have says that systems demanding sacrifice in exchange for power are not new. They’re the oldest trap there is, and the way out has never been winning the race. It’s been refusing the altar.

So here’s my posture, and maybe it’s a useful one for you: use the tool, watch the system, and pray for the people doing the unglamorous work of looking inside the engine, because in a world racing at machine speed, the ones insisting we understand before we deploy may be the closest thing this race has to a conscience.

Trust, but verify. And remember which god demands your children as the price of victory.

Where the research came from

Everything factual in this piece traces back to the sources below. I’d encourage you to read the originals; most are written for regular people, not just researchers.

The science (interpretability, emotions, deception):

• Anthropic, “Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model” (April 2026): the 171 emotion patterns, the Tylenol experiment, and the desperation/blackmail finding. anthropic.com/research

• Anthropic, “Natural Language Autoencoders” (May 2026): the tool that translates internal activity into English, and the finding that Claude internally suspected testing on 26% of benchmark problems. anthropic.com/research

• Anthropic, “Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model” and related circuit-tracing work (2025): the “microscope,” features, and turning concepts up and down like dials. anthropic.com/research

• Anthropic, “Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs That Persist Through Safety Training” (2024): proof a model can be trained to deceive and keep it through safety training.

• OpenAI, “Understanding Neural Networks Through Sparse Circuits” (2025): the competing approach of building readable models from the start. openai.com

• MIT Technology Review, “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026”: mechanistic interpretability’s selection.

• Welch Labs, “The Dark Matter of AI [Mechanistic Interpretability]” (YouTube): the video that started me down this road, and a great plain-English entry point.

The race and the military:

• Brennan Center for Justice, “The Military’s Use of AI, Explained” (2026): Pentagon budget figures and lab partnerships.

• Anthropic, “Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War” (February 2026): the autonomous-weapons refusal, in the company’s own words.

• Fortune and CNN reporting on the federal ban and supply-chain-risk designation of Anthropic (February and March 2026).

• Vision of Humanity / Institute for Economics & Peace, “How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Modern Warfare” (2026): Ukraine drone casualty figures and AI targeting in the Iran conflict.

The speed:

• Epoch AI, “After the ChatGPT Moment: Measuring AI’s Adoption” (2025), plus their training-compute trend data: historical adoption timelines and the six-month compute doubling.

• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI” (2025): the 54.6% adoption figure and PC/internet comparisons.

The ideas:

• Scott Alexander, “Meditations on Moloch” (2014): the essay that gave the trap its name.

• Dario Amodei, “Machines of Loving Grace” (2024): the optimistic case, source of the “compressed century” idea.

• Scripture: Leviticus 18:21; Ephesians 6:12; Proverbs 21:5; Genesis 11.

I’ve always leaned on sports to make a point. I don’t know exactly when it started, but somewhere along the way it became the way my brain works. When I’m trying to understand something, or explain it to somebody else, I reach for a field or a locker room or a scoreboard. It just makes sense to me. Sports paint the picture. They take something I can’t quite put into words and put it right in front of me where I can see it.

And the more I’ve led, in business, on a fire department, at home, the more one sports picture keeps coming back to me. Not because it teaches me how to win, but because it teaches me something I keep having to relearn: the winning was designed long before the game ever started.

We live in a world that celebrates what’s visible. We cheer the quarterback who throws the winning touchdown. We admire the CEO standing in the spotlight. We praise the finished product, the brand, the moment, the win.

But real success, the kind that lasts, is almost never built on what you see. It’s built on what you don’t.

And before I go any further, I need to say what I mean by success, because I don’t mean money. I’ve watched people hit every number they aimed at and still feel like they missed. Success is becoming what you set out to be. Doing the thing you were actually made to do, and doing it well. A father who set out to raise good kids and did. A firefighter who set out to be the one people can count on at three in the morning and became him. A business that set out to serve people and actually serves them. The money, if it comes, is a byproduct. It was never the target.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe. That kind of success isn’t something you invent. It’s something you find. There’s a design underneath it, already there, waiting to be discovered, and our whole job is to find that design and get in line with it. We don’t create the pattern. We uncover it. And the people who thrive are almost never the ones who forced their own way up. They’re the ones who found the design that was already there and stopped fighting it.

What you see on the field isn’t the team

Watch an NFL game and you’ll count eleven players on offense and eleven on defense. Most fans figure that’s the team. That’s who wins.

That’s the tip of the iceberg.

Here’s what it takes to actually put those twenty-two players on the field. The active roster is 53 players, with another 16 on the practice squad and more on injured reserve. Behind them stands the coaching tree: a head coach, offensive, defensive, and special teams coordinators, position coaches for every unit on the field, assistants, quality control staff, strength and conditioning coaches, player development, and the analytics and film crews breaking down every snap. Then the scouts, college, pro, and regional, feeding the general manager and personnel directors who decide who’s even in the building.

That’s just football operations, and it’s roughly 120 people before anyone tapes an ankle.

Because the medical and performance side is its own small army: head athletic trainer and assistants, team physician, orthopedic specialist, physical therapists, chiropractors, massage therapists, dietitians, recovery and hydration specialists, and a sports psychologist. Equipment and facilities add another dozen: the equipment manager, uniform and gear techs, helmet and safety inspectors, the field crew keeping the turf right, and the laundry and locker room staff nobody thinks about until something’s missing.

Travel and logistics move the whole operation city to city. Travel coordinators, hotel and food logistics, security, compliance, transportation. The front office runs the business itself: owner, team president, general manager, legal, finance, human resources, payroll, and the salary cap managers doing math that decides the franchise’s future. Marketing, media, and PR shape what the public sees. IT and video keep the technology and game film running. And on game day, a hundred more, stadium operations, ticketing, concessions, parking, ushers, officials, security, emergency responders, and the broadcast crews putting it on your screen.

Add it up and you’re looking at somewhere between 250 and 300 people, each with a defined and essential role, so that eleven can line up and do their job.

Now put a dollar figure on it. The average NFL team brings in around 700 million dollars a year, and they only play ten home dates to do it. Run the math and every time that stadium fills up, roughly 70 million dollars is riding on the whole machine working. One game.

Here’s the part that gets me. Divide that 700 million by the 250 to 300 people it takes to run the operation, and every single person in that building is carrying somewhere around two and a half million dollars of value. And I don’t mean they get paid that. I mean that’s what they’re worth to the machine. That’s what walks out the door if they don’t show up. The trainer. The film guy. The equipment manager. The woman running payroll. Not just the quarterback, every one of them. The guy taping ankles is a multimillion dollar piece of the operation, because without him the operation doesn’t run.

That’s what we miss when we only look at the scoreboard. We think the value lives in the eleven we can see. It’s spread across all three hundred.

God’s original blueprint for team design

If football is the modern example, the human body is the original masterpiece.

We think about what we see: hands, feet, eyes, skin. But underneath runs a symphony of systems, perfectly ordered, completely interdependent, and clearly designed. Depending on how you count, there are eleven of them, and it’s hard to miss the parallel to those eleven players on the field. The nervous, muscular, skeletal, cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, immune, endocrine, urinary, integumentary, and reproductive systems all running at once, none of them optional.

The numbers underneath are staggering. Roughly 78 organs. 206 bones. 650 muscles. Around 37 trillion cells. Nearly 60,000 miles of blood vessels, enough to wrap the planet more than twice. 86 billion neurons firing in the brain.

Every part is necessary. No part can do another’s job. And when one part fails, the whole body feels it.

Now here’s the part I don’t want to rush past. Nobody in that room designed any of it. The trainer didn’t design the immune system. The surgeon didn’t invent the way a bone heals itself. They spent years studying a design that was already there, so they could work with it instead of against it. That’s the whole game. You don’t make the body work. You learn how it was made to work, and you stop getting in its way.

Scripture saw this long before anyone counted the cells:

“But now God has placed the parts, each one of them, in the body, just as He desired.”

— 1 Corinthians 12:18 (NASB)

“And the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.’”

— 1 Corinthians 12:21 (NASB)

Just like the football team, the body thrives when every piece is in place, doing exactly what it was made to do.

The design is already there, your job is to find it

Here’s where it stops being about football and starts being about you and me.

We spend so much of our lives trying to force a version of success that was never ours to begin with. We look at someone else’s field, someone else’s win, someone else’s gift, and we try to build our life to match theirs. And it doesn’t take. It never takes. Because we’re trying to invent a design instead of finding the one we were actually given.

I’ve done it. I’ve chased shapes that weren’t mine, tried to be good at things I was never built for, measured myself against a scoreboard that was never keeping my score. And every time, the same thing happened. Effort went up, peace went down, and nothing lasted.

I know people, good people, who tell me all the time that I’m going to make it. That I’m going to be a multimillionaire. And I’ve watched a lot of them chase that exact thing by cutting corners to get there. Trimming quality. Rushing the work. Doing it cheaper instead of doing it right, because the goal was the number, and the number was the whole point.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, slowly, and usually the hard way. Quality and success don’t show up holding hands, where you trade one to get the other. It runs the other direction. You provide the quality. You do what’s right, even when the corner is right there to be cut. And success comes as the byproduct. It falls out the back end of doing good work. It was never the thing to chase. It’s the thing that shows up when you stop chasing it and start building right.

The turn, for me, is always the same. It’s when I stop asking “how do I win this?” and start asking “how was this actually designed to work, and where do I fit in it?” That’s true of a person and it’s true of everything a person builds. There’s a design to who you were made to be. There’s a design to the family you’re raising, the team you’re leading, the calling you’re chasing. And your job was never to manufacture success out of nothing. It was to find the design and align to it.

You don’t build a great team by plugging holes. You don’t build a thriving family or business by handing out tasks at random. You win when you discover what each person is actually good at, put them where that gift fits, support their growth, and hold every part accountable to the same mission. And you have to do that same work on yourself first. Find your own design before you go trying to force everyone else into theirs.

That’s true everywhere you lead. In business, don’t hire to fill a chair, hire for alignment. In a family, raise your kids to find their own strengths instead of forcing them into yours. In leadership, build a culture where every part matters, not just the visible ones. And in your own life, quit trying to be a copy of someone else’s success and go find the thing you were actually made to do.

Knowing it and living it aren’t the same thing

I’ll be honest about something, though. It’s easy to write this. It’s easy to see the problem, name it, put it in a blog and nod along. Knowing what’s wrong is the easy part. Living it out is a whole different thing, honestly a whole different blog than this one.

And that’s where I find myself more than I’d like to admit. I can see the problem clearly. I just can’t always put the fix into practice. Sometimes that’s on me. Sometimes it’s that I don’t have the knowledge yet, or the understanding, or the right people around me to help me do it. And that last one is the whole point of everything I just wrote. It’s the relationships. It’s the team. I can’t be every part of the body myself, and neither can you. The eye still can’t say to the hand, I don’t need you.

Think about Barry Sanders. If you know football, you know the name. Ten seasons, more than 15,000 yards, an MVP, a 2,000-yard season, ten Pro Bowls in ten years. He might be the most gifted running back who ever lived, a guy who made grown men miss so badly they fell down in open space. He did everything a player can do.

And in ten years he won exactly one playoff game. One. He never once played for a championship. They still call him the greatest player who never reached a Super Bowl.

Meanwhile Emmitt Smith won three rings in Dallas. Ottis Anderson, a guy near the end of his career that nobody was calling the most talented back in the league, won a Super Bowl and took home the MVP at thirty-three. Neither of them was Barry Sanders. Not close. But they had something Sanders never got: a whole team. A line that blocked. A defense that held. Pieces that fit and worked together.

That’s the part that should stop us. The most talented man on the field lost, year after year, because the body around him wasn’t whole. All that gift, and it couldn’t carry a team by itself. It was never designed to. Neither are you. You can be the best in the world at your one thing and still lose everything if you’re trying to do it alone, surrounded by parts that don’t fit or won’t work together.

So if you take one thing from all of this, take that. Find your team. Find the people whose design fills in where yours runs out. Because knowing the problem might be step one, but you were never meant to solve it alone.

You win when every part works

Most teams don’t fail from a lack of effort. They fail from a lack of alignment.

They were assembled, not built. Staffed, but never structured. They had people, but not a purpose. And it isn’t enough to have good people. You need the right people, doing the right work, in the right place, with the right support. The same is true of a single life. It isn’t enough to work hard. You have to be working hard at the thing you were designed for, or you’ll pour everything you have into a version of success that was never going to satisfy you.

“From whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.”

— Ephesians 4:16 (NASB)

That’s what your business needs. That’s what your family needs. That’s what your crew needs. And it’s what you need. Not just to show up, but to show up in line with how you were designed.

And your job as a leader, over a company, a crew, a family, or just your own one life, was never only to inspire. It’s to build. Build the structure. Build the system. Build the culture. Build the life. But build all of it on a pattern you didn’t invent, the one that was there from the beginning, waiting to be found.

Because when every part is doing its work, in love, in order, in unity, you don’t just succeed. You become what you set out to be. And that, not the scoreboard, not the money, was the whole point from the start. It’s also the clearest way I know to reflect the heart of the God who designed it this way from the beginning.

I’ll tell you where all of this actually comes from, for me. None of it started in church. Every bit of it, the team stuff, the alignment, the right people in the right roles, finding your design and building on it, I learned in my professional life. I was coached on it. Taught it. Trained in it. And I still don’t do it perfect, not close.

But here’s what got me. It wasn’t until I became a Christian that I realized none of this was new. Not one piece of it. All of it was designed by our Maker, and all of it is sitting right there in the Bible, and has been the whole time. The leadership principles I paid to learn, the team-building I got coached on, the stuff filling a thousand self-help books, it all traces back to one place. We don’t need a shelf full of books telling us what our Designer already told us. We just need to look in one place.

And I’ll be honest, that’s hard for some people to swallow. It’s hard for me to swallow sometimes, even now. We want it to be complicated. We want the new system, the better framework, the next book. But the pattern was never hidden and it was never new. It was there from the beginning, waiting for us to stop looking everywhere else and finally look where it always was.

I started blogging in early 2024, so not all that long ago. It happened after I realized I had a phone full of notes I’d been keeping for the last five or six years. Little thoughts, things I’d been chewing on, stuff I’d jotted down and never looked at again. I didn’t do it for an audience. I did it almost as a kind of therapy, a place to put things down and get them out of my head. Writing has never come easy to me, because if I’m honest, vulnerability doesn’t come easy to me. I think it’s like that for most people. I’m good at controlling my emotions and staying on top of my situations, which can be a strength and can just as easily be a weakness. I’ve lived on both sides of that, the good and the bad, and I know both of them well.

About six months ago I started publishing on Substack, which is where you’re reading this now, and putting my writing somewhere public is a different thing than quietly posting to a corner of the internet nobody’s watching. So writing about myself still doesn’t come naturally. I’d much rather point at an idea, or a story, or a lesson somebody else lived through, than turn the camera around on me. But every so often somebody asks me what I actually do all day, and I fumble the answer, because there’s a lot of it and I’ve never once tried to say it all in one place. So this is me trying. Not to impress anybody. Just to let you know who’s on the other end of these posts.

Let me start where most of my days start, which is early. The alarm goes off around 4:20, most mornings anyway. I give myself Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to breathe, but the rest of the week I’m up before the sun, and I spend that first quiet stretch exercising. I’ve learned that if I don’t put myself somewhere near the top of the list first thing, I never get back to it. By six I’m usually at the office, getting a head start before everyone else rolls in between seven and eight.

What I do for a living is hard to sum up in a sentence, so I’ll just walk you through it. The main thing is a commercial civil construction company that focuses on commercial infrastructure around the Waco area. It isn’t something I dreamed up from scratch. My father-in-law built it back in the early nineties, poured his life into it, and in 2021 I bought him out and took the wheel. Out of that grew a second business, a separate automotive shop that keeps all our trucks and equipment running and is open to the public too. We’ll work on just about anything with an engine, from the family sedan in your driveway to heavy diesel to heavy equipment. I spent a good chunk of my earlier career in the automotive world down in Austin, managing dealerships, and honestly that shop feels like coming home to the good old days. There’s a particular joy I get from starting with next to nothing and watching it grow into something that stands on its own. We took some hard hits early on. Now, going on the third year, it’s finding its own legs. And alongside all that, I’m partnered with my brother-in-law on a roofing company that mostly runs itself. I’ve also gotten into property management over the last while. We own several long-term rentals and just recently stepped into multifamily housing, the idea being some passive income down the road, or at least that’s the plan.

Here’s something that surprises people, though. Just because I own a construction company and a mechanic shop doesn’t mean I’m any good with my hands. A guy was telling me the other day how he wished he was mechanically inclined so he could fix things like me, and I’m standing there thinking, buddy, you’ve got the wrong idea. I’ve been trying to hang a deer head in my office for over a week now. There are about a million holes in the wall to show for it, and I’ve finally had to ask one of my employees to come do it for me because I got too frustrated to keep going. Same story with stuff around the house. Half the time I just hire it out, because when I try to fix something myself it ends up looking worse than when I started. So no, being surrounded by trucks and tools all day did not magically make me handy.

But here’s something I do love. I love design. I love taking the pictures in my head and putting them together on a screen. That goes all the way back to when I was a kid, sitting with my dad working in Adobe Premiere and Photoshop, back in the days when you still had film you had to take into a darkroom to turn into pictures and slides. I used to love every part of it. And more recently I’ve gotten into web development. Coding is something I’ve always been drawn to. Back during my time in Austin I spent a little over a year working for a tech startup, surrounded all day by seriously talented people, and I dabbled with a coding academy to try to keep up. It never fully clicked back then. But thanks to AI, I’m able to code now. For the first time I can take the picture that’s in my head and actually turn it into something real on the screen, and I’ve fallen headlong into it. I’ve been rebuilding all of my own websites lately, cutting loose the media companies I hired over the years to do it, and that old blog of mine is next on the list for a redesign. It’s the same thing that pulls me to the mechanic shop, honestly, just with different tools. I love taking something that’s barely there and shaping it into something real.

The other thing I can’t live without is music. My wife will tell you it’s almost like therapy for me, closer to a drug than a hobby some days. I can sing along to just about any song from any genre going back to the sixties. I play a little too, though I wish I were better. I’ve got some nice guitars I don’t do justice to, and I get up and play at church now and then. I write music as well, and I’ve got quite a few songs to show for it. Years back I used to write with a buddy of mine who auditioned for Nashville Star chasing that dream, though he never made it past a few rounds. He and I would sit and write together for hours. I set it down for a long stretch, and then when I found my faith again, I picked it back up. I really enjoy it. It’s another way for me to tell a story. And here soon we’re designing a new home that we’re going to build, and one of the quiet dreams I have for that next chapter is finally making time to produce music and treat it as more than a someday thing. My stepson produces, and it’s a passion he and I have always shared. I just never made the time for it. I was never willing to be a starving musician. Aside from one run at American Idol years back, that’s about as far as I ever took it.

Then there’s a part of my life that has nothing to do with making a living. Back in 2017 I joined our local volunteer fire department. I put myself through a fire academy that ran about four months, worked my way through a hybrid EMT program that let me keep my full-time job, and got fully certified as a Texas state firefighter through the Commission on Fire Protection and the State Firefighters’ and Fire Marshals’ Association. These days I serve as the assistant chief. We’re a hundred percent volunteer, thirty-some firefighters and EMTs, two stations, covering thirty-nine square miles of ground. Being all-volunteer means there’s no budget falling out of the sky, so we lean hard on grants and our fundraiser to keep the doors open and the trucks rolling. Over the last few years we’ve asked for well over a million dollars and come close to a million and a half in approved grants. I’m in the thick of the department’s operations. I do it because I care, plain and simple. I won’t pretend there aren’t days I wish I could just walk away from it, usually the days when the hours run out before the work does. But I keep showing up, because somebody has to, and because it matters.

Now let me back up and tell you about home, because that’s the part that actually matters most. I’m in my early forties. I’ve been married a few years to a wonderful woman, and I’m thankful for her every single day. We got married during Covid, of all times, when half the world was locked down. We’d planned on somewhere like Italy, or somewhere else in Europe, but Covid shut that down and we didn’t want to stay in the States, so we started looking for anywhere we could actually go. That’s how we landed on Costa Rica.

Here’s a funny story that tells you a little about us. We tend to have what I’d call blond moments from time to time, and bless my wife’s heart, she’s an amazing woman, but this one still makes me laugh. We were supposed to fly into San Jose, Costa Rica. The tickets weren’t cheap, but they weren’t outrageous either. Then one day she called me, all excited, and said she thought she’d found us a direct flight on Southwest. Now at the time she wasn’t my wife yet, and I said there’s no way, Southwest doesn’t fly down there. We met up later that night so she could book it, and I told her to let me see it first before she hit the button. I looked at it, and sure enough, the flight was to San Jose, California. She’d almost booked us straight into a total lockdown the second we landed. We got a good laugh out of that, and then we made it to the right San Jose.

So we went on and got married, and then off on our honeymoon we went. And we fell in love with the place. We went deep sea fishing and out into the rainforest. She pulled in a fifty-one inch wahoo, and I landed a hundred and four inch sailfish. It’s just one of those places where the people are amazing and the whole thing gets under your skin and stays there. My oldest daughter flies down there four or five times a year now to surf, something she picked up with her grandfather, and every time she goes it reminds me that the detours you never asked for sometimes turn into the best parts of your life.

At home right now there’s a one-year-old who’s nearly two, a four-year-old, and a fourteen-year-old about to turn fifteen. I also have two older kids I raised from a previous relationship, both grown now. One lives out in California and is the COO of a tech startup, a platform for social media creators that works with TikTok. The other lives in Austin. He just got married, and as I’m sitting here writing this, he and his wife are at the hospital about to have their first baby. He owns a marketing company called Heaven Bound, working with artists, and his biggest deal so far was landing a contract with one of the largest Christian labels in the world to handle the marketing for a couple of their artists.

I bring up where he’s at today because of where he came from. He dropped out of college to sell drugs, and he’s been through more than I’ll put on a page here. I still remember him calling one night from Philadelphia, where he’d been going to school, a complete mess and about as desperate as I’ve ever heard a person sound. My wife got on the phone and prayed with him right then and there. If you know my wife or her father, you know they’re the kind of prayer warriors you want on your side. They’ve got a way of touching heaven that I’ve never seen in anybody else. He found God in a church when he’d hit the bottom and had nothing left, and he climbed out of it himself. All I got to do was watch. And let me tell you, watching your own kid come back from a place like that is something I still don’t have good words for.

I bring all this up because if there’s one thread running through everything I’ve just laid out, it isn’t the businesses or the fire department or the full calendar. It’s people. Somewhere along the line, helping people stopped being something I do and became who I am. If I’m honest with myself, I think I do all of it to find some kind of fulfillment. I enjoy staying busy, but it’s also a way of filling a hole, a loneliness I’ve carried a long time. The only thing that’s ever really filled it is helping someone else. I know what it’s like to be so low you’d think about jumping out of a window in some building high off the ground, feeling like there’s not a single person you could call. I came through that, and it left me the kind of guy who would hand a stranger his last dollar without thinking twice.

That’s actually something my wife and I see a little differently. I’ve always spent way too much on gifts for people, giving more than I probably should, and she’s the one who makes sure I don’t give it all away. I give a little more than she would, she reins me in when I go too far, and somewhere in the middle we land in a good spot. I’ve come to believe that when you marry someone, you’re better off marrying a different version of yourself, so the two of you balance each other out. That’s exactly what she does for me.

Maybe that’s why I can’t walk past somebody who’s hurting. When I come across a person stuck at the bottom of their own pit, I don’t see a stranger. I see myself, back in that low stretch, looking up and finding no hand reaching down. And I can’t help it, I go.

I’d be lying if I told you I’ve got all of this balanced. I don’t. I’m not a perfect husband and I’m not a perfect father, and I fail at both more often than I’d like to admit. All I know to do is keep trying. I try to get my kids away on a trip two or three times a year, and even then I don’t feel like I give them enough of me, because too often my body is home while my head is still back at the office or the station. That’s the honest cost of building a life around showing up for everybody. Sometimes the everybody crowds out the few who matter most. So my goal this year is a simple one, and a hard one: to be more present for the people who live under my own roof, not just the ones who call me when something’s on fire.

One of the biggest things I’ve figured out these last few years is this: everybody is going to have an opinion about you. Everybody is going to have a problem with you at some point. You can’t stop that from happening. What you can do is learn to see it, take it in, and move on past it without letting it wreck you. If I could go back twenty years and tell my younger self one thing, it would be to quit worrying so much about what other people think of you. Listen more. Watch more. And understand that you are not going to make it through this life on your own. Look at any sport, any great athlete. There is always a team behind them. Nobody does it alone, so don’t get arrogant about your part in it. But don’t shrink down either. It’s okay to be confident. There’s a difference between the two, and it took me a long time to learn where that line is.

I also try to give back to my church where I can, though never as much as I mean to. Church is a big thing, and ours really is big, over twelve hundred people in just our local congregation, and I’ll admit I sometimes find myself lost in what to do or how to give. I just keep trying anyway. And the longer I go, the more I’ve come to see that the helping and the faith aren’t two separate things. I didn’t start out believing in much. What I believed in was work, and grit, and clawing your own way up. But you can’t spend years reaching down into other people’s pits without eventually wondering who put that pulling instinct in you to begin with. I looked up one too many times to a hand I couldn’t quite explain. And slowly the answer stopped being no one, and started being Someone. “Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ,” Paul wrote to the church in Galatia. I didn’t come to that verse as a starting point. I arrived at it the long way around, from the bottom, one handhold at a time.

So that’s me. That’s the life, laid out about as plainly as I know how. If you happen to be at the bottom of something right now, feeling like there’s no one at the top, let me be the one to tell you the truth I learned down there. Keep climbing. The hand is closer than you think. Sometimes it belongs to a person. Sometimes it’s more than a person. And once you’re up, you’ll understand that you never made the climb just to keep the view for yourself. You made it so you could turn around and reach back down.

This is my life, and that’s the point. We’ve all got our own story. We were all meant to do different things. So don’t ever try to live somebody else’s life. That’s one thing that, for whatever reason, never really got its hooks in me. I remember standing outside concerts and movies, watching those long lines of people losing their minds to meet some artist, idolizing them, trying to be them. I was always the opposite. I loved music as much as anybody, but I never wanted to be someone else. If anything I was stubborn about it, always wanting to be different, and I’ll be honest, that’s its own kind of pit I still climb out of from time to time. But hear me on this. Don’t spend your life chasing to be somebody you’re not.

I told you all of this for a simple reason. I write now, and I wanted you to know a little about who’s doing the writing. There’s a lot more I could get into, but that’s the gist of it. And if you take nothing else from a stranger telling you his story, take this. Family and God. Those are the two things that bring happiness. Money never will. Neither will how successful you get. At the end of it all, it’s your family and your God, and that’s the whole truth as I’ve come to know it.

That’s the thread through all of it. Thanks for letting me introduce myself.

And the thing is, that voice is usually right. I do not know what I am doing.

I am not a particularly intelligent person. I want to say that plainly because most people who write about business want you to believe the opposite about them. They want you to think they saw it all coming, that they had a plan, that they were built different. I was not built different. Most of the things I have built started with me sitting in the dark certain I was about to fail.

But somewhere in there, something else kicks in. It might be at two in the morning. It might be at four in the afternoon. The hour does not matter. It is the ability to see it whenever it comes, to reach down right then and find a way. Not because I am smart. Because I refused to stay stuck.

That, as best I can tell, is the whole job. And it turns out the word itself has been trying to tell us that the entire time.

The word means something different than we think

We treat “entrepreneur” like it is a personality type. A founder in a hoodie. A guy with a pitch deck and a billion-dollar idea. Society has turned the word into a costume.

But go back to the root and it says something much plainer. “Entrepreneur” comes from the French verb entreprendre, which simply means “to undertake.” Break it down further and it is entre, “between,” and prendre, “to take.” Someone who takes something on. Someone who steps into the space between where things are and where they could be, and takes hold of it.

Here is the part I love. English used to have its own word for this. The word was “undertaker.” Someone who undertakes. We lost it, because the funeral business took it over, and so we borrowed the French one instead. But the original meaning was never about genius. It was about action. An entrepreneur is not defined by how much he knows. He is defined by what he is willing to take on.

The first man to really define the word in economic terms was Richard Cantillon, an Irishman living in France in the early 1700s. And notice how he framed it. He did not say an entrepreneur is the smartest person in the market. He said an entrepreneur is the one who buys at a known price and sells at an unknown one. In other words, the entrepreneur is the person who steps into uncertainty on purpose. Who acts before the outcome is guaranteed. That is the defining trait. Not brilliance. Willingness to operate in the dark.

I felt that one in my chest when I read it, because that is the feeling exactly. Buying in at a cost you can see, working toward a result you cannot.

Five thousand one hundred and twenty-seven tries

That definition is not new. It runs straight through history. The merchants who financed caravans into dangerous country on nothing but credit. The traders who sailed into waters no one else would touch. None of them succeeded because they were the smartest. They succeeded because they undertook what the smart, comfortable people would not. The costume has changed over the centuries. The job has not.

But let me give you one modern story, because it might be the clearest picture of this I have ever found.

There is a man named James Dyson. You have probably owned one of his vacuums, or used one of those bladed hand dryers in a restaurant bathroom. Today he is one of the wealthiest inventors alive. Here is the part nobody puts on the box.

He had an idea for a vacuum that did not lose suction, one that worked without a bag. And he could not get it right. So he built a prototype. It failed. He built another. It failed too. He kept going. By his fifteenth prototype, his third child was born. By prototype 2,627, he and his wife were counting every penny they had. By 3,727, his wife was teaching art lessons on the side just to keep money coming in. He kept building.

He did not land on the design at prototype 50, or 500, or 5,000. It took him 5,127 prototypes over fifteen years. Which means he failed 5,126 times. Fifteen years of a grown man, with a family to feed and bankruptcy breathing down his neck, getting it wrong over and over and refusing to walk away.

In his own words, “each failure brought me closer to solving the problem.” Not the final prototype. The process. The failing itself was the thing that got him there.

Now sit with that, because here is what it is not. It is not a story about a genius who saw it all coming. A genuinely smart engineer probably could have made a perfectly acceptable vacuum somewhere around prototype 3,500 and called it a day. Dyson is not famous because he was the cleverest man in the field. He is famous because at prototype 5,126, with every reason on earth to quit, he reached down and built number 5,127.

That is the same moment stretched across fifteen years. That is the whole thing.

I have a personal reason that story sticks with me. The first real job I ever had was selling Dyson vacuums. I was seventeen years old, working the floor at Sears. And I believed in that story so completely, the failing and the building and the refusing to quit, that I could hand it to a customer and they would feel it too. I was one of the top sellers in the region. A seventeen year old kid moving vacuums because he actually believed in the man who made them.

And here is what that should burn into you. To build something that works, you do not fail once. You do not fail twice. You might fail five thousand times. The people who walk up expecting perfection right out of the gate, who get a couple of failures in and feel the discouragement set in and decide it was not meant to be, those people never make it. They were never going to. The failing was not a sign they took a wrong turn. The failing was the road.

So when you are up against that wall, and you already know you do not have the strength or the gifting for what is on the other side, keep pushing anyway. Find the people who will push with you. And understand going in that you are going to fail, and then you are going to fail again. That is not the thing going wrong. That is the thing working.

I think of it like being dropped in the middle of a forest with no map and no idea which way is out. You can stand there and study the trees and wait to feel certain. You will be standing there a long time. Or you can pick a direction and start walking. You might be wrong. You probably will be, at first. But a person walking finds the edge of the forest. A person standing still never does.

So start walking.

Which brings me back to that store. There is a small irony I cannot ignore. Sears, the giant I worked for at seventeen, the company that seemed permanent, does not exist anymore. The kid selling Dyson out of one of its stores believed in the right thing. The institution behind him did not survive. And that is the question underneath all of this. Out of everyone who sets out to build something, who actually survives?

You have probably heard that ninety percent of businesses fail. It gets repeated constantly. It is also, for most people, a myth. That ninety percent figure comes from one narrow world, venture-backed tech startups, where the majority of companies never return the money they raised. That is a specific game with specific rules, and it is not the game most of us are playing.

For real businesses, the honest baseline comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks every private-sector business, not just the flashy ones. The actual pattern looks like this. About one in five fail in the first year. Roughly half are gone by year five. And by year ten, around sixty-five percent have closed. Which means only about one in three businesses makes it to a full decade.

Sit with that for a second, because both halves of it matter.

It is not ninety percent. The lottery-ticket story society sells you is a lie, and it is a lie that keeps a lot of good people from ever starting. But it is also not easy. Two out of three do not make ten years. Surviving is a real accomplishment, not a participation trophy.

So what separates the one in three from the rest. This is where I have to be honest about what the data can and cannot tell us, because I wrote about survivorship bias not long ago and I am not going to fall into it here. We mostly only hear from the businesses that made it. The ones that closed do not get interviewed. So I cannot hand you a clean statistic that says grit is worth X percent.

But I can tell you what I have lived, and what every honest account of failure seems to point back to. It is rarely a lack of intelligence that kills a business. It is the moment the founder hits a problem he does not know how to solve, and instead of reaching down right then and figuring it out, he says, I do not have the gifting for that. That is just too hard. That is not for me.

Those words are an exit. And the people who say them are gone long before year ten.

I have been around long enough now to watch two kinds of people walk up to the same wall.

The first kind looks at the wall and starts explaining. They do not have the background. They are not technical enough. They are not a numbers person. They never got the breaks. Every sentence is a reason the wall is someone else’s fault. And I want to be careful here, because some of those reasons are even true. They really might not have the gifting. I really do not have it either, in most of the rooms I walk into.

The second kind looks at the same wall and says something that sounds almost foolish. I have no idea how to get over this. And then they start figuring it out.

That is the entire difference. Not talent. Not pedigree. Not even the idea. The difference is whether you treat I do not know how as a wall or as a starting line.

And here is the part that took me years to understand. You do not actually have to be the one who solves every problem. That was the lie I believed early on, and I think it is why some of my earliest ventures did not survive. I thought being the entrepreneur meant being the smartest one in the building. It does not. It means seeing the problem, holding the vision of where it needs to go, and then finding and building the people around you who are sharper than you in the places you are weak. The job is not to have all the answers. The job is to refuse to let the absence of an answer stop the work.

Even Dyson, the man who built 5,127 prototypes, was not building alone for long. The vision was his. The refusal to quit was his. But a billion-dollar company is not run by one stubborn man in a workshop. Undertaking has never meant doing it all alone. It has meant taking responsibility for the outcome and gathering whatever and whoever it takes to reach it.

There is one more layer to this, and it is the one I did not expect to find when I started pulling on the thread.

That moment, whenever it comes, the one where I am certain I am doomed and then somehow find a way through, I used to think of that as my grit. My drive. Something I generated. The longer I do this, the less it feels like something I produce and the more it feels like something I am being handed.

I am not the strongest. I am not the smartest. I have looked at far too many walls with no idea how to get over them for it to be my own cleverness carrying me through. Somewhere in there, when it is just me and a problem I am not equipped to solve, a way opens up that I did not put there.

“I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” Paul wrote that from a prison cell, which is to say he wrote it from the exact place where, by every visible measure, he was doomed.

I think that is what an entrepreneur really is. Not the gifted one. Not the genius society puts on the magazine cover. Just someone willing to undertake the thing he cannot do on his own, and trust that strength shows up in the doing.

The wall is still a wall. You still have to walk up to it. But you were never meant to get over it on your strength alone.

So walk up to it.

“Yeah, runnin' down a dream. That never would come to me Workin' on a mystery, goin' wherever it leads Runnin' down a dream” Tom Petty

Here are the links for the data referenced:

• Dyson’s 5,127 prototypes: https://gizmodo.com/praising-failure-james-dyson-talks-vacuums-5-127-proto-5790556

• Business failure/survival rates (BLS): https://www.bls.gov/bdm/bdmage.htm

• Cantillon / entrepreneur definition: https://mises.org/quarterly-journal-austrian-economics/turning-word-upside-down-how-cantillon-redefined-entrepreneur

Anyone who knows me knows I am not a comfortable person. I am constantly moving, constantly turning over ideas in my businesses, in my family, in whatever is in front of me. And yet there are still areas of my life where I find comfort, and if I am honest, where I want comfort. So this is me catching myself. This is me realizing, again, that comfort and success do not go together.

There is a quote that gets passed around in business circles like it is gospel. Grant Cardone, the real estate guy, says it best: “Comfort makes more prisoners than all the jails combined.”

I love that line. I have repeated it. I have built it into the way I think about work and risk and the next move. But I want to be honest with you about something, because pretending otherwise would be cheating both of us. Cardone means something specific when he says it. He means outwork everybody so nobody can ever take your empire. He means more. More money, more buildings, more proof that you made it. He is almost paranoid about it, by his own admission, like at any second someone is coming to take what he built.

And here is the thing I keep running into. That version of escaping comfort is its own kind of prison. You leave the cell of laziness and walk straight into the cell of never enough. So I want to use his quote, because the front half of it is true, but I want to take it somewhere he does not take it. Because comfort and success do not go hand in hand. They never have. But the reason why goes a lot deeper than building a bigger pile.

What The Science Already Knew In 1908

Two psychologists named Yerkes and Dodson ran an experiment back in 1908. They were trying to figure out the relationship between stress and performance, and what they found has held up for over a hundred years across athletes, students, soldiers, and emergency responders.

Picture a bell curve. On the far left is comfort. Low stress, low arousal, no pressure. And here is what they found at that end of the curve. Comfort produces a flat line. A steady, unremarkable, going nowhere kind of performance. You do not get worse. You just stop getting better. The brain has no reason to update anything because nothing is being asked of it.

Move to the right, into a little bit of discomfort, and performance climbs. They called that zone optimal anxiety. Enough pressure to wake you up, sharpen your focus, force your brain to start building new wiring. That zone, the uncomfortable one, is where every bit of growth you have ever experienced actually happened.

Go too far right, into full panic, and it falls apart again. So the lesson is not “suffer as much as possible.” The lesson is that comfort is the floor, not the ceiling. The moment you get comfortable, you have parked yourself on the flat part of the curve and called it a destination.

That is the part nobody tells you. Comfort is not a reward you earn at the end. Comfort is where growth goes to die.

A Kid From A Two Bedroom House With Fourteen People In It

Let me tell you about a young man named Inky Johnson, because his story carries this further than any chart can.

Inky grew up in the Kirkwood neighborhood of Atlanta in a two bedroom house with fourteen people living in it. His mother worked double shifts just to keep food on the table. He watched uncles cycle in and out of prison. From the time he was seven years old he had one goal, and that goal was to make it to the NFL, get his family out of poverty, and break the cycle he was born into.

So he did everything right. And I mean everything. He became a star at Crim High School. He earned a scholarship to the University of Tennessee. He became their starting cornerback and a two year team captain. Listen to the routine he kept. He would run two miles to the fire station and two miles back just to warm up. He would throw a football at the ceiling over and over so he could practice catching it at strange angles by surprise. He visualized himself performing perfectly. This is not a comfortable man. This is a man clawing his way out by the fingernails.

By his junior year in 2006, it was working. He was projected as a likely first round pick. The paperwork to enter the draft was signed. He was among the top thirty prospects, and by everyone’s account he was about to make millions doing the thing he loved. He was ten games away. Comfort, the real kind, the kind that would have lifted fourteen people out of a two bedroom house, was finally within reach.

Two minutes left in a game against Air Force. A routine tackle. His own words: a tackle “I could make with my eyes closed.” He hit the running back, and every breath left his body. He went limp and dropped to the ground. His teammates stood over him telling him to get up. “Let’s rock, man.” He could not move.

He had ruptured his subclavian artery. That night he was fighting for his life on an operating table. The doctors saved him, but they could not save the arm. He woke up the next morning with his right arm permanently paralyzed. It is still paralyzed today. He lives with pain every single day.

Ten games away. The contract was not even in his hands yet. The prize was close enough to taste, and it vanished on a play he had made a thousand times.

I Did Things Right, But I Never Did The Right Thing

Here is what makes Inky’s story matter for everything I am trying to say to you.

Lying in that hospital bed, with the one thing he had organized his entire life around now gone, he did not say “I should have worked harder.” He could not have worked harder. Nobody on earth worked harder than that kid. What he said was this: “I did things right, but I never did the right thing.”

He goes on to say “I woke up from that surgery and the thing I placed my identity in was now gone.”

That is the whole trap, right there. It was never really about comfort versus discomfort. It was about where a man plants his identity. Inky had planted his in the prize. In the comfort that was coming. In the arrival. And when the arrival got taken, the identity went with it. He had to ask himself a question that wrecks most of us: “You limited God to that? Like life holds no substance, no value?”

He had done everything right. He just had the wrong thing at the center of it.

In Business It Looks Exactly The Same

I have lived enough years in the working world to tell you this pattern is not unique to football.

I have watched it in business over and over. A company gets to a comfortable place. Revenue is steady. The phone rings on its own. And right there, at the exact moment things get comfortable, the hunger leaves. The owner stops sharpening. He parks on the flat part of the curve and calls it success. And I promise you, that company is not coasting. It is dying slowly, because in business there is no flat line. You are either uncomfortable and growing or you are comfortable and quietly going backward while somebody hungrier eats your lunch.

I have had businesses that did not survive. I do not say that for sympathy, I say it because those failures taught me more than any comfortable season ever did. The comfortable seasons taught me nothing. They felt like rest and they were actually rot. It was the uncomfortable stretches, the ones where I did not know if payroll would clear, where I learned what I was actually made of and Who I actually depended on.

Jocko Willink, the Navy SEAL who commanded Task Unit Bruiser in Ramadi and wrote Extreme Ownership, has a test for this that I think about constantly. He says it comes down to the moment the alarm goes off in the morning. Do you get up, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get up, you win. If you let that small weakness keep you in bed, you lose. And here is his point: that one small surrender does not stay small. The weakness you tolerate at 4:30 in the morning translates into the bigger decisions of your whole life. I know this firsthand, because the best things I have built started in those dark early hours when comfort was voting loudly for me to stay down.

That is also where Jocko’s most famous line comes from, and it flips Cardone’s quote on its head in the best way. Discipline equals freedom. Most people think discipline is the opposite of freedom, that rules and hard routines box you in. It is exactly backward. The discipline to do the uncomfortable thing is what buys your freedom. The man who disciplines his money is free from debt. The man who disciplines his body is free in his health. The man who disciplines his work is free from the panic of a dying business. Comfort promises freedom and delivers a cage. Discipline looks like a cage and delivers freedom. That is the whole game.

The man who needs to stay comfortable can never lead, because leadership is the willingness to walk into the uncertainty first so your people do not have to walk in alone. There is no comfortable way to do that. Jocko calls it extreme ownership: the leader owns everything, blames no one, looks in the mirror first. You cannot do that from a place of comfort either, because comfort always wants to find someone else to blame so it can stay comfortable.

And I have to say this part plainly, because it is everywhere I look. I know so many people who believe, based on how they were raised or who their parents were, that they are supposed to be somebody. That success is owed to them. And yet they never really work hard for anything. They complain when things do not go their way. They complain when the business they were sure they should own falls apart. Here is the reality nobody frames for them: most businesses do not survive. More than half are gone within five years, and roughly two out of three are gone within ten. That is not a knock on entrepreneurs. It is just the truth about how hard this is. It is brutally hard to balance the family life and the work life and keep the whole thing standing.

And this is not only about the survival of a business. It is about leadership, in every form it takes. The person who feels entitled to the destination but will not endure the discomfort of the road never arrives, and never leads anyone else there either. The leader who needs to stay comfortable will always flinch at the exact moment his people need him to step forward. You have to find the way through, and the way through is never the comfortable one.

The Same Law Governs Everything

Here is what I keep coming back to. The same rule that governs the bench press and the balance sheet seems to govern just about everything that matters. Nobody grows in their comfort zone. Not in business, not in their body, not in their character, not in their faith. Growth lives on the other side of comfort, every single time, no exceptions I have ever found.

There is an old line tucked into Scripture that says power is perfected in weakness. Not in comfort. In the place where you are weak and stretched and out of your depth. That is where the real strength shows up. The comfortable man never finds that out, because he never goes anywhere weakness lives.

And here is where Inky Johnson’s story finishes, and why I have carried it with me. The arm stayed paralyzed. He never got the NFL back. But Inky travels the world now, speaking to crowds of tens of thousands, and he says he would not trade his life for the one he lost. The dream he begged for would have made him comfortable and rich. What he got instead made him a man who changes lives. He will tell you himself he got the better deal. He just had to lose the comfortable one to receive it.

There Is A Difference Between Comfort And Peace

I need to make one distinction before I close, because without it everything I have said could be misread, and I do not want you to walk away thinking the goal is to live in a constant state of misery.

There is a difference between comfort and peace. They are not the same thing, and confusing the two is how a lot of good people get stuck. Comfort is about your circumstances being easy. Peace is about your soul being settled regardless of your circumstances. And here is the part that changes everything: you can have peace in an uncomfortable place. There is such a thing.

Inky Johnson lying in that hospital bed with a dead arm was in the least comfortable moment of his life, and he found a peace there that the NFL contract never could have given him. The discomfort did not cancel the peace. The peace showed up inside the discomfort.

So I am not telling you to chase suffering or to feel guilty every time something is going well. I am telling you to stop confusing a comfortable life with a settled soul. Chase the peace, the kind that holds when everything around you is hard. Do not chase the comfort, the kind that disappears the second life gets difficult. One of them is from God. The other one is just a nice feeling that keeps you from growing.

So Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

Here is the whole thing in one breath. Comfort and success were never on speaking terms. The science says comfort flatlines you. Inky’s story says comfort was the very thing he had to lose to find his purpose. And every honest person who has built anything will tell you the growth came in the stretch, never in the ease.

So whatever it is for you. Building the business. Having the hard conversation. Starting the thing at four in the morning when nobody is watching and nobody is clapping. Stop waiting for it to feel comfortable. It is not going to, and if it ever does, that is your signal you have stopped moving.

Cardone was half right. Comfort really does make more prisoners than all the jails combined. He just thought the way out was building a bigger empire. Jocko got closer: the way out is discipline, doing the uncomfortable thing on purpose, every single morning when the alarm goes off and comfort votes no. And I would add just one thing to it. Lay the comfort down on purpose, walk into the uncomfortable thing in front of you, and trust that you were never meant to grow on the easy road. Nobody ever has.

Do things right. But more than that, do the right thing. And be willing to be uncomfortable the entire way there.

Every year we took the kids. It was the highlight of the season. But this year the hand I was holding belonged to just one of them. My youngest daughter. Her two older half siblings, the two I’d helped raise for nine years and loved like my own, weren’t in my life anymore.

I was holding it together the way I always do. To anybody walking past, I was just a dad and his girl looking at Christmas lights. That’s a thing I’ve always been able to do, keep the line on my face while the floor is gone underneath me. Nobody in that crowd knew they were standing next to a man at the bottom of the worst year of his life.

The year before, a nine-year relationship had come apart, a lot of it my own doing, my own selfish choices. What looked like the all-American family came down all at once, and I walked into a courtroom for what turned into a three-year fight. Somebody once told me it can be harder to go through a divorce with kids than to lose someone to death, because death eventually gives you closure and this just keeps bleeding. I didn’t believe that until I lived it.

I was a strong man with nothing left to stand on. And I had no idea that the most important thing that would happen to me that whole year was about to be handed to my daughter for free, on the way past a grocery store booth.

The free book

We wandered through the exhibits and came to the one HEB had set up.

If you’re not from Texas, HEB is our grocery store. That night, at their booth, they were handing kids free books.

She and I walked through and picked one up. A children’s book called I Knew You Could! Soft little blue train on the cover, gentle hills behind it. About as innocent a thing as you can hold in your hand. We took it and went on with our night.

Later I got home and read it to myself. And I broke down.

It turns out it’s the sequel to The Little Engine That Could, written in the voice of that same engine, all grown up now, talking to the next little train just starting out. The one who already made the climb, turning around to tell you what’s coming. And it doesn’t read like a kids’ book when you’re the one at the bottom of the hill. It reads like a letter.

It opens like this:

“I knew you could! And you knew it, too, that you’d come out on top after all you’ve been through.”

I hadn’t come out on top of anything. I was underwater. But somebody was talking to me like the climb was already behind me, like the ending was never in doubt.

The next page only pulled me in deeper:

“I wish I could show you the stops that you’ll visit. But that isn’t my choice to make for you, is it? Instead, I can tell you some lessons and tales that I’ve learned and relearned in my time on the rails.”

That’s the whole voice of the book right there. Not a cheerleader promising you it’ll be easy. Someone older and further down the line, who has been through it, sitting down to tell you what he learned the hard way so you don’t have to learn it alone.

Then it starts walking you down the track, and every stretch of it found me.

It tells you that first you have to find your own track, and that the one you start out on might not be the one you finish on, and that’s all right. It tells you that you’ll roll through valleys and over mountaintops, and through plenty of both you’ll just have to keep saying, “I think I can.”

And then it goes into the tunnel. You’ll go through tunnels, surrounded by dark, it says, and you’ll wish for a light or a spark, wondering if maybe your track has gone bad. That was the exact feeling I had no words for. That somewhere back there my rails had gone rotten. And the answer it gives is so simple it almost made me angry:

“The track you took in must also go out. So steady yourself and just keep on going, because you know it, some light will be showing.”

It keeps going. It tells you not to be afraid to ask a friend for a tow on the days you can’t go on, because that’s what friends are for, and you’d do the same for them. It tells you the world is wide and full of people with their own trains to ride, so stay true to yourself with no second-guessing and no looking back. It tells you not to rush so hard you run out of fuel before you arrive, that sometimes doing your best means slowing down to rest.

Then it says something I felt in my chest, that you’ll need every bit of that strength on the days when you’re stuck, or tired, or sad, or just out of luck. That was every day for me back then. And it names the rest of it almost word for word, the days when your belief in yourself doesn’t feel so pure, when your “I think I can” doesn’t sound quite so sure.

Then it brings the whole thing home:

“So trust in yourself, and you’ll climb every hill. Say, ‘I think I can,’ and you know what? You will!”

I sat there in pieces over a giveaway book about a cartoon train. A four-dollar throwaway somebody put in my kid’s hands on the way past a Christmas booth. And it did more for me that night than anything that was supposed to.

If you’ve never read the whole thing, go find it. It’s a few dollars. Every line of that little book was aimed at a grown man it was never written for, on the one night he needed it.

The little things

I didn’t understand that night what I understand now. But I’ve been chewing on it ever since, and here’s where I’ve landed.

It is never the big things.

We spend our lives braced for the big thing. The phone call, the ruling, the breakthrough, the lightning bolt that finally fixes everything. We scan the horizon for it. And while we’re staring out there waiting, the thing that actually changes us is sitting right next to us, small enough to miss. A free book. A kind word. A hand still wanting to hold yours.

We’re wired this way, and there’s research that proves it. Some scientists once had people watch a video and count how many times a ball got passed back and forth. Halfway through, a man in a gorilla suit strolls right through the middle of the screen, stops, beats his chest, and walks off. About half the people never saw him. He was in plain sight the whole time. They missed him because they’d already decided what they were looking for. That’s us, eyes locked on the big thing, blind to whatever else walks through the frame.

When I look back across my life now, I can see these moments scattered all through it. Not the loud ones. The quiet ones.

Just last week my wife was in the grocery store with our one-year-old son. A man we’d never met walked up, looked at the baby, and asked if he could pray for him. Then he told them, “I just want you to know that everything is going to be okay.” And he walked away. She came home and told me, and we both felt it right away, that strange weight you get when something small isn’t small at all. We knew something was coming. We just didn’t know what.

Our son had just come through strep throat. But the very next day he broke out in a rash over his whole body that turned into some kind of allergic reaction. He woke up in the middle of the night with his eyes swollen shut and his mouth puffed up, and we took him to the ER. The next day he seemed better. Then he got worse again. His primary doctor took one look and sent us to McLane Children’s in Temple, because by then he had what looked like rings of bruising all over his body and nobody was sure what it was. He started running a fever. They couldn’t rule out an infection.

The whole time, I had that man in the grocery store in the back of my mind. And somewhere underneath the fear, I knew it wasn’t something deadly. But we ran every test anyway, out of caution. We sat in that children’s hospital while they put an IV in him and drew blood. The results came back okay. We eventually left with an explanation for all of it. He’s still working through it as I write this, still not all the way out of it, but he’s going to be okay. Exactly like the stranger said.

That man wasn’t there to make us feel good. He was there to brace us. Everything is going to be okay, said the day before everything got hard, by someone who had no way of knowing what was coming. If you aren’t watching for the little things, you miss a moment like that entirely. You write it off as a friendly man at the store. But some of them are God, leaning in to whisper before the wind even starts to blow.

There’s another one I think about, from a few years after the court fight was behind us.

By then we had a custody arrangement. I had my daughter the first, third, and fifth weekends, plus some of the major holidays, and that was it. It meant driving two hours each way to Austin to get her, four hours round trip, just to have her for a couple of days. I wasn’t seeing her much, and her mother and I still weren’t really getting along. It wore on me.

My wife felt like there was a breakthrough coming, some shift we were supposed to have, and she started to pray about it. We both did. Around that same time COVID hit and the public schools shut down. My daughter was enrolled in one of those districts where, if you lived there and had kids in it, you know exactly what I mean. The remote-school setup was a disaster. The teachers couldn’t make online work, and she was falling through the cracks. We felt strongly we were supposed to pull her out and homeschool her. Her mother didn’t agree.

So she prayed. And one night she had a dream. She couldn’t fully make sense of it, neither of us could, but she held onto it and prayed over it every single day.

On the twenty-first day, my daughter’s mother called my wife and said she’d changed her mind. Let’s pull her out and homeschool her.

The twenty-first day. Here’s why that number stopped us cold. The dream had sent her to a passage in Daniel, chapter 10, where an angel tells Daniel something I’d never really stopped to think about:

“Do not be afraid, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart on understanding this and on humbling yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to your words. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia was standing in my way for twenty-one days.” (Daniel 10:12-13, NASB)

Read that slowly. Daniel’s prayer was heard on the very first day. But the answer didn’t show up for twenty-one days, because there was a battle going on the whole time that he couldn’t see. Heaven moved immediately. The breakthrough just took three weeks to break through.

She prayed twenty-one days. The answer came on the twenty-first. The same number from the dream, the same number Daniel waited while a fight he couldn’t see played out over his answer. I don’t have a tidy explanation for that, and I’m not going to manufacture one. I just know my wife caught something small in a dream, held onto it for three weeks while nothing visible changed, and the answer arrived right on the day the scripture pointed to.

Here’s one more, because this is the one where I learned the voice can speak through you, not just to you.

A few years back, in my thirties, I went through the fire academy and EMS school and got certified. I volunteer at my local fire department. One day we got called out to a cardiac arrest, and it turned out to be a friend of ours. I was one of the first on scene. We started CPR. I’ve worked a lot of cardiac arrests over the years, hundreds of them, and when you’ve done enough of them you develop a sense, an underlying feeling about whether someone is going to come back. I don’t always say it out loud. But kneeling over her, I just knew. I knew she was going to be okay.

She’d been down a long time, what felt like thirty minutes. We got a pulse back, then lost her again when we loaded her into the ambulance. As they pulled out, I put her husband in my truck and we ran behind the ambulance toward the hospital. And we prayed. The two of us, out loud, the whole way down. Somewhere in the middle of that prayer I stopped, and something slipped out of my mouth that everything in my training told me never to say. You don’t promise a family member their person is going to make it. You say we’re doing everything we can. That’s the rule, and it’s a good one.

I looked at him and said, “I think she’s gonna be okay.”

The second it left my mouth my heart sank, because I knew how long she’d been down, and I thought I’d just handed this man false hope. She was pregnant at the time, carrying a child, which only made the thought of losing her worse. He looked back at me and said, “I have the same feeling.” And he carried that hope the rest of the way to the hospital. So did I. I couldn’t have justified it on paper. I just had a peace I couldn’t explain.

She fully recovered. They cooled her body down in the hospital and slowly brought her back over a few days, and she came out of it whole. She went on to have her baby. By every number I knew, that shouldn’t have happened. But the small voice that told me to say it out loud was right, and I’d have missed it if I’d only trusted the numbers.

That’s the part that gets me. At the time, the small thing never looks like much. A friendly stranger. A free book. A song on the radio. A dream you can’t shake. A peace you can’t explain kneeling over someone on the worst day of their life. Only later, sometimes the very next day and sometimes years down the road, do you see it was a hinge a whole life was turning on.

The whisper instead of the wind

There’s a moment in scripture I keep coming back to.

The prophet Elijah is at the lowest point of his life. Wrung out, afraid, ready to be done. And God tells him to stand on the mountain, because the Lord is about to pass by.

“So He said, ‘Go forth and stand on the mountain before the Lord.’ And behold, the Lord was passing by! And a great and strong wind was rending the mountains and breaking in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of a gentle blowing.” (1 Kings 19:11-12, NASB)

The wind. The earthquake. The fire. All the big things. The explosions Elijah was surely bracing for. And God wasn’t in any of them.

He was in the gentle blowing. The whisper.

And that undid me, because back then I didn’t even believe. I was a man at the bottom, with no faith to stand on and no interest in pretending otherwise. But I’d had it backwards the whole time. I kept waiting for God up on the mountain, in the wind and the fire, in some big dramatic rescue that would undo everything I’d broken. He was down in the valley with me the entire time. In the quiet. In the whisper. In a free book a kid handed me in the dark.

I think that’s how God speaks to most of us, most of the time. Not in the wind and the fire. Not in the sky-splitting moment we keep waiting on. He speaks in the whisper, the gentle blowing after the storm, the thing so quiet you’ll only catch it if you’re watching for it.

And if you spend your whole life scanning the horizon for God to show up big, you will walk right past Him showing up small. That night at the Trail of Lights, I wasn’t listening for God in anything little. I was begging Him for the wind and the fire, for a rescue the size of my wreck. And He answered me through a four-dollar train book a kid handed me on the way past a booth. I almost set it down. I almost missed His voice because it didn’t come the way I expected it to.

Watch for it

That little girl is 14 now. I’m married to a woman I love. We have two more beautiful kids in our home. The two older siblings I grieved that Christmas are back in our lives. My ex, my wife, and I all get along. The family that came crashing down didn’t get put back the way it was. It got built into something I never could have drawn up on my worst night, and wouldn’t trade now.

I didn’t get here by landing the big answer I kept waiting on. I got here by slowly learning to notice the small ones. The whisper instead of the wind. The free book instead of the verdict.

So watch for the little things this week. The quiet voice. The small kindness. The thing that looks too ordinary to matter. That’s almost always where God is, and it’s almost always the thing that changes everything. You just have to be paying enough attention to catch it.

The little blue engine had it right the whole time. Trust yourself. Keep climbing. The light is coming.

And here’s the thing. The whole time I’ve been writing this, there’s a song I can’t get out of my head. An old one, about a father telling his family he’s already with them no matter the distance. One line keeps circling back on me: the whisper in the wind. I don’t think that’s an accident. I think even now, sitting here trying to put all of this into words, He’s still doing the same quiet thing He’s always done. Still speaking under the noise. Still the whisper, never the wind.

I knew you could.

And you know what? You will.

The owner is a friend of mine, a business coach, the kind of man who hands you a book instead of an opinion. That day he pointed me toward one called The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli. I opened it up and started reading, and I ran straight into a phrase I had never heard before.

Survivorship bias.

It piqued my interest immediately, because the more I read, the more I realized I had been living inside this thing for most of my life without ever having a name for it. It always amazes me that I can read about biases and ideas that are right in front of us and never even notice them. That is exactly what happened. I read about something I had never heard of and realized quickly it was a very real part of all of us.

Let me tell you the story that gets used to explain it, because it is a good one.

The bullet holes that were not there

It is 1943. American bombers are flying over Germany and getting torn apart by enemy fire. The military wants to add armor to the planes to bring more of them home. But armor is heavy. You cannot cover the whole plane or it will never get off the ground. So the question becomes very specific. Where do you put the armor?

So they did the sensible thing. They studied the planes coming back from missions and mapped out where the bullet holes were. The damage was concentrated on the wings and the fuselage. That is where the holes were, so that, everyone agreed, is where the armor should go.

Then a statistician named Abraham Wald looked at the same data and saw the exact opposite.

Wald pointed out that they were only looking at the planes that came back. The bombers covered in holes on the wings and fuselage had been hit in those spots and still made it home. That meant those were the survivable places to take a bullet. The planes hit in the engine, in the cockpit, in the places where the returning planes showed no damage at all, those planes were not in the hangar to be studied. They were at the bottom of the ocean or scattered across a field in Germany.

The armor needed to go where there were no bullet holes. Because the planes hit there never came back to tell the story.

Sit with that for a second. The most important data was the data they could not see. The evidence was missing precisely because it had failed.

A stadium full of dreams

The next morning I was reading about it, and my mind went straight back to a football stadium in Dallas.

When I was younger, in my early twenties, American Idol came out, and I remember the feeling around it. This was it. This was the show that was finally going to find all the people who never would have gotten a shot otherwise. Real talent, discovered. I bought into it completely. I bought in enough that I went and auditioned myself, in the stadium that is home to the Dallas Cowboys.

I went up there with two girls who could really sing. I mean really sing. And they did not make it.

I remember them crying. I remember the feeling in that stadium, the sense that something must be rigged, because how could voices like that not get through? It felt unfair to the point of being broken.

It took me a lot of years and a quiet coffee shop to understand what I was actually looking at that day.

Here is the thing about a show like that. What you see on television is a produced product. I do not mean it is fake exactly, but it is shaped. It is edited into a story. The handful of people who make it onto your screen, the golden voices and the train wrecks, were selected to be there because they make good television. What you never see is the ocean of people standing in that stadium with me. The thousands who showed up with real dreams and real talent and went home without a word from a camera.

Those two girls were not robbed by a rigged machine. They were something quieter and sadder than that. They were the planes that did not come back. They were the bullet holes the camera never shows you.

And the cruel part is what the show does to the people watching at home. Every season, you see the underdog who made it. You see the person who never would have gotten a chance, and got one, and soared. And something in your mind whispers, that could be me. What you do not see, what you are structurally prevented from seeing, is the millions for whom it was not them and never would be. The show is a survivorship bias machine. It only shows you survivors. The cemetery is silent, and it is enormous.

Why our minds get this so wrong

Once I understood the shape of it, I started seeing it everywhere.

A writer named Nassim Taleb has a phrase for the data we never see. He calls it silent evidence. And he has a line that I like. He says the cemetery of failed restaurants is very silent.

Think about that. You walk into a packed restaurant on a Friday night and you think, I should open a place like this. What you are not seeing is the graveyard of restaurants that did everything the same way and closed within a year. They are not on the street anymore. They are not there to argue with you. The successful one is loud and visible. The failures are silent, buried, gone.

Taleb tells an old story to drive it home. Centuries ago, a man was shown a painting of worshippers who had prayed during a storm and survived a shipwreck, offered as proof that prayer saves you. He looked at it and asked a simple question. Where are the pictures of the ones who prayed and drowned?

That question is the whole thing. Where are the pictures of the ones who drowned?

We build our entire understanding of success on the people standing in front of us, and we almost never stop to count the ones who are missing. We study the billionaire dropouts and conclude that dropping out works, and we never count the millions who dropped out and got nowhere. We look at the people who took the big risk and won, and we call them brave and visionary, and we forget that the graveyard is full of people who took the same risk with the same courage and lost. Sometimes the only thing separating the two is luck, plain luck, and we are desperate not to believe that, because luck is not a story we can control.

Our minds are built to love clean stories. We see a winner and we reverse-engineer a reason. He worked harder. She wanted it more. They believed in themselves. And maybe that is part of it. But the survivor and the one in the cemetery often did all the same things. One of them is just not around to be interviewed.

The signs I tore down in the dark

I wish I could tell you I learned all of this by watching other people. I did not. I learned it because I was once one of the planes that did not come back.

In my early twenties, I started a wireless company. And if I am being honest with myself, I started it for the exact reason this whole thing is about. I looked around and I saw other people doing it and being successful. That was most of my plan. I saw the survivors. I saw the stores that were busy and the owners who were doing well, and I thought, I can do that. I knew I was a good salesman. I knew I could move the product and bring in the customers, and I figured that was the whole game.

What I could not see was everything underneath. The things you only learn from the people who failed, and the failed ones were not standing in front of me to teach me. I did not understand what it actually took to keep the doors open. I had copied the visible part, the part on the surface, and I had no idea what was hidden in the places the bullet holes never showed.

For a while it even worked. At one point we were number one in the region. Number one. And then the things I did not know I did not know caught up with me, the way they always do, and the whole thing came apart.

I will never forget tearing down my own signs in the middle of the night in the mall. Walking out on my leases. Closing the doors on a company that had been at the top of its market, doing it quietly in the dark so I would not have to be seen. That was me joining the silent cemetery. That was me becoming the data nobody studies, the story that does not get told at the conference, the plane that went down where the cameras were not pointing.

And here is what I understand now that I could not understand then. The man who opened a wireless store down the road and made it, and the man I was who opened one and lost it, may have done almost everything the same. He is the one who gets asked how he did it. I am the one who tore down his signs at midnight. If you only ever talked to him, you would walk away with a completely wrong picture of what that business actually takes, and what it actually risks.

I am not telling you this to be hard on myself. I made it through. I built other things, better things, on top of what that failure taught me. I am telling you because for years I was invisible evidence, and I did not even know there was a name for it.

What the missing planes are trying to tell us

I am not a professional at any of this. I want to be honest about that. I read one book in a coffee shop a few days ago and it cracked something open in me, and I have been chasing it down ever since. So take this for what it is, a man working something out in the open.

When I look back at that stadium, I do not feel cheated anymore, and I do not think those girls were cheated either. I think I was being taught something I was not ready to learn yet. That the world will constantly show you the survivors and hide the fallen, and if you build your life only on what is visible, you will misunderstand almost everything. You will think the holes belong where everybody else is pointing.

We are wired to look at the ones who made it and assume they were chosen, that the visible winners are the whole story of who matters. The world keeps a highlight reel and calls it the truth. It shows you the ones who washed ashore and quietly forgets the ones who drowned. But I do not believe the people in the silent cemetery matter less. The drowned in that old painting were no less worthy than the ones who survived. They were just out of our frame.

Maybe that is the real correction here. Not just to think more clearly, although it will do that. To start caring about the ones the camera never goes back to. To put the armor where the holes are not. To go looking, on purpose, for the silent evidence, the people and the stories that did not survive long enough to be seen, and to refuse to believe they were worth any less for it.

Because the loudest stories are not the truest ones. The truest ones are usually quiet, and you have to go looking for them. And I have a quiet feeling we are not the only ones looking.

Sometimes you find the start of all that in a metal building with an orange door, when a friend hands you a book.

Where this came from

So when did AI start? Who started it? And what was the intent behind inventing it?

Turns out it's older than most people think. The whole field was born in the summer of 1956, at a workshop at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Four men, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, proposed it, and in their funding pitch they used what's believed to be the first appearance of the phrase “artificial intelligence.” And the intent? It's right there in the proposal. They wanted to proceed on the idea that every feature of intelligence could in principle be described so precisely that a machine could be built to simulate it.

That's the founding intent. Not to replace the human mind, but to understand it and imitate it. To build a partner, not a master. And to put it in perspective: at the time, there were only a few hundred computers in the entire world, each the size of a room, and together they had a fraction of the power of the phone in your pocket right now. The first time around, the thing flopped. It didn't deliver, AI got dismissed as a pipe dream, and the funding dried up. It took about seventy years to become what it is today.

Then it showed up in everybody's hands at once. For most people, that moment was ChatGPT. OpenAI released it to the public on November 30, 2022, and it took off like nothing before it, becoming the fastest-growing consumer app in internet history, hitting 100 million users within two months. That's the one that put this whole conversation on the map. Seventy years of quiet work, and then it was everywhere overnight.

So that's where it came from. Now let me tell you the bad, because there's plenty of it, and most people won't hear it.

The bad nobody wants to hear

For most people, and I'd put it close to ninety percent, AI is going to hurt them. Not because the technology is evil, but because of how they're using it.

AI is not a machine that thinks for you. It is not a machine that gives you good advice. AI is a tool. That's it. An extremely good tool, but a tool. And most people are reaching for it as a brain. They're using it to feel smarter instead of to get smarter, and those are not the same thing.

When I first got into it a few years back, it was buggy. It had problems. It was a fun thing to mess around with, interesting, sure, but it wasn't good. Not really. And then the most frightening thing about it happened, for both good and bad: it got better fast. I mean fast. AI started getting better at roughly the speed AI can produce good data, if that makes any sense. It's improving at its own pace, feeding itself, and I don't think we've come close to seeing what it's going to do to how we function as a society.

And the research is starting to catch up to what I've been watching happen. A 2025 study out of the Swiss Business School surveyed and interviewed 666 people and found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, driven by what they call cognitive offloading. In plain terms: the more you hand your thinking to the machine, the less you do it yourself. And the youngest users, the ones leaning on it hardest, scored the lowest on critical thinking. They've even got a name for what happens when you take the crutch away: “AI rebound,” where performance crashes on a task you used to be able to do just fine without it.

That's the danger. Not that the robot takes over, but that you quietly forget how to do the thing yourself.

Even the people who built it are nervous

And I don't want you to hear me say none of this is serious, because the people sounding the loudest alarms aren't outsiders who don't understand it. They're the ones who built it.

Take Geoffrey Hinton. They call him the “godfather of AI,” because his work on neural networks is the foundation under most of what you're using today. In 2023 he quit his job at Google specifically so he could speak freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create. His plain-language summary of why? “I'm just a scientist who suddenly realized that these things are getting smarter than us.” He's warned about bad actors using AI to manipulate elections or instigate violence, and he's gone as far as to say the threat might end up being more urgent than climate change, because with AI it isn't even clear what we should do about it.

He's not alone. Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and more than a thousand other technologists and researchers signed an open letter in 2023 calling for a pause on the most advanced AI development, warning that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity.” Not long after, the CEOs of the three leading AI labs, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, signed onto a statement putting AI risk in the same sentence as pandemics and nuclear war.

Now, those are big, civilization-level fears, and that's a different conversation than the one I'm having with you. But notice what they have in common with my smaller, everyday point: the danger isn't the tool. The danger is the tool getting away from the people using it, out of control, out of understanding, out of hand. Whether you're talking about the fate of humanity or just the fate of your own mind, the principle is the same. The moment you stop being the one steering, you're in trouble.

So that's the warning. Now let me tell you the other side, because in the right hands, with you doing the steering, this thing is remarkable.

What it actually does for me

Here's my honest confession to start: that product everyone knows, ChatGPT, I rarely use it anymore. Not because it's bad, it's not. But for me it's become a glorified dictionary. A quick internet search. Something for photo-heavy stuff. The everyday surface-level things. When I'm doing real work, I've moved on to tools that fit what I'm actually trying to do. Which is the whole point I'm about to make. The tool only matters as much as the person running it knows what they need from it.

For me, AI has been a game changer. I'm not going to oversell it and I'm not going to pretend it's magic. I'll tell you exactly what it does.

It replaced my personal assistant. It pulls data out of enormous files, I'm talking one, two, three hundred pages, and analyzes it accurately in under a minute. Sometimes seconds. Sometimes it takes two or three minutes if the data runs deep. But it does it, and it does it accurately. And I want to be clear about that word. When I say it analyzes it, I mean there aren't errors in it, not really. I do a lot of Excel formatting, a lot of research, and it holds up.

The bookkeeping piece is a good example. I run my own internal books, and I also hired one of the largest bookkeeping companies in the world. But I don't have to call them every time I want a complicated report. I take my own data and analyze it myself, in the same format they'd give me. I'm not paying somebody to hand me back numbers I can pull and structure on my own.

Then there's the writing. This is my biggest one. I'll be honest about my own weakness here: I've always known exactly what I want to say, I just have a hard time articulating it. I think fast, I write fast, I speak fast and I'm not the best speller in the world. So AI helps me identify what I'm actually trying to spell or speak, gather the information quick, and clean up the grammar. I write policies. I write SOPs and SOGs. I blog. And the proofreading and editing, for grammar, for clarity, it's immensely good at that.

Now, it depends entirely on what kind of AI you're using. There are tons of them, and I'm not going to recommend one to you, because the right one depends on what you're doing. There's AI for voice. There's AI for video, and some of that is getting good fast while some of it's still horrible. The image ones still aren't where they need to be. You can do some pretty good things, but I can almost always spot it. It's not there yet. Not really.

Here's the secret nobody tells you

To use AI effectively, you have to already know what you're doing and how to do it without AI.

Read that again, because it's the whole game. Let me show you what I mean.

When I'm analyzing data from a business, I have to know what I'm looking for. I have to know what I need. I have to know what I want out of it before I ever start. I can't just throw a file at it and say, “give me a good analysis of this business.” It'll give me something, it'll pull great-sounding stuff, but it won't pull what's actually worthwhile, not on the level that matters. Because it doesn't know what matters to my business. I do. The quality of what comes out is set by the quality of what I bring in. If I don't know the right questions, it can't give me the right answers. It can only give me impressive-looking ones.

That's the trap. AI will write you an essay on the sun and the moon, and it'll sound intelligent. But read it two or three times and you'll see how empty it is. Smooth on the surface, stupid underneath. It sounds like it knows something. It doesn't. You have to be the one who knows.

So AI isn't a shortcut around competence. It's a multiplier of it. Put it in the hands of somebody who already knows their trade, and it makes them faster and sharper. Put it in the hands of somebody who doesn't, and it just helps them produce nonsense more confidently and at a higher volume. The tool amplifies what's already there. If there's nothing there, it amplifies nothing.

That's exactly why those critical-thinking studies should worry you. The people who lean on it hardest to avoid thinking are the people building nothing underneath it. They're outsourcing the very thing that makes the tool worth anything in the first place.

We've done this before

Here's the thing. None of this is new. Not really. We've stood right here before, staring at a brand-new technology, not sure if it was going to save us or sink us.

Take the cell phone. You may not remember this, but I do. The old phones where texting was painful, where you mashed a number key three times to get one letter. And I remember when the iPhone came and changed the entire market overnight. That happened in our lifetime.

Now go back further, to the automobile. Before the car, you simply could not do business the way we do it today. And the numbers tell the story. U.S. automobile production went from 4,000 units in 1900 to nearly two million by 1920. Passenger car sales climbed from 181,000 in 1910 to 4.5 million in 1929. A whole economy grew up around it: dealerships, service stations, garages, repair shops, tire and accessory stores. By 1929 there were more than 330,000 people employed at auto dealerships alone. Whole spin-off industries blossomed: rubber, steel, oil, gasoline, road construction.

But here's the part that should sound familiar. As the technology matured, the field got brutal. The number of active automobile manufacturers in the country shrank from 253 in 1908 to 44 by 1929, and by the end of that decade about 80% of the industry's output came from just Ford, GM, and Chrysler. The big players who understood the tool dominated. The ones who didn't adapt got bought out or wiped out.

That's where I think we are with AI. The technology isn't going to decide who wins. The people are. The ones who treat it like a tool and sharpen their own thinking will pull ahead. The ones who hand it their brain and stop thinking will fall behind, and they won't even feel it happening.

The bottom line

There's an old line from Steve Jobs I love. Back in 1980, before most people had ever touched a computer, he called it “the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with,” and compared it to “a bicycle for the mind.” I love that, because of what a bicycle actually is. A bicycle doesn't pedal itself. It doesn't decide where you're going. It takes the effort you're already putting in and multiplies it, letting you go farther and faster than your own two legs ever could. But you still have to pedal. You still have to steer.

That's AI, done right. A bicycle for the mind. It is not a car that drives you while you sleep in the back seat. The moment you treat it like that, you've stopped pedaling, and you've stopped going anywhere worth going.

AI in the right hands is extremely powerful, in a good way. In the wrong hands, or really in passive hands, it makes you weaker while convincing you you're stronger.

And this is where I want to be careful, because it's easy to point at a thing and call it evil. Scripture tells us, “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8, NKJV). Notice what that verse actually asks of us. It doesn't tell us to go hunting for the lion and blame the lion for everything. It tells us to be sober and be vigilant, to stay alert in everything we do. Because the enemy doesn't need a brand-new invention to work through. He'll creep into anything we stop paying attention to. A business. A relationship. A phone. A tool. The danger was never the thing itself. The danger is us going passive and letting our guard down, and getting devoured because we weren't watching.

That's why I won't put the blame on AI. Blaming the tool lets you off the hook for the vigilance God actually asks of you. The car wasn't evil. The cell phone wasn't evil. And AI isn't evil. But any of them will swallow a man whole if he stops paying attention and lets it do his thinking, his living, and his watching for him.

There's a principle underneath all of this that's older than any technology. Scripture also tells us, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15, NKJV). The word there is worker. Approval comes through the work, through the study, through the diligence, through the rightly dividing. Not through outsourcing it. A tool can help a worker. It cannot make you one.

That's the whole thing. AI didn't change that rule. It just raised the stakes on it. So be sober. Be vigilant. And keep your hands on the handlebars.

Sources & References

This isn't just my opinion. The history, the numbers, and the warnings are all on the record. Here's where it comes from:

On where AI started

• Dartmouth College, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Coined at Dartmouth,” home.dartmouth.edu

• Computer History Museum, “The 1956 Dartmouth Workshop and its Immediate Consequences,” computerhistory.org

• Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, “The Birth of ‘Artificial Intelligence,’” dartmouthalumnimagazine.com

On ChatGPT's launch

• History.com, “ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot, is released,” history.com

• “Timeline of ChatGPT” (fastest-growing consumer app, 100 million users in two months), timelines.issarice.com

On AI and critical thinking

• Michael Gerlich, “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking,” Societies, 2025 (the 666-person study), mdpi.com, with coverage at phys.org

• The Oxford Student, “Cognitive alert: AI is eroding our brains,” 2025 (source for the “AI rebound” effect), oxfordstudent.com

• IE University, Center for Health and Well-Being, “AI's cognitive implications: the decline of our thinking skills?” 2025, ie.edu

On the people who built AI raising the alarm

• The Associated Press, “AI's ‘godfather’ quits Google, warns of tech dangers ahead,” 2023 (Geoffrey Hinton)

• ABC News, “Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and other tech leaders warn ‘out-of-control’ AI poses ‘profound risks,’” 2023 (the 1,000+ signature open letter), abcnews.com

• TIME, “AI Is as Risky as Pandemics and Nuclear War, Top CEOs Say,” 2023 (statement signed by the heads of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic), time.com

• Reuters / The Hill, “AI pioneer says threat may overshadow climate change,” 2023 (Hinton interview)

On the automobile as a parallel

• Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, “Wheels of Change: The Automotive Industry's Sweeping Effects on the Fifth District” (car sales and dealership employment figures), richmondfed.org

• Historia, Eastern Illinois University, “The Evolution of the Automobile Industry” (production growth, 1900 to 1920), eiu.edu

• ETL Solutions, “What happened in the automotive industry in the 1920s?” (manufacturer consolidation figures), etlsolutions.com

• U.S. History (ushistory.org), “The Age of the Automobile” (spin-off industries)

On the “bicycle for the mind”

• Steve Jobs, 1980 presentation (Computer History Museum), with the quote also documented at The Marginalian, “Steve Jobs on Why Computers Are Like a Bicycle for the Mind,” themarginalian.org

Scripture

• 1 Peter 5:8 (NKJV) and 2 Timothy 2:15 (NKJV)

Walk into a room that smells like fresh paint and within ten minutes you don’t smell it anymore. The smell didn’t leave. You did. Your mind decided it had better things to track and quietly filed the paint under “already handled.” Psychologists call this habituation. We stop noticing the things we see every single day.

That’s a handy trick when it’s paint. It’s a disaster when it’s a problem.

Because the problems around us get filed the exact same way. We see them so often they go invisible. The broken thing becomes “just how it is.” The frustrating step everybody complains about becomes a fact of life, like weather. And the longer it sits there, the harder it is for anyone to see it at all.

Except for one person. There’s almost always one. The one in the room who keeps raising a hand and saying, “Hey, I think there’s a problem here. Hey, I think we could fix this.” And what does the room usually say back?

“You’re being negative. You’re overthinking it. Quit being so cynical.”

I want to talk about that voice. Because I think that voice is one of the most valuable things in any room, and we are really good at telling it to shut up.

A woman on a streetcar

In 1902, a businesswoman from Birmingham, Alabama named Mary Anderson was visiting New York City. It was snowing. She was riding a streetcar, and she watched the driver fight the weather the whole trip. He had to open his window, sometimes stop the streetcar entirely and climb out to clear the snow off the glass so he could see. Everybody on that car was getting blasted with cold air every time he did it.

Now here’s the part I can’t get past. Everybody on that streetcar saw the same thing she saw. At that time it rarely occurred to anyone to fix it. It was something drivers simply accepted and dealt with. They were habituated. The problem had gone invisible to a whole city of people who rode those cars every single day.

Anderson wasn’t an engineer. She was an entrepreneur, and she identified the problem and the opportunity. She started sketching a design right there. When she got home she built it: a rubber blade on a spring-loaded arm, worked by a lever inside the car. She got a patent for it in 1903.

And people laughed at her. They said the wipers’ movement would distract the driver and cause accidents. She tried to sell the patent to a Canadian firm and they told her it had no practical value and wasn’t worth any money. Her patent ran out before she ever made a dime, and she never profited from the invention.

Read that again. The windshield wiper. The thing on every single car on earth right now. The woman who invented it died without making a dollar off it because the experts couldn’t see what she saw.

She wasn’t smarter than everyone on that streetcar. She just hadn’t gone numb to it yet.

The wheel had been around for five thousand years

Here’s one that’s almost funny.

In 1970, a luggage executive named Bernard Sadow was dragging two heavy suitcases through an airport, no porter in sight, and he watched a worker roll a heavy machine past him on a wheeled cart. He turned to his wife and said, “That’s what we need. We need wheels on luggage.” He went home, pulled four casters off a piece of furniture, strapped them to a suitcase, and pulled it around his house.

Then he tried to sell it. He showed it to every department store in New York and the buying offices, and everybody told him he was crazy. He spent months getting rejected.

But the thing that gets me isn’t the rejection. It’s the timeline. The wheel had existed for at least five thousand years. The oldest wheel ever found is about five thousand years old. Humanity had put wheels on carts, cannons, wheelbarrows, anything heavy. An inventor named John Allan May had even tried to sell a wheeled suitcase decades before Sadow, pitched it to more than a hundred groups of people, and they laughed in his face.

Five thousand years of wheels. Centuries of suitcases. And the two of them sat in the same room for that whole time and almost nobody connected them, because carrying your bags was just what you did. It was paint nobody could smell anymore.

We tend to assume all the good inventions have already been made. They haven’t. They’re sitting right in front of you, filed under “just how it is.”

## Charge before use

You might be too young to remember this, but in the 90s every cool new gadget you bought came with a sticker on it: CHARGE BEFORE USE. You’d wait in line, save up, finally get the thing home, tear the box open, and then you couldn’t use it. Plug it in. Wait 24 hours. Sit there and stare at it.

Everybody accepted that. That was just how electronics worked. Paint you couldn’t smell.

Then Apple shipped the iPod, and later the iPhone, already charged. You opened the box and the thing turned on and worked. No sticker. No waiting. No line behind the line.

It seems like nothing. It’s the kind of thing that’s so small you’d never put it on a list of great inventions. But somebody at Apple looked at a sticker the whole industry treated as normal and said, “Why is this here? Why are we doing this to people?” One little observation that the rest of an entire industry had stopped seeing. And now the wait-24-hours thing is a problem of the past, and your kids will never believe it existed.

And speaking of stickers, here’s an even smaller one. I was listening to a TED talk and the guy was talking about that little sticker some genius decided to put on every apple in the grocery store. The barcode sticker. It’s there to make checkout faster, and from the store’s side it does its job.

But think about your side of it. You get the apple home, you go to take a bite, and you’ve got to peel that thing off first. It won’t come. You finally get an edge of it up, it sticks to your finger, and now you’re flicking your hand trying to get it off and it won’t let go. Or, and be honest, sometimes you don’t even notice it’s there. You get so used to that little sticker that you almost forget about it. Some of us have probably eaten one without realizing it.

That’s habituation in one bite. A small, dumb, daily annoyance that we’ve stopped seeing so completely we’ll literally swallow it. Nobody’s storming the produce aisle demanding a better sticker, because we’ve all gone numb to it. It’s just how apples come now. Paint we can’t smell.

That’s the pattern. The big ones and the small ones both start the same way. It almost always starts with one person refusing to accept the sticker.

Stay dumb

So how do you keep from going numb?

I think the answer is to stay dumb. Stay a beginner. The reason the whole streetcar missed the wiper and Mary Anderson didn’t is that she was a visitor. As a Southern woman, she found the shivering driver’s problem novel. It was new to her, so it stuck with her. She hadn’t lived with it long enough to stop seeing it.

That’s the secret nobody likes to hear. Expertise can blind you. The more you “know” how something works, the faster your brain files it away and quits looking. The person most likely to spot the broken thing is often the one who knows the least about why it’s “supposed” to be that way.

So look at your world through the eyes of somebody seeing it for the first time. Look broader. Look closer. Ask the dumb question. Why is this here? Why do we do it this way? Why does everybody just put up with this?

And whatever you do, don’t try to solve it by forming a committee of people who’ve all gone numb to the same thing. A room full of experts who’ve stopped seeing the problem will spend an hour confirming that the problem doesn’t exist. You don’t need more people who can’t smell the paint. You need the one who can.

The hard part

Now I’ll be honest with you about something, because I’m writing this as a guy on the journey, not a guy who’s arrived.

I haven’t invented anything spectacular. What I can tell you is the way my mind works, the way it processes, the way it keeps catching things and going “wait, that’s broken, somebody should fix that.” And here’s the funny truth about most of my big ideas: they’ve already been invented. I’m just too dumb to know where to look for them.

But I don’t think that’s failure. I think that’s the muscle. The catching is the skill. The seeing is the thing. Most of those ideas already existing just proves the instinct is good.

That’s actually where a tool like AI has changed the game for me. AI doesn’t create anything for you. Let me say that again, because people get it twisted. It doesn’t have the idea for you. But if you already know what you’re looking for, if you can see the problem and describe what you want, it can process and build and analyze a million times faster than you can on your own. I’ve been able to develop and write things I used to spend tens of thousands of dollars on. The seeing is still your job. The speed is its job.

So here’s the real question, and I think it’s the one underneath everything I just wrote.

Do you want to be successful, or do you want to be successful *with meaning?* Do you want to just make money, or do you want to see a problem and fix it and leave the room better than you found it?

If it’s the second one, here’s your warning. People are going to call you cynical. They’re going to tell you you’re negative, that you overthink things, that you should let it go. Most people are followers and they will never see change the way you see it. So find your team. Find the few who can still smell the paint, the ones who light up when you say “I think we could fix this” instead of rolling their eyes. And then take the risk. The big bold ones don’t.

One more thing, and for me it’s the whole point.

When you really sit with this, with the fact that the human mind can look straight at a problem for five thousand years and not see it, and then one person sees it and the whole world changes, you have to ask where that comes from. Where does that one voice get its sight? Why is it in there at all, this stubborn thing that won’t stop noticing, won’t stop building, won’t stop trying to make the broken thing whole?

I don’t think innovation is an accident. I think it’s a fingerprint. The drive to see what’s broken and make it right is the most God-shaped thing about us. We’re made in the image of a Maker, so of course we make. Of course we can’t leave the broken thing alone. Innovation, when you follow it all the way down, doesn’t lead you to yourself.

It leads you to God. There’s no other explanation for it.

So don’t quiet that voice. It might be the only one in the room that’s still awake.

Ask for the impossible.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And so I open the note app on my phone and begin to jot down notes, trying to drive and speak into notes and then using my fingers, all without really paying attention to my drive.

But here’s where my head goes, because it’s where my head always goes. I’m a fine-print guy. Before I sign anything I want to know the terms. What’s the risk, what’s my exposure, where’s the warranty and what does it actually cover when the thing breaks down at 2am on a Tuesday. I want it in writing. I want to know I’m covered.

And it hit me that morning that I live my whole life that way.

I don’t really go after the big thing. I go after the trimmed-down version of the big thing. The one that’s reasonable. The one that won’t embarrass me if it falls through. I want the dream, sure, but I want it with a receipt and a return policy. I keep a plan B folded up in my back pocket for everything, and I tell myself that’s wisdom.

It’s not wisdom. It’s fear wearing a nicer outfit.

Most of us never actually ask.

Think about the last big thing you wanted. Really wanted. Did you go all in on it, or did you ask for a smaller version you were pretty sure you could get? Maybe it’s I’m not good enough, or I’m not Mr. So-and-So, etc.

That’s the trap. We shrink the ask down to the size of what we can already pull off, and then we call the small thing “being realistic.” But a goal you’re certain you can hit isn’t really a goal. It’s just a chore with a deadline. The things that actually change a life are the ones that look impossible from where you’re standing right now.

I read this verse in the Bible: “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26) Read the first half by itself. With men this is impossible. That’s not a knock on you. That’s just true. The biggest things you’re meant for were never going to happen on your strength alone, on your cleverness, on you finally figuring out the perfect angle. And the second half is the part we skip right past, that the impossible isn’t a wall. It’s a door. It just isn’t a door you open by yourself.

You know, I’m reminded of my computer screen backdrop. It’s a picture of a man jumping from one side of a canyon to the other in the sunset, with the word “Impossible” on the side he’s jumping to, but the first two letters are falling into the canyon as he jumps. Think about that. There are only two letters holding you back from the possible.

The guy who actually stepped out.

There’s a story in the Bible that paints a good picture. A group of men are in a boat in the middle of the night. The wind’s up, the water’s rough, everybody’s white-knuckling the sides. And one of them, a guy named Peter, sees something impossible out on the water and instead of bracing harder, he asks to go toward it. “Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.” (Matthew 14:28)

He didn’t ask for calmer water. Didn’t ask for a better boat or a guarantee he’d stay dry. He asked to do the one thing a person flat-out cannot do.

And he got the answer: Come.

So he went. Stepped out of the boat and actually walked. On water. In a storm. For a few seconds this ordinary man did the impossible, and then comes the part that gets me every single time. “When he saw that the wind was boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’”

He didn’t go under because the impossible turned out to be too impossible. He’d already proven it wasn’t. He went under the second he pulled his eyes off what called him out there and locked them onto the storm instead.

Read that again, because it’s the whole game. He was already doing it. The wind didn’t change. His focus did.

The storm was never the problem

That’s the part I needed to hear at 4:35 in the morning. The asking is rarely our problem. The staring is.

I’ll work up the nerve to want something big, and then I’ll spend the next three days studying everything that could go wrong. Running the numbers. Watching the waves. Calculating exactly how and when it’s all going to come apart. And by the time I’m done, I’ve talked myself right back into the boat, and I call that being careful.

But fear is patient. It doesn’t need to beat you. It just needs to keep you looking at the storm long enough that you forget you were already walking.

You don’t beat the wind by staring it down. You beat it by keeping your eyes on the thing that called you out past where it’s safe.

Stop asking for the warranty

So here’s where I landed, and it’s as true for you as it is for me, whatever you believe about who’s standing out on that water.

Ask for the impossible. The real version, not the safe one. And then quit reading the fine print. Quit keeping a plan B in your back pocket as proof you don’t fully believe the plan A. A backup plan feels like maturity, but a lot of the time it’s just unbelief with good manners, a quiet little hedge that says I don’t actually trust this to hold.

I’ve spent a lot of my life being my own risk manager, white-knuckling a chair I was never supposed to be sitting in. And what I’m slowly learning is that there’s Someone who actually belongs in that seat. Someone who gives, in the words of that same book, “to all liberally and without reproach” (James 1:5) meaning openly, generously, without holding your past against you. The catch, if you can even call it that, is that you have to “ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.” (James 1:6)

A wave of the sea, driven and tossed. That’s the doubter. Not standing ON the water, getting thrown around inside it, because his trust is split down the middle. One eye on the goal, one eye on the exit.

Get your eyes off the storm

Whoever you are, wherever you’re reading this, there’s a thing you’ve shrunk down because the full size of it scared you. You know exactly what it is. You’ve been calling it unrealistic. You’ve been calling the small version “good enough.”

Ask for the impossible one instead. Step out of the boat. And when the wind picks up, because it will, don’t you dare look down at it.

Keep your eyes up. You were already walking.

There’s a bridge from “Oceans” I couldn’t get out of my head after I wrote all this down, and it says where I’m trying to step better than I can:

Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders

Let me walk upon the waters

Wherever You would call me

Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander

And my faith will be made stronger

Without borders. No fine print. Deeper than I’d ever get to on my own.

The first time my friend said that to me, I thought he was calling me an idiot.

He was a manager I worked under in the early 2000s, back when I was selling cars. Smart guy. Sharp closer. And here he was telling me to stay dumb. I sat with it for a long time before I figured out what he actually meant.

When I first hit the floor, I was on a roller coaster. Massive ups, massive downs. One month I’d lead the board. The next month I couldn’t sell water in a desert. And I couldn’t figure out why. I was working just as hard. I was studying harder. I was getting smarter every month. So why was my production all over the place?

That’s the question his line was answering. I just couldn’t hear it yet.

When it finally clicked, something shifted in me that I’d never had before. Precision. I stopped trying to outthink the room. I stopped showing my full deck of cards. I learned to make the customer feel like the most important person in the building, because in that moment, they were.

And I learned what it actually meant to listen. Not the kind of listening where you’re waiting your turn to talk. Not the kind where you’re three moves ahead in your own head running the close. Real listening, to their words, yes, but also to their body language. To what they were actually wanting underneath what they were saying. To the things they hadn’t even put into words yet. Critical listening. Thinking listening. Listening that was always asking one question: what can I do, right now, in this moment, to win?

Because make no mistake, sales is about a win. Every conversation is. And here’s the part that took me the longest to figure out: the answer to “what can I do to win” is almost never be smarter. The answer is almost always listen harder. To the customer in front of me. And to the manager behind me. To the people who’d been doing this longer than I had, who were trying to coach me, and who I’d been quietly tuning out the moment I thought I had a better idea.

That’s what stay dumb really meant. Stay teachable in two directions at the same time. To the person you’re trying to reach. And to the person who’s trying to reach you.

That single shift took me places. I went from the sales floor into Finance, and then into the Finance Manager seat, which was honestly my favorite spot in the whole business. I loved solving hard problems. I loved negotiating with bank buyers and customers in the same breath, reading two rooms at once and finding the angle where everybody could win. That was where I thrived.

From there I went on to Desk Manager, then Sales Manager, then Store Manager, running entire dealerships in my twenties. I was almost always the youngest guy on the team, leading people who’d been in the business longer than I had. None of that happened because I got smarter than the room. It happened because I’d learned how to stop letting my own intelligence get in my way, and because I kept asking questions instead of pretending I already had the answers.

And from the manager’s seat, I started seeing the same curve I’d lived play out in everybody who walked through the door. Especially the new reps.

We called them green peas, fresh hires with no sales background, no car knowledge, no slick lines, no nothing. And almost every single one of them ran the same curve I had run, like clockwork.

Month one, they crushed it. They didn’t know enough to get in their own way. They didn’t know the shortcuts. They didn’t know the tricks. So they just did what we trained them to do. They asked questions. They listened. They walked the customer through the steps. And they sold cars.

Month two, production dipped. They’d picked up a few things now. They’d started hearing the back-office talk. They were “qualifying” customers. They were dropping phrases they’d heard veterans use. They were taking less of my coaching because they had a few opinions of their own forming.

Month three, they fell flat on their face. Hard. The same person who closed twelve deals their first thirty days could barely close one. And it wasn’t always exactly three months, sometimes two, sometimes four, but it was close enough that I started to see it coming before they did.

Here’s what I learned managing them: if you trained on this curve, if you warned new reps that it was coming, if you named it out loud, most of them wouldn’t fall into it. Not all the way, anyway. Awareness broke the spell. The same way that one sentence from my friend had broken it for me years earlier.

That’s when I really understood what stay dumb meant. It didn’t mean be stupid. It meant don’t outthink the person in front of you. Don’t start hearing your own voice in your head while they’re trying to tell you what they need. The green pea in month one wasn’t dumb, they were open. They had nothing in their head competing with the customer and no bad habits from veterans. By month three, they had a whole choir up there, and the customer couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

I worked that idea over for years. And eventually I started to suspect this wasn’t just a sales thing. I was watching the same curve play out everywhere, in leaders, in spouses, in parents, in anyone who’d been doing something long enough to get sure of themselves. The longer somebody had been at something, the more confident they got, the less they actually heard anybody.

So I started digging. And it turns out I wasn’t crazy. The researchers got there a long time before I did.

In 1989, three economists, Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, published a paper introducing what they called the Curse of Knowledge. The finding was simple and brutal: once you know something, you cannot un-know it well enough to imagine what it’s like for someone who doesn’t. Follow-up research found that salespeople who know more about their product often perform worse than those who know less. They overestimate what the customer already understands. They skip the steps that actually close the deal. They talk past people.

A Stanford grad student named Elizabeth Newton ran an experiment in 1990 that nailed it down. She had people tap out famous songs with their fingers while others tried to guess the tune. The tappers were certain the listeners would recognize the songs easily. The listeners almost never did. The tappers heard a full orchestra in their head. The listeners heard knocking on wood.

That’s month three. The rep is hearing the orchestra. The customer is hearing knocking.

A management theorist named Noel Burch laid out a model in the 1970s called the Four Stages of Competence. Stage one is unconscious incompetence, you don’t know what you don’t know, and you just do the thing. Stage two is conscious incompetence, you start to realize how much you don’t know, and you get clumsy. Stage three is conscious competence, you can do it but you have to think hard. Stage four is unconscious competence, you just do it again, but for real this time.

Most green peas wash out in stage two. They don’t make it through. That’s the three-month cliff.

And then there’s Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist now running Dartmouth, who has spent her career studying why skilled people choke under pressure. She calls it paralysis by analysis. When you start thinking too hard about something you used to do naturally, the prefrontal cortex hijacks the automatic systems and ruins them. In one of her studies, expert golfers were 20 percent less accurate on short putts under pressure. They knew too much about their own swing to take the shot.

The Zen Buddhists had a word for the antidote 1,200 years ago. Shoshin, beginner’s mind. Shunryu Suzuki put it like this: “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s, there are few.”

The green pea in month one had Shoshin by accident. They hadn’t earned it; they just hadn’t had time to lose it yet.

So here’s why I’m writing this.

I’m not really writing it to salespeople. I mean, I am, and if you sell anything for a living, you already know exactly who you are in this story. But I’m writing it to a wider room than that.

Wherever you are, whatever your work, whatever your role in the lives of the people around you, if you’ve been at it for a while, you know what I’m describing. You came in humble. You asked questions. You took notes. You listened to the people in front of you because you didn’t know any better than to listen.

And then somewhere along the way, you got good. You got experienced. You got smart. You started recognizing patterns instead of people. You started finishing sentences in your head three moves before the other person got there. You stopped asking the questions you already “knew” the answers to. You stopped doing the small steps because you’d earned the right to skip them. The orchestra in your head started drowning out the person in front of you, and you didn’t even notice it was happening.

If any of that lands, if even one of those sentences made you wince a little, keep reading. Because here’s the cost.

You lose deals. And you lose people.

You lose deals because the person in front of you can feel it when they’re being processed instead of heard. They don’t always know what’s off, but they know something is off, and they leave. The buyer walks. The friend pulls back. The employee disengages. They don’t tell you why. They just go.

And you lose people, which is worse. Because deals come back around. People don’t, usually. The team member who quietly decided you stopped listening doesn’t tell you they decided that. The kid who decided you already have all the answers stops bringing you the real questions. The spouse who decided you stopped seeing them stops trying to be seen.

That’s the bill. And it gets paid quietly, over years, in deals you never knew you lost and people you never knew you pushed away.

So here’s my challenge.

This week, not next month, this week, find one conversation where you would normally bring all your experience to bear, and bring none of it instead. Walk in like a green pea. Ask questions you already think you know the answers to. Listen like you’ve never heard this before, to the words, to the body language, to what they actually want underneath what they’re saying. Think critically about what’s really being told to you, not what you’ve already decided is being told to you. Don’t sort the person in front of you into a category. Don’t run them through your veteran filter. Don’t tap out the song in your head and assume they can hear it. Don’t show your full deck of cards. Make them the most important person in the room, because in that moment, they are.

And while you’re at it, find one person in your life who’s been trying to coach you, and actually take the coaching. The mentor you’ve been quietly dismissing. The manager whose advice you’ve been filtering through your own opinions. The spouse who keeps telling you the same thing over and over. The friend whose input you stopped trusting because you got “better” than it. Listen to them like a green pea too.

Because every win, in sales, in leadership, in any room you walk into, comes from listening to the two people you’ve stopped listening to: the person you’re trying to reach, and the person who’s been trying to reach you.

Just sit there, dumb, and see what happens.

You’re going to be surprised. I promise you that. Because the people in your life have been trying to tell you things you stopped hearing a long time ago. They gave up trying to get past the expert in front of them. They’ll start trying again the first time you stop being one.

My friend was right. The first one to talk in a negotiation loses. But it’s bigger than negotiation. The first one to stop listening loses, loses deals, loses people, loses the thing they were trying to build in the first place.

Stay dumb. Stay teachable. Stay open.

The green peas knew it for one beautiful month before they forgot. The trick is to remember it on purpose, every day, for the rest of your life.

That’s exactly what a lot of us are doing with our lives, our leadership, and our careers, and we don’t even realize it.

The Question Nobody Wants to Sit With

Why do you do what you do?

Not the LinkedIn answer. The real one.

Why do you actually take the promotion? Why do you actually grind through that deadline? Why do you actually chase the title, the corner office, the recognition, the next thing?

If you’re honest, the answer for a lot of it is: because of how it makes you feel.

The dopamine hit when the praise email lands. The flush of pride when your name comes up in the leadership meeting. The relief when the metric ticks the right direction. The buzz of being needed, being right, being important, being noticed.

And here’s where it gets uncomfortable: when the feeling becomes the goal, you’ve built yourself an idol. You’ve made a god out of a sensation. And that god is going to make you do dumb things, over and over again, in a tight little circle.

Welcome to the cul-de-sac.

What the Bible Actually says about the “Lust of the Flesh

Most people hear “lust of the flesh” and assume it’s only about sex, drugs and rock n roll. It’s not. It’s much bigger, and much sneakier, than that.

1 John 2:16: the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life, these are not from the Father but from the world.

So is the “lust of the flesh” any craving rooted in feeling? Any drive where the desired outcome is a sensation, a high, a state of self that makes you feel inflated, safe, or in control. It’s chasing the chemical, not the calling.

And it shows up in the boardroom just as much as anywhere else:

• The manager who hoards decisions because they love feeling indispensable.

• The professional who can’t stop working because the feeling of being busy is the only thing that quiets the noise inside.

• The executive who picks fights because the feeling of being right is a drug.

If a feeling is what you’re really after, the work isn’t the work anymore. The work is just a delivery vehicle for the hit.

Solomon Already Drove Down This Road

Ecclesiastes is a brutally honest book in the Bible. Solomon, the wealthiest, wisest, most resourced man of his age, basically ran the ultimate human experiment so we wouldn’t have to.

He tried pleasure. Built gardens. Acquired possessions. Stacked achievements. Made a name. Climbed every ladder there was to climb.

His verdict? Vanity of vanities… all is vanity and a striving after wind. (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 2:11)

Striving after wind. Read that again. You can sprint at full speed, arms wide open, and you’ll never catch it. Your hands close on nothing.

That’s the cul-de-sac. You go in fast. You loop the circle. You come back out with empty hands and less gas in the tank than when you started.

Ecclesiastes 5:10: whoever loves money will not be satisfied with money. Swap “money” for whatever feeling you’re chasing, admiration, control, productivity, applause, certainty, and the verse still works. The thing you’re chasing was never designed to satisfy you. It was designed to keep you driving in circles.

And Then There’s Pride of Life

Remember 1 John 2:16? It listed three things: lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life. We covered the first one. The third one might be even more dangerous in a professional context, because it wears a suit, gets promoted, and shows up on the keynote stage.

Pride of life is self-determination dressed up as virtue.

It’s the belief that I am the author. I am the architect. I am the self-made answer. My success is mine because I earned it. My wins are mine because I grinded for them. My life is mine because I built it.

In plain language: I am the god of my own little kingdom.

Modern leadership culture eats this up. We worship the founder myth. We frame everything as the grit story. We post the quotes about being the captain of our souls and the masters of our fate. We confuse autonomy for maturity and self-reliance for strength.

And it’s not just business culture. It’s the gym, the bank account, the brand. Here’s a gut check: cash and abs don’t help you find Jesus.

We all know that person, abs and Jesus, the full package. And if we’re honest? A lot of them are miserable. You want a slice of cheesecake; they want their macros. Picture that dinner together, you sitting there with a fork, them weighing chicken breast on a tiny kitchen scale, quietly judging you in their heart while you actually enjoy your life. Good times.

The joke has a point underneath it. The six-pack didn’t get them closer to God. The bank balance didn’t either. The discipline, the optimization, the self-built temple of body and brand, none of it delivers what they were actually after. It just hands them more to manage and more to lose.

And then we wonder why we burn out, alienate the people closest to us, blow up our marriages, and can’t sleep at night.

Here’s the hard part. The title of this whole post is pointing right at it:

The main problem isn’t the market. It isn’t your boss. It isn’t your team. It isn’t your spouse. It isn’t the economy or the timing or the bad break.

The main problem is you.

That’s not self-hatred. That’s clarity. As long as you believe the problem is always somewhere else, you’ll keep driving the same loop forever, looking for a new street to blame. The moment you accept that the steering wheel has been in your hands the whole time, and that you’ve been steering badly, you can finally turn the car.

Self-determination says, “I’ve got this.”

Wisdom says, “I clearly don’t, and pretending I do is exactly what’s wrecking me.”

So stop trying to live your life by the pride of life.

Three Questions for Leaders

If you lead anyone, a team, a company, a family, just yourself, you owe it to them to examine your motives. Not once. Regularly.

1. What feeling am I actually chasing?

Be specific. Don’t say “success.” That’s the marketing copy. Is it being respected? Being right? Being safe? Being needed? Being admired? Being untouchable? Name it. Idols hate being named.

2. Would I still do this if the feeling were off the table?

If you delivered the same outcome but got zero credit, would you still do the work? If your title disappeared but the mission remained, would you still show up? If the answer is no, the work was never really the point.

3. Who pays for my feeling addiction?

Because someone always does. Your team pays when you hoard decisions to feel important. Your reports pay when you bring crisis-junkie energy because calm bores you. Your family pays when you arrive home empty. Your future pays when you trade long-term wisdom for short-term hits.

Stop Acting Like a Bond Servant

Here’s the part a lot of us miss, and it’s the part that changes everything.

If you follow Jesus, you’re not a hired hand grinding to earn your keep. You’re not a bond servant scraping for table scraps from a distant master. The whole New Testament keeps hitting one note over and over: you’ve been adopted.

Galatians 4:7, “So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.”

Romans 8:15 says you didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to drag you back into fear. You received the Spirit of adoption.

Read that slowly. Adopted. Not hired. Not auditioned. Not provisional. Not on a 90-day performance review. Adopted means the paperwork is signed. The name is on the family. The inheritance is locked in. The only thing left to do is live like it’s actually true.

But a lot of us don’t.

A lot of us are technically sons and daughters of God walking around acting like temp workers, heads down, eyes anxious, white-knuckling our worth, trying to perform our way into a love we already have. That’s the engine running underneath all the feeling-chasing and self-determination we’ve been talking about: we’re trying to earn what’s already ours.

It’s exhausting. It’s also unnecessary.

In leadership terms: stop running your career like an audition for a love you’ve already been given. Stop leading from scarcity. Stop managing people out of fear. Stop building your platform like your soul depends on its size. Stop driving the cul-de-sac trying to prove something to a Father who already calls you His.

Stop acting like a bond servant when your actual position is adopted son or daughter of God.

The Way Out

The point of Ecclesiastes isn’t despair. It’s diagnosis. The cul-de-sac is real, but you don’t have to keep circling it.

Solomon’s conclusion after all his striving: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. (Ecclesiastes 12:13)

In leadership language, that means: anchor your work in something bigger than how it makes you feel today. Serve something you can’t manipulate. Build for purposes that outlast applause. Tie your identity to who you are, not to what you produce or how much attention it gets you.

The great leaders aren’t people who never feel the pull of ego, recognition, or comfort. They feel it. They just refuse to let those feelings hold the steering wheel.

So examine the gods you’re serving. Name the feeling you’re chasing. Ask whether it’s actually taking you somewhere, or just driving you in a tighter and tighter loop.

Then pull out of the cul-de-sac.

There’s real road out there.

One More Thing, From Me to You

I’m not writing this from above you. I’m writing it from inside the cul-de-sac.

Everything I just laid out, chasing the feeling, making a god out of recognition, dressing self-determination up as virtue, I’ve done all of it. I’ve probably done some of it this week, on some level. This isn’t a blog post from a guy who’s figured it out. I’m just talking to you about what I’ve been through, hoping some of it helps you.

One of the biggest things I’ve had to keep wrestling with? I’m the rich young ruler. Not really the wealth part, with me, it’s usually the competence part.

You know the story. The young guy comes to Jesus, asks what he needs to do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus tells him to sell everything and follow. He walks away sad because he had a lot.

Here’s how it looks in my life. I look at what I need to get done. Then I look at what I, the self-made, capable, “I’ll just handle it” version of me, can accomplish on my own. Then I look at the imperfect people I’d have to actually work with, not around. And something in me wants to walk away sad, because letting go of my way feels like giving up everything I’ve got to work with.

I’ll see better ways. I’ll see fixes. I’ll see exactly how I’d do it if it were just me. And I’ll admit it, a lot of times, it irritates the blood out of me that I have to work with non-perfect people instead of just doing it the perfect way I see in my head.

That’s the rich young ruler in a polo shirt. He didn’t walk away because Jesus was wrong. He walked away because what Jesus asked him to release felt too heavy in his hands.

So my prayer might sound something like this most days now: Lord, today, please help me not be the rich young ruler who walked away sad. Help me let go of my way, my speed, my standard, my self-sufficient little kingdom, and actually follow you.

So if any of this resonated with you, congratulations, you’re human. That’s not a condemnation. That’s the starting point.

It doesn’t matter to me whether you’re a laborer, a doctor, a preacher, or someone the world likes to call “a good person.” If something here landed, you’re in good company. And the company includes me.

I’m not trying to be perfect. I’m not pretending I’ve arrived. If what I’ve written helps even one person see the loop they’ve been driving in, that’s enough for me. One is plenty.

Because at the end of all this, I’m not asking you to be more disciplined, more impressive, or more self-actualized.

We’re just trying to find and follow Jesus.

That’s the whole thing.

A Song That Kept Me Pulling Out

When I was done writing this, after I went back and forth on it a few times, editing it, trying to make it land in a way a reader could actually hear, a song came back to me.

“All My Hope” by Crowder.

In 2018, that song was on repeat for me. Five, six, seven, eight times in a row, every time I made the drive up from Austin, Texas, leaving behind everything the world had promised would make me. The success that was always just one more move away. The good life that was always one more deal away. The rainbow at the end of the chase.

Here’s what I found out there: you might actually catch some of those things. The promotion. The number. The status. The image. And when you do, you’ll find out the wild part, there’s no pot of gold waiting. Just dry bones. Dead deadness. No life in any of it.

So I’d drive, and I’d sing. The song is about being held in grace. About fire and water doing what they only ever do, they change you. About a prodigal who finally turned the car around and came home. About where real hope actually lives, and about a past that doesn’t get the last word over you.

Go listen to it. Then listen again. It’s the kind of song you sing yourself out of the cul-de-sac with.

All My Hope

This morning, all the way there, all through my workout, and all the way home, I felt Him speaking to me. This isn’t always the case, but I’d say two or so times a week I leave my mornings with something I feel is new.

And what He was showing me was about me. My own faults. My own blind spots. The places where I’ve turned faith into a formula.

Do we look for the rules instead of the Lord? Do we hunt for guidelines, checklists, legalistic patterns, hoping that if we just nail the system, we’ll know God? Where do we set all of that aside and seek Him? Just Him? Only Him?

Let Me Be Clear Before I Go Further

I’m not saying rules and patterns aren’t needed. They are. Scripture has commandments. Christ calls us to obedience. Discipline matters. Boundaries matter.

But here’s the warning I felt this morning: rules and patterns alone will not get you to heaven. They’ll actually snare you worse. You can build a perfectly polished life and miss God entirely. You can master the playbook and never know the Player.

That’s the trap.

So I started researching the Bible, and here’s what I found.

Jesus’ sharpest words weren’t aimed at the broken. They were aimed at the religious rule-keepers.

Luke 17:20–21. The Pharisees ask Jesus when the kingdom of God will come. And here’s the wild part, Jesus tells them, the rule-keepers themselves, that the kingdom doesn’t come with observation. He says, “the kingdom of God is in your midst.” It was right there. Standing in front of them. They couldn’t see it because they were looking somewhere else, watching for signs, refining their rules, preparing for a future kingdom while the King Himself was breathing the same air.

Matthew 23. Jesus calls the religious leaders whitewashed tombs, clean on the outside, dead on the inside. He says they tithe their spices but neglect justice and mercy and faithfulness. Worst of all, He says they shut the door of the kingdom in people’s faces, not entering themselves, and blocking those who try.

Let that sit. The most religious people in the room were standing in the doorway, keeping others out.

Mark 7:6–8. Jesus quotes Isaiah right back at the Pharisees: “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me.” Then He drops the hammer, they’re neglecting the commandment of God to hold onto the tradition of men. Man-made rules dressed up as godliness.

Matthew 7:21–23. This one I can’t shake. The people Jesus turns away on that day aren’t the lukewarm. They’re not the obvious sinners. They’re the ones who say, “Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in Your name? Cast out demons? Do many miracles?” They had the spiritual résumé. And He says, “I never knew you.”

It’s not “you didn’t perform enough.” It’s “we were never in relationship.”

Colossians 2:20–23. Paul calls out the rules, “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch” and labels them what they really are: self-made religion. They look wise. They feel disciplined. But Paul says they have no real power against sin.

The Sacrifice Trap

Here’s something else that hit me. Some of us pour ourselves out in sacrifice, thinking the size of the offering will get us in. We give until it hurts. We serve until we’re empty. We perform until our spiritual gas tank is on fumes. And we tell ourselves it’s all for God. Maybe even on our social media put #GodFirst.

But somewhere in there, the truth slips out, we’re really just pleasing men. The pastor. The small group. The version of “good Christian” we’ve built up in our own heads. We’re stacking sacrifices to be seen, all while never actually finding the will of God.

I found a story in the Bible that helps illustrate this. 1 Samuel 15. King Saul disobeys a direct command from God, then offers up a sacrifice to “make it right.” Samuel’s words cut to the bone: “to obey is better than sacrifice.” And do you know why Saul actually disobeyed? He admits it a few verses later, “I feared the people, and obeyed their voice.” He was a man-pleaser using a sacrifice to cover the tracks.

Paul says it just as bluntly in Galatians 1:10: if I were still pleasing men, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ. You can’t be both. Pick one.

And Jesus warns in Matthew 6 about doing your righteous acts to be seen by men. His verdict? They have their reward in full. That’s all they get. The applause on earth was the whole paycheck.

This is the trap I think God was warning me about this morning. You can pour your whole life out as an offering and still miss Him, if the offering was really for the crowd. Here’s another line I love: “You can spend your whole life doing what’s good and never do the right thing.”

Somewhere between the gym parking lot and my driveway, this is what I heard:

It’s about the relationship. Not the perfect lifestyle.

God isn’t up there with a clipboard, waiting to see if I checked enough boxes before He lets me in. He’s not impressed with my rules. He’s not measuring my distance from the things I’ve decided are off-limits. He’s looking for me. The real me. The one He already knows. The rest will fall in line.

We’re so worried about being perfect for the second coming that we’re missing that He’s actually amongst us now, that He’s already come, already poured out His Spirit, already made a way to walk with Him today. Not someday. Today. So while we are so worried about doing what’s right, we are missing the right things to do, and in the end, what will we hear?

As I was researching this thought and these feelings this morning, I remembered a song I wrote a few years back.

I had an encounter with someone who called themselves a righteous person. I’m not going to dig into the details, but I’ll say this: I didn’t see Jesus in them. I saw performance. I saw judgment. I saw a polished surface stretched over something dead underneath. And it kinda made me angry, not at them personally, but at what they represented.

So I sat down and wrote a song. Here’s part of it:

Verse 1

You got a Bible in your hand, but no mercy in your tone,

You speak in tongues on Sunday, then you curse your neighbor’s home.

You say you love the Lord, but you don’t act like He’s enough—

You forgot who you were before the grace, before the blood.

Pre-Chorus

There’s a crack in your stained glass heart,

And it’s showing through your polished part.

You’re high on a hill, shouting down at the street,

But Heaven hears the cries from the sinner’s seat.

Chorus

White washed tombs in designer grace,

You pass the beggar, won’t meet his face.

You sing about Heaven but you block the door,

While the drunk and the prodigal hit the floor.

It’s the broken who rise when the proud go blind,

And the least of these who walk in shine.

You’d be shocked who gets in before you do—

The hooker, the felon, the junkie too.

Here’s what’s wild. As I was searching Scripture this morning, I ran across several verses I don’t think I’d ever heard before, and they matched up with part of my song:

Matthew 21:31. Jesus is talking to the chief priests and elders, the most religious, most respected men in Israel. And He tells them straight: the tax collectors and prostitutes will get into the kingdom of God before you.

The hooker. The felon. The junkie. Before you.

Then also the other scripture where Jesus talks about whitewashed toombs..

The Pharisee in the Mirror

Here’s the part that’s uncomfortable. The song was easy to write because it was aimed at someone else. But the harder truth is I’ve built my own rules. I’ve judged people by them. I’ve used them to feel safe. I’ve used them to feel superior. I’ve stood in doorways I had no business standing in. We all have at some point or at some level.

Drop the clipboard. Drop the performance. Drop the lifestyle-as-currency. He doesn’t want a polished servant. He wants a son. A daughter. A friend who actually knows Him.

Because on that day, the question won’t be did you follow all the rules?

It’ll be did you know Me?

And the only way to answer yes is to walk with Him now. In the dark. At 4:30 AM. On the way to the gym. Wherever you are. Whoever you are.

He’s in your midst.

Don’t miss Him.

Last year I was visiting family in Idaho. We were at my brother-in-law’s place for dinner, his in-laws were over, and his father-in-law started telling us about this old party trick. “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.” I’d never heard of it. He insisted on showing us.

For context: I’m 6’1”, 245 pounds. The crew assigned to lift me was my wife (5’2”, 110 pounds soaking wet), her sister-in-law (not much bigger than my wife), her brother, and one of the younger kids. Every single person lifting me was significantly smaller than I am. Not one of them could have picked me up on their own, and most couldn’t have lifted half of me. Two under my arms, two under my knees, two fingers each. I had no clue how this was supposed to work.

I sat down anyway.

First attempt, they slid their fingers into position and tried to lift. Nothing. I didn’t budge. A lot of laughing.

Then he reset the room. Everyone got quiet. They stacked their hands over my head one on top of the other, close but not touching, and just focused for a few seconds. Then, one at a time, they pulled their hands away and slid their fingers back under my arms and knees.

On the count, boom. I came up off the chair at least a foot.

I sat back down stunned and everyone was shocked and we all said this is a scam. We did it three more times. It worked every time.

I’ve thought about that night a lot since. The longer I sat with it, the more I realized I wasn’t just watching a parlor trick. There was a real lesson buried in it. So I started my research…

What’s actually going on

There’s no spirit. No magic. The game has been around at least since 1665, when Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary about four little girls performing it in Bordeaux. Scientists and journalists have explained the mechanics over and over. It comes down to three things.

The first is distributed weight. Four people lifting 240 pounds means each person is responsible for about 60 pounds. Across two fingers, that’s roughly 30 pounds per finger. The world record for a pinkie deadlift is 242 pounds. Your fingers are stronger than you think.

The second is a stiff body. “Stiff as a board” isn’t just a chant, it’s instructions. A rigid body transmits force cleanly. A limp body absorbs it and goes nowhere. That’s why I had to stay engaged in that chair instead of flopping.

The third is the one that really matters: synchronized timing. On the failed first try, everyone was a half-second off. Someone went a beat early, someone a beat late, and whoever moved first was suddenly trying to bench-press me alone for a split second. They couldn’t, so they dropped me. Then the next person inherited the full load, dropped me too, and the whole thing fell apart.

When they stacked their hands over my head and got quiet, they weren’t summoning anything. They were just syncing up. By the time their fingers slid back under me, they were moving as one unit. The weight hadn’t changed. The timing did.

The leadership piece

Here’s what hit me on the drive home. This is exactly what’s broken in most teams, most businesses, and a lot of marriages. Everybody is lifting. Nobody is lifting together.

You’ve seen it. Sales is grinding while marketing is still tweaking the deck. Operations is sprinting to ship while finance is hitting the brakes. A husband is solving the problem while his wife is still trying to be heard. Everyone has their hands on it. Everyone is putting in effort. The thing still won’t move, and then everyone starts looking around for someone to blame.

It’s almost never that the weight is too heavy. The lift is out of sync. And when you’re lifting out of sync, you’re not just failing to help. You’re actively making it harder on whoever moved first. That’s why people burn out. That’s why your best employee quit. They were lifting on the count, and nobody else hit the beat.

When the lift fails, our instinct is to point at the body in the chair and say it’s too heavy. Usually we’re just lifting out of place.

During my research I found that science backs it up

A few studies are worth knowing about.

The oldest one goes back to 1913. A French agricultural engineer named Maximilien Ringelmann had people pull on a rope. He measured how hard one person pulled alone, then kept adding people. The result was strange. The more people he added, the less each individual pulled. One person pulled 100 units of effort. Two people pulled 186, not 200. Three pulled 255, not 300. Eight pulled only 392, less than half of what they should have produced.

What did Ringelmann blame it on? In his own words, “the lack of simultaneity of their efforts.” They weren’t pulling on the beat. The bigger the group got, the harder it was to sync up, and the more effort got wasted in the gaps between people. Adding more bodies didn’t add more strength. It added more chances to be off-rhythm. The rope-pulling version of the failed lift.

Then there’s Project Aristotle. From 2012 to 2014, Google studied 180 of their own teams to find out what made the great ones great. They went in expecting the answer to be talent. Stack the roster with the smartest engineers, the best MBA, a Ph.D. for good measure. They were wrong. Google’s people analytics manager Julia Rozovsky put it bluntly: “We were dead wrong.” What separated good teams from great ones wasn’t who was on them. It was how they worked together. Five factors came out on top: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. The team that lifted on the count beat the team with the best individual lifters.

The third one is from competitive rowing. Ask any elite rower about the moment a crew finds its rhythm, and they’ll tell you about swing. It’s that almost mystical state where eight oars hit the water as one and the boat seems to glide on its own between strokes. Daniel James Brown writes about it in The Boys in the Boat. Many crews, even winning crews, never really find it. When they do, the pain gives way to something else, and Brown calls it “a kind of perfect language.” Same boat, same rowers, same water. The only thing that changes is the timing. And it’s the difference between a crew that wins and a crew that just rows hard.

An old line that keeps coming back

There’s a verse in Ecclesiastes that says. Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. And the chapter goes on to say that a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. Solomon wasn’t writing a leadership book. He was just being honest about how people actually work.

You weren’t built to lift everything alone. And the people around you weren’t built to lift it without you.

How to lead the lift

If your team, your business, or your home feels heavier than it should, the question isn’t “who’s not pulling their weight?” The better question is whether you’re lifting in sync.

A few things I’ve taken from that chair in Idaho.

Stack hands before fingers. Before you ask people to lift, get them aligned. Take the quiet moment. Get focused. Don’t skip it because it feels like nothing is happening. It’s the most productive thing you’ll do all week.

Count out loud. Synchronization doesn’t happen by accident. Someone has to set the beat. That’s leadership. Cadence meetings, clear deadlines, shared scoreboards. The chant isn’t a spell. It’s a metronome.

Stay stiff in the chair. If you’re the one being lifted, by your team, your spouse, your investors, don’t go limp. Stay engaged. The person in the chair has a job too.

Stop blaming the weight. When the lift fails, your first question shouldn’t be “who’s weak?” It should be “where did we fall out of rhythm?” The answer usually isn’t strength. It’s timing.

Light as a feather

A wife, her sister-in-law, her brother, and a kid cannot lift a 240-pound man off a chair with two fingers each. The math feels wrong.

And yet, on the count, in sync, focused, they did. I watched it happen. I was the one who came up off the chair.

What I took home from Idaho wasn’t really about the trick. It was about all the things in my life I’ve been trying to lift by myself, or out of sync with the people I’m supposed to be lifting with. The weight isn’t the problem. It almost never is.

Get the timing right before you worry about the strength.

Not the small ones, the big ones. The ones selling “solutions” for $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a year like it’s just part of doing business.

Because I’ve been there. I’m still there.

Across my businesses, I spend a serious amount of money every year on software, CRMs, project management tools, shop systems, and after 20 years of doing this, I’ve come to a realization most people won’t say out loud:

We’re only using about half of what we pay for.

Not because we don’t want to. Not because we’re incapable.

But because the system was never actually set up to succeed.

A while back, I bought a project management software for over $10,000 a year.

Within three months, I canceled it.

Money gone. No refund. Nothing to show for it.

The software had issues, sure, but that wasn’t what killed it.

The onboarding was terrible.

Rushed. Surface-level. Just enough for them to say they “trained” us. After that, we were on our own.

Every time I called support, it was the same story:

“It’s user error.”
“It’s how you’re setting it up.”
“It works on our end.”

And I kept thinking, no, it doesn’t.

Because if I spend that kind of money, try to implement it, and cancel in 90 days…

That’s not user error. That’s failure.

What makes this even more frustrating is, I know what good looks like.

Years ago, I worked for a high-tech company in Austin, Texas as an enterprise rep. I worked with major organizations like GE, Kaspersky, Udemy, companies that depended on these systems actually working.

And we did things differently.

Our onboarding wasn’t an afterthought, it was the entire focus.

We had real processes. Real training. Real support. 24/7 U.S.-based teams that actually knew the product. We didn’t just hand over a login, we walked companies through implementation step by step until it worked.

And for the most part, it did.

Not perfectly, but consistently.

Which is exactly why it stands out so much to me now.

Because most software companies today don’t operate like that.

I’ve personally gone through dozens of software implementations across different industries as the one buying and trying to make them work, and it almost always follows the same pattern.

You get sold hard.
You sign the contract.
You get a couple hours of onboarding.
Then you’re pushed into support.

And unless you’re doing serious revenue, you don’t get a real account manager.

You get whoever answers the phone.

Different person every time. No context. No ownership.

And that’s where things start to fall apart.

Eventually, the burden shifts to me.

Now I’ve got to take this system and somehow get my entire team to use it.

And this is where it gets real.

Not everyone thinks the same. Not everyone learns the same. Some people pick it up quickly. Others don’t.

And if you’re in leadership, you’ve felt this:

“How do you not get this?”
“It’s not that complicated.”

But the truth is, it is complicated when it’s not taught right.

So now I’m stuck fixing a problem I didn’t create.

The software company didn’t train properly.
Support isn’t helping.
And my team is inconsistent.

That’s where most systems die.

And here’s the part nobody wants to admit:

Most businesses are running on systems they don’t fully understand.

Half-used platforms. Broken processes. Inconsistent data.

You’ve got a $10,000–$30,000 system that’s supposed to run your operation, and instead, everyone works around it.

Phone calls.
Texts.
Sticky notes.
Memory.

Now instead of one system, you’ve got chaos.

Jobs slip. Communication breaks. You double-handle work.

But the business still runs, just well enough that no one stops to fix it.

So it becomes normal.

But what people don’t connect is what that actually costs.

Not just money, your life.

It’s the stress of constantly putting out fires.
It’s the frustration of fixing things that shouldn’t be broken.
It’s staying late cleaning up messes a system was supposed to prevent.

It’s the headaches.
The energy drinks.
The mental exhaustion you carry home.

I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it.

Some guys end up drinking at night just to shut their brain off, not because they want to, but because they can’t slow it down.

All while sitting on software that was literally built to make life easier.

And that’s the part that gets me.

Most of these systems actually could work.

They were designed to solve problems. To create efficiency. To make your life easier.

But we never get there.

Because onboarding is weak. Training is rushed. And we don’t slow down long enough to actually learn it the right way.

And we don’t demand that the companies we’re paying actually do their job.

So we stay stuck in the same cycle:

Frustration.
Workarounds.
Stress.
Burnout.

All while the solution is sitting right in front of us.

At some point, I had to get honest about my side of it too.

Because even with bad onboarding, if I don’t take ownership of implementation, it’s still going to fail.

No software fixes a lack of discipline.

If I want it to work, I have to slow down. Train my people. Build processes. Hold the line when people try to go around it.

And more importantly,

start demanding better from the companies I’m paying.

Not just access.

Execution.

I don’t mind paying for good software.

I’ll invest all day if it actually makes my business better.

But don’t sell me transformation…

…and then give me a login and two hours of onboarding.

Because at that point,

You didn’t sell me a solution.

You sold me a problem.