Last week, Rich and I caught up on a call, and I shared that I recently became aware of how much of my identity was merged with my work.

By this I mean how I saw myself, as Patrick, was rooted entirely in what Patrick does for work. That has been the primary mode of how I have seen myself for years. Just recently, I felt distance from that and started to see myself as more than my work. My work is a part of me, but not the whole.

When I shared this with Rich, he could relate to this and also shared how he thinks this is very much in the unconscious for entrepreneurs or artists, or anybody on their own path.

I felt like there was more to unpack around this than we had time for on our call, so we recorded a conversation to go deeper on it. We talk about identity, self-worth, impact, and the pressure to keep evolving your business as you grow as a person.

This conversation is really about finding a healthier relationship with work, so it supports your life instead of consuming it.

We would love to hear your perspective on this.

It’s not a safe or predictable path. It asks for responsibility, risk, and a steady willingness to walk into the unknown. Yet people keep stepping toward it, not because it’s easy, but because the cost of ignoring it feels greater.

There is a force inside that pushes them to be challenged. I’ve come to see that this force usually arises from one of three deep motives, or a combination of them:

1. Security

2. Expression

3. Contribution

These aren’t professional goals. They’re inner forces that pull a person toward a larger life.

Many people seek security. For those who grew up in homes of poverty, neglect, or dependency, the drive is to create stability for themselves and their families. They want more control over their lives so they are not vulnerable.

Others are driven by expression. They feel contained in their current environment and can no longer conform. They have something to say and need to create their own path to say it. These are often the people who make poor employees but great artists or entrepreneurs.

And there are those moved by contribution. They want to serve, to add something meaningful to the world around them. Many were helped by others who changed their lives and now feel compelled to pass that forward.

All three share a unifying thread: the desire for freedom.
Not freedom from something, but freedom to commit to something—the life we actually desire.

On the surface, someone might leave a salary to escape dependency and seek independence. But beneath that is the deeper wish to live from a place of sovereignty.

Freedom and the Desire for More Life

Connected to this desire for freedom is an impulse for discovery.

There’s a moment in many lives when the outer world feels steady, maybe even good, but something inside knows it’s not enough. There’s a restlessness for more life.

As children, that freedom is everywhere. We are constantly changing—new schools, new friends, new experiences. The body matures, the world opens, and everything is in motion. Each stage asks something different of us. Each step forward expands who we are.

Then, in early adulthood, the rhythm shifts. We begin to commit to a partner, a profession, a place. Routine takes root. The pace of change slows.

For some, that brings peace.
For others, it brings a quiet ache.

A sense that the life they’ve built no longer stretches to contain who they’re becoming. The same energy that once carried them forward begins to fade, like a river that’s lost its current.

So they leap.
They start again. They make a move that others call risky but that feels inevitable. They walk away from what’s known not because they are fearless, but because staying still has become too painful.

Through that leap they discover something vital: life responds to movement. New frontiers wake up dormant parts of us. Risk, though uncomfortable, keeps the inner world alive.

I think of this as life force—the current that runs through us when we engage what’s real. It might appear as the pull to start a new venture, to tell a truth that’s been avoided, to slow down when everything around us says go faster. It’s the moment we stop managing life and start meeting it again.

When we’re connected to that force, we welcome change. Even our problems become raw material for growth. That’s the work of those who lead, create, and build: to meet the unknown each day and find themselves within it.

The External Game

The irony is that the moment we step into this path of freedom, we’re met with a flood of measurable indicators of success or failure.

The entrepreneur faces revenue targets.
The leader faces KPIs.
The artist faces views, sales, and applause.

What once felt alive and immeasurable soon becomes something that can be counted, tracked, and managed.

These markers are useful. They provide structure and feedback. Without them, the journey loses form. But they are not the thing itself.

When we mistake the markers for meaning, the very path that was meant to set us free begins to feel like another cage.

I once worked with a sales leader who had just taken over a new territory. Early on, he struggled to sleep because he was anxious about failing. One morning at 4:30 am, he woke, checked his phone, and saw an email with the previous day’s sales numbers. They were off target. He got up immediately to fix it.

The next night, he woke again at 4:30 am. This time, the numbers were good, so he went back to sleep. Soon, he no longer needed an alarm. His nervous system was the alarm. Every morning, he woke at 4:30 am to check.

If the numbers were good, he rested. If they were bad, he worked.
Three years later, he was exhausted, burned out, and resentful of the work he once loved.

His success had become dependent on something he didn’t even choose. Every morning was a referendum on his worth.

Allen Carr, the British author on addictions, would ask smokers when they decided to become addicted. The answer, of course, is that they never did. It just happened.

The same happens in life. We get pulled into patterns we never consciously chose, and because we never question them, they grow.

When I met that leader, we had to rediscover why he chose his career in the first place. It was security, the wish to create stability for his family. But that same motive had a shadow side: fear of losing it all.

Until he could create safety within himself, no number would ever be enough.

The goals we set matter. They give us form and focus. But without connection to what lives beneath them, they become hollow. The path that began in pursuit of freedom starts to feel like something to survive.

This is why we must continually return to why we began. The targets matter, but how we approach them—and from what inner state—determines whether they nourish us or drain us.

When we lose our center, every problem feels like a threat. When we’re grounded in it, the same problem becomes a teacher.

The Compass Within

In the beginning, we need frameworks. We look to mentors, books, and best practices, anything that gives structure to the unknown.

But something shifts as we grow. The problems become less technical and more human. The playbooks stop fitting. What once felt like wisdom now sounds like noise.

The higher we go, the less our work is about following best practices and the more it’s about developing our own. We move from asking “What’s the right thing to do?” to asking “What’s right for me, here, now?”

This is where many people feel unmoored. They’ve spent years excelling by doing things the right way. But at a certain point, external guidance can’t carry you further. You need something deeper—a signal that doesn’t come from the noise around you but from the clarity within.

Next week, I’ll be working with six partners at the top wealth management team in the country. They’ve just stepped into leadership. They’re brilliant executors, but now their task is different. They can’t just follow the rulebook; they have to write their own. They have to stop waiting for permission and find what’s meaningful to them so they can lead not just with performance, but with presence.

That’s why clarity of center becomes everything. At the highest level, you’re not managing results; you’re shaping reality. And you can’t do that without knowing where you stand.

When we’re connected to that center, every challenge becomes a chance to align the inner and outer worlds, to let what’s happening outside reflect what’s unfolding inside.

When we lose that connection, life gets noisy. We start looking outward for answers, copying others, chasing formulas that don’t fit. There’s nothing wrong with seeking ideas, but we have to treat them as experiments, not blueprints.

There’s no universal formula for a good life. No perfect routine. No single way to lead, to love, or to succeed. There’s only your way, the one that reveals itself as you walk it.

And when you treat each decision as a chance to deepen that connection to yourself, life gets clearer. The fog lifts. The next step shows itself.

Freedom as Practice

Freedom isn’t something we win and keep. It’s the ongoing practice of self-discovery, the courage to keep meeting who we are becoming.

Every challenge, every success, every risk is an opportunity to align what’s happening outside with what’s true inside.

The external game gives us form and feedback.
The internal game gives us meaning.

And the only real mistake is forgetting that the game was always ours to play.

I think one of the hardest things to practice is being human.

We talk often about change, about wanting to show up differently, communicate more honestly, or relate to others with greater ease. But most of the time, when those moments arrive, we find ourselves returning to what’s familiar.

We speak in the same tone that’s worked before. We rely on the gestures that keep things smooth. We default to the version of ourselves that gets through.

It’s hard to change from the way we have always been.

If we try to do it alone, it doesn’t feel real.

We can’t simulate the friction, the surprise, or the contact of having another person in front of us.
And if we try to do it in real life — at work, with a partner, in conflict — the stakes are too high.

So we stay caught in the way we have always been, even though we want to try something different.

The safety of the known

Familiar patterns keep us safe. They are the strategies we built early on to manage uncertainty, to belong, to avoid rejection. They may no longer serve who we are becoming, but they continue to serve a purpose: they keep life predictable.

And predictability can feel a lot like control.

The irony is that the more practiced we become at managing how we appear, the less alive we often feel inside it. Our expression becomes consistent but feels empty, missing the spark that comes from surprising ourselves.

The missing rehearsal

We need environments where it’s possible to experiment with new ways of being.
Low-stakes places to try things and not be afraid of mistakes or failure. To say what we mean without fear of consequence.

Real growth happens in the practice. We find our edge in the uncertain process of trying something new and seeing how it lands.

Our culture rarely allows for that. Most spaces are performative, professional, curated, and optimized.

The edge of real connection

Being human, in its truest form, involves risk. The risk of being misunderstood, not meeting expectations, or revealing what we actually want. But those are the same risks that make connection possible.

Without them, we end up in polite, professional exchanges that look harmonious but feel empty. We smooth the edges of truth until nothing real can touch us.

I think the deeper question isn’t “How do I communicate better?” but “Where do I get to practice being real?”

You can practice being real in New York, on Nov 15–16 at Find Your Voice.

This marks the beginning of a series of workshops I’ll be running. In 2026, I’ll be announcing new dates and cities for Find Your Voice and Find Your Center.

Among the ancient stories that continue to speak to us, few feel as modern as the tale of Narcissus, the boy whose reflection became his world.

The story begins with a prophecy. His mother, Liriope, feared what would become of her beautiful child. She sought the oracle Tiresias and asked what every parent asks in some form: Will my son live a long life?

“Yes,” Tiresias replied, “so long as he never knows himself.”

For sixteen years, Narcissus moved through the world untouched by fate. He was radiant, admired, and distant. Those who loved him found their affection reflected back and never reciprocated.

Among them was Echo, a nymph cursed to repeat only the last words she heard. When she first saw Narcissus hunting in the forest, she followed him silently, unable to speak her love. At last, she revealed herself, and he recoiled, rejecting her with a cold indifference that pierced her to the core.

Humiliated, Echo withdrew into the woods. Her body wasted away until only her voice remained, repeating the words of others but never her own.

It was after this encounter, wandering deeper into the forest, that Narcissus came upon a still pool. He bent to drink, and in the water saw a face so exquisite he could not look away.

Each time he reached to touch it, the surface broke, the image dissolved, and he was left staring into ripples that revealed nothing but his own movement. So he held still, drinking not from the water but from the sight before him.

Time slowed, then stopped. The forest, the air, even the sound of the river withdrew.

Unable to touch what he saw, unable to look away, he wasted away by the water’s edge.

So consumed by his reflection, he lost the world.

The Shape of a Gaze

Every age reshapes the human eye.
The plow bent our gaze toward the ground.
The book trained it to move in lines.
The screen teaches us to stare.

Marshall McLuhan once said, “We shape our tools, and afterward, our tools shape us.”
It’s a simple truth that’s easy to overlook. We think we’re choosing what to look at, but the tools we use are quietly deciding how we look.

Science is now beginning to show how literal that is.

Eye specialists describe a condition called digital eye strain, a mix of blurred vision, headaches, and tension that comes from long hours of screen use. The main cause is something known as near work: the act of keeping our eyes focused on something close for long periods.

To do this, the small focusing muscles inside the eye must stay slightly tensed, while both eyes turn inward to keep a single image clear. Without breaks, this system can get stuck in a state of strain. Researchers call it accommodative fatigue, the eye’s version of being overworked.

Extended close-up work keeps the focusing muscles active even after you stop looking, creating a lingering sense of visual effort and tension. That lingering activation means the eyes don’t fully relax. The visual system remains half-engaged, as if waiting for the next task.

During normal conversation, we blink about 18–22 times per minute. On screens, that number drops to 4–6.

Blinking might seem trivial, but it’s one of the clearest signs of how attention changes the body. We blink more when we feel relaxed and socially engaged; we blink less when we’re fixated or under strain. The less we blink, the drier the eyes become, and the longer we stay locked in narrow focus.

This pattern doesn’t stop at the eyes. When our vision stays close and tight, the head tilts forward, the neck and shoulders stiffen, and the upper back rounds. Doctors now treat these as part of one system: the visual posture of modern life. Common complaints like neck pain, headaches, and light sensitivity all trace back to this same posture of focus.

There are simple ways to interrupt it. The same research that identified this cycle also confirmed a small but powerful reset known as the 20-20-20 rule: every twenty minutes, look at something at least twenty feet away for twenty seconds. It gives the eyes a chance to relax, restores moisture, and tells the body it can ease out of vigilance.

What the research makes clear is that our way of seeing has become conditioned into a single mode of readiness. The body holds that stance long after the screen goes dark. Over time, this habit of near-focus doesn’t just shape how our eyes work; it begins to shape how we move, feel, and think.

Trapped in the Spotlight

We often talk about distraction as if it were the problem, as if we’ve lost the ability to focus. But what we call distraction may actually be something else. It may be the symptom of a system that has forgotten how to come down. A body that stays wired for action even when there’s nothing to fight or chase.

A vigilant nervous system cannot sustain focus. It was never designed to. It is built to track, to scan for danger, to shift from one point of attention to the next in search of what might go wrong. The same mechanism that once kept our ancestors alive now keeps us locked in a state of activation.

This is why so many people feel both overstimulated and unfocused at once. Our attention isn’t absent; it’s trapped. We live in a state of hyper-focus, the kind that narrows and jumps but never settles. It feels like concentration, but it’s closer to vigilance. The mind and the gaze are both confined to the near field, pulled toward the next signal, the next stimulus, the next demand.

The philosopher of attention James Williams describes three kinds of attention: the spotlight, the starlight, and the daylight.

The spotlight is narrow and precise. It is the kind of attention we use to perform a task or respond to something immediate.

The starlight is slower. It’s the kind that orients us toward what matters, the goals and values that give our life meaning.

Daylight is awareness itself, the clarity that allows us to step back and see where our attention is being drawn.

Modern life trains us to live almost entirely in the spotlight. Every ping, headline, and notification pulls us toward what is immediate. We mistake this for being distracted, but it’s really a kind of hyper-focus.

The longer we stay here, the more we lose access to the other lights that help us navigate. Without starlight, there is no sense of direction, only motion. Without daylight, there is no reflection, only reaction.

When our eyes stay fixed on what’s near, our thoughts begin to follow the same pattern. We start to think in fragments. We see what’s in front of us but lose the thread that connects it to the whole. Meaning depends on that thread. Without it, life becomes a series of isolated moments that never quite add up.

To recover that thread, we don’t need to force more focus. We need to widen our view. To let the gaze soften and, with it, the mind. When the body feels safe, attention naturally expands. It begins to move again, to alternate between precision and perspective. And in that movement, coherence starts to return.

Vigilance is the Culture

Neuroscience now affirms what contemplative traditions have long understood: the body’s internal state determines the mind’s capacity for awareness. When the nervous system feels safe, the body relaxes. Breathing deepens, muscles release, and vision naturally widens.

In that state, we can see how one thing connects to another, how context gives meaning to what stands in front of us. When we feel safe, the mind can hold complexity. It can live in uncertainty without collapsing into anxiety or judgment.

When that safety fades, the opposite happens. The body tightens, the pupils narrow, and attention contracts around whatever feels most immediate. The brain starts filtering for what’s urgent or potentially threatening, and in doing so, it stops noticing the background.

Stephen Porges calls this process neuroception, the body’s quiet, unconscious scanning of the world for signs of safety or danger. It happens before thought, but it shapes what thought becomes possible. When the body is on alert, we can’t think widely. Our ideas begin to mirror our gaze: narrow, repetitive, and defensive.

A culture that lives in that state of subtle vigilance not only moves quickly; it begins to think differently. It grows reactive. It values activity over understanding. It measures life by how much is produced rather than by what is felt or understood. Conversations shrink, not because there’s less to say, but because the tempo of life allows less room to listen.

The economic historian Harold Innis once wrote that civilizations rise or fall according to how they balance time and space. This is the balancing act of preserving memory and reaching outward toward progress. Some societies are shaped by time, keeping meaning alive through continuity and tradition. Others are shaped by space, by the expansion of communication, and the speed of connection.

In our time, expansion has overtaken endurance. We have reach, but little retention. The present moment dominates, refreshed endlessly but rarely absorbed.

When a culture loses its sense of duration, life begins to feel like a chase. Each new thing replaces the one before it. The past feels irrelevant, and the future feels perpetually behind schedule. What remains is an endless present, filled with motion but thin in meaning.

Derek Thompson recently described this shift in his essay Everything Is Television. He argues that every medium, from the printed page to social media to AI image generators, is slowly being pulled toward a single attractor: the flow of continuous video. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s term from 1974, Thompson explains that television transformed culture by replacing discrete, bounded works with a constant stream of imagery. Today’s platforms perfect that logic. On Instagram or TikTok, no single video matters. It’s the flow itself that holds our attention.

The result is that meaning is no longer expected to cohere. Each fragment of content can be watched, half-watched, or ignored, because coherence isn’t the point. What matters is motion, the feeling of being carried by an unending stream. Thompson calls this “casual viewing,” but it extends far beyond television. It is the perceptual rhythm of a civilization that has lost the thread of continuity, that no longer expects experience to add up to anything larger than itself.

When perception fragments in this way, coherence becomes optional. We stop expecting things to make sense because our nervous systems are trained to move on before sense can form. The pace of media has become a mirror of our own physiology: restless, vigilant, unable to pause.

A culture that cannot hold time will always feel like it is running out of it. And when we live in that constant acceleration, imagination contracts. We lose the capacity to sense continuity between past and future, self and other, human and environment. The spaces between things, the ones that give relationships their texture, begin to disappear.

To see the world whole again, we need to restore the inner conditions that allow the body, and therefore the mind, to widen its view. When the gaze softens, perception follows. And when perception expands, coherence returns. The fragments don’t need to vanish; they simply need to find their place within the larger pattern of life.

How Connection Breaks Down

The psychiatrist Bruce Perry discovered a pattern in how people recover from stress and trauma that has stayed with me. In his work with traumatized children, he noticed that healing follows a particular sequence: first, we regulate, then we relate, and only then can we reason. These three phases are not steps to rush through, but a rhythm to follow.

Regulation comes first because safety is what makes connection possible. When the body settles, the mind can open. Only then can we relate—to listen, to attune, to feel another person’s presence. From there, reasoning becomes possible, the kind of thinking that doesn’t rush to conclusion but grows out of shared understanding.

In my work with teams, I see imbalance between these three stages all the time. When communication breaks down, it’s rarely due to lack of intelligence or intent. More often, it’s because someone is trying to be heard before the other person has the capacity to listen. One person comes in ready to communicate something important, but the person on the receiving end is already overwhelmed or emotionally flooded. They’re not connected, and the message can’t land. The words might be clear, but the meaning is lost in the disconnection.

I also see this principle in action through my work with an improv school here in Santa Fe that I’m part of. It’s remarkable to have a space where people can practice what it means to truly relate to one another. Before any practice or show, the group begins by tuning into each other through games that involve watching and responding. These exercises aren’t about performance. They’re about attunement and feeling the group as one organism rather than a collection of individuals.

Those who struggle with improv share a common pattern: they’re not listening. They’re caught in the effort to plan, to get it right, to make something happen. Their attention is fixed on their next move rather than what’s unfolding in front of them. They’re focused on serving themselves rather than discovering what best serves the collective moment. But as they begin to let go and trust, something shifts. They stop forcing and start responding. The scenes flow, and the comedy that follows isn’t about cleverness; it’s about surprise.

To an outside observer, improv might look like chaos, but there’s actually deep structure beneath it. Every scene begins with what’s called a base reality: the shared understanding of where we are, who we are, and what’s happening. From that foundation, the unusual and surprising can emerge. This same principle exists in every form of healthy relationship or collaboration. When there’s a base reality, we can move freely. When it’s missing, chaos takes its place.

This is something I see not only on stage but in everyday life. Last week a client scheduled a call with me while she was at a conference. We spoke during her lunch break. I know what those environments are like. The constant stimulation, the demand to network, the feeling of being “on” all day while trying to manage everything else. When she joined the call, I could hear the tension in her voice. Rather than diving straight into the work, we spent ten minutes on simple exercises to relax the eyes and slow the breath. Only then did we begin.

After the call, she sent me a screenshot from her Oura ring showing how her stress levels had dropped sharply during those few minutes. She moved from a state of vigilance to a state of engagement. Regulation isn’t about staying calm; it’s about restoring movement. It’s the ability to shift between states, to rise and fall without getting stuck.

This sequence: regulate, relate, reason, is the antidote to the fixation that defines so much of modern life. It reminds us that coherence begins in the body, not the mind. When our gaze is tight and our nervous systems are overstimulated, we lose the foundation for connection.

Many of the distances we feel from one another today aren’t just digital. They live in our bodies. Even face-to-face, we can sense how far away people feel. It’s true that algorithms and echo chambers have divided us, but the gap often begins closer to home.

Many of us use our phones as pacifiers, small devices we turn to for comfort or calm. But they rarely calm us. The same tools that promise regulation often keep our systems subtly activated. The eyes stay fixed, the breath stays shallow, and the body remains half-ready. We scroll to relax, but the act itself keeps us from settling.

Practicing a Wider View

Everything you’ve read so far leads back here, to the body.
Our eyes, breath, and attention are not abstract ideas. They are the way we meet the world. When we reconnect with them, even for a few minutes, something softens. The noise quiets. The world becomes whole again.

If you’d like to experience this directly, I’ve recorded a short guided meditation. It’s an eight-minute practice to release tension in the eyes and reset the body. You can do it anywhere: between meetings, at your desk, or before bed.

The meditation begins by grounding through contact, bringing awareness to the hands, feet, and breath. Then it guides you through gentle exercises that help release tension around the eyes and allow them to move freely again. These movements signal to the body that it can rest, that the vigilance can ease.

You can listen to it whenever you need a pause, when your focus begins to tighten, or when you notice fatigue setting in. It’s a simple way to widen your view again.

→ Listen to the 8-minute meditation here.

Before then, no human had ever traveled faster than a horse could run. Now, with the steam engine, people were moving six times that speed. Journeys that once took weeks were compressed into days. Space seemed to shrink, and with it, the familiar rhythm of life.

Trains were astonishing to behold — loud, fast, unpredictable, and alive with danger. When accidents happened, they were unlike anything people had known. The shock wasn’t limited to those inside the carriages. Witnesses, bystanders, even readers of newspaper accounts reported sleeplessness, trembling, confusion, and a strange inability to recover.

Medicine had no language for what it was seeing.

In 1866, the British surgeon John Eric Erichsen gave it a name: railway spine. He believed that the violent jolts of early train travel caused microscopic injuries to the spinal cord. Creating invisible fractures that disrupted the body’s internal communication.

But soon, other doctors noticed a problem with this theory. Many of the afflicted had never been in a crash at all. Some had only witnessed one. Others had merely read about it in the newspaper and still developed the same symptoms. Their suffering seemed real, but its cause was nowhere to be found.

This unsettled the medical world. Was the injury physical? Emotional? Or was it, as the railway companies claimed, pure fraud?

A young surgeon named Herbert William Page challenged the orthodoxy. Working as a railway doctor in London, he began to notice patterns in his patients, their fears, startle responses, and restless minds. In 1883, he published Injuries of the Spine and Spinal Cord Without Apparent Mechanical Lesion, arguing that the damage wasn’t in the bone or tissue but in the nervous system itself. What they were experiencing, he wrote, was nervous shock — the lingering imprint of terror on the body.

It was a radical idea for its time. Page suggested that fear alone could wound the body as deeply as any physical blow. His work reframed “railway spine” as a psychological injury, not a structural one, and opened the door to a new understanding of trauma.

From this debate emerged the first recognition of psychosomatic illness — the idea that mind and body were not separate but continuously shaping one another.
It was the beginning of modern trauma medicine.

Not long after, in New York, neurologist George Miller Beard identified a related condition among a different kind of patient: the clerks, teachers, and professionals who made up the new class of “brain workers.”
Their symptoms were quieter but no less pervasive — fatigue, heart palpitations, irritability, insomnia, and a strange depletion that no rest could restore.

Beard called it neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, and he traced its source not to an accident, but to civilization itself.
The telegraph, the railway, the daily newspaper, all of it, he said, was overstimulating the nerves. The modern world was burning through the body’s energy reserves faster than they could be replenished.

Those early diagnoses of railway spine and neurasthenia may sound quaint now, like relics of Victorian medicine. But they marked something profound: the first time the human body began to rebel against the speed of its own progress.

A century later, the machinery has changed, but the symptoms haven’t.
What the Victorians called nervous exhaustion, we call burnout.
What they called mental fatigue, we call brain fog.
What they called agitation of the nerves, we call anxiety.

The words evolve, but the story remains the same — the nervous system overwhelmed by an environment it didn’t evolve to handle.

Each generation inherits its own version of this tension: the body trying to live inside a rhythm it was never built for.
And when it can’t keep up, it speaks.

Sometimes as fatigue.
Sometimes as pain.
Sometimes as the quiet refusal that says, I’m not built for this speed.

You usually don’t realize you’ve gone too far until your body says so.

Where the Signals Begin

The body speaks plainly.

For me, it speaks loudest in one place: the low back.

It weakens when I’ve taken on too much, when I’m carrying more than I should and pushing beyond exhaustion.

For years, I tried to fix it with massage, acupuncture, stretching. Each helped for a while, but the pain always returned. Now, when that deep ache surfaces once or twice a year, I know what it means. I don’t rush to fix it; I listen.

I see this in almost everyone I work with. The body always finds a way to speak.

For some, it’s the forearms — tight and charged, always ready to push through.

For others, it’s the space between the shoulder blades — a quiet ache from holding up too much for too long.

Each place tells a story about how the body protects us when the mind refuses to stop.

Most people already know these signals are there. They notice how the same pain or tension keeps returning, no matter how much they stretch, rest, or treat it.

But they don’t know what else to do. Because in the world they inhabit, slowing down looks like weakness. And weakness feels dangerous to those who’ve built their identity on strength, reliability, and drive.

The Moment of Turning Away

What do you do when your body starts sending signals you don’t want to hear?

When the tightness in your chest feels too big, too inconvenient, too much for a Tuesday afternoon?

You turn away. We all do.

You find something to take the edge off. A small relief.
You go back to work, you scroll, you plan, you eat, you pour a drink.
Not because you’re weak or undisciplined, but because what you’re feeling inside often feels harder to face than anything waiting outside.

For years, food was my way out. Pastries during the day, cereal at night — often an entire box after dinner.
Something about both pushed down whatever I didn’t want to feel.
I never felt good after, and always promised to stop, but I didn’t.

It took me a long time to understand that this wasn’t a failure of willpower.
It was a survival reflex — the body’s attempt to find safety when safety felt out of reach.

The relief never lasted. It softened the discomfort but never resolved the cause.
Soon after, a low-grade agitation would return — not guilt or shame, but the quiet ache of having cheated myself.
That’s when the mind would rush in with promises: Tomorrow I’ll do better.
It felt like control, but it was just another way of managing what I hadn’t yet learned to meet.

What I eventually came to see is that the problem isn’t moral — it’s emotional.
We try to fix our behavior when what’s really calling for attention is the state underneath: the restlessness, the loneliness, the strain of being out of alignment with ourselves.

The scrolling, the eating, the overworking — these aren’t failures of character.
They’re the body’s way of managing tension when it doesn’t yet feel safe or connected.

Listening for the Signal

Over time, my work has become less about changing behavior and more about understanding what it’s pointing to beneath the surface.

I began to notice how often people were trying to fix their behavior rather than understand it. They didn’t lack discipline or intelligence. They were simply repeating what we’ve all been taught, that the way to change is to try harder, to push through, to stay in control.

But control can only take you so far. At a certain point, the body steps in.

One client, Tim, embodied this perfectly.

He was the kind of man who built his success on discipline. Sixteen-hour days, a devoted father and husband, always the one others could lean on. Clients, colleagues, family, he carried them all. It wasn’t pressure to him; it was purpose. It was who he believed he was meant to be.

By the time we met, the signals were impossible to ignore: his forearms locked tight, his sleep was erratic, his mind scattered. He had already spent thousands of dollars on physical therapy and deep-tissue massages, trying to loosen the tension in his arms and shoulders.

When he came to me, he said he needed help concentrating. He wanted to feel sharp again, like he used to.

I told him we could get there, but not by training focus. Focus isn’t something you build on top of exhaustion. It’s something that emerges when the nervous system feels safe enough to rest.

For Tim, that safety didn’t exist. There was no internal boundary — no off switch. He had absorbed the belief that being good meant doing everything, that if he just kept pushing, everything would hold together.

So I asked him not to fight the tension in his arms, but to study it. To treat it as information rather than interference.

• When did it appear?

• What was happening in those moments?

• What was he feeling?

After two weeks, the pattern began to reveal itself. The tightness always came when someone crossed a line — when a client dismissed his time, when a team member ignored his effort, when he gave care that wasn’t reciprocated. He rarely said anything in response. He just took it on, storing the frustration in his body.

He also noticed it appeared when he said yes to things he didn’t believe in, when he ignored the quiet sense that said, this isn’t worth it.

There was a part of him that knew when to stop. But he had trained himself to override it. Listening felt like weakness. Saying no felt like failure.

He lived by a story: nobody’s coming to save you. It had truth in it, but it also came with a cost. Every time his body tried to speak up, that story in his mind silenced it. His discipline became defiance. The same force that made him successful also made him deaf to his own limits.

His body had become the only part of him still telling the truth.

Pain as Intelligence

This is what I mean when I say the body is a boundary. It speaks in sensation long before the mind can translate meaning.

In my work, I’ve noticed certain areas of the body reveal how those boundaries are tested.

The arms and jaw tighten when we hold back what we want to say.

The low back and hips grow heavy when we carry too much of other people’s needs.

The hips, in particular, often tell their own story. The right side tends to belong to the busy body, the one who can’t stop, who believes their worth is measured by action.

The left side often carries something different, a quiet helplessness, the feeling of being stuck or victimized by life’s demands.

And the space between the shoulder blades bears the fatigue of keeping everything upright, the effort of appearing fine when what we most need is rest.

The goal isn’t to make it disappear. It’s to understand what it’s trying to say.

Rebuilding Trust

When we ignore these signals long enough, something else begins to erode: trust.

Each time we override what we feel, we send ourselves a message: you can’t be trusted.

Over time, that message becomes the baseline. We start to doubt what we know, question what we feel, and forget that truth was ever something we could sense from within.

Real trust doesn’t begin in the mind; it begins in the body.

It’s the quiet confidence that comes from being able to stay with yourself, even when what you feel is uncomfortable.

Without that foundation, confidence and discipline are brittle. They depend on the world staying under control.

When we begin to listen again, something reorders itself. The noise quiets. What we feel and what we know start moving in the same direction.

And that’s when lasting change, the kind that isn’t forced, begins to take root.

The Work Beneath the Success

When we lose trust in ourselves, we reach outward for safety. What begins as a coping mechanism can, over time, become a way of life.

Many of the people I work with have built remarkable success from that instinct. Achievement becomes a strategy for stability. Control feels like safety.

If you grew up in chaos or uncertainty, that makes sense. You learn to build order outside yourself because the inside feels unpredictable. But the same skill that creates structure can also prevent you from meeting what’s still unsettled within.

No matter how much you build and create, the internal work awaits. The body keeps sending its signals — reminders that safety doesn’t come from external control, but from internal connection.

We spend much of our lives managing what’s outside — the people, the plans, the outcomes — believing that if we can get those right, we’ll finally feel at ease. But without inner stability, control becomes a moving target. The moment something shifts, we lose our footing.

Turning inward changes that. It’s how we learn to stay steady when life moves quickly. The body becomes a reference point, a way to orient in the middle of chaos. Even when things fall apart, we can return to what matters.

A Simple Practice

You can try this wherever you are — in a crowd or on your own.

Find a place in your body that feels heavy or dense. Bring your attention there for a few breaths. Try to locate the center of it. Notice what it feels like. Does it have a color or a temperature?

Then, find a place that feels light — airy, open, or spacious. Bring your attention to that space. What does it feel like? What’s the color of it?

Move between the two at your own pace — spending time in each space.

Notice what happens as you do.

Not what you think about, but what you actually feel.

That noticing is the beginning.

In the military, every new recruit goes through land navigation training. Armed with a map, a compass, and little else, they’re sent out to make their way across a difficult course.

The course is designed to disorient. It’s often done at night, with no obvious landmarks. No church steeples or graveyards to orient by. Soldiers have to rely on an observant eye, noticing subtle details: an isolated bush, a twisted tree, a large boulder. These become their personal guideposts. The markers they use to confirm they’re still on course.

Failure comes from missing those details, from scanning the horizon for grand landmarks that never appear.

Getting lost is part of the training. The real test isn’t in staying perfectly on course, but in the ability to reorient; to stop, study the map, and find your position again. Skilled navigators are those who keep checking, adjusting, and confirming their direction as they move.

Land navigation remains a vital skill even in our high-tech world. A soldier who can find their way with only a map and compass will never be stranded when technology fails.

And just as soldiers must reorient themselves to the map, we too have to pause and check in with our own internal sense of direction. Without that pause, it’s easy to walk confidently in the wrong direction.

In this piece, I want to explore what I mean by an inner compass — and how you can begin to access it.

Western culture has long operated under a perceived duality — the separation of mind and body, often called the “Cartesian split.”

We’ve come to treat thinking as something that happens in isolation, above the neck. Logic, reason, and intelligence are imagined as mental functions detached from the rest of the body, as if the mind were a kind of executive control room, issuing orders to the flesh below.

You can see this split everywhere. You go to a doctor for pain in your chest, but to a therapist for the pain in your heart. In schools, learning happens while seated and still, with movement confined to PE. Over time, that conditioning wires itself into us. We start to feel unproductive unless we’re sitting in front of a screen, our minds busy while our bodies go quiet.

This habit of dividing the mental from the physical has shaped how we understand intelligence itself. It’s led us to believe that reason operates independently. That logic alone drives decision-making.

But in the early 1990s, research began to show just how incomplete that picture was.

At the University of Iowa, a team of neurologists were quietly building something remarkable — a long-term patient registry that tracked individuals with specific brain injuries caused by strokes, tumors, or trauma. Unlike most short-term studies, this one followed patients for years, sometimes decades, mapping how different lesions affected emotion, memory, and behavior.

Through this work, Antonio Damasio made one of the most important discoveries in modern psychology. He focused on a small but vital region of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC.

This area acts as the brain’s internal evaluator, linking sensations in the body to past experience which guide present choices. Each feeling carries the memory of what came before. The vmPFC draws on those memories to assign value, helping us sense what feels right or wrong, safe or uncertain, before we can explain why.

Damasio found that these patients still had their intelligence. Their memory and language were intact. They could reason clearly, weigh pros and cons, and argue their point of view. Yet their lives often fell apart. They made reckless financial decisions, sabotaged relationships, or became paralyzed by even the simplest choices.

Nothing seemed wrong with their logic, and yet, something essential was missing.

Damasio began to see that these individuals had lost contact with the physical signals that arise from the body. The subtle sensations of unease, curiosity, or excitement. The quiet tug of “this feels right” or “something’s off” were gone. Every decision became a purely mental exercise, detached from feeling.

He called the missing link somatic markers — the body’s way of storing emotional traces from past experience. These visceral cues act as shortcuts, narrowing down the overwhelming number of possible choices. They don’t replace logic; they inform it.

Damasio argued that logic never works alone. The body is always speaking through shifts in heart rate, muscle tone, hormones, and breath. The brain listens and responds. Together, they form an inner landscape, a subtle map that tags each option as good, bad, risky, or rewarding.

When we lose access to that input, reason itself drifts. It becomes unanchored. All calculation, no compass.

Damasio’s research revealed that emotion isn’t the enemy of reason, as we’ve long assumed. It’s the foundation of it.

Our capacity for logic, judgment, and rationality doesn’t emerge in isolation. It grows out of an ongoing conversation between the brain’s higher functions and the body’s felt experience. When that dialogue breaks down, we lose something far more subtle than intelligence. We lose the feedback loop that keeps us attuned to reality itself.

More than a decade after Antonio Damasio introduced his somatic marker hypothesis, John Coates began exploring how the body itself shapes decision-making in the heat of financial markets.

Then a trader for Goldman Sachs and later for Deutsche Bank, Coates lived inside the emotional highs and lows of the market. During his time as a bond trader, a friend of his was completing a PhD in neuroscience at Rockefeller University, and Coates began spending time there. When markets slowed, he’d grab a cab uptown to sit in on lectures or watch experiments unfold — drawn by the uncanny parallels he saw between what was happening in the lab and what he witnessed on the trading floor.

What struck him was how directly the science mapped onto finance. Traders’ bodies reacted instantly to volatility; heart rates spiked, cortisol levels rose, stomachs tightened, often before they consciously knew why.

The markets would twitch, and their physiology would answer. A trader might feel unease as prices soared, even while his reasoning insisted everything looked fine. Another might feel calm just as the market began to turn, without yet knowing why.

These moments revealed something profound: the body was not passively recording the mind’s decisions, it was leading them. It was registering shifts in risk and uncertainty before thought arrived, moving faster than conscious awareness could catch. What traders called “gut instinct” wasn’t a mystical hunch or a quirk of intuition; it was their physiology processing information beneath the surface, drawing on years of embodied experience.

Coates began to see these signals differently. They weren’t noise. They were data. The body’s own predictive model, shaped by repetition and stored as physiological memory. The heart, the gut, and the hormones were running simulations long before the mind began its analysis.

In this sense, he was watching Damasio’s theory play out in real time: the body encoding traces of past outcomes and reactivating them to guide the present. Traders who learned to listen to those signals tended to act with precision. Those who ignored or misread them often moved too soon or too late.

Coates’s work quietly extended a conversation that had exploded into public awareness the year before. In 2011, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow gave us the language of two systems: the fast, intuitive one and the slow, deliberate one. The book became a cultural touchstone, named by The New York Times as one of the ten best of the year.

Kahneman urged caution. He showed that intuition, while often helpful, can be riddled with bias and illusion. His advice was to “keep intuition on ice”. Slow down, engage reason, and test the first impulse before trusting it.

Coates’s book came out a year later, but it carried a different kind of insight, one that didn’t fit the frame of cognitive psychology. Kahneman had shown that we make decisions automatically; Coates showed that this automaticity isn’t just cognitive, it’s physiological. The “fast” system Kahneman described lives in the body, in the racing heart, the tightening gut, the sudden calm that settles in before a decision. These physical signals register truth or danger long before the mind has time to weigh the evidence.

Both perspectives are true. Intuition can mislead us when it’s hijacked by fear or bias, but it can also guide us with remarkable clarity when it’s informed by deep experience. In a future piece, I’ll explore this paradox. Why we sometimes react irrationally in one moment and see with startling precision in another, and how that difference traces back to the emotional landscape we each carry within us.

Coates’ work didn’t make the same cultural impact, but I think that’s because it was ahead of its time. In many ways, it still is.

Over the next five years, I suspect it will become common knowledge. Coates was describing, long before it was fashionable, that our best decisions aren’t just made by the brain. They’re felt by the whole organism.

I became very curious about all of this because I grew disenchanted with the virtues of productivity.

For years, I taught people how to be less distracted, more focused, and more structured. The goal was to help them get more done in less time — to master their attention so they could master their work.

That work began in 2019, when I was running speed-reading and memorization workshops. I’d go into high schools, MBA programs, and corporate teams, teaching people how to retain more information, read faster, and manage their cognitive load.

Everywhere I went, I saw the same pattern: fractured minds. People were driven and ambitious, but they were also blocked. They wanted to move forward but couldn’t seem to find their rhythm. One guy summed it up perfectly when he told me, “I have all the intention, but no attention.”

At first, I believed the solution was structural, that if we could train focus and build better habits, people would feel freer. And for a while, that seemed true. The programs worked. People became more organized, more efficient, more productive.

But over time, I began to question what I was complicit in. Was I really helping people grow, or just making them better taskmasters? Life seemed to be reduced to something to be optimized. A game of owning your to-do list, rather than understanding why those tasks mattered in the first place.

I had imagined that getting more done in less time would create space for internal growth. That once the clutter cleared, people would naturally give more time to what was meaningful to them. But that rarely happened.

Instead, the free time was quickly filled with more work, more obligations, more noise. The machine simply accelerated.

By 2023, I began to notice something deeper: people weren’t just busy — they were disoriented. Fewer and fewer felt they had any real control over their time or attention.

What I was seeing in individuals was a reflection of something much larger. A world that keeps us endlessly responding to external signals, constantly checking, refreshing, reacting. It made me think about how early this conditioning begins.

Do you remember the Tamagotchi?

It was an egg-shaped device with a tiny pixelated screen, like playing Snake on a Nokia 6110, for those who remember. By 1997, it had become a global frenzy. Millions were sold across the US and Europe.

Inside the device lived a virtual pet that would hatch, grow, and eventually die, usually within two weeks. It was designed as a toy to teach children about nurturing and responsibility.

The game was simple: keep your pet alive for as long as possible. There was no pause button. When it needed to be fed, cleaned, or played with, it beeped. A reminder that you were responsible. If you ignored it, it could die.

Kids became deeply attached to their black-and-white pixelated pets, and distraught when they died. Classrooms were filled with the sound of beeping devices as children compulsively checked their Tamagotchis, desperate to keep them alive. By the end of 1997, many schools around the world had banned them for being too disruptive.

How did kids become so emotionally attached to something so primitive?

It wasn’t the graphics.
It was the design.

The engineers who created the Tamagotchi followed a process that would later be known as the Hooked Model, coined by behavioral designer Nir Eyal.

A quick point of irony: in 2013, Eyal published Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Six years later, he released Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
Make of that what you will.

The Hooked Model unfolds in four steps:

1. Trigger. An external cue draws you in; a sound, vibration, or notification that prompts action.
On the Tamagotchi, it was the high-pitched beep and flashing screen.

2. Action. The behavior that follows must be simple and satisfying.
On the Tamagotchi, it was pressing a button to feed, clean, or play with your pet.

3. Variable reward. Unpredictable outcomes create anticipation and drive engagement.
Sometimes your pet thrived; other times it got sick or died despite your care. The uncertainty kept you checking, wondering what state it might be in next.

4. Investment. Each small action creates emotional and time investment, making it harder to step away.
You named your pet. You nurtured it. You talked about it with friends.

When these four steps repeat enough times, something shifts; you no longer need the external trigger. The pull now comes from within.
Boredom, anxiety, or curiosity prompt you to check before the beep.

That’s when the loop closes.
You’re hooked.

This design framework now underpins nearly every digital product that measures success by engagement. It’s not just your social media feeds or streaming apps — it’s your inbox, your productivity tools, even your fitness trackers.

The most damaging part of this design isn’t just distraction. It’s the erosion of choice.
We think we’re the users, when in fact, we’re the product.
What’s being consumed isn’t the app. It’s us. Our time, our attention, our nervous systems are the scarce, valuable resources.

This is accomplished, not through force, but by quietly rerouting our instincts. Teaching our bodies to respond to external signals instead of our own. Reshaping what we feel and slowly rewriting the body’s guidance system from the inside out.

Abraham Maslow spent his career exploring self-actualization — what it means for someone to become who they are capable of being. He found that what separates a self-actualized person from those simply meeting their basic needs is that they know what they want. Just as importantly, they also know what they don’t — and they live their life in accordance with both.

He once wrote:

Recovering the self must include the recovery of the ability to have and to cognize these inner signals, to know what and whom one likes and dislikes, what is enjoyable and what is not, when to eat and when not to, when to sleep, when to urinate, when to rest. The experientially empty person, lacking these directives from within…must turn to outer cues for guidance…he guides himself by clocks, rules, calendars, schedules, agenda, and by hints and cues from other people.

This quote is from The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971). It was a very different world, but even then, he was observing how external conditioning is what overshadows our inner compass.

When we lose connection to ourselves, we lose the ability to feel what’s true. We start reaching outward for orientation — looking for figures to tell us how to think, what to value, where to go. In the absence of inner guidance, we follow whatever direction is most confidently broadcast by others.

I feel fortunate to have been off social media, barring LinkedIn, for the past seven years. Because I’m not on it, I’ve become more aware of how easily we absorb and repeat the ideas around us. It’s striking how often I hear people speak with conviction about something they’ve read or heard online, and how quickly that conviction fades when you ask a few simple questions.

It’s not that people aren’t intelligent; it’s that they’re not metabolizing what they take in. They’re not slowly making sense of the world in their own way. They’re immersed. Feeling everything all at once. Passing that emotional charge onto whoever they’re with.

The internet is full of speculation about the possibilities of artificial intelligence: curing cancer, transforming education, and driving massive gains in productivity. These are real and exciting possibilities. But amid all of it, I feel more certain than ever that the most advanced “device” we have access to is the one we already inhabit: the body.

Most of our suffering comes from forgetting this simple fact — that the truest guidance doesn’t arrive from the outside. It’s carried within, in the quiet language of sensation and intuition.

The inner compass never disappears. It just waits for us to turn back toward it.

I was on a call today when someone asked me, "What does the science say about how many times we should check email each day?"

It's a reasonable question. The answer, according to research, is quite clear: about three times daily. Responding to emails at specific times of the day significantly reduces stress and improves well-being. Professor Gloria Mark's research at UC Irvine found that when people are cut off from email, they experience less stress, focus better, and have more natural heart rates.

All very rational. All very sensible.

Yet here we are, checking our inboxes 50, 60, 70 times a day.

This gap between what we know we should do and what we actually do is where I find myself most curious.

Why do we continue behaviors that we know are harmful to us?

Beyond Rational Science

For decades, economics was built on the concept of homo economicus – the rational economic man who makes logical decisions to maximize utility. We've since discovered, through pioneers like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, that humans are far more irrational than rational. Our decisions are colored by cognitive biases, emotional states, and situational contexts.

The same principle applies to our relationship with email. The science tells us to check it three times a day, but science doesn't account for the emotional architecture we've built around these digital tools.

The Architecture of Dependence

Our relationship with email follows the exact pattern described in Nir Eyal's "Hooked" model:

1. Trigger: external (a notification ping), eventually internal (a feeling)

2. Action: Opening the app or browser tab

3. Variable Reward: Sometimes important messages, sometimes nothing

4. Investment: Responding, organizing, or simply absorbing the information

The genius – or perhaps the tragedy – of this loop is how it eventually eliminates the need for external triggers. We move from needing a notification to reaching for our inbox whenever we feel a certain way.

Bored? Check email. Anxious? Check email. Frustrated with a difficult task? Check email. Uncertain about what to do next? Check email.

The loop becomes self-sustaining. Our emotional states become the triggers.

The Emotional Tether

Two weeks ago, I had a very short window between finishing a keynote and getting to the airport to catch a flight. Caught in Fort Lauderdale traffic, I found myself cycling between different apps on my phone—checking news headlines, sports, email, WhatsApp—again and again, until I caught sight of what I was doing and put the phone away.

I felt stressed that I would miss the flight and I was using this constant shifting of my attention to distract myself from what I felt inside. But I had to put the phone away and be with it, accept it. Once I did that, it didn't feel so bad. If I missed the flight, I missed it. I'd get another one. My perspective started to zoom out, and as I saw the bigger picture, I became more calm.

The reality is that we don't check email 50 times a day because we're expecting 50 important messages. We check it because the act of checking itself has become a coping mechanism—a way to momentarily relieve the discomfort of our inner experience.

And herein lies the nature of our codependency: we use email (and Slack, and Teams, Instagram, X etc.) not as tools but as emotional regulators.

A Split-Second Reaction

The most insidious aspect of this relationship is how instantaneous it becomes. It begins not with an emotion, but with a bodily sensation—a subtle tightness in the chest, perhaps, or a flutter in the stomach, a slight increase in heart rate. And within a split second—before we've even interpreted this sensation—we're reaching for the inbox.

Lisa Feldman Barrett's groundbreaking work on emotions helps explain this process. Her research shows that emotions aren't hardwired reactions but constructed experiences. What happens first are physical sensations—the raw data of our internal experience. Our brain then makes meaning of these sensations based on past experience and context.

What's fascinating is that our digital behaviors often short-circuit this meaning-making process. We react to the raw sensation before we've even constructed an emotion around it. The body senses discomfort, and the hand reaches for the phone—bypassing conscious awareness entirely.

This happens below the threshold of awareness. It's not a decision we make; it's a response we have.

And in that split-second reaction, we sacrifice our ability to create space, to focus on what matters, to be present with ourselves. We fragment our attention into smaller and smaller pieces until we can no longer see the whole.

The Illusion of Control

When we talk about our relationship with digital tools like email, we often frame it as a matter of willpower and discipline. Just check it three times a day. Just turn off notifications. Just be more mindful.

But this approach often fails us, doesn't it? We make these resolutions in moments of clarity, only to find ourselves back in the same patterns hours later.

Perhaps this is because we've misidentified the nature of control in this relationship. Control doesn't come through willpower as much as it comes through awareness.

Work and the Screen

Part of what keeps us tethered to our inboxes is a deeper association we've formed: the belief that work happens when we're on screen. To step away feels like idleness, like wasting time.

This association creates a self-reinforcing cycle. We stay at our screens because that's where "work" happens, but in doing so, we deprive ourselves of the very breaks that would allow us to self-regulate and ultimately work more effectively.

Coming Back to Ourselves

What does it mean to self-regulate? At its core, it means reconnecting with ourselves.

When we're constantly engaged with our screens, we're extending our consciousness outward – into the environments of others, into digital spaces, into the countless perspectives and demands coming through our devices. We're everywhere except where we actually are.

The longer we stay in this extended state, the more difficult it becomes to create inner stability or a sense of consistency within ourselves. We become like water taking the shape of whatever digital container we pour ourselves into.

And so we outsource our emotional regulation to these tools – a quick hit of dopamine from a new message, the brief relief of distraction, the illusion of productivity from clearing an inbox. But these external forms of regulation ultimately leave us unfulfilled, because they can't address what we're really seeking: a stable sense of self in an increasingly fragmented world.

Beyond Judgment

I'm not suggesting we need to judge ourselves for checking email 50 times a day, or for scrolling Instagram when we meant to finish that presentation or respond to that important client. Judgment only adds another layer of discomfort to escape from.

Instead, I'm inviting curiosity. What's driving this behavior? What am I seeking when I reach for my phone first thing in the morning? What feeling arises right before I tab over to my inbox for the third time in ten minutes?

The driver might be different for each of us. For some, it's anxiety about missing something important. For others, it's the discomfort of focusing on challenging work. For others still, it's a deeper sense of disconnection or inadequacy that we're trying to soothe through constant engagement.

Whatever it is, awareness of that driver gives us something that willpower alone cannot: the possibility of choice.

Without awareness, we remain caught in the cycle – making resolutions, breaking them, judging ourselves, and trying again with renewed determination but no new understanding. With awareness, we can begin to see the patterns and, in seeing them, create the space for something different to emerge.

This isn't about fixing or optimizing ourselves. It's about coming home to ourselves in a world that constantly invites us elsewhere. It's about remembering that behind the screens and beneath the notifications, there is a self that exists independent of digital validation or distraction.

So perhaps the next time you notice that impulse to check your email, instead of either following it automatically or forcefully resisting it, you might simply pause and notice: "Here I am, feeling something that wants relief." And in that noticing, you might discover a freedom that no amount of digital discipline could ever provide.

They're transitioning from internal to external sales roles, I've been working with them over the past year. Today was our final call as a group. As we closed this journey, I wanted to understand something deeper – why they were in this role and what they truly wanted for themselves.

The words that emerged, over and over again, were "freedom" and "fullness."

The path they envisioned to attain these states? Financial security.

In addition to this group work, I individually coach a select few people. Every person I coach has crossed that threshold of creating financial security – they've established a solid foundation.

The irony doesn't escape me - nearly every one of them chased financial security as their path to freedom. Here’s a very rudimentary drawing I made on the call about this.

There's a common thread among many of the entrepreneurs and leaders I coach: backgrounds of poverty, impoverishment, limited opportunity.

They've experienced firsthand how being poor creates constant instability. Perpetual uncertainty. A pervasive feeling of restriction that narrows life's possibilities.

They set out to create the opposite reality through earning money and establishing security.

Then life played its clever trick.

As they climbed toward financial heights, they tied their sense of freedom to these external milestones. The outcome? They became trapped within the very structures they created to free themselves.

This single-minded pursuit of money – making it the primary source of meaning and the top priority above all else – can consume decades of one's life. Until eventually, you arrive at a disturbing realization: you don't know who you are anymore.

You've lost touch with what you truly want or don't want.

Then comes the pivotal moment of choice:

Do I address what has been unaddressed for so long?

Or do I continue on this path, burying these questions deeper and deeper?

The people I'm working with are choosing to address it. To create more alignment in their lives.

It was a beautiful moment this morning, speaking with these ambitious young salespeople, some just a few years into their careers, others with young families at home. To acknowledge that you can strive for both.

You can pursue financial independence by creating security in your life. This is genuinely important – I value it and see it as something worth pursuing.

But equally important is pursuing a sense of inner freedom.

This inner liberation comes through addressing the resistances you meet along life's journey. The things you fear. The tender and fragile aspects within yourself that you'd rather not face.

Instead of bypassing these elements, we actually turn toward them.

This is what the inner game is fundamentally about.

Most people pursue these elements separately. They spend their career focusing on the external – achievement, advancement, accumulation. Then, when they retire, they plan to give space to the internal journey.

From what I've witnessed, that's often too late.

It becomes increasingly difficult to develop those internal tools and skills once your career has concluded. The patterns are too deeply set. The identity too firmly established.

But when you bring these dimensions together – the external pursuit of security and the internal journey of growth – something powerful emerges.

It transforms into a space where freedom and fullness converge.

I've experienced this firsthand in my work as a speaker. There have been keynotes where I've walked off stage to applause and glowing feedback, yet internally felt terrible – empty, off, misaligned. The audience's experience was positive, but mine was painful.

The discomfort could last for hours or even days.

What was happening? It wasn't about my delivery or content. It was about my presence within myself – I had chosen against myself. I'd spoken in a way that wasn't true to me or showed up in a way that felt false. The audience couldn't see this disconnect, but I had to live with it afterward.

Then there are times when I've received less enthusiastic external feedback, yet felt deeply satisfied and aligned within myself.

And occasionally, there's that sweet spot – when I feel genuine and whole on stage, and the audience feels genuinely moved. These moments become markers for me, indicators of alignment between my inner and outer worlds.

What is this fullness?

It's the feeling that comes when all aspects of yourself are welcomed into your work. When your analytical mind, your emotional intelligence, your creativity, and yes – even your wounds and vulnerabilities – all have a place at the table.

Most of us feel depleted because we compartmentalize. We bring our strategic thinking to work but leave our intuition at home. We showcase our strengths but hide our struggles. We focus on results while neglecting relationships.

This selective expression leaves us feeling imbalanced and unfulfilled – successful in narrow domains but empty in others.

The sales call becomes more than a transaction when you bring your full humanity to it. The presentation becomes more than a pitch when it carries your authentic voice. The leadership role becomes more than a title when it embodies your values and vision.

True freedom isn't just financial independence. It's the liberation that comes from no longer fragmenting yourself – from allowing the fullness of who you are to find expression in what you do.

Most wait a lifetime to discover this integration, often too late.

And why would you ever want to retire from something that has become a canvas for your whole self?

This is the promise at the intersection of inner work and outer achievement: not just the security of having enough, but the aliveness that comes from being enough – and bringing all of that to everything you do.

This post comes from a keynote I will give today on how we have evolved to deal with uncertainty and why we need new ways to find our center.

The Problem with Waiting

Houston Airport had a problem.

Passengers were complaining about the wait time for baggage. They solved the problem with the obvious solution - hiring more baggage handlers to get the bags onto the carousel faster. The wait time was reduced to an average of eight minutes, which is well within industry standards. But the complaints continued.

It took passengers one minute to walk to the baggage claim and a seven-minute wait for their bags. Houston airport flipped the experience. They moved the arrival gate to be farther away so passengers would walk for 7 minutes and wait for one minute. After this, the complaints virtually disappeared.

This counterintuitive solution reveals something fundamental about human nature. The problem wasn't the waiting itself, it was the experience of not knowing how long they were going to wait for.

Something similar happened on London's Underground when they implemented a countdown system in 2001.

Simply displaying when the next train would arrive decreased passenger stress dramatically, even though the actual waiting times hadn't changed at all. What causes anxiety, it turns out, isn't the duration of a wait but the uncertainty within it.

Standing at a baggage carousel and watching an empty belt spin creates the same psychological tension as staring down an empty train tunnel, wondering if your train will arrive in one minute or ten.

This insight about uncertainty and information helped London transform their passenger experience, just as it helped Houston's airport solve its baggage claim problem.

When we're walking to claim our bags, even if the journey takes longer, we feel a sense of agency. We're not just waiting; we're progressing. We can see our movement, feel it in our steps, and measure it in the distance covered.

Similarly, when Underground passengers can see "Next train: 4 minutes," they can mentally prepare, and use the time to read or send a message. The uncertainty transforms into a defined space they can work with.

When Uncertainty Gets Personal

This pattern of how uncertainty shapes our behavior isn't abstract - it plays out in deeply personal ways. I remember working with a sales leader who discovered something about himself one sleepless morning.

His company sent out daily sales reports at 4 AM, and that particular morning, having woken up unusually early, he checked his phone and found disappointing numbers. The surge of adrenaline was immediate, driving him out of bed and straight to work, determined to correct course.

But what began as a random early morning check transformed into something more profound. Soon his body, without an alarm, would wake him at 4 AM every day, as if he had developed an internal clock synchronized to the arrival of those numbers.

The reports became more than data - they became the script for his day. Poor numbers meant an immediate start to work; good numbers granted permission for more rest. In this tiny window between 4 AM and dawn, you could see the whole story of his relationship with uncertainty playing out: the need to know, the physical response to information, the illusion of control that comes from immediate action.

Like the Underground passengers checking the countdown clock, or the airport travelers pacing toward baggage claim, he had developed a coping mechanism for uncertainty. But unlike walking to baggage claim, which has a clear endpoint, this pattern had no natural conclusion - it was a loop that repeated each morning, shaping not just his days but gradually transforming his relationship with both work and rest.

These aren't just random behaviors or individual quirks - they're manifestations of our fundamental relationship with uncertainty. Just as London Underground passengers felt more at ease simply knowing when their train would arrive, we seek out information, any information, to fill the uncomfortable void of not knowing. The challenge isn't that we seek information - it's that in today's world, the seeking itself can become compulsive, a reflexive response to the slightest hint of uncertainty.

Our Ancient Relationship with the Unknown

This response is deeply woven into our evolutionary story. As sociologist Edward O. Wilson observed, we have "Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies." To understand why we check our phones hundreds of times a day, we need to understand how our ancestors handled their own uncertainties.

They developed two competing systems: a threat-detection system that made them hyper-aware of potential dangers, and a learning system that rewarded them for exploring and understanding their environment.

But their most powerful technology for managing uncertainty wasn't either of these systems - it was storytelling. In communal gatherings, there were stories that explained everything from the changing of seasons to the movements of stars. These weren't just entertainment; they were a way to make sense of an unpredictable world.

Consider how many ancient cultures have flood myths, or stories about why the sun rises and sets. Whether or not these stories were factually accurate wasn't the point - they provided something more valuable: a framework for understanding, a way to place uncertainty within a larger pattern of meaning.

Modern Solutions, Ancient Problems

Today, we have unprecedented access to knowledge about our world - a development that should, in theory, reduce our uncertainty. We understand weather patterns our ancestors attributed to temperamental gods. We can track diseases they might have seen as curses. We can predict celestial events they wove elaborate myths around. Yet this explosion of information hasn't necessarily led to greater peace of mind.

Consider one of today's most popular podcasts, "Diary of a CEO," which draws millions of listeners per episode. Where our ancestors might have gathered to hear a single, coherent narrative about life's mysteries, modern listeners encounter a weekly rotation of experts offering isolated fragments of certainty. One episode features a toxicologist warning about everyday products affecting fertility, another presents a body language expert revealing the secret codes of human connection, while a third brings in a life coach sharing techniques for anxiety reduction. Each expert speaks with authority, each offers valuable insights, but together they create a blur of competing certainties.

This pattern repeats across our information landscape. We no longer have myths about spirits causing illness; instead, we have endless studies about what might make us sick, each adding new items to our mental checklist of things to fear. We've replaced stories about fate and destiny with countless frameworks for self-optimization, each promising to give us control over our future. The ancient tale of a hero's journey has been replaced by thousands of success stories, each suggesting a different path to follow.

This wealth of information provides knowledge but not necessarily wisdom. Our ancestors' stories, though simpler and often factually incorrect, provided something our modern information streams struggle to deliver: coherence. They offered a complete worldview, a way to understand how all the pieces fit together.

Our modern predicament isn't just about having too much information - it's about the loss of narrative coherence. We consume these fragments of expertise like snacks, temporarily satisfying our hunger for certainty but never quite providing the nourishment of a complete meal. It's why we can listen to hundreds of hours of expert advice and still feel uncertain about basic life decisions. It's why we can know more than ever about the world and still feel lost within it.

This helps explain our compulsive information-seeking behaviors. Just as our ancestors might have sought comfort in retelling familiar stories, we repeatedly check our devices, listen to more podcasts, read more articles, hoping that the next piece of information will finally help everything make sense. We're seeking not just knowledge but resolution - that satisfying sense of completion that comes at the end of a well-told story.

Yet life, as we know, rarely provides such neat resolutions. The challenge we face isn't to find the perfect story or the ultimate expert opinion, but to develop a different relationship with uncertainty itself. Perhaps what we need isn't more information about how to control our world, but better ways to live meaningfully within its inherent uncertainty.

When Systems Take Over

Here's the thing about uncertainty - it doesn't just mess with our heads as individuals. It shapes how entire companies and organizations behave, often in surprisingly similar ways. A fascinating book by Dan Davies called "The Unaccountability Machine" points out something I can't stop noticing now: organizations build what he calls "accountability sinks" - basically, systems that make it impossible to find anyone actually responsible for decisions.

You know that feeling when you're stuck in an automated phone menu, being bounced from option to option, never quite reaching a human who can actually help? That's an accountability sink in action. It's not a flaw in the system - it's exactly how it's meant to work. The system is designed to handle problems without anyone having to take personal responsibility for them.

Let's go back to our sales leader waking up at 4 AM to check his numbers. He's not alone in this behavior - entire organizations do a version of the same thing. They create more reports, gather more data, add more metrics. Not because they need more information to make decisions, but because gathering data feels like doing something. It's like corporate-level phone checking - it gives us the illusion of control without actually making things better.

What makes this really interesting is how these systems feed themselves. A company might start out with good intentions - "Let's create a new reporting system to make things more transparent!" But instead of making things clearer, they often end up building what Davies calls an "unaccountability machine" - a system so complicated that it becomes impossible to figure out who's actually making decisions. It's like trying to find out who's responsible for a mistake in a huge company and everyone keeps pointing to someone else.

Just as we comfort ourselves by checking our phones, organizations comfort themselves by creating systems that look like they're in control. The London Underground got it right with their countdown clocks, and Houston Airport nailed it by giving people a longer walk - they worked with how people actually behave. But most organizational systems do the opposite. They try to remove human judgment entirely, thinking this will create certainty. Instead, they just push the uncertainty into the shadows.

This explains something that's always puzzled me: why do we often feel less confident the more information we have? Whether it's someone binge-listening to expert advice on podcasts or a company drowning in market data, the problem isn't that we don't have enough information. The problem is our relationship with uncertainty itself. We've built these elaborate systems promising to eliminate uncertainty through data and standardization, but in doing so, we've actually made it harder to use good judgment and take real responsibility.

Finding Stability in a World of Change

We live in an extraordinary time. The technology we have access to would seem like magic to our ancestors. We can connect with anyone across the globe instantly. We can access the world's knowledge from a device in our pocket. We can watch events unfold in real-time from anywhere on the planet.

But every evolutionary leap in our external environment demands an internal adaptation. As our world grows more complex and interconnected, we need new ways to maintain our stability within it.

The ancient Greeks built labyrinths - not to get lost in, but to find their way to the center. Indian culture created mandalas, circular designs that always lead back to a central point. Modern physics shows us the same pattern - in the eye of a storm or the still point of a spinning wheel, there's always a quiet center amid chaos.

These aren't just historical curiosities. Across cultures and times, humans have recognized the importance of finding and maintaining access to their center. But our era might be the first where this skill has become essential rather than optional.

Without a strong connection to our center, we risk being overwhelmed by the very technologies meant to empower us. Each new advancement, each new stream of information, each new possibility can become another source of destabilization rather than opportunity.

But with this skill - this ability to find and maintain our center - we can move differently through our rapidly changing world. We can embrace the magic of our technological age while maintaining our internal coherence. We can engage with the complexity around us without losing ourselves within it.

These ancient practices are pointing to something both timeless and urgently relevant: we can't eliminate uncertainty, but we can develop a different relationship with it. One that allows us to remain steady as we engage with all the possibilities our modern world offers.

Over the past few years, I've been exploring and developing practices that help me stay centered in this fast-moving world. They've changed how I work, how I rest, and how I engage with technology. This year, I'll be sharing what I've learned - not as universal solutions, but as possibilities for finding your own way to move with the complexity of our time.

My first proper job with responsibility was as the GM of a restaurant on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. We were the outliers – the only non-Italian restaurant tucked between Hester and Broome Street.

Every morning, I'd step off the 6 train at Spring Street and walk down Mulberry. Along my route, I'd pass the old-school Italian restaurants where owners sat outside, nursing their espressos and cigars while their staff prepared for service inside.

At 22, I judged them. I was all nervous energy and constant motion, viewing their morning ritual as a sign they'd lost their hunger, their drive. I placed so much value on action that I couldn't see the wisdom in their stillness.

Almost ten years later, those morning scenes take on a different meaning.

The Heart of the Kitchen

There's a beautiful story about Ali Sonko, who spent 15 years as a dishwasher at Noma, consistently rated the world's best restaurant. In 2017, René Redzepi made him co-owner, recognizing that Ali's contribution went far beyond clean plates – he was the heart of the restaurant, the foundation everything else was built upon.

In every restaurant, the dishwasher is the most important person day-to-day. Without them, everything falls apart. No clean plates to serve your food, no glasses for drinks. The entire operation depends on this seemingly simple role.

But over time, I've learned that the growth of any restaurant – or any business – requires us to move through different roles, each teaching us something essential about ourselves and our venture.

The Dance of Roles

As entrepreneurs, we embody different parts of the restaurant at different times:

The dishwasher is our taskmaster self – focused, diligent, essential.

The chef is our project manager – creative, coordinating, bringing vision to life.

The server is our connection to people – present, attentive, responding to needs.

The manager is our systems thinker – observing, adjusting, improving.

The owner is our visionary self – watching patterns, steering growth, maintaining perspective.

The Trap of Perpetual Motion

Many of us get stuck in dishwasher mode. Like my younger self, judging those owners on Mulberry Street, we equate value with constant action. We're so focused on the next batch of dirty dishes that we never step out to see what's happening on the restaurant floor.

We forget that sometimes the most productive thing we can do is sit still long enough to see the whole picture.

Finding Our Way to Stillness

We all start as dishwashers in our businesses – and we should. There's profound wisdom in starting from the foundation, in understanding every aspect of our operation from the ground up.

But staying there? That's where many of us get trapped.

Those Italian restaurant owners I once judged weren't disconnected from their businesses – they had found a different way of being present. Their morning ritual wasn't about checking out – it was about maintaining the perspective necessary to guide their restaurants forward.

That espresso and cigar outside? It took me years to understand it wasn't about relaxation – it was about presence. About being still enough to see clearly, calm enough to make wise decisions, and confident enough to let your team grow into their roles.

The Continuing Evolution

I no longer walk down Mulberry Street, but the lesson of those morning scenes stays with me. Now I find myself asking different questions: Where am I limiting my business by overvaluing one role and undervaluing another? When am I holding on too tightly to tasks that should be shared or delegated?

My business is entering a new phase where I don't want everything to flow through me. I'm actively seeking the right partners, learning to take decisive action in some areas while simply overseeing projects in others. In certain aspects, my role is purely about setting vision and bringing the right people together.

The challenge isn't just about moving through these roles – it's about developing the wisdom to know which role is needed at which time. Sometimes we need to roll up our sleeves and wash the dishes. Other times we need to step back and watch the whole restaurant move in its dance.

The path of an entrepreneur isn't linear. It's about growing into all these roles while maintaining the humility to move between them as needed.

The true art lies not in mastering any one position, but in knowing exactly what the business needs from us at any given moment.

The question I sit with now isn't about which role is most important – it's about having the awareness to recognize which role is needed when, and the courage to step into it fully.

I spoke with an entrepreneur today who owns a web design agency. He shared how deeply anxiety affected him when he started working for himself.

In an effort to heal himself, he discovered something unexpected: how vital exercise was for his sanity and well-being. Without his daily movement practice, anxiety would creep in and take hold.

His story opened up a question I've been sitting with about remote work: How is it that working in a way where we are completely with ourselves allows us to become isolated from ourselves?

The Screen as a Mirror

The tools we use shape our internal experience in ways we rarely notice. The screen, in particular, is a peculiar mirror. Instead of reflecting ourselves back to us, it pulls us into its own world.

Michael Sacasas captured this when writing about our excessively emotional age: "Twitter says 'feel this,' we say 'how intensely?' Social media never invites us to step away, to think and reflect, to remain silent."

This happens through immersion, but not the kind that deepens our experience. When we read a book, we bring our past experiences to meet the words on the page. It's a conversation between the author's intention and our interpretation. We create the visuals within.

The screen offers something different – a total sensory takeover that can drown out the subtle messages our body is constantly sending us.

A Story About Ketchup

Last year, after giving a talk in New York, a man approached me with a problem. He was a runner who couldn't bear to run without music or podcasts in his ears. The week before, he had attempted a half-marathon with dead AirPods. "It was a disaster," he said. "I couldn't find my groove."

I asked him if he puts ketchup on his food.

He pulled back, surprised by my response. "Yeah, sometimes."

"When do you eat it?" I asked.

"With burgers and fries, things like that," he said.

"Why not with everything?" I asked. "Why not with your steak or vegetables?"

His face looked disgusted at the thought. "Because I want to taste those foods properly."

He knew where ketchup should and shouldn't be used. He knew when it would improve the taste and when it would drown out the taste.

That's the thing about condiments – use them long enough, and the plain food becomes boring. Your taste buds forget how to appreciate subtle flavors.

I understand this more deeply than most. I didn't have a sense of smell for most of my 20s due to a medical condition. When surgery finally restored it at 29, I realized how much context and richness I had been missing.

A place isn't just what you see – it's the subtle fragrance that makes it memorable. A person isn't just their appearance – it's their unique scent that makes them familiar.

The Body's Symphony

There's a whole symphony of sensations pulsating through our bodies at any moment. These aren't just random feelings – they're intelligence. They tell us what we want and don't want, what feels right and what doesn't.

I've been thinking about the term "common sense" lately. We use it casually now, but its origins reveal something profound about human experience. The ancient Greeks had a beautiful way of understanding it – they called it "koinē aisthēsis," meaning the power to bring all our senses together into one clear experience.

When you bite into an apple, you're not separately processing the crunch, the sweetness, the smell, the texture. All of these merge into one seamless moment of "apple." This is what we've lost touch with – not just good judgment, but the art of letting our senses dance together.

But in our screen-mediated world, we get something different. The internal landscape becomes fragmented and confusing. We retreat to the mind's guidance alone – like trying to navigate a city with only a map, never touching the ground or feeling the air.

Over time, this disconnection shows up as tension in the body, constriction in the breathing, chaos in the mind. We call it "anxiety," but perhaps it's really a fear of or inability to be present with ourselves.

Finding Our Way Back

Last summer, I trained with Ido Portal. In passing one day, he mentioned how he improved his capacity to smell. He would rub different fragrances on cloth – garlic, pepper, lavender – and practice detecting their subtle differences. By making it harder to notice, he made his sensitivity stronger.

Since practicing this myself, I've noticed how much richer my walks have become. The world has layers of experience I was missing before.

This is what we need to recover in our relationship with ourselves – the ability to detect and trust the subtle signals that make us who we are.

The path back to ourselves isn't about rejecting technology – it's about remembering that beneath all our digital extensions, there's a body waiting to be heard, carrying wisdom that no algorithm can match.

On Friday afternoon, I spoke with Phil, an ER doctor transitioning into concierge medicine.

A friend connected us because Phil is struggling with a challenge many professionals face: communicating the value of his presence and wisdom in a product-driven world.

Phil’s move into concierge medicine is part of a growing industry where patients pay an annual or monthly fee for personalized care. Unlike traditional practices, concierge doctors prioritize time, attention, and holistic well-being.

Instead of rushing through 20–30 patients a day, they see only 6–10, dedicating 30–45 minutes per visit. They don’t just treat illness; they foster long-term health and build real relationships with their patients.

Despite this, Phil is grappling with ‘sales.’

His clients will pay $7,500 a year for access to him, but he worries that he might not be offering enough. He’s considering adding a suite of products and tests to justify the price.

I told him no.

The value isn’t in the products or services he could provide—it’s in him.

His presence, wisdom, and ability to deeply listen are what set him apart. These qualities are incredibly rare, not just in medicine but across all industries.

The Scarcity of Presence and Wisdom

In most healthcare systems, time and attention are luxuries.

My cousin, a GP in Dublin, dreads hearing a patient say, “Now while I have you…” She doesn’t have time for extra concerns. She’s on a relentless schedule, seeing a patient every ten minutes.

She once joked about advising someone on their diabetes medication while eyeing a Snickers bar in her desk drawer—a desperate snack between patients. The irony isn’t lost on her.

This pressure isn’t just hard on patients; it’s exhausting for physicians, too.

Last summer, during a workshop with renowned psychiatrist and trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk, I met nurses and doctors who were burnt out from their hospital work. They wanted to practice medicine differently—more expansively and meaningfully—but felt trapped by the current system.

Why Is Phil Struggling?

Phil’s difficulty in communicating his value stems from a deep conditioning within the medical field. Healthcare systems often evaluate ER doctors based on metrics like "relative value units" (RVUs). These tie a doctor’s compensation to the volume and complexity of procedures performed, reinforcing a mindset where value is linked to transactions: “I must deliver a product or service to justify my worth.”

This conditioning does two harmful things:

1. It reduces a physician’s self-perception to that of a provider of products, not a steward of healing.

2. It prioritizes offering solutions over deeply observing what the patient truly needs.

When your worth is tied to transactions, it becomes almost impossible to recognize the immeasurable value of presence and wisdom—the very things patients crave and are willing to pay for.

A Lesson from Other Industries

This challenge isn’t unique to medicine. I have two friends, E and J, who help business owners optimize operations for more time, profit, and fulfillment. Their approaches couldn’t be more different.

• E is product-focused. He specializes in using Notion to streamline company operations, doing much of the work for his clients and teaching them to use his system.

• J is wisdom-focused. He helps his clients rethink systems and processes altogether, coaching them to delegate effectively so their businesses can run independently. He’s platform-agnostic, empowering them to choose the tools that work for them.

E earns around $150,000 per year and works tirelessly.

J earns over $2 million annually and takes a six-week vacation every year. Why? Because J’s value isn’t tied to a product; it’s rooted in his presence and wisdom. He teaches his clients how to think, enabling them to grow beyond the immediate solution.

The Compression of Value

Productizing your work compresses its true value. It reduces something expansive and transformative into something transactional. By contrast, offering your presence and wisdom empowers others to expand.

Phil doesn’t need to add products or tests to justify his fee. He needs to embrace the rarity of what he’s offering: time, attention, and care. These are not commodities; they’re the foundation of meaningful relationships and transformative health.

In a productized and disconnected age, the most valuable thing you can offer isn’t something you can measure or package. It’s the unique combination of your wisdom and your presence—and that’s worth far more than any product could ever be.

I should be finishing the outline of a keynote talk I’m giving this weekend, but I’ve just had some breakfast and I want to share something with you that I discovered in my research this morning.

Using Google's Ngram Viewer, I traced the usage of the word "optimize" over the past 220 years.

The data shows an exponential increase, particularly in the last 60 years - mapping neatly to the exponential growth in computing power over that same period.

It's obvious how this technological progress has transformed our day-to-day lives. We run our lives from our phones, share with vast anonymous audiences online, and communicate instantly across the globe.

But I'm most intrigued by how these tools alter our perception and consciousness - the psychological impact of their very existence.

The words we use don't just enable communication. They represent and illuminate how we see ourselves. In the book, Metaphors We Live By, linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that the way we think and understand the world is largely metaphorical.

We make sense of the world by drawing analogies from the activities and tools we are most commonly engaged in.

The metaphor of a shepherd tending to his flock was commonly used in Jesus’ time to illustrate God’s relationship with his followers. Shepherding was a very common way of life at that time, so the metaphor resonated.

It’s no surprise today that we are trying to optimize relationships, optimize time, or even optimize hormones.

I say it’s no surprise because the internet is the ultimate mascot of optimization.

1. It’s designed for speed and efficiency, communication is instantaneous.

2. You can use it best when you create and iterate, put something out there, get quick feedback, and iterate to improve the next version.

3. You can sequence processes together to automate them so you don’t have to keep repeating the same action.

4. The internet captures vast amounts of data on behavior, trends, and engagement and allows you to use that to inform your future decision-making.

The very meaning of the word optimize changed with the introduction of the internet. Before the advent of the Internet, the word optimize was mostly used to describe the act of being positive about the world, or being an optimist. Today it is about making something as efficient as possible, (SEO, Search Engine Optimization).

The tools we use shape us in the most insidious ways. The changes are subtle, happening beneath the surface of our conscious awareness until we find ourselves transformed, wondering how it happened.

I have nothing against someone wanting to optimize their life; I've been there myself. However, I wanted to offer you an insight into the origins of this way of thinking and encourage a moment of reflection.

As we embrace the power of optimization, let us not forget to cherish the unoptimized, imperfect moments that make us human. By striking a balance between the two, we can use the best of what technology has to offer while preserving the essence of what makes life truly meaningful.

Discourse involves communicating a message from one to many, like a classic lecture, a speaker on stage, or a content creator behind a camera or microphone.

Discussion, on the other hand, is a two-way conversation but often resembles two overlapping monologues. In a discussion, each person maintains their own point of view or subjective reality and shares it without fully integrating the other person's perspective.

Dialogue, however, is about moving toward a shared reality, even if only for a brief moment. It involves suspending judgment and being open to what the other person presents, allowing us to uncover their view and see how we can relate to it.

This, I believe, is where a shared wisdom can emerge from, because there is an effort to truly see and understand the other person’s perspective.

This weekend, I caught up with my friend Blake La Grange, and we attempted to engage in a genuine dialogue.

The beauty of it is that neither of us knew what would emerge, there was no agenda, other than an intent to be present and open to whatever would arise.

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Every writer needs a reader.

Every performer needs an audience.

Every producer needs an artist.

Every therapist needs a client.

Every salesperson needs a buyer.

Every chef needs a diner.

We all play the role of the giver and receiver.

Sometimes we need to be a better giver. Sometimes we need a better receiver.

I feel that the depth of meaning we get from our lives is in relation to who we serve and how we serve.

Our gifts and talents may not be recognized because we are in the wrong environment and serving the wrong audience.

The issue may have nothing to do with you, but who you are serving.

I think of the Detroit artist Sixto Rodriguez. He produced two albums in the early 70s, which both received critical acclaim for their unique sound and poetic lyrics but he had no audience. Nobody in the USA was listening to him.

He dropped his career as a musician and worked manual jobs for the rest of his life to support his family.

Unknown to him, he was a cultural icon in South Africa - some say he was bigger than Bob Dylan. His lyrics spoke to the youth, they adored him - but knew nothing about him. He was a mystery to them, and they were a mystery to him.

There’s a documentary, Searching for Sugarman, that covers this story. I found it heartbreaking to see a gifted artist who goes unknown because he wasn’t in a place where his gifts could be recognized and appreciated.

For Rodriguez his expression was pure but he was in the wrong place for it to be appreciated.

For world-renowned Chocolatier, Bill Brown his pure expression was repressed until his late 40s.

As a child, he was fixated with drawing. It became an issue in school because he wouldn’t pay attention in class. To make sure he stayed focused teachers stopped giving him paper unless he was doing a test. But Bill found a way, he would stuff toilet paper in his pocket and draw on it when the teacher wasn’t looking.

One day he got caught. He was mocked in front of his classmates and his parents were called into the school to speak with the principal - scolding Bill for misbehaving.

He never drew again. His parents and teachers later tried to encourage him to draw but he would get nervous and flustered so he avoided it completely.

He shut off his creative expression and took a corporate job after graduating. For two decades his life path was dedicated to climbing the corporate ladder, until one day he was watching the Food Channel and saw how chocolate truffles are made.

It sparked a curiosity in him and he started making truffles and bringing them into work for his colleagues. That was enough to reawaken the dormant creative expression that lived in him.

At 46 he left his well-paid job to open William Dean Chocolates, within a few years he would be recognized as the third-best chocolatier in the world.

I interviewed Bill back in 2017 and it has always been an inspiring tale of what can happen when we live in alignment with our true nature.

Our gifts are not meant to be hidden away – they are meant to be shared with the world. But it's not just about sharing them; it's about sharing them with the right people. When we find the courage to express ourselves in a way that feels pure and serves those who truly resonate with what we have to offer, magic happens.

We tap into a deep sense of meaning and fulfillment, and our gifts begin to shine brighter than ever before. So don't be afraid to seek out your true audience – they are waiting for you, ready to embrace and celebrate the unique light that only you can bring. Trust that when you share your gifts with purity and integrity, you will find your way to those who need them most.

Over the past two weeks, I have had many conversations with friends and clients about losing and finding themselves.

For some, it is the first time they have felt a real connection to who they are.

For others, they lost themselves in relationships or businesses that weren’t aligned and are now coming back to their true nature.

In April 2021 I had my first experience of truly finding myself. I was at the Hridaya Yoga Centre in Mexico for six weeks, practicing Hatha Yoga and Meditation.

The Hatha Yoga was so challenging because it moved so slowly. I had been going to Vinyasa classes in New York for years and this is what I thought yoga was: sweat, move, breathe.

But at Hridaya we would hold basic postures for 5 minutes each. It felt torturous, I wanted to do more. So with a few other students, we went to the teachers telling them that we were more advanced than this and could handle more intensity. They smiled and nodded, told us to wait another three days and see how we felt.

They had seen it all before. The battle we faced was in confronting the stillness within. We wanted faster and harder sequences so that we could focus on what was coming next, rather than resting in what was happening now.

During this time there were also social dynamics at play. I was with a group of 40 people, eating, practicing, and hanging out together. From the beginning, there was a lot of judgment toward people in the group. I defined and categorized them, I labeled who I liked and who I disliked.

As weeks passed, it became apparent that what I projected onto each person was just a reflection of my judgments about myself.

By reflecting on how I perceived those around me, I learned a lot about how I perceived myself.

After four weeks of yoga, I did a ten-day silent retreat.

I had learned so much from moving with awareness and observing how I related to other people, but now it was time to uncover the relationship with my self.

A lot emerged from the silent retreat.

The biggest insight was my constant desire to escape myself. I kept wanting to move my body to avoid discomfort or thinking about the next meal, or what I would do once the ten days were over.

But somewhere inside came this voice that kept saying, ‘Stay with me, please don’t leave’

I had never realized it before, but I was always avoiding time with myself. In fact, i didn’t know how to be with myself. Whenever there was space it needed to be filled with doing something, or doing nothing mindlessly, watching YouTube videos or pouring myself into a social media feed.

After these six weeks, I left feeling that I had made a friend for life. It was such a precious experience to go for walks without listening to anything or to go to the beach and watch the waves without thinking about anything.

Toward the end of this, I wrote a poem to reflect on what changes had taken place in me;

Push your body until it hurts

Prove to yourself that you are alive

Squeeze the emotions so that nobody can see

Prove to yourself that you are strong

Be watchful for any admirers

Prove to yourself that you are beautiful

Say things so that others will nod

Prove to yourself that you are smart

I was living a second-hand experience

Through the eyes of others

But now I have seen

The strength in being soft

I have witnessed

The progress from going slow

I have felt

The beauty that lives within

And I have caught a glimpse of a first-hand experience of this life

Slowly and softly I will move forward without pushing

Because I have seen through my own eyes

And I trust that they know where to take me.

I have lost myself many times since and searched to find myself again and again.

I have learned that finding myself can never be done alone. We need others in our life who see us deeply and can reflect our true nature back to us.

I was with my mother, during this time at the Yoga center in Mexico. We both poured into each other - illuminating the beauty we saw in one another. It was such a special time together.

She has since passed, and with her passing, I thought that I would never have anybody in my life who could love and see me so deeply.

But I was wrong. Indeed, I will never have another person who will occupy the immense role of a mother, but I am surrounded by many other beautiful people who I love deeply and whom I feel deeply loved by.

I truly believe that the greatest gift that we can give is to see each other deeply.

This comes with acceptance and encouragement. To accept the person we love for who they are in this moment, and if we see a spark in them that wants to shine, we encourage them to be all that they can become.

This morning I was shot back to the euphoria of November 2018 in West Palm Beach.

Tony Robbins came up in conversation over breakfast and I wanted to show what it looks like when he calls on the crowd to “Make a Move”.

This is what it looks like.

In November 2018 I was at his six-day, Date with Destiny event. Watching that video brought me right back to all of the feelings I had at that time.

I arrived feeling lost and confused. I knew I was going to be leaving my sales role in four months and starting my own business, but I didn’t know what that was going to look like.

I came to Date with Destiny looking for answers, direction, and clarity.

I left feeling like I could conquer the earth and anything was possible.

After the event I was constantly hyping myself up, feeling like I needed to push through every hard experience, in fact I think I craved hard experiences so that I had something to push against.

On runs in the morning I would be saying things to myself like “I’m the Momentum Man, you can’t hurt me” - I wanted to reach a point of exhaustion so I could push myself to go beyond it.

That energy didn’t help me in trying to start a business. It just made me thirst for more motivational content. When I felt confused, lost, or unmotivated I turned to characters like Gary Vaynerchuk or another dose of Tony Robbins. Once again I’d activate the hype machine, “You’ve got this! Let’s go!!”

It’s all very cringy as I look back at it. But seeing that video this morning brought me back to who I was at that time in my life.

I didn’t care to observe myself. I thought that the two core ingredients were drive and action and that’s what I needed to be successful.

I wasn’t thoughtful, I wasn’t intentional, and I certainly wasn’t balanced.

If I couldn’t do something, it was because I lacked the drive, discipline, or willpower to get it done - I needed to be harder.

When I look back on it now, I was constantly reacting to the internal insecurities I had. I wasn’t able to sit with them and unpack why I wanted to start a business and what I wanted to offer. Instead, I was in this frenzy of survival.

I brought that energy into endurance sports, doing triathlons and open-water swimming races. It worked well there - the training made me feel alive, but it didn’t correspond to the mental state I needed to think clearly and strategically in running a business. Instead, that internal chaos manifested itself in how operated.

I was chronically distracted, couldn’t focus, and only got myself together when there was a time crunch and I was under pressure to get something done for somebody else.

Months later, I started teaching speed reading workshops and realized that I wasn’t alone.

That same energy was present in high schools, Ivy League universities, and investment banks. They too had a fragmented state - full of drive, ambition, and caffeine but unable to channel it into clear thought and measured action.

There was no lack of motivation, but there was a poverty of attention.

I’m grateful that I got off the hype train. It’s like a meal at McDonalds, it stimulates the senses but deprives the body of the nourishment it craves.

But the hype train still keeps picking up passengers and selling them a ticket to the destination of their desired selves.

Be wary, I warn you - getting to know your current self is far more revealing than chasing after your desired self.

Because even if you arrive at the destination of your desired self the internal work that has been avoided will still be awaiting you.

"Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom." - Aristotle

You are your own greatest teacher.

For the past few months, I have been working with this idea of the Productivity Paradox. It’s a talk that I have given a few times this year.

The core message is that as we push ourselves to become more efficient, we become less effective. We have reduced productivity to simply "getting things done."

Ironically, the tools that promise to make us more productive often do the opposite. They fragment our attention and inevitably become time-wasters rather than time-savers.

To do our best work and live our most productive lives, we should use technology to support us. However, we often end up hostage to these tools because there is no clear boundary between the human experience and the digital experience.

This idea links to what I was thinking about today: paradoxes are a constant presence in life.

We are always dealing with opposing forces within us, and part of the journey of life is to become aware of and accept that this tension will always exist within us and is something to be embraced.

On this occasion, I recorded a video about this because speaking about it felt more alive than writing about it.

Yesterday I went to a Gaga dance class. It was my first time. There’s always tension when I go to something for the first time. I question myself a lot.

Can I do this?

Will everybody be better than me?

Will I stand out for being so bad?

Those thoughts often follow me into new and unknown experiences. In the past, they prevented me from moving toward trying something new. Now I expect these thoughts to arise but they no longer hold me back.

Still, it does create a stiffness in my body, a certain level of vigilance and uncertainty about whether I am safe or accepted here.

Early into the class, the teacher called us to welcome our weaknesses, “your weakness is your greatest beauty, allow it to be displayed.”

This invitation quickly melted the tension within me. It allowed me to accept the awkward feelings when I felt uncoordinated and less free than those who danced around me.

I did not always have this relationship with my weaknesses.

For most of my life, I treated the parts of myself that I didn’t like as something that needed to be fixed and the experiences that felt awkward were something to be avoided.

Eight years ago I moved to New York as a 22-year-old. There were many things I wanted to experience in this city, high on the list was learning how to Salsa dance.

I felt awkward and clumsy in my body. My balance wasn’t very good and I didn’t have much rhythm or coordination. During my Erasmus year studying in France, I saw some friends dancing Salsa and I wanted to be able to move like them. It looked so fluid and erotic, I wanted to experience what that felt like.

At that time I was too shy to even try to dance. I watched from the side and admired, never daring to step onto the dancefloor.

Two years later I was living in New York and felt ready to take some classes. I went to the Ailey Studios in Midtown and with their floor-to-ceiling mirrors I got to see my uncoordinated, stiff, and awkward body on full display.

I felt this great shame inside. I thought I was going to be much better. My ideal was that I would show up and learn quickly and move my body just like the people at the salsa parties in France. But no, it wasn’t going to be as easy as that and I was unwilling to accept it.

I shut down that part of me. I’m uncoordinated. I don’t have it. I can’t dance.

I didn’t want to think about it or reflect on it. This simple experience became viewed as a failure because my performance did not match the expectations I had in my head.

What a shame. I missed out on so much. If I only I could have accepted myself as I was and laughed at my incompetencies.

It took me five years to take my second salsa class. This time I arrived accepting my uncoordinated awkwardness. I didn’t apologize to my dance partner when I missed a step, I accepted it as part of the learning experience. I didn’t judge myself when I danced in front of the mirror and saw how uncoordinated I was, instead, I thanked myself for coming.

Five days after that class, Covid swept across the world and shut everything down. There would be no more salsa classes to come, and I haven’t tried to dance salsa since.

I didn’t need to become a salsa dancer, that second class gave me what I needed. By showing up with a smile on my face it allowed me to take a whole new approach toward self-discovery.

I became far less concerned with being interesting and much more interested.

In attempting to be interesting to others I was showcasing what I knew and what I was able to do, often hiding my flaws and weaknesses from them. I would read about things so that I was in the know. I would exercise to develop how my body looked. My internal dialogue was fueled by comparing myself to those around me, looking for where was I better or worse.

Now I know much less about what’s happening in the world and I feel as though I have little to prove to others. I am far less plugged into what's happening in sports, current affairs, or entertainment stories. There are many things that I am unable to comment on.

But I am much more interested in myself. Interested in where my faults and weaknesses are. Where I lie to myself. Where I’m stiff and unable to be at ease.

These are not things to fix. They are paths to explore.

I won’t ever really be able to talk to people in great depth about these experiences because they aren’t happening at a verbal level, it’s a felt experience.

In childhood and early adulthood, we are moving through phases of constant growth. I used to feel that at each birthday I was a completely different person than the one who celebrated the year prior. I saw myself very differently and my view of the world had dramatically changed.

But on my 23rd and 24th birthday, I didn’t feel that. I felt stagnant, like something was hardening inside of me.

Before then it felt as if there was momentum pushing me out into the world and exploring new parts of myself, but then the force began to slow.

I was beginning to become more solid and attached to what I liked and didn’t like. My life had become more habitual and unconscious.

The way I broke that up and brought this momentum back into my life was by moving toward my weaknesses. The places I had been avoiding were where I needed to go. The parts of myself that I didn’t know, were the parts I needed to meet.

Yesterday’s message was a powerful reminder of this.

Your weakness is your beauty.

By moving toward your weaknesses you move closer toward who you really are and further away from a deluded idealized self.

Your truth is to be found in your weaknesses.

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It wants me to play games on it. 

I don’t want to play it’s games. 

So I press the button to turn it off. 

But it doesn’t turn off.  

A big pink button appears with Tap to play and a rotating series of titles.

• Want to score a prize? 

• Any good at trivia? 

• We got games.

Why is this screen here? 

The Uber driver told me he gets paid $100 per month for having these screens in his car. 

This screen isn’t here for me. It’s not improving my experience, and it’s extra cash for the driver.

So who’s paying? 

I am.

With my attention. 

Neil Postman suggested asking questions of new technology so that we could enter into a negotiation of whether it’s of use and benefit to our lives. 

The company that created this product is Play Octopus. They raised $13.3 million in 2019 and were acquired by T-Mobile in 2022. 

Let’s apply some of these questions to Play Octopus and explore if this product is of use to my life. 

Considering these screens are in 40,000 Uber and Lyft cars around the country it can apply to you too. 

1. What is the problem that this new technology solves? 

According to the press release after T-Mobile’s purchase; 

Octopus Interactive helps brands reach audiences through video ads presented on screens inside rideshare vehicles, giving marketers yet another way to reach consumers.

Octopus is the largest national network of interactive video screens inside Uber and Lyft vehicles. Its rideshare network enables brands to do geotargeted campaigns across a range of “highly engaged” consumers. (Because what else are you going to do in the back of an Uber, look at your phone?)

So it seems to me that the problem is expanding advertising reach. 

If you’re going to stare at a screen, why not stare at their screen?

2. Whose problem is it? 

I don’t think it’s the passenger’s problem. 

It reads to me that it’s the advertiser’s problem. 

Play Octopus’ website doesn’t even address the passenger, it only addresses advertisers and drivers.

But is it even a problem? I don’t think so. 

It seems like Octopus found empty space and manufactured a need that could be capitalized on.

Earlier this year I was on the beach in Miami.

I was staring out into the clear open water before me until a barge came across with an advertising billboard on it. 

10 minutes later a plane flew across with an ad banner. 

This feels like the same thing. 

Fill the empty space with content and make money through ads.

3. What new problem do we create by solving this problem? 

As I look out the window my eyes keep getting brought back to the screen. 

There’s a changing rotation of titles and I can see it from the corner of my eye. It’s irritating me. 

Because I can’t completely turn the screen off, I place my cap over it. 

If I didn’t have something to cover it with there are two other likely options.

I could pull out my phone and fixate my gaze on one screen to block out the other, or I could close my eyes and turn my attention inward. 

The most likely path is to pick up the phone. 

And here we find the phone becoming a reinforced source of retreat. 

It becomes a way of coping with all of the disregulating forces around us. 

But the phone itself is disregulating. 

Play Octopus is of no use to me. It’s designed to use me, not to serve me. 

This is true for the majority of tech products that are driven by engagement loops. 

They are more interested in designing users than products.  

James Williams speaks about this from what he saw during his time at Google, “We trust these technologies to be companion systems for our lives: we trust them to help us do the things we want to do, to become the people we want to be.”

But the motives are not aligned. They dangle the carrot of entertainment before us so that they can sell our engaged and easily persuaded state to advertisers.

The real problem here is that we have become so used to being stimulated that relaxing now feels uncomfortable and wrong. 

The very nature of these products are built on the premise that we cannot spend time with ourselves. As the press release stated, ‘Because what else are you going to do in the back of an Uber, look at your phone?’

This whole experience was refreshing for me, it reminded me of the necessity to be vigilant with where I place my attention and the convenient habits that I can quickly become dependent on.

I just got my screen time report. I averaged 5 hours per day on my phone last week.

There’s a lot of waste there.

It’s time to trim back the moments where I’m a highly engaged consumer.

Consume less. Experience more.