And there is probably something you really want to do, but can’t stomach doing. Or maybe you are doing it and feel like a loser. That’s why you’re reading this, specifically, despite all of the competing content on the internet.

Well, feeling like a loser. Feeling nervous, sweaty palms, and all of the things is your biology at work. In this live I talk about how your body has been engineered to avoid social ostracism. Your brain is wired to resist anything that might make you look like an outcast. Because 10,000 years ago you would have been thrown to the woods. You needed your tribe. So today, your brain short circuits at the idea of posting a Reel (or a live, in my case).

I discuss how a UCLA researcher put a bunch of brains on an fMRI scanner and found that the simple act of being left out of a game of toss led to the same physical sensation as injury.

TL;DR: it literally hurts to feel like a loser.

So, we design a life to do everything except feel discomfort. But the issue is that discomfort is crucial for progress.

In the live, I show you how to move from your comfort zone, to the fear zone, to the learning zone — and ultimately reach growth. And I share a tool for accountability. Paid subs can replay it above, and click on the vault to access printouts.

WHAT VAULT?

I just launched a vault for paid subs!

It has all the resources from my solo lives, like the series below from this live where I break down what each stage of growth looks like — tactically — and how it feels. And it’s right below the paywall.

UPCOMING LIVES:

• of Instead of Doomscrolling on September 11th. We are going to chat about the business of connection, save the date

• of Write Build Scale on September 16th. She’s a Substack expert, and we will break down the best strategies for publications to build their own distribution network

• Solo live on the 7 strategies to get ahead (when you’re unlikely to get ahead at work, specifically) where I round up ambitious folk and share some of my best leadership insights on Sept 25th. The TL;DR is that junior and senior folks approach the same problems differently, and the approach determines whether or not you are perceived as a leader. Tune in

Read more

His book — Better Good — came out this week. So we decided to give everyone a peek under the hood of what it took for Scott to get his words into the market. In the live, he reverse engineers how he got an agent and a Big Five publisher despite not having a large following. We talk about how much the process cost him, advances, and tools to find agents and fellow writers.

One of my fav nuggets via the convo: Write, Ask, Explore, Repeat. Scott says:

• Write — start now. Momentum begets momentum

• Ask — ask everyone for advice and direction. Friends, colleagues, aspirational agents. Scott cold emailed Celeste Fine of Park, Fine, & Brower and landed his agent — despite folks telling him he didn’t stand a chance.

• Explore — be willing to think bigger than you planned. Be open to getting challenged.

• Repeat — keep going (big theme across my Substack, tbh).

Enjoy the recording and share with any aspiring writer friends.

Join me for my next live video this Saturday at 10 am Pacific on the power of the ick.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

My husband called me from the eleventh floor of a scene-y West Hollywood hotel this morning. He was with his Vietnamese tailor, a savvy businessman who flies into LA to make suits for sartorially inclined finance bros.

”What colors should I get?” Hadi asked. I’ve been pushing him to try bolder colors for a while now. “Should I do an olive? Or a brown? I kinda want a mauve suit???”

“Yeah, but…” I hesitated, then stopped myself. “You will look washed out in most olives and browns. And pink needs a good eye…” I drifted off before saying “Actually — I’ve got this. I have high color acuity, lemme text you options.”

Hadi unsurprisingly trusted me to shoot over some colors, as I am the designer in this union. Then the baby started crying. And the toddler started whining. And instead of my regular creative process of scanning the internet and our closet to find the right hues and saturations, I reached for my phone and uploaded his pic to Gemini. “What are good brown and olive tones for this complexion? Please mock up images.” I prompted.

Gemini gave me options. Many average options. So I tweaked the prompt. And it gave me more good enough options. But nothing great.

While waiting for my AI to process his images, I scrolled Substack and got hit in the head with a quote by that described that moment perfectly. “Everyone is getting good, no one is getting better.”

Brenda had put her finger on something I couldn’t articulate. Good is strangely uniform and easy to achieve in an era of AI. But better is hard. And we are losing the skills for better every day.

Good is competence. It’s producing something recognizable, usable, and polished enough. Better is judgment. It’s seeing what others miss based on what you have learned, seen, and experienced — something that has the potential to deviate from the average of what already exists. And as a result, better is more creative, more original, more imaginative, more nuanced, more personally distinctive, and/or more human.

Creation is the process that produces the judgment for better. And execution is the process that turns that judgment into an output.

And I will spend the next few minutes arguing that we are at risk of confusing good for better, and for confusing execution with creation. Because modern life has come at the cost of the thought that produces better.

WE USED TO LEAVE THE INTERNET

“We used to say BRB and G2G because we would leave the Internet for a while,” as one person pointed out on Threads. We used to stand in line without pulling out our phones. We used to drive without quickly cramming a text in at red lights. We used to get bored long enough for a thought to become something else. And even for a thought to make a mundane idea…better.

Because better requires creativity, and creativity requires imagination — the ability to move past available options of what’s in front of you to what isn’t. Imagination allows you to picture the unknown and novel.

We have confused competent execution with better.

To understand why we’re so good at execution yet so stuck at originality, we have to understand what imagination does for us.

Everyone!!! Quick announcement break: I have a live for paid subscribers on August 29th — we are going to go over the power of the ick, because nothing is more powerful than cringe. LITERALLY. People often ask me if I do 1:1s, at this time I don’t, but the lives are a cool opp for questions and to chat. Join us! I pick a topic every month.

IMAGINATION IS CRITICAL

Imagination is critical. I was just reading The Body Keeps the Score, where the author says

Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.

Dr. van der Kolk is pointing out that imagination is not a luxury. It is a crucial lever for a fulfilling life.

Imagination is how you rehearse a difficult conversation before you have it. It’s how you picture a version of your work that is different. It’s the image of your husband in a kinda-mauve-not-quite-pink-a-little-salmon suit in your head.

Imagination is how you envision the life you want before you can prove that it’s possible.

Without imagination, you lose creativity. And without creativity, you lose options. You become better at choosing from what exists and worse at inventing what should exist.

HOW IMAGINATION HAPPENS

Recently, I was batching content for Reels. All four (?! — still wild to say) of my kids were busy. And I stared at the screen blankly. My creativity was bone dry.

As soon as the baby cried and I sat down to nurse, an idea came to me. Hands tied, completely unable to jot down notes, I yelled into the abyss: “Hey Siri, capture a note,” frantically hoping some Apple device was within earshot. Turns out my phone was around. Siri grabbed my mental note, and I continued to nurse in bliss.

The creative block you experience often happens when you stare directly at the problem. Ideas happen when attention runs free. When you are in the shower or folding laundry or nursing a child. The small gaps leave room in your brain to make connections.

And as points out in the opening pages of her new book You Can Just Do Things, philosophers have known what neuroscientists have proven: you come up with more original ideas when you let your mind wander without distractions.

If you like this, subscribe! You’ll probably never come across my work on Substack again, consider how popular the platform has become. So just drop your email and let’s KIT!

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Neuroscientists have a name for the connected regions of the brain that activate when your attention turns inward. When you daydream, reflect, imagine someone else’s perspective, or think about a possible future, you’re activating your default mode network — the DMN.1 As opposed to outward attention like reading, chatting, or watching a video, which uses a totally separate system.

In a 2024 study, researchers directly stimulated DMN regions in awake neurosurgical patients while the patients were given a standard creativity test. They were shown an everyday object and asked to share as many different uses for it as possible — a brick could be a doorstop, a weight, a tripod, etc.

And when researchers disrupted inward attention, and in turn the DMN regions, patients didn’t produce fewer ideas — but what they did produce was less original. Their brains were still able to wander and generate creative thought, which implies that the DMN is not the sole source of creativity. But the network — when uninterrupted — superpowers our creativity. It helps us make the new connections that generate unexpected work.2

When you imagine, you are not just having thoughts. You are taking pieces of your memory, sensation, knowledge, and experience. You are turning all of those things into something new. Imagination is seeing the mauve suit before it exists. It’s finding that sentence that explains a feeling you so deeply feel, but can’t articulate. Like people are getting good, but no one is getting better. Imagination lets you envision a future that you’ve never seen before.

But the DMN is not an on/off switch. An interruption — a text at a red light, a TikTok during your walk, a child asking for milk — doesn’t shut the system down. It just reduces the system’s ability to produce the loose, unrelated thought that leads to better.

You don’t need a month in a monastery to create something better, you need to develop the habit of not grabbing for your phone every time you feel a twinge of boredom. Creativity needs protected time, so your brain — not your feed — can make some new connections.

Because creation ultimately comes from within you.

EVERYTHING IS WORKING AGAINST YOUR IMAGINATION

The typical internet user spends an average of two and a half hours on social media each day.3 It’s no surprise that short-form video has taken over a huge share of our media diet. It was reported that more than 60% of us watch short-form daily, winning our attention over broadcast TV, long-form streaming, music subscriptions, and gaming.4

And your short-form habit is why you may not be able to get through a movie without reaching for your phone. A 2025 study combined the results of 71 other studies and found that heavy short-form use weakened people’s ability to focus — and weakened their ability to wait for the next thing before they’d finished the last one. Your short-form habit may divert resources away from your imagination.5

SUBSTITUTION VERSUS SCAFFOLDING

Your imagination problems get worse when you let the internet think for you. While short-form fills the pockets your imagination needs to create, AI does something worse — it creates for you. Not always or inherently — but certainly when you use technology to substitute your thinking rather than scaffold it.

I was scrolling through a Bloomberg article a few days ago when I realized that a paid subscriber benefit to the article was an AI summary. In other words, subscribers paid to read high-quality journalism — or paid for the option to avoid reading it. This suggests enough readers prefer a few reliably synthesized bullets of high-quality journalism instead of the high-quality journalism itself.

We used to pay writers to create arguments, scenes, and language. Now, writers are being compensated for their work to be compressed into bullets that we can efficiently process without experiencing. Making us incredibly efficient consumers of information, but removing the ambiguity, texture, nuance, and accumulation through which an argument can actually change us.

Bullets teach us what to think. Reading teaches us how to think.

For someone telling you to get offline, I am online a lot. I watch a lot of content. I make a lot of content. I use a lot of AI. AI is not inherently a creativity killer. Content is not inherently a creativity killer. The internet is not the villain. But the villain is substitution.

Once we use technology to substitute the hard parts of creation, we are in trouble. Because technology is paid in outward attention, and creativity requires inward attention. Better requires inward attention.

So use technology, but make sure to create space for silence. If you don’t give your mind the opportunity to generate thought, technology will certainly offer some version of what you’re looking for.

I must take a moment to remind you that technology has biases, whether it is the average of everybody else’s opinion (like AI) or information designed for your purchasing patterns and interests (like social media). But that’s a whole other essay in itself, which I have chipped at in other essays.

You can do some things on your own, other things you can only do with help, and there are things you can’t do at all. When I asked Gemini to take over my color acuity this morning with the tailor — a thing I am really good at — I moved from something I can do to something I can do with help. Instead of moving forward, I moved back. AI had not replaced my taste, it had replaced the blank page where taste begins.

I received an output instead of making one. I executed, but I didn’t create.

YOU CANNOT CONFUSE CREATION AND EXECUTION

As tools make our lives more efficient, you have to become adept at knowing when you are substituting versus when you are scaffolding. And you have to know when you are creating versus executing.

Execution is destination oriented. It can be optimized, templatized, and sold. AI is good at execution.

Creation is what happens before the destination is clear. It is fueled by curiosity and imagination. It’s the inherent process before an answer is produced. It’s connecting random thoughts and having a bad idea, then another bad idea, then a good idea built on the backs of the bad ideas.

IN CONCLUSION

We may be processing more, but are we thinking more? Or are we becoming more efficient at receiving conclusions we did not come to on our own?

Everyone is getting good because the tools are making execution easier. Nobody is getting better because the muscle that makes us original is at risk: the private, wandering, unstimulating, unassisted act of imagination.

You made it to the end!! What did you think? I love your comments, I love your likes. All of it feels…idk…good? Putting my intellectual heart on my sleeve out here, haha.

I have a live coming up for paid subs! It’s gonna be on the power of the ick on Saturday, August 29th. Join us! I’ll send the recording out to paid subs too.

Also it’s funny that this article is about being good versus better, because my mentor released his BOOK this week, Better Good. It’s a framework for how to make social impact by the king of social impact himself. Check it out.

“Toxic is a conversation-ender, not a diagnosis. And calling someone toxic is an easy and unspecific reason to quit something without doing the work of alignment. What was the goal of the conversation?” I replied.

“I just wanted to be authentic.”

At that moment, her fallback on authenticity was a red-flag. Let’s get into it.

When you disagree with someone, you have 4 options and all of them depend on what you are working towards. This applies to anything — whether it is work, marriage, kids, sport, etc.

THERE ARE 4 WAYS TO HANDLE A DISAGREEMENT

When you disagree, you could:

1. Get aligned

2. Disagree and commit

3. Disengage and walk away

4. Defame

And the options hinge on how productive you want the outcome to be.

Sometimes being productive and aligned really matters. For example, when raising kids, you probably want to be aligned with your partner. You need to agree on what matters and how to raise them.

Other times forcing alignment is the best path to productivity. As a founder, I am either fully aligned with my exec team or I disagree and commit. My goal is a productive outcome, so I will row in the right direction regardless of how we got to the boat.

Sometimes a neutral response is best. If someone is trying to force beliefs on me or get a rise out of me, disengagement is often my approach. You can afford to disengage when the outcome is irrelevant. Or when the outcome is relevant, but nothing you can influence. Or if you have a bias towards the status quo. I disengage all the time on social media, including yesterday when someone called me a “head cage wearing tradwife.” Not sure why she was so venomous towards people with head cages or trad-wives, but I am not planning to find out. Because the outcome of any conversation with this stranger is irrelevant to me.

And sometimes, you take a scorched earth approach — the last path. Maybe you argue. Maybe you cut the person out of your life. Maybe you villainize them. Maybe you call them toxic to convince others of your point of view. This path is always destructive. It will never build a relationship.

In the scorched earth approach, you grip to your position. Nothing else can fit in your hand.

Disagreeing doesn’t end relationships, disengaging or defaming does.

And all four paths are shaped by how coachable you are. And all paths will pretty much guarantee different outcomes. And if you know the outcome you are working towards, you can pick the path that makes the most sense.

Being coachable doesn’t mean being agreeable. Being coachable means being able to assess tough feedback with objectivity, and either mold or respond productively.

Alignment — not agreement, authenticity, or diagnosing someone as toxic — is the real driver of progress in any relationship.

And alignment comes down to one underlying skill: coachability.

YOU ARE NEVER BIGGER THAN THE TEAM

Coachability is a skill that is developed early through training.

I was recently reading Coachable, where the author cites research from Kimberly Shaffer at Barry University. Shaffer says that whether a kid becomes coachable — good with feedback, good with hard things, willing to be pushed — isn’t something they are born with. It’s modeled. It comes from how their parents handle failure, how their parents give feedback, how their parents respond when something gets hard.

Kids don’t learn how to handle failure from being told. They learn it from watching. Modeling beats instruction.1 And kids also inherit their parents’ beliefs about failure — they hear what you say about their ability.2

TL;DR: treat your kids’ limits like something plastic, not something fixed. I was recently hanging with a six-year-old at a birthday party, and the girls were singing. “I want to sing, but my mom told me I don’t have the voice,” one girl casually stated — like fact. My heart shattered for the child who self-selected out of the activity due to a comment her mom probably made in passing, and probably to get a few minutes of reprieve.

A few hours later my kid was singing, and I heard the same girl tell my son “You don’t really have a voice, you can’t sing. You just can’t do it.” I stepped in to gently challenge her belief.

BELIEF IS CONTAGIOUS AND ASYMMETRIC

I stepped in because belief is contagious. And belief determines effort.

The moment reminded me of a study where researchers tracked over a million runners for five years and found that exercise is contagious, but not symmetrically. A less active runner pulls a more active one down toward their pace harder than the reverse ever happens.3

Belief works the same way. A person’s reference group sets their ceiling — what they believe they can achieve and what they’ve decided is impossible. And the pull always runs downhill. If you teach your kids to have a low and fixed bar, they’ll teach it to everyone standing next to them.

One of the most effective ways to encourage plastic thinking is sports, because sports reverse the pull. Instead of standing next to the least effort in the room, you’re standing next to the most. Sports test your emotional, physical, and psychological limits — and the more you believe those limits can move, the more effort you’re willing to put in. An athlete that lacks self-belief won’t succeed.

Which is also why sports shape you for alignment. The best athletes have to think bigger than themselves. The best athletes know they can improve to benefit the team. A misaligned player pulls a team down the same way a less-active runner pulls down a friend.

Like the author of Coachable says, “You are never bigger than the team.”

YOU ARE NEVER BIGGER THAN THE COMPANY STRATEGY

Similar to sports, coachability is relevant in leadership. I will never forget when a girl who worked for us told me I “leave bodybags,” because my speaking style was forceful and lacked alignment.

Like sport, your limits are often tested in leadership. Specifically your emotional and psychological limits (and sometimes physical, when you are on the road for weeks at a time). I am grateful to that girl, because my headspace and communication style were derailing alignment. And if I couldn’t listen and coach my way out, I would hurt the whole business.

And I will never be bigger than the company strategy.

I grew up being called a leader, so the moment was shocking — but not unique.

TALENT IS A BAD TEACHER

I recently ran into a girl I grew up with who was incredibly intelligent, and everybody knew it. She was praised for her grades. Got away with murder due to her academic prowess. Her sister was always compared to her. After college, her life took a variety of random and unrelated directions, and decades later she hadn’t settled on a path.

A 2024 synthesis pulled together 33 studies on gifted kids who never hit their potential. The finding: giftedness identified early — without a matched history of struggle and correction — breeds a fragile sense of self. These kids developed a fixed mindset about their own intelligence. Compared to kids who kept performing, they believed they were smart enough to coast. They were never challenged enough to find out otherwise.4

The real drivers of their underachievement were perfectionism and fear of failure. The logic: if something’s fundamentally wrong with you, don’t risk finding out. Researchers called it “self-handicapping” — these kids engineered their own excuses in advance. They would procrastinate, disengage, or not really try. That way, failure could always be pinned on effort and not ability. Protecting their identity as achievers mattered more than the outcome of achievement.

I was fortunate to want to change when I was told I leave body-bags.

When self-image matters more than learning, you cap your potential. Because learning is hard and should make you feel a little stupid.

None of these kids lacked ability — they lacked a history of taking a hit and realizing they were still fine. Talent gave them early performance with little effort. By the time effort became a key ingredient, they hadn’t developed the focus or emotional regulation required to sustain effort.

There’s a real cost to growing up naturally talented and never coached. How you’re spoken to determines whether you can handle the next setback. If you were told you were “so smart,” you might find that repeated failure breaks you. If you were told you “found a good way” to do something, you may be more likely to keep going.5

And likewise — how you praise your kid today shapes how they handle failure later. Specifically, how they manage a setback when their brain can’t predict the outcome.

BEING COACHABLE TEACHES YOU THAT YOU CAN’T PREDICT EVERYTHING

Coachability is effective when you’re clear-eyed and have an action plan.

A clear plan forces you to focus only on what you can act on. Your brain treats anything it can't predict like an unresolved threat. Give it something actionable — a plan, a step — and your prefrontal cortex engages, which is linked to quieting the amygdala's threat response. Your alarm settles enough for you to think.

The more you focus on things you can’t predict, the more you trigger the brain’s anxiety circuit.

YOU CAN’T FIX WHAT YOU CAN’T PREDICT, BUT YOUR BRAIN DOESN’T KNOW THAT

When something isn’t predictable, the threat signal never gets the chance to settle. It keeps firing. Your brain keeps trying to solve something it has no lever for. So it doubles down on threat monitoring at the cost of pursuing your goal.6

Your brain is constantly trying to predict outcomes. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett describes the brain as a prediction machine, constantly trying to reduce uncertainty about what’s coming next. And unpredictable situations give the model an error because your brain can’t model an outcome that it doesn't have enough information to predict. That shows up as anxious arousal.7

Coachable people stay calm under correction: they’ve trained their brain to look for the lever to shape outcomes instead of the verdict to call it quits.

STOP CALLING PEOPLE TOXIC

Back to my friend. She didn’t reach for “toxic” because she’s dishonest. She reached for it because nobody taught her how to survive a hard conversation without it becoming a referendum on her. She had a training gap in the school of life. The same training gap that turns gifted kids into fragile adults, the same one that makes a six-year-old inherit a ceiling based on words she’s heard.

Being able to align or disagree and commit aren’t communication styles. They are tools to coach yourself into an outcome you want. And you’ll be better at aligning if you’ve survived enough correction to know that friction isn’t bad.

So the next time you reach for the word “toxic” to describe being misaligned, think about your outcome. What do you want out of the conversation?

What do you think? I always love your comments.

Leave a comment

Hi friends! I recently launched a paid tier. If you are already a subscriber, nothing will change. You will still get articles like this in your inbox for free. I appreciate and value your support so much. If you go paid, you have access to my lives and Q+As and some additional posts. I hope you caught the last live on why you have to be good at being bad at things.

JOIN MY NEXT LIVES

• On August 29th, we are gonna talk about the power of the ick. The TL;DR here is that being able to withstand the ick is literally all it takes to do whatever you want.

• On September 26th, we are going to talk about the 7 differences I have seen between junior and senior people in the workplace. These strategies will level you up in literally an hour.

And recordings for both will go out after!

I went live on Substack this weekend — and talked about why you have to be good at being bad at things. And I was very honest about how good I am at being bad at things. Let’s get into it.

First, I started the live series because throughout my career, access has been my biggest challenge. It’s common for us to quip that we did something “against the odds,” when in reality many of us are working against the statistics. Statistics are much less forgiving than odds. There were as many business best selling books by men named John as all women combined in 2020 — which means I am, once again, working against the statistics. You are also working against the statistics in some way.

So it’s no surprise that the conversation was dedicated to reverse-engineering the odds.

I don’t talk much about my origin story. I’m Iraqi-American. I grew up watching my country get bombed apart and wanted to dedicate my career to post-conflict redevelopment, so I studied architecture. I was determined to rebuild Iraq.

In studying architecture, I fell backwards into an internship at NASA. I got in by applying to a program reserved for aero-astro engineers, and I was rejected. A month later, the program offered me a spot. Two students declined the internship, and the director thought it would be cool to have a designer join. From NASA, I fought my way into MIT (literally showed up at the program director’s office and made my case). And at MIT, ended up building Wise Systems almost by accident — trying to predict bombings with mobility data (you gotta watch the live to get the full story).

Now I lead a logistics software company, and I’m represented in the 7% of minority women in the C-suite. Nobody hired me into that seat. I built it. I built influence — and as a result, power.

What I have learned along the way is that there are only three paths to power.

First: Nepotism. Somebody with power hands you a door.

Second: FOMO. You capture attention in some way, people want in because your success is in reach.

Third: Distribution. You build your own audience. This is the only path to power that others don’t control. It’s fully reliant on your ability to build, and it’s created a path for the unlikeliest of us to build power.

For people who look like me, the first two paths are hard to access. Distribution is the most accessible, and distribution runs entirely on trust.

Trust is the foundation of everything — work, marriage, parenting, your board, your team. Without trust, those around you avoid conflict. Without conflict, it’s impossible to commit to a goal. Without commitment to a goal, accountability is impossible. And without accountability, the goal will never be reached — a la Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Trust is at the foundation of results. And so, trust is at the foundation of your potential.

I booked my next lives — mark them on your calendars.

Subscribe now

JOIN MY NEXT LIVES

August 29th — 9 am Pacific. The power of the ick

Sept 26th — 9 am Pacific — 7 strategies to fake it til you make it in leadership

HOW YOU LOSE TRUST

So let’s talk about trust.

You lose trust two ways: people think you lack integrity, or people think you lack competence.

Competence is a sliding scale. You can lose it and rebuild it. When the NVIDIA CEO washed dishes at Denny’s, nobody would have trusted him with a global business. Today, he is an iconic rags to riches story. His LinkedIn is the American dream.

Read more

Recently my eight-year-old asked me if I had a TikTok, I said yes. “So why can’t I start a YouTube?” she asked, joining the 1 in 3 kids who aspire to become YouTubers.1

“You can,” I said. “When you become really, really good at something and want to teach it. That’s what I do.” Both buying time before my kid gets online, and calibrating her compass towards excellence.

But as I think about my advice, I wonder if it will hold in a decade. Is AI killing the knowledge business? Is AI killing influence?

The knowledge business is already a tough one. I recently read a Substack by about how knowledge is being commodified. The same article advised folks to go upstream: high-ticket advising/coaching. She cited creators who are advising to the tune of $150,000. And she really got me thinking about discernment.

Tim Ferriss further illustrated the point through his declining book sales, citing AI bots as a new-age swap for many readers.

CAN AI REPLACE THE KNOWLEDGE BUSINESS?

So can AI replace me? Can it replace my daughter’s YouTube dreams?

AI HAS DILUTED MAINSTREAM INFLUENCE

One thing that AI has done is dilute mainstream influence. A job that was started by social media companies a decade ago. Let me explain.

I grew up at a time when celebrity was fully manufactured. Limited programming, a few late night shows, and blockbusters determined celebrity. Magazines fanned the craze — from Cosmo to People to Vogue, influence was gatekept. Our culture was shaped by a few sources, and we followed. The clothes, the eyebrows, the books, the body goals were influenced by curated celebrity.

Then came the streaming era and social media, and more people gained influence and notoriety. Suddenly Hollywood blockbusters weren’t household names. A-list celebrities were A-list for some, but not always national sensations. We went from a select number of influential people to a much wider array. Primetime sitcoms had to compete with YouTubers who would unbox toys for hours on end.

And culture has since been shaped by more sources. Global voices. And influences across cultures, religions, and gender.

And now with AI, the branches of influence have only become more diluted. As Tim Ferriss put it, rather than someone consuming his work, a chatbot can consume his work and spit out frameworks. Culture has been steamrolled and tailored to your preferences in your voice. A quick prompt to the algorithm can create a specialized guide on how to do your eyebrows, what to cook with soursop, and what it takes to get into an Ivy League college.

WHEN INFLUENCE IS DILUTED, AGENCY IS REQUIRED

And so, it’s a time of extreme agency. Instead of relying on others to set culture and norms, we are driving our lives through algorithms shaped to our interests. The more we consume, the more we are shaped by what we consume in an infinite loop of influence.

The thing about extreme agency is that it necessitates extreme discipline.

And extreme discipline is built on self-trust and not letting your mood govern your plan.

BIRTHING A BABY REQUIRES A LOT OF SELF-TRUST

I experienced this a few weeks ago when I was laboring. Self-trust is a crucial skill in birth, with the counsel of a medical team, of course.

My labor was long — like weeks long. I experienced contractions two weeks before my due date, daily. And the contractions led to a domino effect of arranging care for our kids and sledgehammering through various deadlines at work. My due date came and left. There were signs of progress, but no baby.

One night, I called my dad. We chit-chatted aimlessly. As soon as we hung up, he called back. My dad and I hadn’t talked about labor, but he must have sensed that I was struggling with the lack of predictability.

“Layla, labor is long. Don’t be worried. You are very smart, you have a great doctor and you are being monitored regularly. I know you are listening and collecting information, which is your job right now. Do not let this make you anxious. Your body is going through a natural process.”

That call was the push I needed to get out of my own head when I was, indeed, mentally spiraling in anticipation.

I reminded myself that I had done this, I had the discernment to know that my body was progressing. That I was indeed in close collaboration with my doctor and experts. And that my nerves wouldn’t help anything.

By the way, I am doing a live in a few weeks! It’s for paid subscribers. Pledge today to get the early bird rate. I often talk about how trust is foundational to being effective — at any capacity. And how trust is at the foundation of influence. We are going to dive into the mechanics of trust and how to gain influence through trust. Join me!

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AGENCY WITHOUT DISCERNMENT IS DANGEROUS

But what happens when you have extreme agency and limited discernment?

I recently learned about the free birth movement. Turns out I first heard about it on the finale of The Pitt, but it didn’t click until I came across content on Instagram encouraging pregnant women to skip medical care, skip the midwives, and forgo medical assistance altogether. The Guardian highlighted the dangers of this movement in a year-long investigation, interviewing parents whose newborns suffered or died due to the lack of proper medical attention when needed. And just recently, an influencer bled out due to a postpartum hemorrhage after a free birth. Her body couldn’t control the bleed.

As I read the piece in The Guardian, one part stuck out. It highlighted the risks of agency without discernment. It was about a woman who was warned by medical professionals that she was high-risk for shoulder dystocia because the baby was large. She dismissed the claims because a Free Birth Society newsletter told her those fears were “greatly exaggerated.”

As Esau Lopez was asphyxiated for the first 17 minutes of his life on Earth, the atmosphere in the room remained serene, even ecstatic. Acoustic music crooned from a speaker in a modest two-bedroom apartment in a suburb of Pennsylvania. “You are a queen,” murmured one of three friends in the room.

Only Esau’s mother, Gabrielle Lopez, felt something was wrong. She was pushing hard, but her son would not be born. “Can you help [him] out?” she asked, as Esau crowned. “Baby is coming,” the friend replied. Four minutes later, Lopez asked again, “Can you grab [him]?” Another friend murmured, “Baby is safe.” Six minutes passed. Again, Lopez asked, “Can you grab [him]?”

Lopez could not see the cord wrapped around her son’s neck, nor the bubbles blowing from his mouth. She did not know that his shoulder was grinding against her pubic bone, like a tire spinning on gravel. But “deep down”, she says, “I knew he was stuck.”

I wish the story had a better ending, but Lopez’s baby did have shoulder dystocia. The baby’s head was delivered and his body didn’t follow. Her son suffered hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, a brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation, which led to life-altering consequences for him.

I commend the mother’s bravery for sharing her story, as she openly admits she had agency but lacked discernment and a knowledgeable team to support her decisions.

AI CANNOT REPLACE DISCERNMENT

My takeaway: We live in an era of extreme agency, but agency and discernment are not mutually exclusive.

Discernment comes from judgment. Judgment comes from knowledge. Knowledge comes from experience. Experience comes from implementation. Implementation comes from discipline.

The problem with our new AI world is that in the discipline → implementation → experience → knowledge → judgment → discernment lifecycle, we are jumping straight to step 4: knowledge. And relying on AI to check judgment and discernment before we get to implementation. We are starting in the middle of the lifecycle, leaving severe areas of vulnerability.

Similar to how a free birther is trusting the knowledge of the community to help determine judgment over the experience or knowledge of professionals.

AI can not replace discernment.

I am an AI person. I remind my audience — ten toes deep, usually — that I hold the opinion, unpopular in many spaces, that I find AI very useful. That I use AI to streamline my own workflows and create workflows that would have otherwise been done manually.

But I do not rely on AI to create new thoughts or visibility for me. I create those things, whether it’s through writing on Substack or speaking or nailing my tone and message through Reels.

KNOWLEDGE IS NOT THE GAP, JUDGMENT IS

I was recently speaking to a pediatric plastic surgeon. “In residency, we learned as many operations as possible. As an attending, we learn how not to operate as much as possible.” The surgeon was talking about the difference between accumulating knowledge and building judgment. While residency is a great time to solidify technical skills, residents often have the oversight of a more experienced attending physician. As an attending physician, judgment is king.

Knowledge is extremely valuable when it has a synergistic relationship with judgment. You learn, you try, maybe you fail, maybe you succeed, and you tweak the process.

Knowledge enables judgment, execution guarantees it. And discernment refines it.

With AI, knowledge can be produced with very little judgment and context from the prompter. There is zero friction between an idea and an implementation plan. You don’t have to read all 448 pages of a Tim Ferriss book to create context, sink into the arguments, and generate a plan. You can prompt a plan in seconds. And sometimes you can even automate the implementation.

But friction helps us learn.

So maybe use AI to outsource your learning process and learn a thing or two. Or maybe the consequences of lacking discernment arrive faster and AI slop accumulates. And maybe you never really build skills along the way.

Research out of the MIT Media Lab demonstrates the difference between learning and retrieving knowledge. In the study, 54 participants wrote essays using ChatGPT, Google Search, or no tools, with EEG monitoring throughout. Predictably, the ChatGPT group showed the weakest, least distributed brain connectivity of the three. When later asked to write without AI, that group couldn’t recall content from their own earlier essays.2

But decades before the Media Lab’s study, UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork coined a term that we all know to be true (even though it’s actually pretty counterintuitive): desirable difficulties. Desirable difficulties describe conditions that make learning feel harder in the moment but produce long-term retention. When you struggle to retrieve an answer, it sticks. When you practice over time rather than cramming, it sticks. When you creatively produce a solution instead of borrowing someone else’s, it sticks.

It’s not lost on me that this newsletter is called Things You’ll Learn the Hard Way — because the hard way is often the most effective way to learn things.

Slow sticks. Painful sticks. Friction sticks.

And if you are relying on AI to engineer your way out of friction, you will struggle to retain information. You may outsource, but you will not retain effectively.

Because friction is tuition for excellence. As the Four Stages of Competence reminds us, we have to be bad at something before we are good at something.

SO, DID AI KILL THE KNOWLEDGE BUSINESS?

No.

I stand by this claim.

You can’t get to durable knowledge, let alone judgment or discernment, without passing through the difficulty first. AI didn’t find a shortcut around that.

AI did not kill the knowledge business. Because AI cannot replace discernment or judgment. And it cannot create discernment or judgment. But you can. And I can. And we both can document how we think. Or read about how others think, in a way that our brain engages with it and connects dots.

Because AI has reshuffled — once again — how influence is distributed. And it’s a platform for the loud and the well-documented. And a resource for the disciplined.

Thanks for reading! Please do consider subscribing or pledging to be a paid subscriber. If this article proves anything, it’s that I am committed to applying my brain and generating original thought in this new era of AI. So thanks for supporting good, old-school thought pieces.

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My newborn is 3 weeks today! I can’t process that she was in my stomach 22 days ago. This is my current writing quarters.

BABOON TO THE MOON gifted me the most functional bags that I used for my hospital visit. The Small Go-Bag is a dream backpack for any short trip; it carries a bunch of stuff in a deep pocket, but also has a bunch of small pockets. And cleans easily. And the Go-Tote Bucket is my new diaper bag. I’ve honestly had my eye on B2M for a long time because the aesthetic is so cool, and now that I can co-sign on the functionality I am fully sold.

140,000 of you read it. A lot of you have written to tell me it changed something — how you think about trust, how to be perceived in a way that aligns with your goals, how you talk to yourself when something goes wrong. That means more than I know how to say.

And my message is consistent: shoot high, embrace the cringe, manage the emotions around it, succeed. I often have to follow my own advice.

I’m adding a paid tier. I want to be honest about why, because I think you deserve that more than you deserve a sales page.

I am writing a book.

And I am committed to writing a really, really good book.

The writing takes real time. The research takes real time. And now that I have some insight on how writing a book works, I have learned that both the writing and research benefit from a team. Especially when non-fiction how-to books are losing to generative AI. Especially when there were more business best-sellers by men named John in 2020 than all women combined. And especially since I just had my 4th kid and run a business.

Here’s what the paid tier includes: the core essays stay free. That’s not changing. I am committed to access. What paid subscribers get is something different — live video sessions where we go deep on one topic together.

Live sessions, with Q&A. A recap, recording, and extracted lessons after each one. And some time for 1:1. The first session is on trust. Saturday, August 1st at 9am Pacific. If you can’t make it live, you’ll get the recording.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written on trust — on what breaks it, what builds it, what it actually costs when it’s gone — you know this is a topic I’ve been circling for years. The first session is going to be the version of that conversation I haven’t been able to have in a newsletter.

The launch price is discounted, you just have to pledge and you lock in the pledge deal as long as you stay subscribed. When I turn on payments in a few weeks, that price goes up.

Whether or not you pledge, I am grateful for your support.

First off, thank you for the love over the last week! For those out of the loop, I just had a baby. Noora, our 4th, is perfect. I was actually drafting this article when my water broke.

THE BEST LESSONS OF 2026:

Belief is a biological input.

This one has been a big lesson, as my body went from being extremely athletic in 2024 to surviving an ACL tear in 2025 and my fourth pregnancy in 2026. What you believe about yourself changes how your body performs — how you process food, how you respond to exercise, how much effort your brain allocates to a task before it gives up. There’s research behind this. Harvard researchers studied hotel housekeepers in 2007: when told their daily work counted as exercise, their weight dropped, blood pressure lowered, body fat decreased — without changing anything they did. A different belief led to a different body.

Your beliefs are upstream of your physiology. Which means the work of changing your outcomes starts earlier than most people think. Research and more info below.

Success is cringey.

Ama Hill said “the cost of success is embarrassment.” And it’s true. Success is very cringey.

The cost of success is cringe. And the currency is persistence. TL;DR: if you get cringey and stay cringey, you can do almost anything.

Because your brain doesn’t care about your goals — it cares about your survival. And the life you say you want registers as a threat if it’s outside of your comfort zone. So you may be inclined to shrink your goals, instead of embrace the cringe.

Self-sabotage is usually self-protection.

We all know someone mean. Someone who deflects criticism through insults, anger, or rage. Often, their fits come at the cost of their success.

Why? Because when you’re chronically dysregulated — stressed, reactive, constantly in low-grade survival mode — you cannot access your full cognitive bandwidth. You will never access your brain’s full potential while emotionally flooded.

Many people lack a well-regulated brain. And without a well-regulated brain, you will not have an extraordinary life. Being overwhelmed, mean, chronically overthinking, and emotionally volatile are costing you more than you realize.

Because those feelings get in the way of goals — and your brain doesn’t care about your goals. It cares about your survival.

The life you say you want — the promotion, the business, the version of yourself that posts publicly and charges more and leads boldly — registers in your nervous system as a threat.

What do you think so far? Should I keep these up?

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Clarity is a prerequisite for efficiency. But getting clear is not efficient.

We are in a clarity epidemic right now. Everyone is promising you that the right tool, the right framework, the right AI prompt will make everything obvious. Or better — do the work for you. If you’ve been here long enough, you know I am not an anti-AI Substacker. But I am clear-eyed.

Clarity has been commodified. But clarity is inefficient to acquire and certainly cannot be bought.

If you don’t know what you want or where you’re going, AI will not save you. You cannot optimize your way to a vision. You have to sit in the discomfort of not knowing, and let the answer emerge. That process is slow and uncomfortable and completely necessary.

You can’t get out of your rut because you lack a goal, a path. Or you can’t control your mood.

If you are in a rut, you lack a vision, a path, or you are emotionally dysregulated. The first two are obvious to diagnose. The third, not as much. You will reach for apps to escape discomfort, scrolling endlessly to keep your mind distracted from anything meaningful or challenging. Or, you will prepare and over-think to achieve comfort. But the cure for feeling unprepared is not more preparation. It’s taking action regardless of how you feel.

Efficiency is the enemy of trust.

We are squeezing efficiency out of every corner of work. Cameras off, async everything, no small talk, fewer meetings. And then we wonder why teams feel disconnected.

Trust requires two things: someone has to believe you’re competent, and someone has to believe you have integrity. Both of those things take time, repetition, and actual human interaction to build. You cannot shortcut them. In a remote world, you have to be intentional about slowing down — or you will work with people for years and never actually trust each other.

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Your curiosity is for sale. You have to protect it.

Every social media company on earth is competing for the exact same cognitive resource your brain needs to learn something, get good at it, and want more.

When you do hard things, you grow your brain’s capacity. When you stay comfortable, that capacity shrinks. When your default state is passive consumption, your brain becomes a knife you haven’t sharpened in months.

The companies profiting from your attention know this.

Most of your life will suck.

Roughly a third of life will be good, a third will be hard, and a third will be boring.

To get through the boring, you need focus. To get through the hard, you need the ability to sit with bad feelings and stay functional anyway. This applies to work. To relationships. To any long-term commitment you’ve ever made. The good moments are not the majority — they are one part of the formula.

Align your expectations with that reality, and you’ll stop being blindsided every time things get hard. You’ll also stop abandoning things right before they turn.

Abundance is a discipline, not a desire.

This post about a TikTok poem may be my most viral. Abundance is almost always framed as a destination — but abundance is the result of discipline, not luck. Even when we have abundance, we are wired to forget and want more. A study of lottery winners found that they return to their emotional baseline after winning life-changing money, for example.

Abundance isn’t about wanting more; it’s about handling what you have with a still hand. The people I know with the most abundant lives take on the most and share the most. They build a reputation for high capacity, and the world keeps recognizing it. They also say no constantly — because every yes to more is a no to something else. AI is the perfect test case: use it with discipline and it multiplies you. Use it without focus, and you’re running with a full cup.

Anger is killing your dreams.

Years ago, I was on a call with a reporter and my co-founder. She asked me a question, and I looked at him, signaling for him to respond with a nod. He started to reply and she said “I asked Layla. Do you always mansplain?”

My eyes widened in horror. My co-founder is extremely respectful, calm even under the wildest circumstances, and predictable. He is not one to speak over anybody or strong-arm his way into a point.

“But..I wanted him to.” She talked over me to finish the article and continue her storyline. She was writing a big piece. While I still look back at that moment and cringe from the disrespect, from her falling into orientalist tropes suggesting I lack agency – and from assigning aggressive behavior to one of the few Black CEOs and founders. I now see the moment clearly: He could have reacted. But he didn’t. Because he never loses emotional control. And that’s what makes him great at his job. In fact, most successful founders I come across are emotionally regulated.

Your anger is costing a lot of people a lot of time. Including you — the cost is probably biggest to yourself.

And emotional regulation has a high ROI on your time. When you can manage your emotions, you can use your time wisely.

Send that last one to whoever needed to hear it

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Ambition is expensive.

Ambition is also metabolically expensive. And it competes for the same fuel as anger. At a parenting workshop, the facilitator asked us to write what we were called as children, then name the voice. Then he ended with: “That voice is highly likely the voice in your kids’ heads right now.”

The best part is that I was in the workshop with my mom and sister. When we compared notes, the voice in our head repeated the same positive affirmations. About our excellence, kindness, generosity, curiosity, etc.

The most potent form of generational wealth is emotional regulation.

Ambition is a slow drip when you’re regulated. When you’re not, it goes dormant — because chronic dysregulation hijacks the prefrontal cortex, the same part of your brain responsible for planning and building. TL;DR: anger and ambition run on the same battery. Every time you regulate instead of react, you free up energy for something worth building.

There is an advantage to being unqualified.

“All progress is made by unqualified people,” Jim McKelvey correctly stated. The Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics. Steve Jobs was a college dropout. The unqualified have an advantage: they don’t know what’s supposed to be impossible. When you do hard things, your anterior midcingulate cortex grows — the region linked to motivation, will to live, and resilience. Neuroscience proves the unqualified person willing to struggle has a structural advantage over the qualified person avoiding discomfort. The credential trap tells you to prepare more, study more, wait until you’re ready. That’s a strategy for staying exactly where you are. Progress doesn’t require permission. It requires tolerance for being unqualified for being capable and disciplined enough to do the reps anyway.

Thanks for following along this year, and I hope you all have learned as much as I have by documenting and connecting the various thoughts required to write each Substack.

Thanks for reading! What did you think? One cool thing about writing regularly is that many of these ideas developed throughout the year. They started somewhere, and have since evolved into foundational beliefs that drive me. Anyways, leave a comment and tell me which hit home most.

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I am 40 weeks pregnant right now. Sitting in the hospital room, laboring. It’s my fourth time birthing a child, unmedicated. I know what comes after this moment of calm and reflection. Indescribable and unwavering pain. Incomprehensible despair. A deep belief that I can’t move forward. Then a euphoric feeling words won’t describe once the kid is out. As my friend Marzyeh put it a decade ago: “You will feel like you are breaking. Then broken. Then they put the baby on you and you will feel complete.”

It’s bittersweet. This will be my last labor.

I have been thinking about last-times a lot recently. I was in the breadline at the local Iranian market, patiently waiting thirty minutes for fresh sangaak bread. About ten minutes in, my swollen, pregnant feet couldn’t take it anymore. I started to lean, adjust, and try to find ways to get comfortable. An older man saw me and hurried to grab the closest grocery cart in line (bless the cart’s rightful owner behind me for going along with this), and flipped the cart sideways. He demanded I sit, and reminded me that my job — carrier of life — was more important than social decorum. I sat, gratefully. I also knew that everybody around me would understand — because pregnancy is this oddly mammalian time, when your protection and comfort becomes social obligation that transcends age, race, gender, and even rules of social engagement. Strangers can and will help you. Strangers can and will flip carts for you. Strangers can and will watch their cart get flipped by other strangers in a bread line, and get with the program.

That bread line last week was probably the last time a stranger will defy social norms for me to rest with full buy-in of everybody in eyesight. I won’t be 9 months pregnant ever again.

Some lasts are predictable, some are voluntary, others are neither predictable nor voluntary.

My friend’s father got a terminal prognosis for his cancer; she was preparing for his last Father’s Day recently. She didn’t choose this last and couldn’t predict it. Another friend just divorced her husband. Last year was her last Father’s Day with him. And she could have predicted it, as she was researching divorce attorneys at that time.

Then there’s labor. What I am going through now. The most painful and magical experience of my whole life. The best and worst day of my life. Hours of absolute horror for a lifetime of indescribable joy. Today is the last time I’ll experience labor.

You may be thinking I am crazy to be writing mid-labor. But it’s by design. (And it will stop working really soon, as labor is one of the few human experiences specifically designed to override cognitive control. But I am coherent at the moment).

Everything ends. The bread line ended. My friend’s marriage ended. The labor will end. What you do with the moment after is the only variable you own.

EMOTION IS QUICK

Every time I feel a contraction, as my body pushes the baby’s body down, I reel in pain. Soon, I will shudder in terror. The pain of a single late stage contraction is comparable to getting bit by a pit bull, with the concentrated jaw bite force of over 200 pounds driven by massive skeletal muscles. My uterus — a smooth, involuntary organ (i.e. one you can’t tone), ounce for ounce, is generating a squeezing and expulsive force that rivals the grip intensity of highly powerful jaw muscles.

Every few minutes. If I don’t get my mind off the contractions in the moments of reprieve, I will repeat the pain loop in my head. And the anticipation of what’s ahead, because I know it will get worse. That’s why I write. Sometimes I chat with my husband. Other times I stare at the cute, empty tray of baby stuff — ready to receive the human currently nested in my uterus. The most salient reminder that this will all be over soon.

I was reading about biological responses to triggers recently. And how when a trigger occurs — pain, threat, shock — the brain releases a chemical surge. The amygdala evaluates it fast. From the moment your brain perceives a trigger, an initial surge makes your heart race and your body brace. It peaks and begins to subside in roughly 90 seconds. Harvard neuroanatomist and stroke survivor Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor describes this 90 seconds as a process in which the emotional chemical flush is washed out of your bloodstream. If you don’t feed it, it dissolves on its own.1

If you are still furious, anxious, or deeply sad after 90 seconds, it isn’t because the initial biological trigger is still firing. It’s because your thoughts are restimulating the loop. Your mind is telling a story about the event. “How dare they say that,” “What if this happens?” — which triggers a brand-new 90-second chemical wave.

We don’t stay tied to our pain because of the sensation. We stay tied to the pain because of the fear of the sensation, the anticipation of it — whatever story we are telling ourselves about the pain. So I can push past the fear of the next contraction, or I can anticipate it in terror.

So I write.

And the contraction passes. But in that reprieve, I keep coming back to the same question: if the biology resets, why do we often choose the loop?

WHEN WE SUCCUMB TO EMOTION, WE LEAN ON DESIRE AND NOT CAPACITY

Emotional loops aren’t always self-generated. They can be a result of the systems we were born in. A difficult parent, a chronic pain condition — a constant external trigger. Sometimes the loop is imposed, but my point is to explain how the loop works.

For now, we are going to tackle the loops we have more control over. Understanding the 90-second biological loop helps us understand our capacity, and whether or not we have bogged down our capacity with unregulated emotions.

When we succumb to the loop, we lean on how we feel instead of what we have the tools to work through. Wanting something is about desire, intent, or preference. Capacity is about resources, bandwidth, and neurological/emotional capability.

Capacity is what enables executive function. Executive function and emotional flooding are neurologically incompatible. When the amygdala is highly activated, blood flow is redirected away from the prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain responsible for planning, judgment, and capacity. You cannot access your full cognitive bandwidth while emotionally flooded.2

So, reminding myself that the emotions due to the pain are quick is how I remind myself that I have capacity. Capacity is not desire. I can genuinely want to stay perfectly calm, write a good article, or clear my brain for whatever’s next. But if executive functioning is depleted, or the emotional nervous system is flooded, I will lack the capacity in this moment to do it.

In another context, I was recently talking to a friend who got a friendly message from someone who upset her a decade ago. “I don’t forgive or forget,” she went on. “Why should I?”

Because every time you replay the trigger that upset you, you restart the loop, I told her. You’re not punishing the person who hurt you. You’re dosing yourself with the same chemical wave, over and over, for something that happened ten years ago.

Your biology doesn’t know the difference between the original event and the memory of it. It just responds to the story you keep telling. Releasing the story isn’t about excusing what happened. It’s about getting your bandwidth back.

Desire can be a signal that you want more. But awareness is not restoration, and capacity requires work.

In the context of childbirth, endless literature reminds me that my body will perform — and I just have to follow my body or the advice of a medical professional if my body isn’t performing. That women have given birth in comas. That the pain of a contraction is my body doing its intended function of pushing a tiny human through me. A big, arduous task. The literature reminds me that my body is superhuman at this very moment. The literature reminds me to get control of my head, breathe through the pain, and trust my body. That even if I don’t believe it, my body does have capacity and will push forward without me.

(Broad brushstrokes — there are labors where the body doesn’t perform and medicine has to. And yes, hormones are about to override everything I just said. But the principle holds outside this room.)

And usually, if the capacity is there, the headspace can follow.

Recognizing that you lack the capacity for a thing — rather than assuming you don’t care enough or haven’t tried hard enough — changes how you solve the problem. You stop trying to increase motivation and start focusing on restoring resources.

The baby tray is still empty, the contractions keep coming, and — still — I write.

Hi from labor! How are you all doing? It’s been a very on-and-off few weeks with prodromal contractions, hopefully I will be on the other side soon! Leave a comment or some love, I can use the endorphins.

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I was listening to someone recently say to a big group: “AI will give you strategy — you don’t have a clarity problem! Your real issue is with capacity.” My eyes widened — she was dead wrong.

We are in a clarity epidemic.

With the fast rise of AI and the inevitable mass distribution of slop, we don’t just consume AI slop. We are at risk of thinking like AI slop. AI aside, we are at risk of being cognitively shaped by the algorithms our mindless scrolls meticulously sculpt for us. Our patterns are reinforced based on what we consume — and those patterns turn into values. Clarity has never mattered more and cannot be outsourced to an algorithm or AI.

The clearest articulation of what’s actually happening came from a TikTok (the source of much of my inspiration, won’t even lie about it iykyk):

“You don’t actually have values. You have patterns, and your brain builds them from what you allow — not what you believe. Every time that you tolerate something that goes against your values, you tell your brain that it’s acceptable. What’s actually happening is that your brain builds your identity through these repeated behaviors.” Vickery Mahmoud

@vickerymahmoudSet the standard and your brain will follow

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Vickery goes on to talk about the impact of these behaviors: low effort, being disrespected, behavior your brain doesn’t register as a mistake — it registers as you. And the more you repeat it, the more your brain lowers standards.

His primary argument is that when you tolerate something that contradicts what you believe, the brain doesn’t register it as a lapse. It registers it as you. Over time, instead of your brain rising to meet your beliefs, it drops to meet your behaviors. The mechanism is cognitive dissonance — your brain resolves the gap by moving your standards down, not by moving your behavior up.

When behavior contradicts belief, belief shifts to match.1

You can’t think your way into who you are.

Your brain builds identity by repeated behavior, not belief — and the neuroscience that backs his claim is Hebbian learning, which suggests that repeated behavior physically strengthens the associated neural pathways.2 So you need high standards to cue your brain, repeatedly and specifically, toward the identity you’re constructing. Setting a standard requires direction, which ultimately leads to clarity. Direction leads to habits, and habits — not intentions — drive the majority of your behavior.3

In an age where what you watch online reinforces what the algorithm will serve you, Vickery is right that high standards have never mattered more.

Because what I’ll argue today is that standards shape behavior, behavior shapes identity, identity is reinforced by your environment, and your environment leads you to clarity, which enables — really — anything. Clarity is the prize as you descend into the work, not the ticket to entry. Let’s get into it.

YOU NEED HIGH STANDARDS

So you should have high standards. High standards are the first step in the path to clarity — because often clarity follows from behavior, it doesn’t precede it.

I didn’t wake up in my twenties knowing that I wanted to build a logistics SaaS company. I lived every day according to my values: work hard, be curious, develop a love for big creative problems and execute, don’t make excuses. And the clarity for building a business came later.

I didn’t wake up in my thirties knowing I wanted to write a book about it. I aligned with my standards. Communicate better, build an audience based on knowledge, write concisely but effectively. And the clarity of my writing came after trying a multitude of approaches.

My biggest feats have been a result of high standards, not clarity. But standards don’t emerge in a vacuum.

TO HAVE HIGHER STANDARDS YOU HAVE TO HAVE BETTER FRIENDS

Your standards are an outcome of environmental design, more than a character trait.

When I was a grad student in Boston, my friend Marzyeh had friends over nearly every night. The unspoken rule was she’d feed us, and we would hang out and read to her kids. It was a foundational decision to make sure her kids were surrounded by intelligent people, she often admitted.

Science shows us that the easiest way to have higher standards is to have friends aligned with who you want to be. The people you spend time with are your reference group — they are the people you measure yourself against when you make career decisions, get dressed, or pick a partner. Your reference group will validate your decisions because your brain uses others to calibrate what’s a good decision.4 And your goals are a byproduct of perception and what you see as possible.

The reason friends are so important is they shift your perception.

In the 1930s, researcher Muzafer Sherif proved this when he put people in a dark room, created a single point of light on a wall, and asked each person how far the light moved. The study relied on something called the autokinetic effect — a perceptual trick where a stationary light in a dark room appears to shift because your eyes are constantly making tiny adjustments, and without anything fixed to anchor against, your brain invents motion to explain them. In this effect, everyone sees something different and is certain they are right.

As individuals, each person developed their own answer. Some said the light moved two inches, others believed it moved six inches. Then Sherif put the participants in groups and had them call out their estimates out loud, in front of each other, over several sessions. Gradually and without orchestration, the estimates converged on consensus. The group built a number based off of each other’s influence and not objective facts. When Sherif sent the group back into the room alone, they didn’t return to their original answer. Even with the social pressure gone, the group’s deliberation became the norm. Sherif called this internalization — not compliance or performance — because the group had rewritten what each person privately believed.

That’s the impact of a reference group. Do you and your friends talk about salary? Good relationships? Ambition? Do you gossip day and night? Did your parents pay for private school, where the culture was focused on elite colleges and screen-free exploration?(Ofc there is an angle that must be acknowledged, and it’s proximity/privilege and reference groups — I can write a whole other article on access and reference groups). While you might think those are your standards, they are the standards you built in consensus with the people you surround yourself by. And you continue to carry them out.

Is your environment calibrating you toward who you want to become or is it quietly pulling you down? Your friends aren’t just shaping your behavior — they’re shaping your ceiling by shaping your standards.

CLARITY IS INEFFICIENT

Clarity is often inefficient, but it’s a prerequisite for efficiency. We are sold efficiency with the promise of clarity in so many ways.

Dating apps provide the promise of efficiently finding a partner, filtered to your needs. Yet every one of my girlfriends searching for a partner complains of the mental fatigue. The apps provide pipeline. Broad, kinda filtered — but efficient — pipeline. The clarity required to settle on a life partner is slow. And painful.

Back to my opening: perhaps the most omnipresent form of efficiency without clarity is AI slop. AI is particularly notorious for offering efficiency — and often, it does. At the risk of losing some of you, I will openly confess that I love AI. I use AI. But I don’t rely on AI for the parts of my life that have to be human. I just got done talking to an enterprise sales consultant who talked about how he set up an AI agent (agent: a series of actions that happen automatically, without your involvement) to bring in pipeline for businesses. Quite like dating apps, business pipeline is often the wide, messy, barely accurate first shot at finding potential buyers. He said every time a demo request comes in, his agent researches the companies, finds the pain points via internet scraping, and reaches out to the prospects. “What’s the average deal size?” I asked, trying to size up who he targets. “$40,000-$50,000,” he replied. “That won’t work,” I replied directly. He was taken aback by my crudeness — but as someone who has been in the business of selling enterprise software for over a decade, unless the product is singularly threaded and solves one pain (like cloud storage, maybe), you can’t figure out a company’s pain points via an internet search.

Figuring out an issue or problem is inefficient. It’s like trying to figure out what someone really wants through a dating profile. It requires conversations via discovery, and it has to thread back to the company’s needs.

Ok, so you need cloud storage — is it because your goals are revenue for the year and your servers need to enable a wider workforce? Or because your servers had a data leak and you have a liability issue? Or is it because you want to go remote and cut your overhead in prep for a sale? These are all very different conversations that require the creativity of the human brain. The real question is how I can convince you that the issue necessitating cloud storage costs more than $50,000 a year so you can spend some time exploring solutions with me. Which is a conversation that requires cognitively heavy dot connecting based on expertise, judgment, and good questions. When you jump into AI agents or prompts before clarity, your outcome will be bad.

AI slop is efficiency without clarity.

Efficiency without clarity doesn’t save time. It wastes time by positioning you in the wrong direction. As our world becomes more digital and as we lean on AI more, clarity will become one of the most underrated skills of our time. Everything relies on it.

And shortcuts to clarity are being commodified.

Like a diet pill selling the promise of the body without the work, your algorithm is assembling a digital composition of your interests, ambitions, and reference points. Your AI is offering a quick road to redemption, a shortcut to ambition, or whatever else you’re searching for.

The algorithm doesn’t know what you want. It knows what you’ve clicked. And without clarity, you’ll feel the slow erosion of knowing what you want.

You can’t buy direction. You can only build it.

WHY DO YOU LACK CLARITY?

When someone tells me they are in a rut, my response is predictable:

1. You lack a goal (can’t get started)

2. You lack a path (getting started in the wrong direction), or

3. You are emotionally dysregulated (mood is getting in the way/too scared to start, etc)

We know that specific, challenging goals outperform vague ones.5 And it’s obvious a goal needs a path. But what about your feelings getting in the way of your goals?

Emotional regulation isn’t about calming down. It’s about freeing up cognitive space — the budget required for mental peace or capacity or whatever you need to execute. If you are scared you can’t do the thing, or anxious you can’t do it right, or bored, you won’t do it. Emotional dysregulation doesn’t always manifest via a big, obvious breakdown. Often, dysregulation manifests through a person who is running a background process that is draining their cognitive budget, the same budget required to pursue goals and hold standards.6

The antidote to dysregulation isn’t calm — it’s direction. Which brings us back to clarity. Once you have clarity, you can make sure your decisions follow a vision and plan.

WHAT DOES CLARITY GIVE YOU?

Clarity is a decision, not a state of mind. Clarity is often treated like an otherworldly intuition, a moment when everything clicks. In reality, clarity is the commitment you make to your values before having all of the information. Clarity comes after the decision, not before. Waiting to feel clear is as unproductive as waiting to feel ready.

Clarity directs habits. Habits are built based on how you respond to cravings. And cravings aren’t random urges — they are learned brain states shaped by dopamine, memory, attention, and habit. If you reinforce how you respond to cravings, that’s who you are. If you rewire it (a big benefit of clarity) by pausing and choosing a different response, you build a new circuit over time. Because real neuroplasticity happens slowly through repetition, it’s not an instant reset.78

And repetition over time needs clarity. I’ve written about how your curiosity is for sale, and now your clarity is for sale too. Don’t bite.

You made it to the end! What did you think?! Leave me a comment or a like — I love reading your comments, and happy Eid to those celebrating!

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“Nurse, I will die,” I yelled in exasperation. The bright lights overhead combined with the most physical pain in my entire life had me dizzy. “Give me something, anything! I don’t care anymore, I changed my mind!” I was begging for an epidural, in active labor with my first child.

“Sweetie,” the nurse chuckled, “it’s too late, the baby is coming whether you like it or not, and you aren’t dying.”

WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL AT PEACE?

I was thinking about that experience this weekend, when someone had asked on my Instagram weekly AMA. “What makes you feel at peace?”

The question stuck with me as I went to my regular lifting class. And I pushed myself, as usual. I got high-fives from strangers, a regular occurrence as my pregnancy has made me unavoidable amidst the chiseled bodies of Los Angeles’ finest influencers, et al. As I finished my workout, I remembered something my physical therapist had told me 9 months ago — she’s an endurance athlete who trains athletes. I was recently pregnant and asked “have you trained any other pregnant return-to-sport patients mid-ACL recovery?” I was unwilling to slow down my ACL recovery — or worse, bring it to a grinding halt, and never return to the pitch again.

“Layla,” she laughed, “no. And I’ll bet most other PTs haven’t either.”

So, on Saturday, I asked my lifting coach the same question, “How many other 8-month-pregnant women have you trained?” Sean also laughed, “none, Layla. None.”

Which kinda surprised me. Because pregnancy is hard. And labor is the hardest thing I have ever done. When I think about working out, and gritting my teeth through the challenge, I see it as conditioning for labor. What will likely be the 4th hardest day of my life, considering that my other 3 births were (by far) the most physically challenging days of my life. Everything else pales in comparison.

If labor and delivery were a sport, it would be the most physically and mentally challenging. Tearing my ACL, cutting my leg open for operation, playing numerous sports for numerous leagues, jumping out of an airplane, speaking to an audience of thousands, sleeping in the Amazon (by a jaguar, no less), and anything I’ve ever done pales in comparison.

Rather than seeing my body as an obstacle, I see myself as superhuman right now. I recall the first words my sister said to me after delivering my first child, (voluntarily) unmedicated. “You feel unstoppable right now, don’t you? It feels like you can do anything!”

I laughed and said “yes…definitely, yes.”

I was recently reading the Upside of Stress. The author was talking about how the same event can trigger a challenge response or anxiety response. And I kept thinking — that’s exactly what was happening in that delivery room. And at the gym. And every hard thing in between.

I wasn’t managing pain as much as I was interpreting it.

Belief is a biological input.

When you frame hard things as challenges instead of threats, your body responds differently. Your cardiovascular system responds differently depending on how you interpret a stressor. When you appraise a challenge as something you have the resources to handle, your heart pumps more efficiently and your blood vessels dilate — a physiological profile associated with better performance. When you appraise the same thing as a threat, the opposite happens.1

Meaning your body is taking cues from your mind about whether the hard thing is survivable. Meaning believing that stress is harmful is what actually harms you.

Another landmark study followed 30,000 adults over eight years and found that high levels of stress alone didn’t increase your chance of dying — but high stress combined with the belief that stress is bad increased the risk of dying by 43%. People who reported high stress but didn’t view it as harmful had no elevated risk at all.2

But the challenge response only works if your nervous system has enough baseline regulation to access it.

When you’re chronically stressed, your prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain that does the reframing — goes offline. The amygdala takes over. And you can’t think your way out of a state your body is already locked into. Research on stress reappraisal shows the intervention works reliably for acute stress, but is way less effective for people carrying chronic stress or high baseline anxiety.3

Reframing requires capacity, chronic stress depletes capacity.

There’s even a term for the cumulative physiological wear of long-term stress: allostatic load. The higher it is, the more your body’s baseline is already elevated — which means the gap between calm and activated and the gap where the challenge response lives — shrinks.4 You can’t access a tool your nervous system doesn’t have the reserve to use.

So before the challenge response, there’s a prerequisite. Sleep. Safe relationships. Reducing the mental loops that keep your stress response running long after the stressor is gone — what researchers call perseverative cognition.5 Polyvagal theory calls this ventral vagal activation — a state of safety that makes growth, connection, and higher-order thinking available.6

The challenge response is more of a tool than a mindset hack. And like any tool, it only works if the conditions are right. You can’t operate a lawnmower in a tornado.

DOING HARD THINGS GROWS YOUR BRAIN

Doing hard things — especially ones you don’t want to do — physically grows your brain.

When you push through something your body or mind is resisting, your anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) — the region of the brain most associated with willpower, persistence, and the will to keep going — activates. The more you challenge yourself, the greater your aMCC volume — the size of which is linked to longevity and motivation in older adults. The people who seem unstoppable aren’t made differently, they’ve been doing things they didn’t want to do for longer.7

I TRUST ME BECAUSE I TRY HARD THINGS

I was listening to a neurosurgeon who said aspiring neurosurgeons always ask him how to get a headstart on being good at neurosurgery. “You can’t be good at neurosurgery in pre-med. Not in med school. You only become good at neurosurgery in neurosurgery residency. And the only way you can prep in advance is by being good at learning,” he said (disclaimer: this was from a TikTok but I can’t find it for the life of me, comment the link if you find it).

Science proves what he’s saying — mastery experiences (not pep talks) are the strongest predictor of self-efficacy. Albert Bandura spent decades studying what actually builds belief in yourself. His conclusion: mastery experiences are the number one source of self-efficacy — stronger than watching others succeed, stronger than being told you can do it. When you do a hard thing and survive it, your brain files that as evidence. Accumulated evidence becomes the foundation of self-trust.8

This is why doing is the most effective mechanism for being.

I TRUST ME BECAUSE I DO HARD THINGS

Your behaviors don’t just reflect your identity — they create it.

Once you believe abilities are developed through effort, you show fundamentally different behavioral responses to setbacks than those who see abilities as fixed.9 Adopting growth-oriented behaviors first shifts identity over time, not the reverse.10 You can’t think your way into believing you’re the kind of person who does hard things, you have to do hard things to know that you’re capable of whatever lies ahead.

THE ONLY WAY YOU LEARN IS THROUGH DOING THINGS

Because you can’t learn it in preparation. You can only learn it in the doing. Like the TikTok neurosurgeon said, research11 confirms that what separates novices from experts isn’t talent or prior knowledge — it’s accumulated deliberate practice in the actual domain.

Because I know I am willing to try, and I am ok with being wrong, and there’s a direct correlation between how many shots I shoot in life versus those I make, I am optimistic.

BUT OPTIMISM CAN’T COME AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS

So, I trust me.

But others have to trust me too. I am optimistic. Being optimistic is not the same as overpromising and underdelivering. Optimism cannot come at the expense of others. But I generally do believe I will be fine.

YOU CAN CHOOSE WHO YOU ARE

I read a Substack recently that talked about how neuroplasticity is value neutral.

Things are either negative, neutral, or additive. I have always looked at neuroplasticity through a lens of dismantling negative habits, like carrying a nasty temper. And I think about neuroplasticity with additive habits, like working out. But I seldom think about it through a neutral lens. What are the tiny day to day things we do that reinforce who we are?

The way you talk to yourself when a workout gets hard. Whether you finish the thing you said you’d finish. Whether you tell the truth when the lie is easier. Whether you show up when no one is watching.

Neuroplasticity doesn’t care about your intentions. It responds to your behavior. Every rep, every follow-through, every moment you choose discomfort over retreat is data your brain files away. Over time, it becomes the story your nervous system tells about who you are.

Which means the question isn’t who you want to be. It’s what you’re doing today that proves it. Even in the mundane. Especially in the mundane.

So back to being at peace.

WHAT MAKES ME FEEL AT PEACE?

I am at peace because I trust myself. Not because everything has gone my way. Not because I’ve avoided hard things. Because I’ve done hard things. I do hard things. Over and over, in rooms where nobody was watching, with no guarantee it would work out.

I trust myself. I trust myself to get through the good. The bad. The ugly. The fantastic. I trust myself to do the right thing when I screw up, and I do screw up. My self-trust is not based on an image (or lived experience) of perfection. It’s based on an image of agency and accountability and proactivity.

And I don’t trust myself because I mentally exhaust every option, often something that anxious people do when they worry about bad outcomes.12 I don’t over-solve in advance or run every scenario in my head, leading to serious mental fatigue. I exist, and solve when it happens.

That nurse was right. The baby was coming whether I liked it or not. Labor doesn’t negotiate just like most of life doesn’t negotiate.

What matters is the evidence you’ve been stacking, quietly, that you can handle what’s coming. I’ve been stacking it for a long time. That’s what peace feels like.

Helllooo and thanks for reading til the end! Leave me a comment, love hearing from y’all. The feedback also helps me shape my own ideas.

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This post was not technically sponsored by Spencer’s West Hollywood, but they gifted me an amazing pre-natal massage where I did a lot of thinking for this article, so they certainly enabled it. 15/10 rec for my Los Angeles/NYC readers. The LA location is in this stunning mid-century, Spanish style home.

“Absolutely,” I replied. And I’ll tell you why.

First, a personal brand doesn’t always mean being an influencer. It can be an email list, or some form of distribution. But distribution is power.

So let’s talk about power and why distribution matters so much.

HOW TO BE POWERFUL

If there is one thing that I have learned as both a founder and content creator, it is that the more power you have, the easier it is to shape things in your favor. Because power leads to credibility.

But credibility isn’t earned — it’s manufactured.

You can become powerful in one of three ways:

PATH ONE TO POWER: PROXIMITY

This could be nepotism — university legacy admissions show us that being related to an alum of an elite institution increases a kid’s odds (by 45%).1 Or being the boss’s favorite. Someone may see potential in you and want to grow you. Or riding someone’s coattails. Recently, Emma Grede has been in the spotlight for saying she doesn’t typically invest in first-time founders. Emma has lived this ethos long before confessing it on a podcast. She went from a successful talent management and marketing executive to consumer business. She made the transition by borrowing the Kardashians’ celebrity reach and using her strategic and intellectual prowess to build incredible companies. While Emma had solid work experience pre-Kardashians, she used that proximity to spin out massive consumer successes. She now has her own personal brand — but the path is effective, and I see it often.

The issue with path one is that proximity is largely unavailable to people who don’t look like the rooms they’re trying to enter.

PATH TWO TO POWER: FOMO

Rupi Kaur did this. Kaur had been posting poetry across social for years before she was taken seriously in traditional publishing. In 2014, she self-published Milk and Honey after literary journals passed on her work. She sold over ten thousand copies on her own and went viral for posting a project that showed menstrual blood around the same time. Instagram took it down. “They allow porn on Instagram, but not periods?” she remarked to the Washington Post. The public response was so large that Kaur couldn’t be ignored. Andrews McMeel saw the hype, picked up Milk and Honey, and the book subsequently spent 165 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. 11 million copies later, I highly doubt any traditional publisher or journal would pass on the opportunity to work with her.

You see FOMO used a lot in venture capital. A hot deal and a savvy founder make rounds, communicate that the round is oversubscribed, and the self-generated hype pays dividends. Investors salivate for a piece. Like many founders, Elizabeth Holmes was very good at this. But we all saw how that played out. FOMO requires integrity to be sustainable.

And FOMO requires a little bit of luck. Luck can always be engineered, but it is heavily reliant on getting recognized. Kaur’s period-stained bedsheets could have led to…nothing. The moment could have passed. But it didn’t. And she’s now a star.

PATH THREE TO POWER: DISTRIBUTION

Distribution is the newest player to the game. We now live in a visibility economy, where visibility gives you access to power and influence. This is the path that is most controllable — if you aren’t born to wealth and don’t have proximity to power. This path can and should be taken alongside paths one and two. Or, if you’re an underdog, it’s your best bet to double down on. This is the personal brand. The email list. The online following. The audience you’ve built makes you a bestseller — nobody chooses you, you’ve already been chosen. The audience you’ve built clicks your links and establishes your influence. You’re a risk-free bet to the powers that be as well, despite all odds or stereotypes held against you.

Distribution is extremely powerful when owned. And — for those with money — it can be gamed. I can count at least half a dozen influencers I know who started with no following and used Instagram ads to balloon their audience seemingly overnight. In reality, they paid for exposure, got their content right, and eventually built a brand.

DISTRIBUTION IS KING

Distribution isn’t just a strategy for underdogs, it’s structural equity. It’s the only path to power that can be built entirely on agency.

My personal approach to distribution has been this: years ago, I knew I wanted to write about everything I learned at work. I also knew that there were as many business bestsellers by men named John as by all women combined in 2020 — so I wouldn’t be chosen. I started posting on the internet. Then I met a book agent who told me I needed to collect emails to be taken seriously by agents and publishers. I moved to Substack, which became my primary mode of social media, and I wrote and wrote and wrote. My writing sucked at first — so honestly, emails were probably a secondary goal, and I hadn’t realized it. As I wrote more, my thing became clearer. My writing improved. And the emails came.

And people bit. The research assumed it would, btw.

I could manufacture credibility, because repeated exposure to me and my ideas led you to believe I am credible and to like me. Research shows us that repeated exposure to a person or idea increases perceived credibility and liking, independent of content quality — this is why consistent posting builds trust before expertise is proven.2

And it serves me in multiple ways because research also reminds us that most career opportunities come from acquaintances, not close contacts.3 Distribution has more people believing I know what I’m talking about. A majority of speaking invitations come from my audience. And once I have spoken, my return rate is high. People usually ask me to speak again, creating a flywheel effect built on weak ties.

DISTRIBUTION NEEDS VISIBILITY

Distribution needs visibility. And visibility and exposure are a high ROI bet. Maybe you will post and nobody will care. Maybe visibility will lead to more opportunity. Maybe visibility will lead to you realizing that you don’t have the charisma or value proposition to attract folks, and you shift your goal to building exactly that. But without visibility and exposure, you won’t get distribution.

DISTRIBUTION NEEDS INTEGRITY

Distribution really came for me when clarity came. Path three comes with clarity — clarity of goals, specifically. And because of that, it’s the largest mental lift.

We celebrate the bootstrapped audience builder, but statistically, proximity still produces more power faster. Building a network that trusts you is hard. Having a network to distribute to without a point of view is just noise. The internet is full of people with audiences and nothing to say. Reach and relevance are not the same thing.

And I am not surprised that my audience became stronger when my message became clearer (if you are new here, I talk a lot about emotional regulation and performance from the POV of a founder). Specific, challenging goals produce significantly higher performance than vague ones in over 90% of studies.4

I didn’t have clarity in my own content for a long time, clarity was my output — not my input. I didn’t start writing because I knew what I wanted to say. I started writing because I had things to figure out. The clarity came after — sometimes months after — not before. And it turns out, that’s exactly how the brain works. Neuroscientists have found that motor cortex activation — the brain region responsible for executing action — precedes conscious intention. You do before you know why you’re doing it. The brain builds understanding through experience, not anticipation. Schemas — the mental frameworks we use to make sense of the world — are constructed through repeated exposure and action, not through thinking about taking action.5 This is why waiting for clarity before you start is neurologically backwards. Your brain cannot give you a map of territory it has never visited. The only way to know what you’re building is to build it. I wrote my way into a point of view. I posted my way into an audience. The emails didn’t come because I had a strategy. They came because I stayed in motion long enough for a strategy to reveal itself.

And it worked out because I have integrity. As I’ve sharpened my thoughts and ideas, it’s never come at the expense of others. I don’t punch down, I don’t offer salacious details about others. And it’s worked for me.

Because sometimes the personal brand is actually a liability before it’s a strength. Many people build distribution before they have anything worth distributing, and dilute themselves in the process. We’ve all seen this from a certain kind of influencer — the one whose entire angle is tearing people down. Minority communities sometimes see this as horizontal aggression, where people dismantle their own. It’s attention. It’s not distribution. It’s not power. And it’s much harder to translate into something meaningful. I have actually seen a few influencers try to move from the hater space to becoming a social media or business consultant. It never works, despite audience size.

Recently, someone invited me to speak on a panel with a hater-turned-business-consultant. This particular hater showed horizontal aggression, and was especially nasty towards women in our shared Muslim community, but recently cleared her feed to remove all evidence of her hater origins into fame. I declined. It takes years to build a reputation and moments to kill one, I don’t take risks with proximity. explains my gut instinct effectively. She’s a PR exec who does an incredible job talking about reputation on Substack and TikTok. Molly says that reputations break down when your audience identifies your trust promise and you deviate from it. Do people trust you because you share enemies? Or because they think you’re good at something? If it’s the former, and you move to becoming a social media consultant, your audience will measure the gap and call it out. She refers to origin story drift as a red flag for reputation — you became known for one thing and then tried to reframe it as soon as the narrative stopped fitting you.

Everybody’s story evolves — my first foray with virality was a music video where I skateboarded in a hijab and heels, far from my content today. Trust doesn’t fracture in evolution. Trust fractures when integrity is in question.

CLARITY IS THE OPPOSITE OF A RUT: WHY YOU’RE IN A RUT

Speaking of evolution, someone recently asked me how I know what to post. The honest answer: I figured it out over years, and it continues to evolve. If something would have been helpful to younger me, I post about it. If you don’t know what to post — or what your thing is — you’re in a rut for one of three reasons:

• Unclear goal

• Unclear path

• Disinterest, which can be an emotional dysregulation you’re mistaking for a strategy problem

In order to stay in flow, all three have to be clear. My goal is clear: I want to expand access to power, I take pride in teaching others (often women, often minorities) how to ascend. My path I discussed above: I produce content on IG, TikTok, Substack — and soon, a book. And the third: I don’t let my mood get in the way of my plan. I have a posting schedule, etc, etc, and it happens when I am in a good mood or a bad mood.

But I have lacked a goal and a path before. And I have certainly been disinterested before. While it’s easy to diagnose that you don’t know what you are doing or how you are doing it, diagnosing disinterest is the hardest. Disinterest feels like laziness. It presents like procrastination. But underneath it, something neurological is happening. Motivation is not a personality trait. It’s a chemical prediction. Your brain’s dopaminergic reward pathway is constantly running a forecast: if I do this thing, will something good happen? When the goal is unclear, the forecast fails. When the path is wrong, the forecast fails. When you’re afraid of being seen — afraid of trying publicly and losing publicly — the forecast fails. And when the forecast fails, the drive signal collapses. You don’t feel like doing it because your brain has already run the numbers and returned an error. Doomscrolling isn’t weakness. It’s your brain choosing the one thing in the room with a guaranteed dopamine return.

Ruts are like muddy puddles at best, muddy waterfalls at worst. Ruts can cascade. Recently someone told me she had been onboarding at work — and three months in, her boss was dragging her feet on getting her trained. “She’s too busy,” my friend said. “No, she isn’t. You are not a priority. And it’s extremely dangerous.” This friend had been out of work for a long time before finally landing a role. I didn’t think her new job would last long without a serious intervention. If she didn’t find a way to work on the company’s needs and execute the boss’s strategy, she was going to fade into irrelevance. “Every Monday morning, send her your 3-5 goals. Link those goals to the company needs. Ask her if you are correct or if anything should be shifted, and put 10 minutes on the calendar to discuss. On Fridays, report progress. Force her to lead you. Manage up.”

Ruts compound. You miss one week of posting, and then two, and suddenly you’re three months in and the gap feels too large to close. You miss one quarter of putting work in, and your boss doesn’t consider you for hard problems. What’s happening underneath that isn’t a motivation problem — it’s a default mode problem. When the brain isn’t actively engaged in a task with a clear goal, it doesn’t go quiet. It turns inward. The default mode network — the set of brain regions most active during self-referential thinking — takes over, and it is not kind. It runs loops. It revisits failures. It generates the specific flavor of anxious, circular thinking that feels like reflection but produces nothing. The antidote isn’t inspiration. It’s a specific enough next action that your brain has something to execute against.6

My POV: her boss was in a rut — unclear goal, unclear path, or maybe she thought she made the wrong hiring decision and was avoiding correcting it — and my friend’s boss’s rut became her rut.

And this issue is painfully common. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace consistently finds that roughly 60–70% of workers are disengaged. Most people’s ruts aren’t strategy problems, they’re motivation and clarity problems.

Ruts don’t break with motivation. They break with precision.

IT HAPPENS TO ALL OF US

Like I said earlier, I have lacked a goal and a path before. And I have certainly been disinterested before.

I’ll never forget when my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I walked into a meeting dead in the eyes. My soul had been sucked out of me. It was early in the diagnosis — I hadn’t shared much with my peers. The figuring-it-out-stage can take months. And time is slow, painful, and draining as new pieces of the diagnosis puzzle become revealed. When I wasn’t actively googling my way into depression, I was in a haze. My advisor immediately clocked my shift and asked: “Layla, what’s up? It looks like someone took you and shook everything out of you upside down and flipped you back over.” She wasn’t wrong. I knew my goals. I knew my path. I was just disinterested. Anxious. Upset. Depressed. I didn’t really care about much.

YOUR BASELINE IS YOUR BASELINE

Around the same time, I was chatting with a colleague. “Layla, listen — I’m not sure what to say, because there’s nothing I can say that will make your mom’s cancer go away. But what I can tell you is that I know you, and your emotional baseline is solid, and it will be a reliable companion.” She went on to explain a concept known as the hedonic treadmill. The TL;DR is that we cultivate certain emotional baselines. Maybe we are always joyful, or anxious, or unsettled. And research has shown that people who go through euphoric highs or extreme lows bounce back to their baselines.

You could win the lottery tomorrow and be euphoric for a while — but at some point, you will return to your emotional baseline, for better or worse. Or you can go through a devastating loss — and while you may view the world differently or tactically shift how you move, your emotional baseline will eventually return.

Your emotional baseline may or may not be a gift — but it is definitely a ceiling. And you have to be aware of it. The hedonic treadmill cuts both ways. The same mechanism that pulls you back from despair also pulls you back from exceptional drive. The highest performers don’t just return to baseline — they engineer a new one.

THANK YOU for making it to the end! Leave a comment or a like, I love your comments — they also help me evolve my thinking as I am writing this book. On a personal note, check out my absolutely stunning baby sprinkle last weekend.

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Some people were pissed off.

Others agreed.

And ofc, a larger discussion about access for women emerged. Her lifestyle and access to resources were dissected. The internet erupted.

My team had a parallel discussion before our executive offsite. The team wanted to get together in Boston. I argued that we should just take the meeting remotely, used to our regular efficient work style. I ultimately lost the argument to intangibles. “It will be nice to get together,” “we can do a team event,” and on. So I conceded.

The offsite was last week. We all got there on time — as usual, we take start times seriously. But we started late — which was not usual.

We caught up. We talked about life, kids, death, dogs, and everything in between.

We chatted in a way that we can’t afford to on Zoom, where every meeting is dialed in by the minute and where talking over someone is processed as an interruption versus the livelihood of sentences running into each other in real time. Where AI recaps eternalize any banter about what we ate for lunch or the road rage incident we dodged, in our own personal version of the Truman Show.

When the meeting started, we easily navigated the tension of a high-accountability environment to serve the business. One leader sternly asked: “You were responsible for that goal, what happened?” A debate broke out about the importance of a priority. And many more heated conversations followed.

As a leadership team, we have always been good at cultivating psychological safety. Psychological safety is not comfort — often, our meetings are uncomfortable. I’ve never thought much about how we’ve created this space, but I know that it’s okay and easy to be wrong at Wise. Coachable is the status quo and expectation. And as long as you generally grow from mishaps, nothing is personal.

Which works well for us because we are a startup and autonomy matters. We need each person to own their output, and research reminds us that controlling environments — using intimidation, conditional regard, or isolation — create short-term compliance but undermine autonomy and long-term motivation.2 People motivated by inner drive are more engaged than those motivated by external pressure.3

When you are in a psychologically safe environment, you are not safe from challenge — you are safe to be challenged. Because you trust those around you enough to resolve conflict, commit as a team, hold each other accountable, and focus on what needs to get done.4

So much of trust is built on genuine interactions. And trust paves the way for belonging.

You can’t force belonging or bonding, but you can be authentic enough to create an environment where people feel safe enough to lower their guards and also be authentic. Once you create the space for genuine interactions, you optimize for growth because you create space for belonging. And humans function from growth and development, not fear. In Do Hard Things, Steve Magness reminds us of how this plays out via legendary NBA coach of the San Antonio Spurs, Gregg Popovich, who became known for taking his entire team out for dinner after a game to build cohesion and mental resilience over individual pursuits.5 Popovich created an environment of belonging.

And belonging matters because belonging creates trust. Trust narrows our aperture toward mastery and the greater good. When we trust, we play to win. When we are scared, we play not to lose.6

So liminal spaces, like the conference room table while everyone is unwrapping their cords before the offsite, create the realization that someone is more than their role. And in those moments, people feel belonging.

Which might be what Emma had been talking about. Emma’s framing ruffled feathers, but the mechanics of her argument hold merit. It’s hard to feel belonging behind pixels (especially with video off, come for me — I will die on this hill: turn your video on).

Which is ironically not very girl-boss, because — and I say this as an efficiency enthusiast — efficiency is the enemy of trust.

EFFICIENCY IS THE ENEMY OF TRUST

The more you optimize a team for productivity over connection, the less psychological safety you actually build. The “wasted” time is the work. And I am not arguing for a return-to-office lifestyle, I don’t even work in an office full-time. But I am arguing for the preservation and prioritization of connection, whatever that balance looks like for you.

Research reminds us that liminal spaces just do not work the same way online. In-person interaction tends to produce stronger social connection, better emotional attunement, and greater wellbeing than virtual interaction. Virtual is still beneficial and linked to wellbeing, but face-to-face wins when it comes to maximizing positive affect.7

It’s not that virtual doesn’t work — it’s that people often connect differently online than they do in person, and in-person contact is generally richer for emotional connection and social bonding.

Connection is a performance input, not a soft perk.

CONNECTION RAISES EXPECTATIONS OF YOURSELF

And the benefits don’t stop at well-being — being genuinely seen by others results in you seeing yourself differently. How you are received dictates how you see yourself. And how you see yourself directly dictates how others receive you.

We often equate controlling how we are perceived with being faked. And when we come across magnetic people, we believe they were just wired that way.

There’s no doubt that some people are just more magnetic than others. More likable. More interesting to be around in real life.

And it serves them, because likability is how to get what you want — above talent or network. The overlap between low-likability and high-effectiveness is extremely rare.8

But likability is a practice — a leadership skill, not a personality trait. You treat it like something you’re born with. It isn’t. It’s an output of how much you expect people to like you.

YOUR EXPECTATIONS ARE CONTAGIOUS

I recently learned about the acceptance prophecy through psychology educator Francesca Tighinean who said “Experiences shape your identity, leading you to think, ‘I am the kind of person who connects easily.’ And that identity becomes expectation.”

Your expectations of yourself are contagious.

You shape social interactions by predicting how you will be received. Per research by Danu Anthony Stinson, it’s called the acceptance prophecy.9 Your expectation of being accepted or rejected shapes your behavior, which other people mirror when interacting with you. If you walk into a room expecting to be dismissed, people will dismiss you. The acceptance prophecy runs in both directions — upward and downward. People meet you where you are. Which means…you kinda can control how much people like you.

This probably explains something we don’t like to admit: narcissists are magnetic too. Not because they are likable in any meaningful way, but because they walk into every room certain they deserve to be there. Their expectation of being received well is so total that people mirror it back to them — at least at first. The acceptance prophecy doesn’t differentiate the self-obsessed from the humble. It works for the generous and the delusional alike. Which tells you something important: the mechanism isn’t about being good. It’s about what you expect.

PERFORMANCE IS ALSO BASED ON EXPECTATIONS

We have established that expectations of ourselves dictate how others treat us. And we have established that connecting with people makes high expectations more manageable. So let’s talk about performance and expectations.

Do Hard Things has this formula that goes something like actual effort × expected effort = drive or performance (I gotta be honest, I was listening to the book at the gym and didn’t finish the set in time to write the formula down. If you have the actual formula, please put it in the comments). If you are putting in as much effort as expected, you are performing as expected. If you put in more effort than expected, you are an overachiever.

And I argue that the genuine interactions that create trust also lead us to trust ourselves enough to do more than expected.

SO, EMMA?

Think about the last time you performed beyond what you thought you were capable of. There was probably someone in the room who saw you as more than your role before you did. A team dinner. A slow morning before the meeting started. A conversation that had nothing to do with the agenda.

Emma’s argument got swallowed by a debate about access. And that’s a real debate — but there’s a different angle worth examining in an ever-automated and digital world. The mechanics are simpler and they apply to everyone: you cannot build high expectations of yourself in a vacuum. You need the room. The cords. The water filter you can’t figure out. Or whatever version of that exists in your world at some frequency. You need to be seen as more than your role before you can perform beyond it, which means you need to see yourself as more.

Genuine connection raises your expectations of yourself, which raises how others treat you, which raises your performance.

Hi friends! What did you think? Your comments make my day! I am knee deep in my BOOK PROPOSAL 😱😱😱 — your feedback helps me shape my own ideas and goes far

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I remember asking my mom if she was yelled at as a kid. “No. Yelling was not in our dictionary — not my mother’s, not my father’s. And I think you can bear witness that it wasn’t in our home’s culture either. Because yelling doesn’t solve anything. It just shows the kids that we’re crazy. I used to see friends whose parents, especially fathers, who’d spank and yell — and I was very traumatized by that. Why would they do that to a kid? What do they get out of it? Other than an immediate, momentary release with just seconds of relief. Nothing more than that. It’s not a problem solver.”

That tiny interaction paints such a clear picture of why my mom has always been so regulated and high capacity (stick with me). And it reflects why she parented us the way she did. Growing up in a calm environment isn’t a luxury as much as it is a neurological advantage that follows you for life. And the stakes continue to grow.

It came up when I was talking with my friend Tara recently.

“I stopped yelling at my kids,” Tara confessed. I had seen her snap at her kids often, so I was thrilled to hear it. After congratulating her for choosing kindness toward young, vulnerable humans, I continued in a different direction. “The best thing you could do for your kids in an era of AI is not being a jerk. Because you’re preparing them for boredom — and boredom is the fuel for what’s emerging as the most important skill: creativity.” It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot.

People think what it takes to be nasty to kids is abuse, violence, neglect. But I would argue that it takes a whole lot less to throw them off course from their potential. Often just treating them like they are annoying — yelling, nagging, rolling your eyes — will make your kids believe they are annoying. And it will tie up their nervous system. So now you’ve taken away their self-confidence and ability to be bored and create. You simply cannot install a high-performance operating system on top of hardware that is wired for fear.1

The constant yelling, aggravation, and frustration you harbor may be capping your kids potential. Or, at least, driving a wedge between them and their potential that will take a lot of time and therapy to fix.

I love this TikTok where Dr. RJ, a triple board resident/MD/PhD/MBA (and my favorite new follow), so clearly states what goes wrong in parenting.

@drrussellledetRepetition isn’t rebellion. It’s development + communication. Parents… we’ve got to stop personalizing what is neurological. #parenting #fyp #explore

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He explains that when your kid doesn’t do something, it’s not defiance — it’s developmental. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for following through, controlling impulses, and remembering instructions, is still under construction. But your kid’s emotional brain is fully online. So what you’re dealing with isn’t a disrespectful kid. It’s a kid whose feelings are loud and whose executive function hasn’t caught up yet. Kids need a lot of repetition. Parents misunderstand the defiance as disrespect instead of understanding how the brain works.

He urges parents to ask themselves: “Is it developmental? Am I expecting consistency from a brain that can’t do that yet? Is my communication clear? Did I give one instruction or did I give a paragraph? Did I build a system for them to be successful or did I just use my voice? Was my timing right? You cannot give instructions to a distracted brain and expect execution. Adjust your expectations.”

So this is what it ends up looking like: your kid is wild after school and doesn’t do homework — so you repeat yourself, and you repeat yourself, and you repeat yourself — then you explode. The kid gets scared. The response shows up as even more defiance or they are terrified of you. The kids new focus: managing your emotions, rather than developing their own. And so the dance is formed. And once a dance is formed, it’s hard to break.

So you get comfortable yelling. Like Tara. And maybe it eats away at you. Maybe you experienced yelling yourself, so it feels normal.

And that yelling, night after night, creates an environment that isn’t calm — which reinforces the cycle at much higher stakes. In Stolen Focus,2 the author discusses why children raised in chronically stressful environments are described as bear cubs in a forest where hunters are constantly firing guns. A frightened brain wires for vigilance, not concentration. And for survival, not creation.

Newton’s Third Law reminds us that all forces result from mutual interactions. In the same vein, your behavior leads to an outcome. Some people have been neurologically prepared to handle boredom and deep work through safety. Others face additional hurdles on the path to success that nobody ever names or recognizes as a result of their upbringing. Children who grow up managing chaos never get to play — and play is how they build the cognitive and social-emotional foundations for everything else. It’s a hidden inequality. Boredom acts as a psychological incubation period; when you lack external stimulation, you free your brain up to problem solve creatively and think differently. In Unequal Childhoods, the author explores this idea through class-based parenting styles — where some children are granted the safety to treat life like a playground for self-discovery, while others are conditioned by environments of constraint, forcing mental energy to be diverted away from creativity and toward navigating adult moods or environmental chaos.3

And to bring it full circle, that chaos or chronic stress can just be a parent who is mean, with a terrible tone, a loud voice, or an unpredictable attitude.

A calm nervous system leaves room for creation, ideation, and dreaming. Including dreaming up future versions of you.

Loved this. Stay delulu and dream up

“Delulu Tip for Today: Record a 1-minute voice note of your future self talking about how everything worked out. Listening to your own voice activates mirror neurons, and your brain begins to identify as that future version of you.” @amoyashante

As I make the case for boredom as a differentiator, it’s worth noting that there is nuance here — the capacity to sit with boredom and let creativity emerge requires baseline safety and stability. Children who are food insecure, housing insecure, or navigating genuinely chaotic home environments aren’t avoiding boredom — they’re surviving. Boredom will not satisfy basic human needs.

It’s also worth noting that my ask is not trivial. We are the first generation trying to parent consciously while also being the most overstimulated generation in history. You have to regulate yourself so you can regulate your child, in an era designed to keep you constantly activated. It’s not easy.

SO…AI?

Let’s jump into how this all relates to AI. The next set of thoughts are pure observation from an operator’s POV.

Today I was talking to my co-founder Chazz about a Reddit thread he’d seen. The gist was: ideas used to be cheap and implementation expensive. Now, with AI, ideas and implementation are cheap. But quality can be easily lost if the work lacks creativity and judgment. And you can’t replicate creativity.

We just saw Oracle lay off up to 30,000 people with a 6 AM email in the name of cost cutting, all while ramping up AI spend. What that might mean is they will employ AI agents for some of the jobs and functionalities that were humans. This will likely work fine in many places. And AI agents are transforming the cost of operating a business. But what Oracle and other AI can’t replicate is new ideation.

Research out of MIT explains the mechanical reason why AI fails at developing new ideas. AI models are universal approximation functions — they are built to predict the most likely next step based on historical patterns.4 I am no AI hater (unpopular opinion, I know). AI has unlocked and multiplied many parts of my creative ADHD brain. But I also understand its limits and want you to understand them too.

An HBR professor argues that while AI can demonstrate expertise and creative thinking, it lacks intrinsic motivation — the internal drive to solve new problems.5 And so the output can become slop — maybe technically correct — but devoid of the emotional resonance and quality that defines true creativity.

A crucial defense is nurturing our creativity.6 But we don’t realize how much we get in the way of our own — and our kids’ ability to create, because creation requires boredom. And the world’s most valuable social media companies also thrive on your boredom.

Society as it’s designed has built-in creativity killers everywhere. If you find yourself unlocking your phone at every stoplight and grocery line, you are just an average American who unlocks their phone 144 times a day, or every 15 minutes.7 When we instinctively scroll instead of zone out, we remove the very opportunities to get bored and ideate.

My grandpa could have managed my mom’s defiance with force. But management comes at the cost of creation. Yelling at your kids undermines their ability to grow. Your craving for control undermines your kid’s ability to grow. Research shows when humans are managed toward an answer, their neural connectivity in critical thinking regions drops by over 50%.8

I recently overheard a conversation my own kids had under my bed, while eating unsanctioned popsicles at 8 PM. I didn’t really care about the popsicles, but they didn’t know that. In the spirit of my grandpa and my mom, I pick my emotional battles judiciously. I could have yelled about the popsicles, but I have made it a practice not to — because those little releases of frustration turn into a million tiny moments that shred a kid’s self-esteem. And the conversation brought on by their tiny moment of quiet reminded me of my own mom’s moments of missing her big sister as my 4 year old confessed that she hates when her siblings are in school, because it makes her sad to miss them. Is parenting as simple as leaving kids with a safe space to love and be loved?

I can tell you for sure that calm environments build the neurological foundation for tolerating boredom — which is the foundation for mastery. If you grew up in chaos and still made it, understand you did it the hard way. The brain is ultimately plastic and you can undo the deep-seated belief that you aren’t worth it, or that you are annoying, or you can be like Tara and break the yelling habit. The bar you cleared was higher than most people will ever know.

And if you’re raising kids, the most powerful thing you can give them isn’t money. It’s a regulated nervous system.

Thanks for reading!! What did you think? I love your comments, likes, and shares. Life is good here, gearing up for a baby in a few months, time is literally flying.

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I take pride in being a hotshot at the gym. I like staring at my round belly as I challenge myself — being the pregnant woman to farmer carry huge loads, defying what people expect. Even though I was panting at 10 pounds, I felt like I had cheated the gym.

As I lazily carried myself out, I checked Instagram for my weekly AMA. Someone asked: “How do you mentally prepare for birth? I’m not even pregnant, but you are a superwoman.”

As I thought about the response, I realized the mental preparation I apply to birth is the same mental preparation I apply to everything. The 100 pound farmer carry may be a revenue number, a title, a pace to run at, a role to perform at work.

Here is how I do hard things.

FIRST, I UNDERSTAND THE BODY

I recently changed my perspective on goal setting, thanks to a book called Tiny Experiments. The author’s argument is that we set goals based on outcome over output. When we focus on outcome, goals become identity-based — so we scan for failure. When we focus on output, we slip into routine easier and actually commit. She recommends this one sentence:

I will do [X] -- [X] times -- in [X] days.

Your brain treats a goal like a threat. It scans for failure. But an experiment doesn’t put your identity on the line. The shift from “I have to” to “let’s see” lowers cortisol and keeps your prefrontal cortex online — the part of your brain that governs executive function: planning, impulse control, rational decision-making. The part that even mild stress impairs by flooding it with dopamine and norepinephrine.1 When goals are framed around avoiding failure, the brain activates a threat response — narrowing attention and impairing decision-making. When goals are framed as approach-oriented, performance and persistence improve. This is the direct neuroscience behind why outcome-based goals backfire — and why “let’s see” outperforms “I have to.”2 Instead of testing your worth, you’re testing a variable.

Sometimes when you think you lack motivation, you actually just lack a low enough bar.

Another book I recently read doubles down on why dropping from a 25 pound weight set to 10 pounds was so hard — it required separating my identity from my performance. I was no longer the pregnant woman who defied odds at the gym. I was the pregnant woman you should probably carve out space for because her pace is, understandably, slower (which is exactly what happened — people went out of their way to clear space out of courtesy, and I was also probably an obstacle). Per Do Hard Things, real toughness isn’t about ignoring signals. It’s about having the security to respond to them without ego interference.

When people tie identity to performance outcomes, they systematically avoid challenges that might disrupt that identity as a form of self-protection.3

SECOND, I GET CONTROL OF MY MIND

My gym commitment is a tiny experiment, not a goal. As a pregnant woman healing a torn ACL, I will lift three times a week for the rest of my pregnancy. Period.

Small, low-stakes behavioral commitments activate reward pathways more reliably than large ambitious goals — because they remove identity threat from the equation entirely. The nervous system responds to evidence, not declarations. Confidence built on performance is fragile by design. Confidence built on the lived experience of surviving discomfort compounds. Every time you stayed when it was hard, every time you came back anyway, you made a deposit into your nervous system.

It’s worth saying that the commitment is often boring or hard.

Earlier in our startup journey, I was on the phone with an advisor. “How do you like the new initiative?” she asked. “Firing on all cylinders,” I answered reflexively. “Funny you say that,” she said, “because that’s not what it looks like. You are slumped, you have been off — and it honestly looks like someone flipped you upside down, shook everything out of you, and flipped you back over.”

I fessed up that I hated what I was doing, but the business needed it.

Her response: “You’re an architect who likes to build and you aren’t building. So you are bone dry. No dopamine hits. Layla, you have to navigate this -- because otherwise your energy will be contagious. Your conviction, your body language. All of it.”

Sometimes it sucks. But something sucking doesn’t mean you can’t do it. And something sucking doesn’t mean you can avoid it to get to the other side. My advisor’s point was about navigating a commitment, even when I hated it. Which takes me to step three.

THIRD, I REALLY THINK I CAN DO IT

Controlling my mind got me through the boring days at the startup, but building true self-belief required something more public: standing my ground when the world started looking at me.

The sequence is not fail → improve → feel great. The sequence is fail → stay → develop the knowledge that you can handle what comes next — because you have seen your best and your worst, and pulled through both.

Confidence is seldom a reward for getting good at something. It’s the residue of not quitting.

I want to tell you about the decision that should have made me less confident — and did the opposite.

I tell young, career-oriented Muslim women that even though society told us hijab would be a disadvantage in a post-9/11 world, it has proven to be the opposite for me. Wearing hijab decoupled how I project my identity from what’s socially acceptable. It removed society’s belief in me — that’s how stereotypes work. The mix of my high agency over my own identity and society’s low bar made it easy to stand out. The result: I am confident.

This all came to a head when I went viral for the Mipsterz music video in 2012. Over a million views overnight. I was a hijabi skateboarding in heels, representing joy — and the commentary was immediate, from peers and strangers alike, all of whom had opinions about how I presented myself. It tore open something old — a deep, misplaced fear of being seen that I had subconsciously developed. I had spent years seeing hijabis become conditioned to stay small, to avoid being affiliated with terrorism by association. And there I was, visible.

When I walked into my advisor’s office at the MIT Media Lab, he didn’t let me hide. “Layla, write about this before someone like me does. Here is what’s going to happen: you are going to write a first draft. You are going to hate it. You are going to throw it away. You are going to write a second draft. Then you will send it to me and I will get it published in The Atlantic.”

That is exactly what happened. Not because I was told to be. Because I accumulated evidence that I could handle the gap between how I was perceived and who I actually was.

Confidence is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. It confirms a trend after it has already happened. We have built an entire self-help industrial complex around manufacturing confidence as a precondition — feel good first, then go. That is scientifically backwards.

Confidence is not an input. It’s an output.

And it’s an output that comes from a lot of failure, but even more self-belief.

Thanks so much for reading! Leave a ❤️ or a comment and let me know what you thought! If you have an ERG or group you want me to speak to, lmk here.

Many people lack a well-regulated brain. And without a well-regulated brain, you will not have an extraordinary life. Being overwhelmed, mean, chronically overthinking, and emotionally volatile are costing you more than you realize.

Because those feelings get in the way of goals — and your brain doesn’t care about your goals. It cares about your survival.

The life you say you want — the promotion, the business, the version of yourself that posts publicly and charges more and leads boldly — registers in your nervous system as a threat.

The amygdala doesn’t distinguish well between physical danger and social risk.1 Visibility, rejection, higher status, raising your prices — these activate the same neural circuits as danger. Your brain sees expansion and sounds the alarm. So it delays and scrolls and cleans the kitchen and avoids the goal.

The guy with big feelings lets his threat response paint everything. Even mundane conversations. And that threat response makes trust harder, which is the foundation for alignment — at the very least. Though the ripple effects, I’ll argue, are even larger than that.

Self-sabotage often starts as self-protection. And at the root of self-sabotage, often, is a lack of self-belief. And nothing is worse than a lack of self-belief.

BUT YOUR OUTPUT DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU EXPECT

What you think goes very far — even within your body.

In 2007, Harvard researchers studied hotel housekeepers doing physically demanding work daily. When half of them were told their work met the Surgeon General’s criteria for exercise, their health markers improved. Weight dropped, blood pressure lowered, and body fat decreased in comparison to a control group of housekeepers whose work was not reframed as exercise.2 Their workload didn’t change, but their belief did.

One of the same researchers at Harvard went on to test whether the brain could change the body’s chemistry based on framing and expectations, and gave participants a milkshake. One group was told it was a 620-calorie indulgent shake. The other was told it was a 140-calorie sensible shake. The researches then measured ghrelin — the hunger hormone — before and after. The indulgent group’s ghrelin dropped sharply after drinking, signaling fullness and satisfaction, and the sensible group’s ghrelin barely moved. The same nutritional input had a different hormonal response because of the brain.3

Belief is a biological input, but we don’t treat healthy beliefs they way we treat a gym schedule. What you expect changes your physiological response before you do a single thing. The effect you expect is the effect you get. I’ve never been one for manifestation, but the idea that expectation can alter physical outcomes turns out to have legs.

This plays out clearly in endurance science. Your body doesn’t simply quit. It slows down when perceived effort crosses a threshold your brain deems tolerable. If the effort feels easier than expected, pace increases. If it feels harder, pain amplifies, fatigue rises, you stop -- even if you were physically capable of continuing.4

Performance output ≈ Actual physiological demand ÷ Expected demand5

The ceiling isn’t in your body, the ceiling is in your expectation.

As a pregnant woman, I have had many people question whether I should lift, walk, or stay as active as I am. TL;DR, I should because I can. It sucks and I am tired. I’d rather edit the dictionary than walk into the gym these days, but I do it anyway.

LACK OF SELF-BELIEF HAPPENS INNOCENTLY

I was recently with a friend and her son, and the friend mentioned that her son wasn’t ready for different things two or three times in the conversation. The topics were simple, not terribly difficult. Her school-aged child sat beside her quietly listening. But every time she mentioned that he couldn’t do something, I flinched. While her intention was protection, she was building her son’s sense of self without realizing it, and it had a lot of boundaries.

A few hours later, the boy was playing with my toddler. “Khala, she asked me if she could play with this but I told her she wasn’t ready.” I suspected that years of innocuous exchanges, like the one earlier, had formed into a belief, and the belief had been cemented and was being passed on to others.

My theory was supported by a study that tried to figure out why some kids crumble under difficulty and others push through it. What she found came down to one thing: what they believed about their own ability. Children who had been told — directly or indirectly — that ability was fixed (”you’re not a math person,” “that’s too hard for you”) developed what she called a fixed mindset. When they hit obstacles, they interpreted the difficulty as confirmation of their limitations. They stopped trying.

Children who were taught that ability was developed through effort held a growth mindset. They interpreted difficulty as information rather than an identity.

As my mom once put it: “Layla — when you tell a child who they are, they believe you.”

OPTIMISM IS NOT A STRATEGY

So how do you change what you expect? Not only through belief, but also through repetition.

Confidence doesn’t come from believing in yourself. It comes from having done the uncomfortable thing enough times that your nervous system stops flagging it as an emergency.

Because nothing is actually hard, it’s just unfamiliar.

Difficulty is a perception your brain assigns to protect you from novelty — not an accurate measure of what you’re capable of. Every time you post, pitch, or push through something that scares you, your brain updates its prediction model. Expansion stops being coded as danger.6

You don’t build confidence by thinking differently. You build it by acting before you’re ready, until the action becomes familiar enough that the threat response weakens.

Team! I am running a live on August 1st for paid subs. We will talk about trust, self-trust, and performance. Consider joining my paid tier for $36 for the year (temporary offer!)

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IT WON’T FEEL GOOD. DO IT ANYWAY.

When I was at MIT, a senior administrator introduced me to a Head of State. “This is Layla, she is fearless,” he said. The description took me aback. I have always known myself to be fearful. I was lowkey intimidated by the director himself. But I push past it. Always.

The moment before your big leaps feel identical to the moment before danger.

Your heart rate increases, your palms sweat, your inner voice starts negotiating. Your body cannot distinguish between activation and fear — that is the same physiological state.7

You are not afraid, you are activated, it just feels the same.

The people who move forward aren’t less afraid. They’ve just learned to read the signal correctly. The people who don’t move forward don’t lack courage, they start thinking. And thinking too much is where it falls apart.

YOU BURN OUT BECAUSE YOU OVERTHINK

Your brain is built for acute stress. If something real is happening, your stress hormones spike, your system activates, you respond — and then the cycle ends.8

What breaks you is not the work. It’s the overthinking loop.

Researchers found that the stressor itself wasn’t what damaged people, it was how long they kept thinking about it afterward. Worry, rumination, and anticipatory dread kept the physiological stress response active long after the original trigger was gone. The body doesn’t know the difference between a real threat and a vividly imagined one.9

I saw this in my own blood sugar when I was tied up to a continuous glucose monitor and very upset at a ref who had made a bad call during a playoff game. My anger sent my blood sugar through the roof. Even when I came down, it took a few hours for my blood sugar to stabilize.

When you are stuck in thought — cycling through what could go wrong, what people will think, whether you’re ready — your nervous system never gets the signal to stand down. The stress cycle never closes.

You don’t burn out from working too much. You burn out from thinking too much.

An overconsumed mind is not an overworked body. Burnout is the cost of unresolved thought, not the cost of ambition.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU BREAK THROUGH

What you feel right before growth is often a surge of sympathetic activation. That spike can be misinterpreted as danger. In most cases, it is simply arousal without evidence of harm.

Every time you move forward instead of retreating, you update the brain’s prediction model. Expansion stops being coded as danger and the threat response weakens. Just like lifting a heavy weight, you have to push your baseline to see gains.

There is a region in the brain -- the anterior midcingulate cortex -- that activates when you do something you don’t want to do. When you listen to the voice that says I don’t want to and comply, it stays the same. When you push anyway, it grows. The stronger it gets, the faster you move toward hard things — not because they stop being hard, but because your brain stops treating them as threats.10

If you move before the loop starts, you can avoid this. You can do this by naming the avoidance out loud. Research on affect labeling shows that naming a feeling recruits the prefrontal cortex and reduces amygdala activation — the emotion becomes cognitive data instead of raw sensation.11 Then do one small thing. Post the video. Send the email. Reach out to your dream mentor. Hold the position long enough for your nervous system to register that you are ok.

And every time you move forward instead of retreating, you update the model. And eventually — the thing that terrified you becomes familiar.

Thanks so much for reading! Leave a comment and tell me what you thought. I am starting my BOOK process — proposal is in motion. Very exciting, and your feedback goes far. What did you think?

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“I miss the days when she was real.”

“She is so annoying now.”

“What’s with her ugly eyebrows?”

As someone who has been in the internet game for a while now, I let her know that her journey was par-for-the-course. And she would probably take one of three routes.

1. Deal with it, get stronger

2. Think she was an imposter and the growth was a fluke, shut down

3. Not be able to cope with the over-scrutinization, crash out

Whether or not you are internet famous, those three options are at the crossroads for anybody who feels seen and unnerved by it. And I hoped she’d take path one. Because abundance and growth require emotional regulation. Success requires emotional regulation. The path to “making it” is slow, silent, and repetitive, but success brings scrutiny. And scrutiny brings opinions, critiques, and narratives built on porous facts — or altogether lies. And at that point, rejection tolerance becomes your most important asset. Not succumbing to imposter syndrome becomes crucial. And moving forward matters.

HAILEY BIEBER?

Let’s talk about Hailey Bieber. While I may have fallen victim to her $21 smoothie at Erewhon once, I am not a mega consumer of her products — just an objective observer. But I am on the internet. And Hailey Bieber’s public scrutiny is (not-uniquely) never ending. The same claims are repeated by armchair critics hoping to transform their brain-rot into part of the pile-on.

• She married one of the most famous artists? He hates her anyway, he is going to divorce her — look at the body language!

• She built a billion dollar company? Who wouldn’t with those resources!

• She’s an it girl? So much plastic surgery, she is so ugly!

Hailey Bieber was a wealthy girl who chased a very famous man and got him, that much I do know. When that was said and done, she built Rhode, a makeup company which exited for $1 billion. And as much as naysayers want to believe that a $1 billion exit is child’s play with a reach like hers, let me offer my perspective as somebody actually building a business. TL;DR “it built itself” is a naive belief. Money helps — but a $1b business is a huge feat. Her resources contribute to the explanation, not the excuse.

• She has built, fed, and sustained an incredible social media presence that served as her marketing pipeline to feed the sales and ultimate valuation. This is not something to shake off — there are many boring celebrities on the internet that don’t feed the interests of their audience and stagnate

• Her marketing pipeline, once converted, kept buying from her — she produced cult-classics

• Which means she hired (and fired) well in product formulation, brand experience, and leadership

• And — without a doubt — she has utilized her haters as a free marketing team by not paying them attention or trying to shut them down and by not relinquishing her power to them and quitting

Controversy is a free distribution mechanism. The people hate-watching are still watching and increasing her reach.

My point here is not to get you to buy Rhode, I have no dog in the fight nor an affiliate link to offer. My point here is to tell you that as you grow more successful, people will be mean. Either to your face or behind your back. And you can’t let it stop you.

Oscar Wilde said it best: “Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.”

And when you are trying to do something, obscurity is riskier than scrutiny. You are less likely to get lucky without both doing and telling.

HOW HIGH IS YOUR SUCCESS TOLERANCE?

So you can fall apart, believe you are an imposter, or work through it and stay regulated. You can spiral up or down. I encourage you to imagine yourself doing something great. Then someone comes into your DMs to tell you it sucks, you are ugly, and unworthy. Your boss walks into your office and is unimpressed. You don’t get Forbes 30 Under 30, even though all of your friends did. Where does your head go?

Another thought exercise: when an internet pile-on happens, do you jump in? Do you build anonymous Reddit accounts to bash? Often, how you assess people is a projection of the barometers you use to assess yourself.

SUCCESS MAKES PEOPLE DO LESS

The data on public scrutiny tells us something important. Most people, when faced with public evaluation, do less. They make slower, more conservative decisions in the workplace as they seek to avoid public criticism. They retreat. They play small.1 And playing small does not do a whole lot to increase luck or odds at getting what you want.

And the statistics are brutal. Public recognition leads to imposter syndrome, especially for high achievers. Studies show as much as 60% of medical students experience imposter syndrome.2 Nearly 70% of adults experience imposter syndrome at least once, with roughly 30% facing it persistently.3

The self-perpetuating nature is what kills you — high achieving women continually discount their own abilities despite repeated successes. They attribute success to luck instead of skill.4 And here’s what that costs: belief in yourself is the highest predictor of success, more than intelligence or a burst of hard work, because belief determines how long effort lasts.

Angela Duckworth’s research on grit showed us this.5 Achieving hard things is not only talent — but the application of sustained and focused talent over time. Imposter syndrome takes the credit from your self-belief and gives it to luck. And when you believe you’re lucky rather than capable, you stop when the luck “runs out.”

Public recognition leads to imposter syndrome, especially for high achievers. And people with imposter syndrome lack self-belief — the single most important indicator of sustained success.

EMOTIONAL REGULATION IS NOT CALM

Emotional regulation isn’t calm — it’s capacity.

I am not describing staying zen, rather I am describing the ability to execute while being actively hated. Or actively criticized. Or actively ignored. Or working without any positive reinforcement via those you’d expect it from.

Research backs this: emotion regulation was a significant predictor of academic success in kindergarteners, even after controlling for IQ. There is no doubt that being able to separate how you feel from what you do relates directly to achievement and productivity.6

But most people misunderstand what emotional regulation actually means. They think it’s about feeling good or staying positive. It’s not. It’s about performing regardless of how you feel.

Here’s a framework that helps: the ABCDE model from Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.

• A - Activating Event: Someone comments “She’s so fake now” on your post.

• B - Belief: The thought that triggers is “They’re right, I don’t belong here, I’m a fraud.”

• C - Consequence: You spiral, delete the post, consider quitting.

• D - Dispute: You challenge the belief. “Is that actually true? I’ve been working on this for years. One person’s opinion doesn’t define my legitimacy.”

• E - Effect: You keep posting. You keep building. The belief changes from “I’m a fraud” to “Some people won’t like what I do, and that’s irrelevant to whether I continue.”

The dispute is the highest failure point. They let the activating event skip straight to consequence. The internet says you’re ugly? You must be. Someone questions your credentials? You must not have them. A competitor discredits your work? Maybe they’re right. Especially when nobody who is doing it well looks like you anyway, right?

Emotional regulation is the gap between stimulus and response. It’s the space where you decide whether external opinions control your internal operating system.

Emotional regulation, in so many words, is avoiding the crash out. Because crash-outs aren’t constructive.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

Success requires systematic embarrassment tolerance. Not confidence. Not fearlessness. It requires tolerance, which is the ability to be publicly criticized and keep executing anyway. Tolerance is the ability to be called a ditz while building a billion-dollar company. Tolerance is the ability to read “you’re so annoying” and still keep it moving.

Embarrassment tolerance is not a skill you’re born with. It’s trained. Every time you execute despite discomfort, you’re training your nervous system that scrutiny is survivable. Every time you retreat when criticized, you’re training it that visibility means danger.

The girl who made it big on the internet? She’s at a fork. Path one means training her system that hate comments are background noise. Path two means letting strangers define whether she’s “real” enough to deserve success. Path three means letting the volume of criticism determine her capacity for action.

Most people take path two or three. They either internalize the criticism and shut down, or they can’t metabolize the volume and crash out. The ones who make it — the Hailey Biebers, the founders who scale, the writers who keep publishing despite reviews — they took path one.

They didn’t stop feeling the sting. They just stopped letting it control the decision of whether to continue. And that, not talent or luck or resources, is what separates people who make it from people who almost did.

You have also been at that fork, and will be at that fork sometime soon. And you must remember that your only limit is how you perceive yourself.

First — Ramadan Mubarak to all celebrating! And thanks for reading — I would love to know what you thought. And I also want to take a minute to thank ALL 100,000 OF YOU THAT ARE HERE! Building this community has brought me so much joy and pride. I appreciate every single one of you taking time to read this.

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Separately, Case Study has been gifting me their planner for 3 years now? Since my Substack was <1000 and one thing about me is I am loyal. She didn’t ask or pay me to post anywhere — and I say with full conviction that Case Study has the best planners on earth.

Go-tos:

• My daily planner, 3 years strong?

• My tiny planner

• My to-do list

I’ll never forget my first time riding in an 18-wheel truck. We had just released our brand new mobile app to drivers as new founders. I hopped in a truck with a Fortune 500 driver at four in the morning to get feedback and walk him through the product. Pride swelling in my chest. “You made this?” he asked.

“Yes!” I beamed.

“Why the hell would you put so many pop-ups in an app for a driver?” he responded aggressively.

I froze for a second before I texted my co-founder: “Drop the pop-ups ASAP.”

“Done,” he responded shortly after.

That tiny interaction captures the startup journey — which is often glamorized and perceived as a byproduct of luck. And captures a lot of life. While portrayed as glamorous, it’s embarrassing, then it’s fixed, then you move forward. And in between that, often it’s boring.

And what you do in the boring and bad is a key determinant of luck.

THE RULE OF THIRDS

There’s a concept called the Rule of Thirds: 1/3 of your life will be boring, 1/3 will be hard, 1/3 will be great. I’ve heard it thrown around in a variety of forms, but here is my reading:

66% of the time, you won’t feel like doing something in your best state of mind.

The tricky thing about two-thirds of your life being boring or bad is that most great things are based on perception. Perception is built on your actions. If your actions follow your mood, you’re actively working against your goals two-thirds of the time.

Research shows us the impact of mood on behavior. People in negative moods make systematically different decisions than those in positive moods — often choosing short-term relief over long-term benefit. Studies show that anxious people avoid risk, which leads to missing opportunities. Bored people seek stimulation, which leads to abandoning boring but necessary work. And angry people make retaliatory choices, like damaging relationships. When decisions are mood-dependent rather than goal-dependent, goals get de-prioritized. Emotions do not just get in the way of good decision making; they are built into how we judge situations, weigh risks, and choose what to do.1

And ultimately, how people perceive you determines your influence. Your power. Your luck. And how much people trust you.

LUCK COMES FROM SURFACE AREA

Luck is a consequence of both surface area and emotional regulation. The argument above makes the case for emotional regulation. And Jason Roberts2 makes the case for surface area below.

“If there’s one thing I’ve discovered in recent years it’s this. The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated. It’s a simple concept, but an extremely powerful one because what it implies is that you can directly control the amount of luck you receive. In other words, you make your own luck.” Jason Roberts

As Roberts says, L = D * T. Luck = doing x telling.3

I see Roberts’ theory come to fruition in my own life and through others. As a founder, there is a strong correlation between people who ask for what they want and those who get what they want.

It’s predictably the people who ask to solve something, ask to take over a responsibility, or just do the thing who are the luckiest. Because the outcome they sought after — the title, stature, skills — generally follow. And this happens in asinine ways too (I have literally asked to be upgraded to business class, just because, and had my ticket changed. More than once).

Of course, some luck is out of your control. Having emotionally regulated parents was pure luck. Being born to a family that could prioritize educating me was pure luck. But luck can be increased, with strategy.

I will share my “lucky girl syndrome” strategy: Do a lot (ship, ask, connect) + tell a lot (communicate clearly what you’re doing and what you want to the right people).

And that means doing and asking even when it’s bad or boring. As long as you can remove mood-based decisions from the two-thirds of your life that is tethered to your goals and the future emotions that will emerge when you accomplish them.

I talk about how I walked into my program director at MIT’s office — pre-admission — a lot. Because MIT wasn’t pure luck or pure talent. It was a bit of those, but mostly me making the case for what I want out loud. And I advise aspiring students of any program to call program directors during the application process to increase their luck as well (send this to anyone applying to grad school asap).

DON’T DISCOUNT THE POWER OF STRESS

This morning I was reading The Upside of Stress4 by Kelly McGonical. Honestly, phenomenal book. Everyone should read it to reframe how powerful stress can be, considering it’s an inevitable reaction to many of life’s woes. McGonical’s central claim is that believing “stress is harmful” versus “stress is helpful” changes how your body and brain respond to it. People with a stress‑is‑enhancing mindset show better health, more productivity, and greater resilience at the same stress levels than those who see stress as purely toxic. She argues you can train yourself to shift stress from a “threat response” (“I can’t do this, I’m overwhelmed; I need out”) to a “challenge response” (“I’m pushing my limits; This energy will push me”), which changes cardiovascular patterns and coping behavior. I bring this up because the 33% of your life that is bad can either work as rocket fuel or wet mud, depending on your view on stress. This paragraph is underdeveloped because I just started the book, but you can rest assured that I will reference the book many more times in upcoming articles because I am so aligned with the message.

LUCK COMES FROM WEAK TIES — NETWORK MATTERS

Recently an acquaintance asked me for an introduction. “Sure, but when I introduce you to Ahmed keep in mind that he is direct,” I started before making a few more recommendations. He recently reached back out to let me know he got the job. While it may seem like the intro was a stroke of luck, research by Mark Granovetter5 shows most job opportunities, business partnerships, and breakthrough ideas come from acquaintances rather than close friends — so from weak ties rather than strong ties. The more people who know what you’re working on, the more serendipitous connections occur. Your network size and communication about your work directly correlates with opportunity.

POWER COMES FROM ONE OF TWO PLACES

A good friend of mine was passionate and hard working. We hit a lot of life’s milestones together until our mid-twenties, when she married a mean guy. He put her down and abused her. Her home was always volatile. His emotional state was unpredictable, so rather than spending her days fulfilling her potential, she spent her days being overly-vigilant about how not to trigger him. Or she spent her days angry. He had power over her because he was mean. Meanwhile, I had the oblivious privilege of pursuing my interests in a calm environment.

He had power over her because you can build power through extreme emotional dysregulation. People are afraid of you. They comply because the alternative is unpredictable rage or punishment. But it’s the type of power that costs the people around you (and, probably yourself) a lot of joy, opportunity, and stability. And, it costs time. When you spiral, you’re burning glucose your brain needs for problem-solving on much less productive things.

Fear creates a world‑view of low control and high threat; people become vigilant, risk‑averse, and focused on avoiding punishment. In an abusive dynamic, someone spends her cognitive budget on not triggering him, instead of building skills or opportunities. Fear‑based power hijacks others’ affect so their decisions become about short‑term emotional safety, not mutual long‑term goals.6

Or you can build power through emotional regulation. People are influenced by you. They follow because they trust you. Trust‑based power comes from repeated evidence that your actions are not wildly mood‑driven — people can predict you, so they can safely attach their own goals to you.

People give you power when they are afraid of you or influenced by you.

There is a reason the influencer economy has quickly torpedoed traditional marketing. The influencer economy, a $250B+ sector, has relied on community-driven content.

The influencer economy represents a high-growth, $250+ billion sector (said to double by 2027) that often outperforms traditional advertising by leveraging authentic, community-driven content, with an average skip time of 17.8 seconds (typical branded content is 7.9 seconds).7 I heard that 61% of an audience’s market trusts the creator over a brand.

In the offline world, trust is built through a series of completed transactions. You say you’ll do something. You do it. Repeat.

But trust breaks in one of two ways: People think you’re incompetent or they think you lack integrity.

That friend eventually divorced her husband. And despite his many attempts to get her back, she witnessed his low integrity. Low integrity is generally unforgivable. But incompetence? That’s a required stage on the path to mastery.

YOU MUST BE BAD BEFORE YOU’RE GOOD

Why am I so fond of incompetence? Because you are oblivious that you’re bad at anything before you become good at anything. In the last few articles, I have talked about incompetence a few times. And have referenced the image below, I think it’s so powerful.

1. Unconscious incompetence -- you don’t know what you don’t know

2. Conscious incompetence -- you realize you’re bad at this

3. Conscious competence -- you can do it, but it takes effort

4. Unconscious competence -- it’s automatic

That second stage is where most people quit. When you don’t know you are bad at something, you don’t feel bad. As soon as you feel bad, embarrassment, shame, and anxiety surface. This is where you are most likely to quit. The moment you realize you are bad at something is when immediate negative emotion is strongest and the temptation for short‑term relief through quit, blame, and distraction is highest.

You quit because realizing you’re bad at something requires three things:

1. Space to assess yourself

2. Emotional regulation to pause instead of spiraling

3. Seeking good mentorship to show you the gap

In that truck, I had seconds to choose my response. Spiral into defensiveness? Blame the driver for not understanding? Freeze in embarrassment?

I chose: fix it immediately in the truck. While pride was my immediate emotion in the sting of criticism, I had a split second to choose defensiveness or a goal-aligned response. I chose a goal aligned response. Research reminds us that when goal-dependent reactions override short-term reactions (like the urge for emotional protection), goals are more likely.8

The lucky aren’t mood dependent. They are goal focused.

HOW YOU DEAL WITH THE BAD AND BORING IS A LEADING INDICATOR FOR YOUR FUTURE

When you realize you’re incompetent at something, where does your head go?

Fear? Anxiety? Boredom?

Or do you focus on your ability to keep pushing?

The people who win aren’t more talented. They just don’t let their mood determine their actions.

They understand that showing up when it’s hard or boring is what separates influence from irrelevance. That trust is built in the moments when you’d rather disappear.

That driver didn’t remember my pride or excitement. He remembered whether the app worked for him the next day. On my next ride-along, I chose to go with him. “How was the app?” I asked. “Way better,” he replied.

Your reputation isn’t built in the 33% when everything feels good. It’s built in the 66% when it doesn’t. Emotions are always in the decision loop. Specific emotions push decisions in predictable directions. People who build habits, environments, and relationships that stabilize their affect—and who deliberately lean on anticipated long‑term feelings over immediate moods — will, over time, look “luckier.”

You made it to the end! I would absolutely love to know what you think, share a comment or say hello :) Your comments make my day!

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I asked him how he stayed so motivated.

“That’s a stupid question, Layla. You either do something or you don’t.”

THE RISE OF DISCIPLINE

Those words have stuck with me for years. Which is maybe why I was struck when a TikTok creator said there is a “cultural pendulum swing back to discipline and hard work.”

“I am seeing a cultural pendulum swing back to discipline and hard work. As it stands, images are editable, intelligence is performable, taste is curatable, productivity is automated. Identity is to be purchased and customized. You can buy a face, a body and audience productivity and normal career luxury goods performance. You cannot buy discipline. And so discipline is virtually the only thing we have left that we can’t fake or speed up. It’s the antithesis to our modern problem of convenience culture and fatigue of ease.”

@feelingsfactorySome thoughts on Marty Supreme, the shift back to hard-work-as-cultural-capital after years of softness + predictions for the future of luxury 💻 #discipline #curriculum #martysupreme #winterarc #hardwork

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She’s right. And it connects to something I’ve been noticing for years: the self-actualization economy has convinced us that who we are can be acquired through what we own.

Maslow’s hierarchy has a fatal flaw that marketers discovered decades ago: the higher up you climb, the easier it becomes to fake your progress.

If you lack housing or food, the signs are obvious. You can’t Instagram your way out of homelessness or tweet your way to a full stomach. The bottom of the pyramid is brutally honest.

But self-actualization? That’s where the con begins.

Watch a lifestyle influencer’s morning routine. Notice how they sell you pieces of their “actualized” identity: the $70 candle for mindfulness, the matching yoga set for wellness, the expensive coffee shop for creativity. Brands have figured out that self-actualization looks like something. And if it looks like something (or someone), it can be packaged, branded, and sold.

I recently watched Alix Earle — who runs a multi-million dollar enterprise off a party girl persona — film a “day in the life” video showing back-to-back business meetings. A stark juxtaposition (and probably more realistic view of her life) to the majority of her content which is about how much she parties. Google her name and “vomit-covered dress in closet,” and the internet will help you paint the picture. The disconnect is jarring: she’s selling aspiration through self-destruction, packaging chaos as authenticity. And she can push product to the tune of millions.

But it works. Because we’ve been taught that identity can be acquired. A shortcut to development.

A VICTIM IN MY OWN RIGHT

I was limping through the mall shortly after ACL surgery, when something caught my eye. Nike was advertising a night race. Professional lighting that made weekend joggers look like Olympians. Merchandise displaying the race name like a badge of honor. A photo booth that transformed ordinary people into athletes with a single click.

For the first time in my life, I am not an athlete. Post-op life has stolen my strength, my tone, my discipline. Standing there in Nike’s temple of aspiration, I realized something that changed everything I thought I knew about human motivation.

My old identity was for sale. And I almost bought it.

Marketing has moved from inaccessible celebrities behind a TV screen to everyday lifestyle influencers who sell you the ingredients to become them. To become a clean girl, a pilates girly, a fun mom, a sports mom, or even productive (guilty as charged). And with a slick image and some cool shoes, I could have also projected my faux-athletic prowess to the world.

The facade has one issue: you can’t buy an identity. You can’t buy self-actualization. Which is why discipline is the truest gold-standard. Discipline can’t be bought.

THE LITTLE GIRL INSIDE

A baby girl walks into a room with bows in her hair and a princess dress. “You are so pretty,” an audience instinctively coos.

What the girl is learning is that beauty is an aspiration, a title granted. Style is an aspiration — you have it or you don’t, and the validation of others cements it.

In reality, beauty and style are a skill. And skills need discipline, time, and effort as the video below discusses.

@ileana.justine@Beck Goodman, M. Ed this video changed my brain chemistry. #changedmybrainchemistry #parenting #toddlermom

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My parents had an effective approach and it was to never talk about our looks. We weren’t clumsy, ugly, beautiful, brown-eyed, green-eyed, big-eyed, tall, short, slim, fat, or anything else. We just were. As society has shifted into a world of likes, views, subs, and other vanity metrics that are hard to avoid and measure ourselves by, we need a plan B.

Because while anybody can fall victim to a lifetime of aspiration over discipline, women and girls are especially vulnerable. At different times for different reasons. Today’s soup-de-jour includes the $450b wellness industry has us convinced that bubble baths and a soft-life build the headspace for internal peace and resilience. In reality, resilience comes from hard things. Especially the hard things you don’t want to do. Your nervous system doesn’t learn strength from comfort, it learns from systematic exposure to discomfort.

THE PATH TO HELPLESSNESS IS PAVED IN GOOD INTENTION

I was at the mall recently when I saw a 4-year-old ask her parents for something. “No.” She asked something else. “No.” And a few more nos. The conversation was absolutely unremarkable, it could have been my own. Until I heard about a study that shifted my perspective.

When we fall into the habit of evergreen no’s as parents, we teach our kids dependence. When a child asks for something and the parent’s immediate response is “no” — without explanation or alternative — they learn helplessness.

Research on learned helplessness and child development reveals when parents respond with unconditional refusals without explanation, children can develop a sense that their actions don’t predict outcomes. In contrast, when parents provide structure — clear expectations with rationales and feedback — children learn that their behavior influences their world, reducing the risk of learned helplessness.1

But parents who say “Ask me after you finish X” activate the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for planning and delayed gratification. The child learns that their behavior influences their world. They learn agency.

When parents provide clear expectations with rationales and feedback, children’s own actions carry predictable consequences, making it easier for the child to see the outcomes their behavior led to, which results in less helpless kids.2 Who grow into less helpless adults.

It’s the difference between raising a child who believes they can impact their circumstances versus one who believes they’re at the mercy of forces beyond their control. It’s the secret ingredient that separates people who crumble from those who bend but don’t break.

And ultimately, we all want to raise children who take control and spiral up. To do hard things, you have to spiral up.

STRESS EXPOSES YOUR LOWEST SELF

A friend recently told me she’d been struggling with anxiety and finally got medication that helped. But when she asked for a higher dose, her doctor said: “I want you to see a therapist first. I want you to look yourself straight in the eye and confront the anxiety, not just medicate it away.”

Her doctor understood that you can buy external relief, but you cannot buy internal resolve. I am all for anti-anxiety meds and have seen them transform lives, but the doctor’s approach was more comprehensive than a chemical rebalancing alone.

Another friend learned this during her divorce. Suddenly, she was dressing differently, altering her body, desperately trying to project the image of an attractive, unfazed woman instead of the depressed person she actually was. She was buying an identity to cover the cracks in her foundation. Which ultimately shattered before she rebuilt herself.

Stress has a way of exposing everything. And if your lowest self is full of cracks, no amount of purchased identity can save you.

THE FOUR-LEVEL REALITY CHECK

Here’s how to audit whether your identity is real or rented:

Level 1 - Physical Reality: Does discipline drive you? Can you actually do the things your identity claims? If you call yourself an athlete, can you perform athletically? If you identify as creative, do you create things?

Level 2 - Internal Motivation: Do you engage in your identity’s behaviors when no one is watching? Do you write when there’s no audience? Exercise when there’s no selfie?

Level 3 - Stress Survival: Does your identity hold up under pressure? When you’re tired, broke, or criticized, do you still know who you are?

Level 4 - Independent Worth: Can you respect yourself without external validation? Would you still be proud of your work if no one ever saw it?

Most people pass Level 1 by purchasing the right accessories. They crash out at Level 2 because their motivation requires an audience. They never reach Levels 3 and 4 because their identity was never built in the first place.

YOU CAN’T BUY DISCIPLINE

You can write without the coffee shop. You can exercise without the matching yoga set. You can find peace without the expensive candle.

Real self-actualization is messy, unglamorous, and completely unsellable. It happens in the space between who you think you should be and who you actually are. It develops through the repetitive, boring work of being introspective and pushing yourself when no one is watching. And it can be embarrassing.

You can outpace embarrassment. Reps are louder than shame.

MOTIVATE YOURSELF, FOR YOU — AND IT WILL LAST

We are motivated by two fundamental drives: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. When we want to get fit to look good for others, that’s extrinsic motivation — we’re performing for an audience. When we want to get fit to reduce our diabetes risk and increase our longevity, that’s intrinsic motivation — we’re investing in ourselves.

The difference matters more than most people realize. Extrinsic motivation requires constant external validation to sustain itself. It’s fragile, dependent on others’ reactions, and often dies the moment the audience disappears. Intrinsic motivation is self-renewing. It doesn’t need applause to survive because the benefits are felt internally, daily, regardless of who’s watching.

This is why people who exercise “to look good” often burn out or quit when progress stalls, while those who exercise “to feel strong” tend to maintain their habits for decades. One motivation can be taken away by circumstances; the other lives independently of external conditions.

LOST POTENTIAL

There is a fundamental misalignment between lacking discipline and wanting to grow.

Building anything meaningful — whether it’s expertise, relationships, or genuine achievement — requires sustained focus over years.

But when you’re operating from a purchased or faked identity rather than authentic self-knowledge, you’re constantly spending time maintaining the performance instead of developing real capability.

You’re choosing outfits instead of practicing skills. You’re curating social media to present an image of a problem solver instead of solving actual problems. You’re attending networking events instead of creating work worth talking about.

Meanwhile, the people who know who they are are putting in their 10,000 hours while you’re putting in 10,000 hours of pretending.

The opportunity cost is staggering. Every moment spent propping up a fake identity is a moment not spent building the real thing. And since meaningful achievement requires deep, sustained effort over time, this misdirection doesn’t just delay your progress — it can prevent it entirely.

THE LAST IDENTITY STANDING

My uncle didn’t need motivation because he never rented his identity as an athlete. He built it. Four in the morning, decade after decade, whether anyone was watching or not.

That’s the thing about discipline: it can’t be purchased, performed, or projected. It must be built, brick by brick, through actions that connect to outcomes, choices that reflect values, and the gradual accumulation of evidence that you can trust yourself.

Your real identity can’t be sold to you. But that’s exactly what makes it worth having.

Because unlike everything else in this world, no one can take it away.

Hi friends! You made it this far! Thank you for reading along, I would love to hear what you think.

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Every year, a dozen friends. seek me out for serious advice on how to start a business/podcast/blog/etc. One or two go through with it.

Something I’ve observed as a founder is that most people are pretty naive when they start a business. Probably contributing to the 80% failure rate among startups. But when a founder does fail, they leave smarter. And when a founder doesn’t fail, they are considered a super founder.1 A second-timer with all the scar tissue, grit, and intensity from the first time around who won’t repeat certain mistakes. And the most likely kind of founder to build a unicorn.

When you start anything, you will start bad at it.

But the problem with being bad at something is it’s embarrassing. It’s scary. It requires self-awareness. Enough self-awareness to eventually level up.

YOU HAVE TO BE INCOMPETENT BEFORE YOU ARE COMPETENT

Like the Four Stages of Competence2 above suggest, we are unconsciously incompetent about a lot of things. Did you know that snake milkers collect venom for medicine? Probably not. Sometimes unconscious incompetence is bliss. In the startup, business, content creator, vlogger, leadership, writer, or whatever worlds, this is when you come up with an idea and think “I can probably do that. In fact, I want to do that.” So you do it. Or you don’t.

If you don’t, the thing remains a dream for the rest of your life.

If you do, you overcome the fear of trying something new, the anxiety of failure or being perceived, and develop the ability to do the thing. To build the company or launch the brand.

And you are a novice.

As you gain experience and make good and bad decisions, you develop judgment. If success is on the horizon, the judgment teaches you what you are bad at. Then you take a leap into conscious incompetence. And with humility and will, you overcome that thing.

Then you become good at the thing. You are consciously competent.

Then, you are a master.

You will never learn mastery from others. You will never earn mastery without the embarrassment of feeling insufficient. Mastery is a journey.

CONVICTION > COMPETENCE

Most successful founders weren’t the most qualified — they were the most committed. The person who starts incompetent but relentless beats the expert who starts cautious. I’ve watched this play out a few times. Including in my own company.

This is what “enough” has looked like for some successful people

• Alex Hormozi makes 450 pieces of content weekly and says spend 4 hours a day doing outbound and you will never be hungry again

• Seth Godin has written a blog post every single day for over 25 years, never missing a day (9,000+ posts)

• Grant Cardone makes 100+ sales calls per day and says “I make more calls before 9 AM than most people make all week”

• Warren Buffett reads 500+ pages daily and has for 6 decades, spending 5-6 hours a day on financial reports

• MrBeast works 12-16 hours a day on content and thinks about YouTube “every waking moment”

• David Goggins runs 100+ miles per week, does 1,000+ push-ups daily, and trains 2-3 times per day every day

• Serena Williams practiced tennis 6-8 hours daily plus 2-3 hours of fitness year-round for two decades

The pattern is clear: while most people worry about looking foolish or being judged, these individuals focus on volume and consistency to transcend competence into mastery.

SELF-AWARENESS IS EASIER WITH PURPOSE

My mom is the queen of self-awareness. I was on a podcast yesterday (follow my IG, I will let you know when my Well Rooted episode drops), and I recalled a story. My mom got a dental degree in Iraq (as the top student in her class, as her reputation has it). Then she came to America and had the degree validated with more school, but not before getting a master’s degree in microbiology. She worked as a dentist for a decade before starting a Pre-K through 12th grade Islamic school, and about seven years into the journey of the school went back to get a doctorate in Educational Leadership. At 50 years old with six kids at home and hundreds of students at the school. The other day I remembered this random and seldom-discussed moment in her life. She already holds the title of doctor, so little materially changed after her degree. Only intangibles were realized: personal development and leadership. So I texted her.

“Mama, you are such a baller for getting a random PhD at 50.”

She replied: “It was not random. It was from a point of responsibility towards the task I took upon myself.”

My mom felt like she had more to learn, with the responsibility of education on her. And my mom was ready to tolerate another challenge alongside her responsibilities.

DOING HARD THINGS > KNOWLEDGE

My mom is a high-capacity person. With a high tolerance for discomfort.

Your tolerance for discomfort will take you further than your expertise.

When you challenge your brain regularly, your brain rewires itself. The anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) lights up when you take on something hard and doing something difficult grows the brain. The size of your aMCC is linked to motivation, will to live, and resilience. Higher persistence. Greater meaning. Stronger emotional control.3 Your brain is stronger when challenge exceeds comfort.

Neuroscience proves that the unqualified person willing to struggle has a structural advantage over the qualified person avoiding discomfort.

WE’RE NEUROPLASTIC, IT’S FANTASTIC

Neuroplasticity research shows the brain remains adaptable, yet we’ve created a culture where learning past 30 feels indulgent. The real barrier isn’t biology, but it’s permission. We’ve somehow decided there’s an expiration date on ambition. That reinvention past a certain age is indulgent rather than necessary. But incompetence doesn’t care about your age — it only cares whether you’re willing to endure it.

Which brings me to another story about my mother-in-law, who was a chemist working for a pharmaceutical company as a 40-year-old mother of four. One day she mentioned to her boss that she was considering law school. “Fariba,” he started, “you’ll wake up in five years as a 45-year-old lawyer or a 45-year-old doing what you are doing today. Who do you want to be?” Suffice it to say that his argument was compelling, as my MIL just retired from a career as a patent attorney at Pfizer.

READY OR NOT, SOMEONE’S GOING

That woman who told me she wasn’t ready is still waiting. My mom at 50 and my MIL at 40 weren’t ready either, they just understood that readiness is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid the embarrassment of being bad at something new. The question isn’t whether you’re ready. It’s whether you’re willing to be incompetent long enough to become competent.

Five years from now, you'll be five years older whether you start the thing or not. The only variable is whether you'll be five years more competent or five years more comfortable with your excuses. Mastery requires incompetence. Comfort requires nothing. You can't skip novice. You can only decide whether the embarrassment is worth the expertise.

Thank youuuu for reading! What did you think? Sometimes it feels good to be bad at something, because it means you are on the journey to conscious competence

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