This chapter is about the half-second between what happens and what you do about it. Listen for the thermostat and the thermometer: same room, completely different relationship to it. That metaphor carries the whole practice.

New chapter every Monday. Deeper into the sources every Friday.

Prefer to watch? Tap the video below!

Onward.
Scott

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

On Monday I read you the Introduction of Stepping Into Possibility — the chapter about what Stoicism actually is, versus the stiff-upper-lip caricature everybody’s been sold.1

Starting this week, Fridays here go deeper.

Each week I’ll take you to the ancient texts behind the chapter you just heard (the actual sentences, in context), and share how the principle shows up in real life. Usually mine.

This week, three sentences. And a confession.

The line the internet cut in half

You’ve probably seen this Seneca quote on somebody’s wall.

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

It’s authentic. I appears in Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 13. But the version that’s most often shared is only half the sentence. Here’s the whole thing.

“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

The half that got cut is the half that actually matters more.

Seneca isn’t saying your suffering is fake. He’s making a distinction. The things that can frighten you vastly outnumber the things that can crush you (and most of what torments us lives in the first category).

Here’s my take.

We were born with an amygdala that hijacks our thought process and puts us into fight, flight, or freeze when life throws us a curveball. It makes us much more reactive than responsive.

We make sense of the world most often through the stories we’re telling ourselves about what’s going on, rather than the actual facts of what’s going on.

“Suffering in imagination” is exactly that: forming stories on the impressions (the immediate emotional reactions to what’s happening) rather than on the facts of what’s actually happening.

Frightened by the story often. Rarely crushed by the fact.

The engine under the thermostat

The second sentence is Epictetus, from the Enchiridion:

“People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of things.”

This is the engine underneath the whole thermostat idea, and it’s the antidote to trying to fix your life with mindset, willpower, or positive thinking.2

The difference is this.

We are disturbed not by the actual facts of what’s happening. We are disturbed by the story we tell ourselves about what’s happening. And when we choose our story, we actually choose our future.

If we choose a story based on our knee-jerk reaction to something unexpected or uncertain, we get hijacked. Our capacity for reason, our capacity to be the person we want to be, gets hijacked by the impression instead of guided by our reasoned response.

So how do we stop being disturbed by things?

We stop being disturbed by the narrative fallacies we attach to them.

Strip away the adjectives, the adverbs, and the judgments. Work on the facts. That turns the situation into a solvable problem we can work on (instead of a problem that’s working on us).

An emperor who didn’t want to get out of bed

The third text is my favorite kind of Stoicism, unglamorous.

In Book 5 of the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the Western world, opens with an argument he’s having with himself at dawn, about getting out of bed.

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for— the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

—But it’s nicer here. . . .

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds,the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

—But we have to sleep sometime. . . .

Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota.

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.

Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?”

What does that passage do for me? It’s the ordinariness of it. The everyday human default setting of waking up in the comfort of bed, where we’re warm and feel safe, wanting to rest there a little longer, instead of getting out and doing the work that needs to be done, facing the challenges and opportunities in the day ahead.

No marble statue could ever write that. A human did. That’s the whole point of this philosophy. It was built by people who found mornings hard, for people who find mornings hard (along with an array of other everyday challenges and discomforts).

The confession

Now the real-life example (and this week, it’s me).

Public speaking and reading aloud are fears I have had from a very young age. I get tripped up when I have to stand up and speak my truth, or even stand up to ask a question. I get freaked out when it’s time to do a reading at a book event.

There’s no good, rational reason for this.

I made a living for over 25 years as a professional musician. I had no problem standing on a stage with a guitar strapped on, cracking jokes, introducing songs, making small talk with a room full of strangers.

But somehow, in a more formal setting, standing up to deliver something that matters to me, something I believe will be valuable to other people, I get really stressed. My voice starts shaking. My knees start quaking.

Run it through Seneca’s distinction. What about reading aloud could actually crush me? Nothing.

The fact of the matter is there’s nothing truly frightening about any of it. The suffering is entirely in the story I tell myself that if I stand up to be seen and speak up to be heard, I’ll die of fright or embarrassment.

That story has been running for fifty years. And on Monday, you heard me start dismantling it. Because reading this book aloud, week after week, is the most effective means I have of reaching the people I want to reach and serving them in the most articulate, composed way I can imagine.

I’m not reading you the book despite the fear. I’m reading it because of it. The practice, practiced.

Try this before Monday

Take one thing that’s been frightening you this week. Write it down in Seneca’s two columns: what about it could actually crush you, and what about it merely frightens you?

Then look at the frighten column and ask Epictetus’s question. What’s the fact, and what’s the view I’ve taken of it? Strip the adjectives. Keep the facts.

Chapter 1, Why we keep reacting instead of responding, drops Monday.

→ [Hear the Introduction read aloud]

Let’s talk about it — Friday on Purpose

Every Friday, paid subscribers gather for Friday on Purpose — thirty minutes to end the week with a little insight, inspiration, and connection. I share a short riff or provocation, and then we drop into breakout rooms to unpack it together.

This Friday’s prompt: What’s one thing frightening you right now that cannot actually crush you (and what would it look like to act anyway)?

If you’re reading as a free subscriber, upgrading gets you a seat — details are in the welcome email.

Click the button below before Monday to save big on the annual plan.

Circle up

Everything here comes out of Stepping Into Possibility: Ancient Stoic Wisdom for Navigating Modern Life, Work & Relationships — available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook. If it lands for you, pass it to someone who needs it. That’s how we find the others.

→ Get the book

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai, which helped me organize and sharpen my own words, ideas, and examples. The voice and the responsibility are mine.

I’m doing it for you, and honestly, for me. Reading aloud has scared me my whole life, and this series is me stepping into possibility in public, one chapter at a time.

We start where the book starts, with the word itself.

Lowercase-s stoicism is the stiff upper lip, the false front, a dead end. Capital-S Stoicism is something else entirely.

Listen for the difference; the whole book depends on it.

This Friday: the Seneca quote the internet cut in half (and a confession about the fear behind this series).

Prefer to watch? Tap the video below!

Onward.
Scott

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

The book has been out for seven days. Here are some snapshots of it captured in the wild.

That's with it on his Kindle. with her copy fresh out of the mailer, saving it for a quiet afternoon. holding hers up like a proud relative. , who finished the Introduction before the packaging hit the recycling. declaring “Happy days.” And — Claire put her running shoe right on the cover and wrote, “I'm stepping into possibility, one foot at a time.”

Many authors have said launching a book is like birthing a child. Being a cliché doesn't make it any less true. Seeing my “baby” make its way into the world fills me with a Stoically appropriate amount of joy and pride!

What a week!

By the numbers, launch week was more than I hoped for: Stepping Into Possibility reached #26 on Amazon’s Greek & Roman Philosophy bestseller list — one spot behind Ryan Holiday — and #57 in Stress Management. Those two lists side by side tell me the book is doing what I hoped, being taken seriously as Stoicism, and actually helping with the stress of real life.

And the first reader review arrived. Kelsey wrote:

Next to Seth Godin’s blurb calling it my “most important book.” I’ll take the pairing. The mentor and the first reader, saying versions of the same thing. This one’s worth highlighting.

“This is Scott Perry's most important book. It's generous, heartfelt, and useful. Day by day, for anyone who chooses, the ideas in this book are life-changing.” — Seth Godin, Author, The Knot

And then there’s what shared. She spent the last day of summer reading the book with her middle schoolers — and when she paused, her 8th grader looked up from the page and protested: “Why did you stop? What are you doing?” Erin’s verdict? “We may have a future philosopher in our midst.”

Kelsey hoped her kids would have this book when they’re young. Erin’s kids already do!

Meanwhile, has declared it her new official “purse book” — “it now goes everywhere with me and will get read at every open moment.”

A book for an 8th grader on the last day of summer, and for a purse on an ordinary errand. That’s the exact book I was trying to write!

Thank you. All of it happened because you read, shared, showed up, and bought.

The launch window closes Sunday night.

I said the at-cost pricing would hold for the first few days, and a promise is a promise. At midnight Sunday, the paperback and ebook go to their regular prices — [$14.99 paperback / $9.99 ebook] — and stay there.

One addition before the window closes: the book is now available in every format, including an audiobook edition. Full transparency, as always: the audiobook uses an AI narrator. It’s there so listeners can access the book today. If you’d rather hear it in my voice — well, keep reading.

→ [Click Here to Get Stepping Into Possibility — at cost through Sunday night]

The journey doesn’t end. It simply changes shape.

Here’s the real news.

Starting Monday, I’m reading you the whole book. One chapter a week on the podcast, every Monday, free — the entire book, in my voice, over the next eighteen weeks. And every Friday here, we’ll go deeper with the ancient texts behind each chapter, unpacked, plus real stories of the practice at work.

I'm doing this in part to navigate a lifelong fear of reading aloud — literally stepping into possibility by building a new skill in public.

And I'm doing it because some recent tough conversations revealed I have plenty of work to do to practice these principles and maintain my equanimity as I navigate my own life's inevitable ups and downs.

A book launch lasts a week. The practice is the rest of your life. Let’s walk it together.

Perfect in every way, with much more to come!

Onward.
Scott

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

And before you know it, you’re no longer dealing with what actually happened. You’re dealing with the story your mind has built around it.

That’s the hijack.

In this episode, shares a practical framework inspired by Stoic philosophy for interrupting that reaction and turning difficult situations into solvable problems.

The central metaphor is simple: be the thermostat, not the thermometer.

A thermometer merely reflects the temperature of the room. A thermostat notices the temperature and then does something about it.

The same choice exists when life gets difficult. You may not control what happens, what someone else does, or how things ultimately turn out. But you can create enough space between stimulus and response to decide what you’ll do next.

Scott walks through three tools for doing exactly that.

The Gate

Before spending time, attention, or emotional energy on a problem, ask:

1. Is it necessary?

2. Is it necessary now?

3. Is it necessary now by me?

A surprising number of apparent emergencies disappear when they pass through those three questions.

The Stoic Fork

If something really does require your attention, separate what’s yours from what isn’t.

You don’t control the outcome, other people, the past, or most circumstances.

You do have agency over two things:

1. How you see the situation.

2. What you decide and do next.

Letting go of everything else isn’t giving up. It’s surrendering responsibility for what was never yours to control.

The Decision Triangle

Once you know what’s yours, ask three more questions:

1. What’s now?
   Strip away the drama, assumptions, motives, and predictions. What are the actual facts?

2. What’s next?
   What are all the available actions—not just the first answer your mind rushes toward?

3. What matters?
   Which choice best aligns with your values, boundaries, character, and the person you want to become?

Scott then puts the entire process to work in a live hot seat with , who wants to write a book but keeps allowing other people’s priorities to consume her time.

Their conversation explores boundaries, people-pleasing, finite resources, the difference between responsibility and rescue, and what happens when the work that matters to you continually gets pushed aside.

The episode also examines why intelligent people rush toward certainty, why better decisions can still produce bad outcomes, and why sometimes the most important move is getting the problem out of your own head and in front of a trusted fellow traveler.

You cannot control the outcome.

You can get better at the decision.

And that space between the two is where possibility lives.

Get Stepping Into Possibility

These ideas come from Scott’s book, Stepping Into Possibility: Ancient Stoic Wisdom for Navigating Modern Life, Work, & Relationships.

→ Purchase Stepping Into Possibility: [CLICK HERE]

Each chapter concludes with a practical invitation designed to help you apply Stoic wisdom to the real situations you’re navigating in your own life, work, and relationships.

→ Paperback: [CLICK HERE]

Join Creative on Purpose

For more practical ideas about living well, doing work that matters, and building something meaningful without betraying yourself, subscribe to Creative on Purpose:

Creative on Purpose

Philosophy that works. Insights that inspire intentional action.

By Scott Perry

And subscribe to the Creative on Purpose YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@CreativeOnPurpose

The book is live.

That’s the announcement. Now let me tell you why this one exists.

Why I wrote it

I wanted to share a book about my experience with Stoicism that did not come from a scholarly or academic point of view, or lean too heavily on historical documents and examples.

I also wanted to thread the needle by not writing it as a self-help book — another bro who treats Stoicism as a life-hack system.

It is personal. But the problems it addresses are universal.

That’s the book I wanted on the shelf and couldn’t find. So I wrote it.

About Seth, and a warning I’ve carried for years

You’ll have seen Seth Godin’s name on this book. He’s been a mentor and a friend for a long time.

Seth was generous enough to review my first book favorably — although he also cautioned me against my choice of title, The Stoic Creative.

I have sat in that tension ever since. And this book was written with Seth’s warning and his support firmly in mind. So when he says this:

“This is Scott Perry’s most important book. It’s generous, heartfelt, and useful. Day by day, for anyone who chooses, the ideas in this book are life-changing.” —Seth Godin, Author, The Knot

…it lands in a particular way. It comes from the person who once told me, honestly, that I hadn’t quite gotten it right the first time.

Do it with other people

Here’s something the caricature gets wrong. The Stoics get painted as solitary figures — the lone tough guy white-knuckling wisdom by himself on a mountaintop.

That’s a modern invention, and a poor one. The word itself comes from the Stoa Poikile, the painted porch in the Athenian marketplace where Zeno first taught. Not a private study. Not a mountaintop. A porch, open to the street, right in the middle of the city, where people came together to practice this out loud, in each other’s company.

Stoicism was communal from day one. It’s literally named after the place people gathered to do it together.

That’s the part I care about most, and it’s why everything I build — The Circle, the Monday and Friday calls, all of it — comes back to the same idea: let’s work together to make things better.

The people who gather with me are a diverse group, pursuing a wide array of pursuits. But we all share one desire: to make a difference, doing work that matters, with people we care about — and to make that difference in the way that only we can.

Because that’s the whole thing. Your life is enhanced most by making the difference only you can make, in the way only you can make it. And you don’t do that alone. You do it with other people.

What I’ll leave you with

Ten weeks, and this is where I want to land.

Perfect in every way.

It’s probably the thing I say most, and I say it on purpose — it’s meant to be a little antagonistic, in the most empathetic way I know how. Some people recoil at it. Some laugh. The ones who lean in to ask what I could possibly mean are the ones who get it.

It isn’t a delusion. It isn’t Pollyanna pretending everything’s fine. It’s a fair read of reality: you, your situation, and the people around you are perfect exactly as you are, right now, because as it is is simply what’s true in this moment.

And here’s the turn. By seeing that reality clearly — as it actually is, not as your fears narrate it — and then deciding and doing what needs to be done next, with intention and integrity, you get to make it even more so. You’re perfect as you are. And you have the ability, in this perfect moment, to step into your becoming and make it better still.

That’s the whole thing. That’s what the book is about, and what these ten weeks were about.

Now go. Take what’s in front of you — the actual life, the one you got — and live it properly.

Onward, Scott

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

It’s here.

Stepping Into Possibility: Ancient Stoic Wisdom for Navigating Modern Life, Work, & Relationships is available now, in paperback and ebook!

The first thing I want to say is thank you. I made this for you.

Of course, I also made it for me — not because it’s going to generate revenue (because it won’t), not in any meaningful sense.

I made this book to fill a gap in the ever-growing list of books about Stoicism that treat this beautiful philosophy of life as either an academic interest or a “broicism” set of lifestyle hacks.

This book provides the most valuable principles and practices for living a meaningful, flourishing life despite whatever life throws at you. It’s an expression of the utility and the humanity of this philosophy of thriving through all of the ups and downs of a fully-lived life.

Start Stepping Into Possiblity

Find the others

If you want, purchase an additional copy for a friend or a family member who needs help navigating life’s inevitable ups and downs with greater purpose, prosperity, and peace of mind.

That’s how we find the others. It’s how ideas that matter spread and how we work together to make things better.

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

There’s a question underneath all the others. It doesn’t get answered once and filed away. It just keeps asking, quietly, every day, under everything else you’re doing:

What kind of person am I becoming?

Not have I arrived. Not am I finished, fixed, sorted out. Becoming.

And the Stoics were startlingly humble about this, which is, I think, the kindest thing about them.

Nobody reaches the mountaintop (and that’s okay)

The Stoics had a name for the goal of all this striving. The Sage — the fully wise person, perfectly virtuous, completely unshakable.

And then they said something remarkable about him. He almost certainly doesn’t exist. Maybe one or two have ever lived. Probably none.

I’m completely fine with that. More than fine. Absolute perfection would be sterile and boring to me. Because everything is already perfect in every way — and I mean that precisely, not as a greeting-card line — because the way always involves challenge, and tests, and struggle. That’s what makes it the way.

We can’t arrive. But we can fully invest in the process, knowing it’ll often get done imperfectly, and knowing at the same time that the process is the shortcut. Trust the process. That’s the whole instruction.

So what does that make the rest of us, falling short of an ideal that literally nobody reaches? Not failures. The Stoics had a better word: prokoptôn — the one who is making progress. The one still on the way.

That’s the actual aim available to a human being. Not perfection. Progress. And a life of progress is a life with no dead ends.

You’re not becoming someone new

Here’s the turn, and it’s the thing I most want to hand you.

You’re not becoming someone new. You’re returning to who you already are.

What that means to me is this: becoming is being more of what you’ve always been. The inherent qualities you developed and explored from the time you were born — before institutionalized education and occupation and societal norms came along and compelled you to get along, fit in, and be someone more convenient.

The practice doesn’t install some foreign virtue. It clears away what’s been burying the thing that was there the whole time.

The puppet show

Let me tell you about a thirteen-year-old.

I’ve mentioned him before — the kid in an Introduction to Foreign Languages class who got handed a dead emperor’s private notebook and was never quite the same. That’s one half of the story.

Here’s what that same kid was doing when he wasn’t in that classroom. He was putting on a puppet show.

My friend Andy and I started by cutting patterns from one of my mom’s magazines and sewing the first round of puppets. But watch what happened next, because it’s the whole thing in miniature. We quickly started altering those patterns. Then we tossed them aside altogether and made patterns of our own, based on what we’d learned doing it their way first. What we ended up creating was originally ours. Made whole cloth.

It didn’t stay small, either. We wrote our own scripts. We built a stage. We drew up flyers and went door to door through the neighborhood drumming up an audience. We printed tickets and sold them. We got my mom to bake, and sold popcorn and cookies through the kitchen window at intermission.

I had no idea at the time, but I was already doing the thing I’d spend the rest of my life doing. It was becoming the thing by doing the thing — and the becoming turned out to be a reflection of what I’d always been.

The years I spent trying to be someone else

The line from that kid to here was not straight. And the wrong turns, when I look back at them, were all the same wrong turn.

Early in my teaching career, I tried to mimic and parrot the teachers I’d respected as a student. I even reached for the Robin Williams character in Dead Poets Society — that’s who I thought a great teacher was supposed to be, so that’s who I tried to become.

As a musician, I played the comparison game constantly. I’d hear a technique or a tune I admired in another player and chase it, and every hour I spent chasing theirs pulled me away from the techniques and the tunes that actually reflected my own creative sensibilities.

See the pattern? Every one of those detours was the same mistake: trying to become someone else, instead of more of myself. Which is the exact opposite of what the puppet-show kid understood without being told — take what others made, learn from it, and then throw out the pattern and cut your own.

It took me a long time, and a lot of imitation, to come back around to what I’d known at thirteen.

The throughline

Here’s what I feel when I look back at that thirteen-year-old and everything that’s unfolded since.

I’ve experienced my greatest sense of fulfillment and flourishing when I’m involved in collaborative creative work that helps close the gap on worthwhile challenges — especially the kind that helps other people discover, develop, and deliver their own creative potential.

That’s the puppet show again. Make something real, with others, for others. And it’s the Latin class again — the art of living, handed forward.

I didn’t become this. I was this, all along, and I’ve spent forty years becoming more of it. Badly at first, then a little less badly. Wandering off to imitate other people, then finding my way back. Failing and returning, the way a prokoptôn does.

That’s the only becoming on offer to any of us. Not invention. Recovery. Being, at last and out loud, more of who you always were.

Try this now

Write a letter from the person you’re becoming, to the person you are right now.

Not a scolding. A letter from a steadier, freer, more practiced version of you, looking back with understanding at exactly where you stand today.

Ask yourself: What does that person want you to remember? What would they say about the hard thing you’re carrying this week? What progress do they see in you that you can’t quite see in yourself?

Then place it somewhere nearby to read in those moments when life goes sideways.

It’s a message from your own prokoptôn — proof that the person you’re becoming isn’t a stranger waiting somewhere in a better future. They’re already here. Already moving. Already you.

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai, which helped me organize and sharpen my own words, ideas, and examples. The voice and the responsibility are mine.

Other people are a mirror. They reflect back to us their experience and interpretation of what they see.

You won’t lose yourself alone on a mountaintop. You’ll lose it in a meeting, in a comment section, in the small daily friction of other people, which is exactly where this practice gets its hardest and most frequent workout.

Here are four moves to stay true to yourself in their company.

1. Acknowledgment is not endorsement

The acknowledgment is not the endorsement. Saying thank you does not say, “I agree with what you’re saying. I agree with your criticism or critique.” It is simply acknowledging that someone cared enough and felt strongly enough to make a statement about you and/or your work, and that is something to be grateful for.

The whole move fits in six words you can say out loud:

“Thank you for sharing your perspective.”

2. Sort the feedback from the criticism

However, not all feedback or criticism is created equal. The acknowledgment of “thank you for sharing your perspective” creates a pause in the same way that the “what’s now” question creates a pause in the Decision Triangle.

Feedback is anticipated, requested, and comes from sources that have a deeper connection and knowledge of who we are and who we are becoming.

Criticism most often comes from people who have decided for themselves that their opinion matters and whose personality and status are attached to sharing it. Criticism often elevates the critic at the expense of the person they are criticizing.

Feedback is the other kind of thing entirely. It is generous and includes a risk for the person that provides it. Feedback is generous and vulnerable.

3. People are fascinating

“People are fascinating.”

I probably say that thirty times a day, usually about someone being rude, mean, or ignorant.

It’s not that they are motivated by bad impulses or bad motives. They are simply doing what they think they need to do based on how they feel, and are mostly unaware and ignorant of the harm and impact it has.

Curiosity and offense can’t occupy the same space. The moment you get interested in why a person is the way they are, you’ve stepped out of the reactive crouch and back into the space where you’re free.

4. Selfishly selfless

Selfish comes from the idea of putting the oxygen mask on yourself before you give it to others, of making sure that you protect yourself first as you swim out to rescue someone else.

Like most difference makers, my default setting is to be promiscuously generous and to give and give and give until I give out. I am also attached to being thought of as a nice guy.

Give from the fumes long enough, and the generosity curdles. A person running dry is no use to anybody, least of all the people they were trying to serve.

Try this today

If I’m coaching somebody through this, the first step is to acknowledge that somebody shared their perspective. That’s why it’s important to say out loud, “Thank you for sharing your perspective.” It creates the space you can inhabit before the gap closes, rushing into an emotional reaction that will lead to anger, sadness, despair, or worse.

When the space is created, it can be sorted out without attachment to narrative fallacies, biases, and ego-driven expectations and desires. The idea is that in that space, you can ask: is this worthwhile feedback that I should think about incorporating, or is this unhelpful criticism coming from someone who may be ignorant or not completely aware of what it is that I’m trying to accomplish?

Onward.

Scott

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

If you’re reading this, you’re already in the game. You’re either using AI knowingly — hopefully with some intention and integrity — or you’re being used by it, because an algorithm was in play in getting this to you. You’re playing with AI, or AI is playing with you.

The idea for this piece arrived where they usually do. I go for a combined walk and run at a nearby cemetery every day — exercise for my physical body, but also for my spiritual and psychological body, because I’m there surrounded by reminders that life is finite and any meaning it has will be determined by the difference I’m making while I have time to make it.

During a recent walk, I was listening to an Alan Watts lecture I’ve listened to many times, Reality, Art and Illusion. In it, he says: “The whole of life is the game of where are we going to draw the line?”

Watts begins with the observation that we live in a wiggly world. It’s human beings who put the lines in, trying to create order out of the wiggly noise that is the cosmos, the natural world, the human mind, and our relationship with it all (not to mention with ourselves and each other).

Decision is a really interesting word here. Its root is the Latin decidere — to cut away or to cut off. The etymology of the word reveals that when you make a decision, you are cutting away all the other decisions you could have made. Caedere can also mean kill. You’re killing off every other option because you’ve decided on this one.1

In other words, the decisions that you make and act on reveal where you’re actually drawing the line in any position or endeavor you’re engaged in.

Which brings me to the line we’re all deciding right now.

A new player on the field

Substack has put a new player on the field: an AI tool, Pangram, that scores posts and Notes on pattern recognition — a zero-to-100 percentage of how much of the word choice and sequence was generated by AI.

I’ll admit that when the tool first appeared, the first thing I did was, “Holy shit, I’ve got to check my score.” My first check came back 100% human. (“Oh, thank God.”) The next check came back 100% AI. (“Oh no — what are people going to think?”)2

My friend and Circle member asked the question that applies here: “Who’s watching the watcher?” Which begs another question: “Who’s scoring the scorer?” But the more important question is: “What exactly is the scorer scoring (and what does that score actually mean)?”

Here’s what the score tells you: how much of the word and word sequence and punctuation choices were generated by a tool.

But here’s what it doesn’t tell you: Who came up with the idea. Who came up with the outline. Who developed the intention for the impact on the reader. Who is taking responsibility for the words that get printed under their name.

In other words, the scorer isn’t (and can’t) judge the judgment (the creator’s discernment, deliberation, discipline, decision-making, and discretion).

Most of the writers I know who use AI aren’t using it to abdicate their authorship. They’re using it to amplify their intelligence — their ability to get clearer about and closer to what they are trying to accomplish on behalf of their audience. They use the tool to enhance their work’s ability to connect with and transform the readers who will benefit from colliding with their art.

Worth naming here: “AI” is two different machines wearing one name.

Generative AI makes things when you ask — drafts, images, answers. You choose it, you prompt it, and you’re responsible for what you ship. That’s the kind I use, out loud, with a disclosure on everything it helps me make.

The other kind doesn’t make anything. It decides things — about you. It ranks your feed. It chose to show you this post. The Pangram scanner is this second kind: nobody prompts it, nobody signs its verdicts, and it decides how your work gets read.

Different tools, different debts. The generative kind owes the writers it learned from, and I’ve written about paying my share. The deciding kind owes us our attention, our data, and our say — and sends no invoice.

The AI I use answers to me. The AI that uses us answers to no one we can name.

Two lines, drawn close to home

Earlier this year I published Intrepid: Dare to Make a Difference — a book of 27 questions to help people define, develop, and deliver the difference only they can make. It was written with some assistance from an AI collaborator, and it says so in an AI collaboration statement on page one, before you even reach the table of contents.

A local shop reviewed it, liked it, and asked for ten copies. Then, last week, I received an email. They’re drawing a line and establishing a position that they will not shelve any books created by AI or with the help of AI. My book is off their shelves, and no longer scheduled for an author event later this month. I’ve already picked up my book and taken the event off my calendar.

(If you’d like to see how an “AI-assisted” book can deliver a difference-worth-making with the effortful intention of enhancing a reader's experience, consdider picking up a copy!)

Sure, my feelings are hurt a bit. I don’t like to be judged or misunderstood. From my perspective, the store’s stance exceeds even that of the Authors Guild. I also believe “created with the help of AI” is doing a lot of heavy lifting — between not-touched-at-all-by-AI and completely-generated-by-AI, there is a lot of gray area and room for discussion.

But I was a brick-and-mortar store owner myself. I made lots of decisions about what I would and would not carry. I changed my mind from time to time. That’s a business owner’s prerogative. It’s a defensible position that I disagree with, and we can disagree without being disagreeable.

Here’s a bit that surprises some people who are aware of this situation. I’m still hosting a monthly event called The Good Life Gathering at their shop. Why? Because I don’t think we solve anything by disengaging.

The same weekend, a very different line. I had posted that “never AI ever” is a simplistic, rigid, and fragile position — which was, to my chagrin, an overstatement of what I’d actually written in my articles (I’m actually somewhat embarrassed I said it that way). A friend pushed back hard: after a lot of research and deliberation, their position is never AI ever — and calling that position simplistic, they said, is akin to calling “never slavery ever” simplistic, rigid, and fragile.

For me, comparing the choice to thoughtfully engage a technology with defending human-on-human crime fails on the merits. I also believe that sharing the claim that there is no ethical use of AI on a platform that is one of the biggest AI promoters and profiteers ever contradicts that stance.

Here’s what happened next, and it’s the part worth writing about.

They didn’t dig in. They showed their work. They joined that platform twenty years ago — before any of us knew what it would cost, before the data mining, before the AI none of us can opt out of. Their network lives there.

Extracting themselves comes at a price they're still finding the bandwidth to pay, and in the meantime they changed how they use it: fewer of their own words, no photos of the people they love, communities that fight for what they believe in.

That’s not hypocrisy. That’s a person holding a hard line inside a compromised world — the only place any of us gets to hold one. I still think their analogy fails. They still think my line falls short of trying hard enough. And every exchange has made both of our positions better, which was the whole point of the post.

Drawing your line on purpose

We’re all going to be complicit. It’s going to be impossible to stay clean in this complicated world where we are either using AI or being used by it almost all the time we’re online. Abstinence is an impossible choice. If you’re online, AI is part of the conversation for you, whether you want to have it or not.

My position is that it is better to make the decision consciously and conscientiously — on purpose. An informed position you’re prepared to change when you’re provided with evidence that requires you to rethink, reframe, or revise it.3

The sins to avoid are dull, distracted, and delusional.

• Dull is autopilot — using the tools, or refusing them, without ever really deciding, while the promise recedes behind everything that feels urgent.

• Distracted is letting the feed (or anyone else) decide for you — making more noise and stealing more attention with nothing to offer but the stolen attention.

• Delusional is believing you’re standing outside the game — that your hands are clean because your line is.

The virtues to avoid these sins are receptivity, restraint, and responsibility.

• Receptivity opens the floor to better thinking, better ideas, and better data.

• Restraint remembers that more for more’s sake is a trap.

• Responsibility takes full ownership of the words that get printed under your name. Who approved this? Me, always.

Then do some research. Figure out what your usage actually costs. By Google’s measured numbers, a year of my heaviest AI use costs about one cheeseburger. By my critics’ most pessimistic math, it costs about a weekly burger habit. I’ll accept either price.

And know where AI actually lives in your life.

For most of us, it’s the feed. An average daily Facebook scroll emits roughly three times the carbon of my entire year of writing with the machine — and the platform discloses none of it. Anyone moving toward an AI-free life will get further, faster, starting with their scroll than with their shelf. Mine included.

But don’t stop at the cost. What’s the value of your use? How does it enhance the work you do and its ability to create the change you want to make with the people you care about?4

Where I land

This article is part of an ongoing conversation I’m having with myself and my readers about trying to figure out where I am, where I stand, where I’m going, and where I need to reconsider — out loud, with the floor open to anyone who wants to weigh in.

The only game that’s worth playing is your game. Play it on your terms, with as little compromise as you can.

Where, when, how, and why will you use AI — and where, when, how, and why won’t you?

Draw your line. And draw it on purpose.

Onward.
Scott

PS. Before you post a comment shaming someone over their AI position — for using it or for refusing it — here’s a self-check you can run first. You can paste it into any AI assistant or do it yourself (which is, of course, part of the point):

Before I post a public comment criticizing someone for using AI in their creative work, I want you to help me check myself. Act as an honest friend, not a cheerleader — do not flatter me, and push back where my reasoning is inconsistent.

Interview me ONE question at a time. Wait for my answer before asking the next. Cover all six:

1. THE WORK. What did this person actually make, and what did they disclose about how they made it? Am I reacting to their work, or to their disclosure?

2. MY OWN USE. Where does AI already live in my life — the feed that showed me their post, the platform I’m about to post on, my search engine, my phone, my recommendations? List what I use daily, and note that this conversation itself is one of them.

3. PROPORTION. Do I know the actual measured footprint of what I’m criticizing versus the footprint of my own scrolling, driving, and eating? If I don’t know the numbers, should I be arguing from them?

4. MY LINE. Is my position on AI a practice I hold myself to — with reasons I can name and costs I’ve accepted — or a verdict I’m handing down to someone else? When did I last change my mind about anything like this?

5. THE PERSON. What do I actually know about their intent, effort, and judgment? Is there a question I could ask them that would teach me something, instead of a statement that would teach them nothing?

6. THE GOAL. What do I want my comment to accomplish? If it works perfectly, what happens? Would I say this sentence to their face, across a table?

When we’re done: if my criticism survived the check, help me rewrite it as an invitation to a real conversation — curious, specific, and aimed at their ideas rather than their character. If it didn’t survive, tell me plainly what fell apart, and help me decide whether the better move is a question, a private message, or nothing at all.

Disagreement is welcome. Shame is not the goal. Curiosity and offense can’t occupy the same space.

Revised August 2026: added the comparison between generative and algorithmic AI, prompted by conversations with readers. I said I’d change this position when given reason to sharpen it. This is what that looks like.

This piece is part of an ongoing conversation: Judge the Presence, Not the Score → The Debt & The Standard → Are You Using AI (Or Is It Using You)?

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

The Catastrophe Machine is powered by the amygdala, the lizard brain. It hijacks the body before the prefrontal cortex can even be brought in to make sense of things or find a better way to make decisions. We go from stimulus to reaction in less than a blink of an eye.

Somewhere in that blink, you stop dealing with what happened and start dealing with a full production: motives you invented for someone else, a future you’ve already decided is coming.

We must find and sit in the pause so that we can make a more reasoned response based on reality, and not the fear, anxiety, and fight, flight, or freeze impulse of the amygdala. What’s now can be said in less than a second, and it creates the pause.

That’s the whole tool. Before you decide anything, before you spin a single story about what it all means, you ask, “What’s now?”

The stolen lamp

Someone broke into Epictetus’s home and stole his iron lamp. The next night he replaced it with a cheaper clay one and let it go.

Epictetus’ lamp story is about the power of letting go of our attachment to things, especially those that don’t really matter. It’s a function-over-form thing. The lamp is there to provide light. Whether it is made of clay or metal is a matter of form.

Now run it on yours

What is actually happening now is so much smaller than the story, because the story is filled with adjectives, adverbs, narrative fallacies, and a treasure trove of cognitive biases.

When I run someone through this exercise, I encourage them not to leap to something that has a lot of suffering or trauma attached to it. It is much better to start with an everyday challenge or inconvenience and, as you develop the skill, move into the harder things.

There is magic in the idea of three words. Three words can be remembered. If we go to first principles, we can usually find that closing the gap between where we are and where we want to be is a matter of just getting two or three things right, not thirty.

A confession: “What’s now?” is mine, not the Stoics’. They had three disciplines you grow into over a lifetime, and this is just the handle simple enough to grab while your pulse is still up.

Try this today

Do this one on paper to help slow things down when things go sideways.

You take the story in your head and draft it into one sentence, without adjectives, adverbs, motivations, aspirations, needs, wants, dreams and desires, or predictions. That makes it an observable fact instead of an ongoing disaster movie.

Then read it back, and measure the distance between that sentence and the movie you’d been carrying all week. That distance is the work.

More soon. Onward.

Scott

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

The Stoics had a phrase for the whole aim of life, and on first hearing it sounds either obvious or hopelessly vague.

“Living in accord with nature.”

Part of what that means is living in accord with your own nature as a social being and a being capable of rational thought. However, we also have to square that with the fact that we often use our capacity for reason to rationalize and justify our irrational and anti-social behavior.

There’s a granite version of the Stoic out there, untouchable and needing no one, and it gets this exactly backward.

We are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1

Marcus’s quote is meaningful: that we work in accord with each other. We work cooperatively, creatively, together. We communicate and collaborate cooperatively, like two rows of teeth or two hands. And this is from the most powerful man in Rome, writing privately to himself.

The founder of Stoicism, Zeno, was fond of a hand analogy. For me, the clenched fist is a perfect metaphor for clinging and attachment, while the open hand is the metaphor for being open, receptive, and accepting of whatever it is that fate delivers.

So am I supposed to want things, or not? Health, money, work, a good reputation, the people you love: the Stoics called these preferred indifferents, indifferent because they don’t decide your character, preferred because of course you’d rather have them than not.

When I let go of my attachment to fame and fortune and my expectations of playing better gigs or raising my status, I found I became much happier, much less angry, and much less anxious. Paradoxically, I became more successful in the ways we normally measure it.

That’s the open hand. You go after all of it, fully, and hold it loosely enough that losing it can’t reach who you are.

Epictetus was a slave. Seneca was a statesman. Marcus was an emperor. The philosophy works regardless of your status or role in society, because you are not your role. You are the content of your character.

Try this today

Here’s the exercise as I run it with people.

Choose three things you’re currently attached to, chasing, or holding on to too tightly. Things like:

• money

• goals, revenue goals

• relationship goals

• health and fitness goals

• the success of a project

• your status in someone else’s eyes

• anything that’s actually live in your life right now

For each one, simply ask: am I holding this lightly, or has it become my master?

When they actually become aware of the things they’re clinging to too tightly, they feel a lightness in their body, and often they visibly smile.

More soon. Onward.

Scott

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

Yes, I pay for a tool trained on stolen books. I knew. I subscribed anyway.

Roughly half a million books. A federal judge called the taking unlawful, and this summer the company behind my favorite AI finished settling for $1.5 billion. About $3,000 a book.

I also participate in (and benefit from) an economy that was built (historically) on the backs of enslaved people of color, live on land taken from a (historically) displaced native population, and enjoy societal privileges and entitlements that gave me a head start over other sexes and identities.

An engaged life, even one that strives to become a better person and help others do the same, is complicated, complicit, and impossible to keep clean.

Last week’s piece was a response to Substack’s Pangram checker announcement/position, the inherent misuse/misinterpretation in AI-scoring, and an initial position statement. This is a deeper exploration and refinement of that position: what do I owe, and to whom, for working this way?

The debt

Training an AI on books was ruled fair use — the judge compared it to a reader who studies in order to write. Acquiring those books from pirate libraries was ruled theft. That’s what the $1.5 billion paid for. And 96% of surveyed authors say their consent should have been required in the first place. It wasn’t.

Intentional theft of someone else’s IP for corporate or personal profit is illegal, AND “Ideas that spread win” (Seth Godin). The creative process has always inherently included elements of thievery coupled with idiosyncratic innovation and augmentation.

“To steal consciously is the way of art and of craft. To steal through breath is the way of wisdom and of art that transcends.” — Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather

What is legal is up to the courts. What is just and right is up to each of us.

Reparations are an attempt to redress systemic wrongs. They require recognition of unfairness and harm, expression of regret, and taking responsibility and participation in redress — not ignoring, distancing, or disengaging.

Canceling, non-participation, and abstinence remove our voice and example from the ongoing discussion about how to increase fairness, access, and abundance. Engagement is, admittedly, fraught, vulnerable, and messy, but it’s the only way I can imagine being able to contribute to the greater good and answer MLK’s invitation: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

A licensing market is forming. Publishers now license titles for AI training at a stated price, split with authors, opt-in only. My money follows the companies that paid, that license, and that keep getting sued into better behavior.

It’s not a perfect position, but, for now, it is my preferred one.

The flood

About half of new articles on the web are now machine-generated. Books assembled by no one have shown up for sale under real authors’ names.

I left LinkedIn and X and took a 9-month hiatus from Facebook because of the flood of AI slop in my feed, and have made dozens of decisions about unfollowing or continuing to follow creators on Substack whose work I recognized as increasingly smelling of “AI creep” based on my judgment of their presence, transparency, intent, and value.

The flood of AI-generated content and the inherent problems and threats it brings is ALSO the opportunity for the thoughtful, disciplined, committed, and well-intended creator to lead the way and forge a path to better.

One of the lessons in this moment is that making a difference is not about being seen. It’s about learning to see.

“Which means the entire contest everyone’s exhausting themselves inside how do I get seen —how do I stand out, how do I prove I’m real — is the wrong contest. You cannot win being-seen against a machine that fakes it for free. But you were never supposed to be playing that game. The light was never for being seen. It was for seeing: for doing the actual work, solving the actual problem, burning off your own dark first. Being seen was only ever the thing that happened to you when the fire got hot enough. The machine can counterfeit the appearance of light infinitely. It cannot counterfeit the fire, because the fire isn’t an image. It’s a cost paid in a body, overtime, that happens to throw a light.” — , Turn the Light On, or Become the Flame

This is not an either/or moment. It’s an opportunity to embrace a both/and approach that enhances the prospects for users and audiences.

“It’s not slop because it was created by an AI. It’s slop because it’s slop.” — Seth Godin

“Who approved this?” is an invitation to embrace responsibility and agency for what I’m making, what it’s for, who it’s for, and the promise I’m making about how I improve the work and enhance its impact going forward.

And the bar Godin set in December 2022 hasn’t moved.

“If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it.”

The smokestack

One text prompt costs about a quarter of a watt-hour and five drops of water, by Google’s measured disclosure. A year of my heaviest use is a rounding error beside a weekly cheeseburger habit.

This cheeseburger comparison is a risk/reward, cost/benefit analysis around the discerned value of AI-assisted work.

The benefit and value to my community, clients, and readers FAR exceeds the cost. The short- and long-term risk to them, myself, and the environment, compared to the upside reward potential, rounds to zero.

My travel or food purchasing/consumption, household maintenance, etc. each have a much higher environmental impact, and they attempt to benefit only my wife and myself.

The feed deserves a line in this ledger too.

By measured figures, an average daily Facebook scroll emits roughly three times the carbon of my entire year of writing with the machine (and the same data centers serve both the algorithms that rank our feeds and the models that help me draft).

An ecological objection to generative AI specifically is an objection to heavy compute generally, scrolling included. Mine included.

AND the buildout is still a real problem.

Data centers are nearly half of America’s electricity demand growth through 2030. One AI company ran dozens of unpermitted gas turbines beside a Memphis neighborhood and pumps roughly 800,000 gallons a day from the aquifer that the city drinks from.

We all need to participate in the redress of the environmental/societal impact AND do so in proportion to our contribution and profit from that impact. We all need to play a role. However, the individual creator’s footprint and profit pales in comparison to that of the corporations who traffic in its development and deployment. Responsibility is shared, but should also be proportional.

The line

The Authors Guild now certifies books as “Human Authored.” Their line: AI for research, brainstorming, and outlining is fine; AI-generated text, beyond a trace, disqualifies the work. By that line, some of what I publish wouldn’t qualify. I want to say that plainly, because “AI-assisted” is doing a lot of quiet work in many bios right now.

Here’s mine.

An idea pops up on a walk, or while I’m reading. I jot it down, noodle on it for a few days against my current knowledge and experience and against the known positions of others. I research and discuss with friends, family, and Circle/Inner Circle subscribers, form an assertion/hypothesis, and steelman it against other prevailing positions.

Then I begin drafting how I want to present it to my audience by developing an intended reader’s arc and outline, referring to my own past work (most of which was created without any AI assistance), and collaboratively organizing, drafting, refining, and revising with Claude.ai.

Claude helps me identify what’s missing, broken, or needs work so that I create the best product possible for my readers. An experience transparently enhanced by AI assistance to amplify my presence and the value of my idiosyncratic (and hopefully unmistakable) thinking, technique, tone, taste, timbre, temperament, and talent as the creator of the work.

My answer to “who approved this” is me, always. I take full responsibility for what I publish under my name and how I created it.

How it lands and is interpreted is beyond my control, and I plan to continue to use that feedback to help become a better contributor and creator.

Where that leaves me

My position is to play your game. “Never AI” is a defensible position if it is true (or at least being truly pursued), and if that position truly helps you get closer to what you want and who you want to become (without interfering with others ability to do the same, of course).

“All AI all the time” is not a position I endorse. When it comes to content and creating change, more for more’s sake is a trap.

Like any other tool, the efficacy and ethics of using AI to enhance creative work begins with the intention, integrity, and impact of its employment.

Using the tool out loud and in public while others watch provides the feedback and data that will allow those of us whose work is dedicated to enhancing the lives of others to refine, revise, iterate, improve, optimize, and maximize that endeavor with increasing purpose, prosperity, and peace of mind for all. Historically, the increased access to technology creates greater abundance.

Let’s talk about it

You may weigh the debt differently than I do. Good. Weigh it and weigh in. Decide your terms on purpose. Then, whatever they are, tell the people you serve and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

Onward.
Scott

Revised August 2026: added the comparison between generative and algorithmic AI, prompted by conversations with readers. I said I'd change this position when given reason to sharpen it. This is what that looks like.

This piece is part of an ongoing conversation: Judge the Presence, Not the Score → The Debt & The Standard → Are You Using AI (Or Is It Using You)?

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai — drafted and refined from my own ideas, examples, and decades of practice. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.

In this episode, Creative on Purpose’s walks through the Marketing Trifecta: three essential questions every solopreneur, coach, creator, consu…

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When I talk about surrender, I don’t mean giving up or giving in. I mean letting go of what was never yours to hold on to in the first place.

I know the word makes people flinch. It shows up wearing a white flag and sounds like the moment you quit.

As a teacher at famous schools and an advancing professional musician, I certainly felt the weight of ambition, the need to “make it,” to be respected and admired. I even achieved some of that.

But it didn’t lead to a sense of happiness or flourishing.

When I let go of my attachment to fame and fortune and my expectations of playing better gigs and reaching bigger audiences to raise my status, I found I became much happier, much less angry, and much less anxious. Paradoxically, I became more successful in the ways it’s normally measured:

• Better gigs

• Better work

• Better bands

• Better audiences

• Better fees

None of that came from gripping harder. It came from putting down what was never mine in the first place. That allowed the energy I’d been spending on the grip to flow straight back into what the work was actually for: connection, communication, and collaboratively creating a way forward.

The famed Stoic teacher Epictetus was owned by a cruel man. His leg was actually broken by his owner. Yet he maintained the freedom of his mind by not attaching his well-being, his sense of purpose, prosperity, and peace of mind to the state or location of his body.

His masters called themselves free while staking everything on wealth and status, all of which could be taken in an instant. He had stopped staking his soul on any of those external indifferents and went all in on investing in the quality of his character and the state of his soul.

(This idea is one thread of my book, Stepping Into Possibility. More at the end if you want it.)

Try this today

Here’s the exercise.

Get out a blank page and at the top write: things I am trying to control. Then draw a line down the middle. On the left are things that aren’t yours to control, and on the right are things that are actually yours to control.

Fill in the left side first, without overthinking it. Do it quickly. You’ll discover you’re clinging to goals, objectives, expectations, and aspirations well beyond your control.

You’re trying to control other people’s opinions of you, control outcomes, and control other people’s lives, like your spouse or your children. You’re ruminating about paths that can’t be adjusted.

On the right side, put down the things that require your effort, your preparation, how you treat people, and your opinion about what it all means and what the actual choices in front of you are.

It’s a shorter list, but it is everything that you actually need to create purpose, prosperity, and peace of mind, because it is all based on how you see things and what you decide and do next.

Don’t fix or adjust your thinking. You can’t stop trying to control things that are beyond your control. If you’re going to improve your posture and your sense of purpose, prosperity, and peace of mind, you have to actually be aware of all the things that you are attached to, in order to actually let them go.

Onward.
Scott

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

I scanned a chapter from my 2020 book Onward through Substack’s new AI detector. It came back 100% human.

Sure, I was relieved that it “passed.” But I also wished I’d had then the tools I have now so I could have made it clearer, more crafted, and better able to connect with my intended audience — not just that chapter, but the entire book.

With Onward, it’s less about any one chapter and more about how the book itself could have been better organized and delivered to impact the reader in the intended way. My new book, Stepping Into Possibility, covers similar terrain and does so with greater ease and impact, according to early readers.

Hold those two facts side by side. The book the scanner certifies as fully human is the one I’d rebuild today. The book the machine helped me make is the one readers say lands.

As you probably know, Substack now offers AI detection, built on a tool called Pangram. A reader can scan a post, a Note, a comment, and get back a percentage: how much of this was generated by AI?

I ran a second test. An earlier draft of this essay had a paragraph the machine roughed up until it read like a 1 a.m. journal entry — lowercase, typos, a kitchen table, a friend named Nate asking why I even cared what the robot thinks. When my editor asked whether Nate was real, my honest answer was: “Not sure where you see Nate.” I had to search my own essay to find a friend the machine had invented for me.

Embarrassed.

This week I scanned that paragraph by itself. 100% AI. Caught.

Two scans, two right answers. So I won’t argue the tool is broken. Three writers I know have tested it as well — one a mentor, an experienced and successful copywriter who has been using AI tools since before ChatGPT became widely available; the other two, Substackers who write about AI use in their publications. All ran actual tests and screenshotted the results. One was able to “trick” the scorer. Another defended her use of AI and attacked Substack’s announcement/position.

Here’s where all of that leaves me. The tool is well-intended and largely accurate about what it measures. The danger is in the judgments and decisions it influences based on what it DOESN’T measure — the background collaborative research, the organization, and the co-created text.

And a confession, as a reader rather than a writer. My primary measuring stick is “was this helpful/useful” (the relative value), and was the author “present”: clear motivation, intent, experience, and POV. Transparency is the least important to me personally. I’m more interested in the efficacy and the applicability of the ideas and knowledge to my own pursuits.

The scanner measures the axis that I personally rank last.

There’s already a cost to reading it any other way. I’ve spoken with many writers who feel wrongly accused or flagged, and many more who feel their motivations and execution are questioned — suspect — despite their disclosure.

So here’s the scan I keep, the one I run on my own drafts before anyone else’s:

Does this piece convey my motivation and intention? And has the machine helped me deliver it in a way that will increase its ability to connect with my intended audience, enhance their experience with the piece, and inspire them to take intentional action with the ideas, insights, and information that helps them get clearer about — and closer to — what they want?

That one still has no number. Good. Some things you have to read for yourself.

For now, I encourage you to judge the presence: the intent, integrity, motivation, and meaning. Because right now it’s the one thing on the page the meter can’t.

Onward.
Scott

PS. If the score ever stops being a signal a reader can choose to pull and becomes a silent thumb on the scale — yes, I’d go. I reserve the right to change my mind if presented with new information or interpretations worthy of consideration. But yes.

This piece is part of an ongoing conversation: Judge the Presence, Not the Score → The Debt & The Standard → Are You Using AI (Or Is It Using You)?

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai — drafted and refined from my own ideas, examples, and decades of practice. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.

Sometimes I ask it other ways. Are you thriving, or just coping? Are you thriving, or just coasting?

By getting through, I mean coasting, coping, or trying to remain dull, distracted, and delusional. Simply doing today what you did yesterday, or scrolling through social media or YouTube videos when you should be doing the real work, or believing in what you believe simply because you believe it.

Most people answer fast, and they land on getting through, and none of it looks like a crisis, which is what makes it so easy to miss.

The ancient Greeks had a word for the sense of thriving we’re all striving for, eudaimonia.

It’s a funny word, fun to say, easy to mispronounce, and even easier to misinterpret.

Most people interpret eudaimonia as happiness, but it really means something closer to human flourishing.

Here’s the fuller version.

Eudaimonia means maintaining your sense of prosperity, purpose, and peace of mind despite anything life throws at you, even when it goes sideways, upside down, and all topsy-turvy. So you can maintain your equanimity in both a hard season and in an easy one.

My both/and interpretation comes from earlier writing, in my book Onward: Where Certainty Ends, Possibility Begins. As you seek and strive, you are sufficient and enough, and there is still more to explore and do. These are not paradoxes or contradictions. This is the human condition.

You are sufficient even as you strive.

I know that from the inside, because I spent years on the wrong side of it.

I taught at famous schools. I was respected by my peers and my students. But I detested the politics, the infighting, and the interference from administrators and parents. I felt like I couldn’t do the real work: helping students become what they wish to become, helping them think and look critically at themselves, the world, and each other.

I left what everyone else told me was a dream job, gave myself to music, and learned the slow way that flourishing never waits on the far side of your troubles. You do it inside them, or you don’t do it at all.

What about you? Are you flourishing, or are you just getting by? And if the honest answer is getting by, what would flourishing look like right here, in the life you already have?

More soon. Onward.

Scott

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

In this wide-ranging live Q&A, speaks with author, entrepreneur, and mentor about what it means to create meaningful work in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.

Nic explains why lived experience, genuine curiosity, human connection, and the willingness to put unfinished work into the world are becoming more valuable—not less. He also shares how to make an impact without pretending to be someone you are not, how to uncover the simple truth buried inside a complicated idea, and why the process really is the shortcut.

The conversation moves from practical communication and business-building principles into deeper questions about identity, fear, structure, energy, and integrity.

Nic also reveals what happened when he quietly published a collection of books on Amazon—and how writing those books forced him to confront the gap between what he taught and how he behaved.

In this episode:

• How to serve others when you naturally prefer solitude

• Why you may need a source on one side and a megaphone on the other

• How conversations help you find the one sentence people remember

• Why you should test ideas on real people instead of polishing them in isolation

• How to choose which fear will guide your actions

• Why curiosity can interrupt anxiety, shame, and embarrassment

• The advantage lived experience gives humans over AI

• Why growth requires a structure capable of supporting more energy, money, or influence

• How writing can expose the difference between your stated beliefs and actual behavior

• What Nick learned from publishing his books through Amazon

• Why philosophy is useless unless it improves your life or the lives of those you serve

The central invitation is simple: put the idea into contact with reality. Say the thing. Watch what happens. Stay receptive. Then use what you learn to make the work clearer, truer, and more useful.

Join the Next Live Q&A

This conversation was recorded during an exclusive live session for members of The Circle.

Join The Circle to participate in future live Q&A calls with Scott and Nic, connect with purpose-driven solopreneurs, and gain access to conversations, coaching, and resources designed to help you build meaningful work on your own terms.

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Creative on Purpose

Close the gap between who you are, what you do, and the life you want.

By Scott Perry

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https://www.youtube.com/@CreativeOnPurpose

Think back over the last seven days and add up what you spent — not the money. The energy. The attention. The worry. The 2 a.m. churn.

The traffic you narrated out loud to no one. The opinion you tried to manage in someone whose mind was already made up. The outcome you refreshed your phone to check, as if checking could bend it. The conversation you replayed for the fortieth time, quietly editing your lines, as though the rehearsal could reach back and change what was already said.

Add it all up. Now ask one question — the one that organizes an entire two-thousand-year-old philosophy:

How much of that did you actually have any control over?

Honestly counted, the answer is close to none.

And yet that’s where the bulk of our energy goes — poured into a fire we can’t reach, while the fire we could actually tend goes cold for lack of fuel.

It’s the most expensive mistake human beings make. We make it constantly.

And the Stoics built their entire practice on noticing it and stopping.

A slave figured this out before any of us

Epictetus was born into slavery. He spent the early part of his life as the legal property of another man, in a world that gave him no rights, no possessions, and no say over where he went or what was done to his body.

If anyone had grounds to believe his freedom depended on his circumstances, it was him.

Instead, Epictetus became the philosopher who taught — more clearly than anyone before or since — that real freedom never depended on circumstances at all.

His teaching survives in a little handbook called the Enchiridion, a word that means something you keep close at hand, like a tool. And it opens with the distinction he considered the foundation of everything:

Some things are up to us, and some things are not.

That’s it. That’s the fork in the road.

Everything you encounter falls on one side or the other, and almost all of our suffering comes from filing something on the wrong side — treating what isn’t ours as if it were, and then breaking ourselves trying to control it.

So here’s the sorting.

Not up to you: outcomes, the past, the future, the weather, the economy, your reputation, what other people think, what other people do, whether your work succeeds, whether you’re treated fairly, whether your body cooperates. The big stuff. The stuff we most desperately want to be ours — and spend our lives pretending is.

Up to you: your judgments. Your choices. Your values. What you decide an event means. How you respond. The character you bring to this moment. A shorter list. A humbler one. It contains none of the outcomes you crave — and, when you look closely, the only things that were ever really yours to begin with.

The Stoics aren’t saying the first list doesn’t matter. Of course your health matters. Of course you’d prefer to be treated fairly and to have your work land.

They’re saying something more surgical: you can influence many of those things, but you can command none of them — so staking your peace of mind on them is like building your house on someone else’s land. The day they decide to evict you, and they will, you’re left with nothing.

The gate you were never assigned to guard

Let me show you what this costs in a real life.

I once watched a friend nearly come apart over his grown daughter’s choices. She was making decisions he could see would cost her, and he could not stop trying to fix it.

He lectured. He strategized. He lay awake constructing the perfect argument that would finally make her see. He managed her — or tried to — the way you’d manage a crisis at work, as if the right combination of effort and intelligence and love could make another adult human being choose differently.

It was destroying him. And here’s the brutal part: it wasn’t working, and it couldn’t, because her choices were never on his side of the fork. They were hers and hers alone.

He had poured a father’s entire heart into a gate he was never assigned to guard.

And while he stood there — exhausted, failing — the gate that was his swung unattended in the wind.

Because there was a part that belonged to him completely: not her path, but whether he stayed someone she could come back to when that path got hard. The warmth he could keep alive between them. Who he was willing to be while she figured it out.

One of those was on his side of the fork. He was spending himself to exhaustion on the other.

I’ve done my own version of this. So have you.

We try to control the client’s opinion instead of doing excellent work and letting the opinion land where it lands. We try to control how the evening goes rather than choosing who we’ll be with. We try to script other people’s reactions, manage what strangers think of us, force outcomes that were always going to be decided by a hundred factors we’ll never touch.

We call it caring, or responsibility, or just trying hard. But a lot of the time it’s simply standing at the wrong gate, wearing ourselves out guarding something that was never ours.

(This idea is one thread of my book, Stepping Into Possibility. More at the end if you want it.)

This is a relief, not a surrender of caring

Most people hear “some things aren’t up to you” and brace for despair. So I’m powerless? So I just give up?

No. In fact, the opposite.

Naming what isn’t yours doesn’t mean caring less about it. It means stopping the bleed.

When you quit pouring yourself into what you can’t control, all that reclaimed energy flows straight back to what you can.

You care about the outcome exactly as much as before. You just stop trying to command it, and start tending the only part that ever answered to you: your effort, your choices, your character, your response.

That’s not resignation. Resignation is collapsing into “nothing matters.”

This is the opposite — a fierce, focused attention on the things that genuinely are yours, freed at last from the dead weight of everything that never was.

The slave who wrote this down understood something his masters never did. They controlled his body and called themselves free.

He controlled his judgments and he was free — in chains, in exile, in poverty — free in the only way the word finally means anything.

Not because his circumstances were good. Because he’d stopped staking his soul on circumstances at all.

Try this now

Draw a line down the middle of a page. Left column: things I’m trying to control that aren’t mine to control. Right column: things that are actually mine.

Fill the left side first, and be ruthless. What have you been gripping this week that lives on the far side of the fork? Someone’s opinion of you. An outcome already in motion. The way another adult is running their own life. The past. Put it all down.

Most people are startled by how fast the left column fills — and how much lighter they feel the moment it’s on paper instead of on their shoulders.

Then look at the right column. That short, humble list? That’s where all your reclaimed energy gets to go now.

That’s the whole move. Stop guarding the wrong gate. Tend the one that’s yours.

More soon. Onward.

Scott

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.

Look at the two devices on the wall of almost any room, and you’ll find a surprisingly complete philosophy of how to live.

A thermometer reacts. That’s the whole of its job. The room warms, the reading climbs. The room cools, and it drops. It has no opinion about what the temperature should be — it simply registers whatever happens to it and moves accordingly. It’s a perfect mirror of its surroundings, and completely at their mercy.

A thermostat reads the room too. But then it does something else: it regulates. It holds a sense of what the temperature ought to be, notices the gap between that and the actual reading, and acts to close it. Same input as the thermometer. Completely different relationship to it.

The thermometer is run by the room. The thermostat runs the room.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Most of us, most of the time, are living as thermometers.

Someone’s tone drops, and ours drops to match. The news turns tense, and so do we. A room fills with anxiety, and we absorb it and call it ours. We react to our surroundings as automatically as mercury climbing a glass tube — and then we wonder why our inner weather always seems to belong to everyone but us.

This is not about pretending you don’t feel the cold

Let me clear up the objection right away, because it’s the one that sinks most advice like this.

Being the thermostat does not mean going numb. The thermostat reads the temperature. It doesn’t pretend the cold isn’t there. It feels the room accurately — that’s the whole first half of its job.

It just doesn’t become the cold.

That distinction matters, because the ancient Stoics — who worked this out two thousand years before central heating — were emphatic about it. They never asked anyone to stop feeling. They knew you couldn’t. They had a word, phantasia, for the involuntary jolt that hits before you’ve decided anything: the spike of fear, the heat of an insult, the pang of envy. It arrives uninvited, fully formed, often wrong — and entirely outside your control.

Even the Stoics who advised emperors admitted that this first flash happens to the wise and the foolish alike. It’s biology. It’s the body doing what bodies do. You will feel the flare of anger when someone wrongs you, the clutch of fear when something threatens you, the ache of grief when you lose what you love. None of that is a character flaw. That’s just having a working nervous system.

The move — the entire hinge of it — comes about a half-second later.

The gap

Because after the impression lands, something else happens, and this part is yours.

The impression knocks. Then you decide whether to open the door. The flash of anger says this is an outrage, strike back— and in the next moment you either nod along and let it drive, or you pause and look at it. Is that true? Is striking back who I want to be right now? Is this even mine to be angry about?

That pause is the thermostat doing its work. The impression is the temperature reading. What you do next is whether you let the reading run you — or hold your setting and respond.

The thermometer says yes to everything, instantly. The thermostat reads, weighs, and chooses.

The gap where that choosing happens is small. Some days it feels like it doesn’t exist at all — like the reaction and the event are the same thing, fused, no daylight between them. But the gap is real, and it is the single most valuable piece of real estate you own. Everything else — every practice, every bit of steadiness you’re ever going to build — gets built in there.

One question you can actually use today

Knowing the gap exists is one thing. Having something to do in it — while the heat is rising and the impression is screaming at you to react — is another.

So here’s a place to start. Before you say the thing or do the thing, ask one question:

Does this actually need to be said or done at all?

That’s it. That’s the whole tool for today.

You’ll be amazed how often the honest answer is no. So much of what we fire off in a hot moment never needed to happen in the first place — the cutting reply, the correction nobody asked for, the point that simply had to be made. Most of it serves the impression rather than the situation. And a surprising amount of peace comes from discovering how often you can simply let the moment pass unanswered.

Try it once this week. The next time your reading spikes — the tone, the email, the comment that lands wrong — before you respond, ask whether it needs a response at all. Then notice what happens in the half-second you bought yourself just by asking.

That half-second is the gap. Standing in it, on purpose, is the whole game.

You’re not trying to stop feeling the room. You’re just deciding, for once, not to become it.

More soon. Onward.

Scott

Written with the assistance of Claude.ai. The thinking and the responsibility are mine.
Click here to learn how and why I work this way.