My life is a perpetual summer, so I’ll keep chugging along. But rather than waste a winter-worthy idea on checked-out minds, here are fourteen lighter things rattling around in mine.

Poke around. Maybe one is worth taking your attention away from berry picking, napping, or lemonade drinking.

Pick What to Poke

1. Theory: AI Is the Great Mediocritizer

2. Book Recommendation: Lonesome Dove

3. Question: Where Should Five-Year-Old You Grow Up?

4. Fitness Find: My New Fitness Fix

5. Parenting Idea: Dear Kid in 2042

6. Reframe: Wealth Is Chucking Stuff

7. Analogy: AI Writing as Plastic Surgery

8. Working Theory: Texture Slows Down Time

9. Resurrection: FaveFinder Is Back

10. Thought Experiment: Why Freeze the Status Quo?

11. Project: Wiki-me-dia

12. Pet Peeve: Don’t Tell Me What Your AI Thinks

13. Provocation: Stop Watching Other People Play

14. Quote: The Quote I Forgot to Credit

A Theory: AI Is the Great Mediocritizer

If you count on your favorite AI product for advice, writing, strategy, marketing, or therapy, it will drag you toward mediocrity.

Consumer AI products are trained on more or less all of humanity’s knowledge. They’re prediction-based and harnessed to protect the lowest common denominator user from inflicting damage on themselves and others. So with everything they do, they veer toward dull, average answers. But in a convincing way!

Even when I had Codex review this draft, it pushed me to not write “drag you to mediocrity.” It recommended I instead write LLMs “tend to produce consensus-shaped answers.”

Well, AI can take its “tend to” and shove it up its data centers.

As far as I can tell, standard AI products don’t take a spiky idea and sharpen it by default. They couch arguments, sand edges, and add caveats.

On the bright(-ish) side, the mediocrity AI pushes us toward is a higher level than before. So AI is raising and polishing the floor of mediocrity. Yay.

On the even brighter side, if you know what you want to sharpen and refuse to let AI take the wheel, it can turbocharge you. It’s like an Iron Man suit. But Iron Man suits are dangerous in deluded hands. So I guess mediocritizing by default is a feature, not a bug.

A Recommendation: Lonesome Dove

Now I appreciate “Wild West.”

Lonesome Dove transported me into a world I had never cared about or appreciated: the American West in the mid-to-late 1800s. Following cowboys driving cattle from Texas to Montana gave me a real appreciation for how tough and uncertain life was, how brutally death could arrive out of the blue, and how much has changed in 150 years.

A friend and I debated how someone from that era would fare if Back-to-the-Futured to today. Vice-versa wasn’t much of a question.

A Question: If You Were Five Today, Where Would You Want to Grow Up?

You get the same family you grew up with, but can be raised in any neighborhood in the world. Where would you want it to be?

I’ve asked pretty much everybody I hang out with these days, for the last couple of months.

My answer?

Not Vancouver. I’d want to be somewhere where I have freedom to roam around with a gang of neighborhood friends (see this podcast episode). But I’d also want solid infrastructure - schools, sports, etc - to prepare me for life by cultivating my spikiness. My initial impulse was somewhere like Byron Bay in Australia. But that may overweigh the importance of weather. I don’t remember caring about rain or cold until I was grown-up. So maybe somewhere in Scandinavia? I’ve only been to Copenhagen and Helsinki for a weekend each, so don’t know the area well enough to say.

Another heuristic: Where do kids grow up and most often return to raise their own families?

A Moving Recommendation: My New Fitness Fix

Last November, a nagging lower-abdomen injury forced me to give up beach volleyball and other exercises. Not wanting to sit around and do nothing but also not wanting to make my injury worse, I started doing YouTube mobility videos to develop practical strength and mobility for functional purposes.

EDR Fitness’s free 40-day program was a fantastic start to 2026. For the spice of life, I sprinkle my rotation with:

• Tom Merrick - more relaxing and mobility-focused

• Julia Reppel - same as EDR

• LeoMoves - good workouts

• Strength + Flow - this is a challenging one

• This 12-minute, 13-million-viewed routine promising you’ll never have back pain if you do it daily.

I consider myself in the top 10 percent of fitness (certainly for my age), and find many of these challenging enough, though some are more accessible and designed for rest days.

An Idea Worth Borrowing: Write Birthday Letters Your Kids Will Open at 21

h/t to Patrick O’Shaughnessy, who passed along this idea from his own dad:

Write your children a letter on every birthday for them to open when they’re 21. Share your thinking, what’s going on in your life, and what you hope they’ll remember when they officially become adults.

I tried it for the first time with Zac when he turned five in April. It was surprisingly emotional to think of life 16 years from now, Zac as an adult looking back at this moment when he’s five, Sandy is three, and Kim and I are young(-er). Their childhoods are still in front of them. My Legant work’s “childhood,” too. Major prostalgia infusion (feeling nostalgia for the present).

My family’s present context feels vivid now, but 16 years from now it will have faded into blurry, distorted memories. Capturing the silly details is valuable to me today and may be valuable to my kids later, or at least to their AI agents. I hope it broadens their perspective of time, refines their life stories, strengthens our connection, and is a super entertaining read. We’ll see.

I’ll report back in 2042.

A Thought: Wealth Is Being Able to Chuck Stuff

Or donate it, because chucking stuff is wasteful.

Migrating between Cape Town and Vancouver means repeatedly looking at things in storage and asking, “Do we really need this?” We keep it just in case. It would feel wasteful to get rid of it.

But then at least twice a year we just move that crap around and ask the same “Do we need this?” question. So it lives rent-free in our heads, and in our storage.

True wealth would be the ability to get rid of it. If I need new boxing gloves, snow boots, or rollerblades, I’ll buy them. And if more people joined in, there’d be more to choose from on Marketplace.

An Analogy: AI Is the Plastic Surgery of Writing

For 99 percent of us, our raw writing is not especially beautiful. So when free plastic surgery comes along, it seems crazy not to give it a shot. You see the output and think, “Wow. So much more polished. So much more attractive.” So much easier, too!

So you do a touch-up here and there. Then a little bit more. Before you know it, your writing is Hollywood has-been-ishly unrecognizable. You think it looks great. Maybe superficial readers who skim the surface don’t mind the artificiality. But those relationships aren’t the ones that are worth writing for.

I say this having gone through it and come out the other side. I’d rather my writing be somewhat ugly and mine than superficial and similar to everybody else’s.

AI can help with my makeup.

A Working Theory: Texture Slows Down Time

As much as I endorse radically moderate progress, if your life is a steady climb, time goes by faster and faster. Plus it’s boring. So I’ve realized it’s important to add texture to the trajectory by intentionally mixing in the odd tent pole.

My theory: Our perception of the pace of passage of time depends on how quickly we can scan backward through our past. If the path is smooth, you can zoom backward and forward lickety-split. Tent poles create speed bumps.

I’m happy with the texture of my parenting life. People say time flies with kids. But maybe that’s because they pull you toward a smooth routine. I’ve tried to venture off those paved paths and seek adventures. Rather than go to the same parks or beaches, head in new directions, often without a plan, and see what happens. Camping trips are great too, and affordable. And of course moving around between Cape Town, Spain, Australia, Costa Rica, Brazil has been a great privilege. My past five years as a parent have felt long. There’s been a crazy amount of texture.

Where I’m missing texture is professionally. I need more adventures that don’t throw me off course but make the climb more memorable.

A Resurrection: FaveFinder, My DIY Movie Recommendation Engine

I’ve always had a hard time picking movies to watch. I practically spend more time deliberating and watching trailers than watching the movie itself.

Recommendations from Netflix, Amazon and the like suck. You don’t know what data they’re using, their incentives aren’t aligned with yours, and their recommendations go haywire if someone else gets access to your account.

So back in 2016 I started creating my own recommendation engine. I called it FaveFinder.

I ranked and rated the movies I’d seen, then compared my profile against movie critics’. The closer someone’s preferences were to mine, the more weight FaveFinder gave to movies they loved but I hadn’t seen.

It worked better than any alternative. I even made a website. A couple dozen friends and a handful of randos who somehow found it gave it a shot. But I eventually let FaveFinder go fallow because of the effort it took to manually import critics’ reviews each week.

AI agents see that “effort” and snort at my human feebleness. They can collect and maintain way bigger databases in their sleep (or at least mine). So FaveFinder is not just resurrected, but better than ever. AI does all the dirty work. I do the fun stuff: tinkering with the algorithm while I watch enjoyable movies.

A Thought Experiment: If You Wouldn’t Reverse It, Why Freeze It?

In my neighborhood of Kitsilano, there is much ado about rezoning that allows for more high-rises. Some objections make sense to me, like that towers would block the southern sun. But would these same people be on-board with tearing down the apartment buildings they live in to put back the houses that used to be on that land? Or go all the way back to forest?

More density: bad. Less density: also bad. So Vancouver’s reached perfect density? Bad.

The same bias applies to a lot of decisions.

• If I already worked at a consulting firm making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, would I quit to make no money doing what I’m doing now?

• If I owned a two-million-dollar half-duplex, would I sell it to invest that cash and rent my place?

If I were already there, would I want to go back to my current status quo?

A Project: Wiki-me-dia

This grab bag is partly an output of my personal Wikipedia of myself.

Since 2015, I’ve been logging my life and summarizing those logs into weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews. Since 2025, I’ve also transcribed and debriefed most of my work-related calls with Granola. More recently, I’ve had my AI agents trace and organize their work too. And, as the #1 client of Innate Edge, I have my personal operating manual and all the data that feeds it.

All this information now sits in a Google Drive folder. Different AI models can use it in myriad ways I’m too naive to care about that violate my privacy access.

Building on Andrej Karpathy’s suggestion, I’ve instructed my agents to map it in a pyramid-type structure so agents can drill into the details as much as necessary for a given job.

I’m the boss, though. So I decide what deserves to sit near the top: my operating manual, what went well and what didn’t, where I want to head. And after every call and month/week/year I still manually recap what mattered.

The result is more than a database. It’s a navigational system. Agents help me not go in circles, find things I’d forgotten, spot patterns I miss, and pull together a grab bag of preoccupations for a newsletter.

A Pet Peeve: Don’t Tell Me What Your AI Thinks

It grates my cheese and makes it stinky when I’m discussing/debating a topic with someone and they defend their side by saying, “well my AI said so and so.”

(Full transparency: I’m a recovering serial offender.)

By all means, go ahead and use AI assistants to prep. In fact, AI has gotten so easy and effective that it’s getting close to the point where, if someone rocks up willy-nilly to a meeting with me, I get a bit offended. Why not get your AI assistant to read our emails, recap our past sessions, do some diligence, and make suggestions? My time is less valuable than your AI’s? Let’s talk about topics our AIs can’t answer.

But let’s not talk about what your AI says. I expect anyone I meet with to be the boss of their opinions, not to outsource it to their mediocritizing assistant. If I want to know what AI has to say, I’ll ask it myself.

A Provocation: Stop Watching Other People Play Games

My friend’s friend recently became worth tens of millions when SpaceX IPO’d. This got me asking him, then others what they’d do with that kind of money.

One relative said he would retire, hang out, play golf, and watch tons of sports. That’s close to the antithesis of what I’m working toward. The sports watching part seems especially wasteful. Why spend your life watching other people play games?

Not that I’m waste-free. I listen to multiple hours of NBA podcasts a week and check ESPN every day. But have those hours contributed to anything I’m proud of? No chance. What I’m actually proud of is that I went cold turkey on the NFL in 2021.

Business, politics, news, movies, and books are largely other people’s games, too. There is certainly a place for a slice of them. For instance, sports fandom is a socially acceptable way for men, especially, to bond. But it’s worth asking: Does this support the game you want to play, or substitute for playing one?

If I had zero interest in the NBA today, would I force myself to become a fan?

The less you know what your own game is, the more interesting other people’s games become.

A Quote I Forgot to Credit

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

The quote has stuck with me for a couple of reasons. First, I suspect it partly explains my lack of accomplishment. My compulsion to design my own frameworks/methods/terminology leads to me giving not enough credit to whomever I derived my ideas from. Second, it gels with my plan to move away from trying to sell my own thing and toward being more of a back-end developer of a methodology that others can use, benefit from, and take the credit for.

So thanks to whomever introduced the quote to me. I don’t remember who it was. Clearly they’re an expert at living up to the words.

An Update: Legant Labs

I’ve retired the ARC acronym and moved The Zag, Innate Edge, collaborations such as The Override, and whatever comes next under my new (sun) umbrella: Legant Labs.

Legant is an anagram of tangle, because the work is about untangling people and their circumstances to find alignment.

This is a move to better align myself. I want to focus on my game: researching and developing the Legant Method. I can team up with people who kick butt at building, selling, and delivering its different applications. The mission remains to raise humanity’s spiky ceiling above its standardized floor. If we can accomplish it, I don’t care who takes the credit.

Thanks for reading.

Stay spiky,

Chris

Share

Life’s about alignment.

Flipping it, that means life’s ultimate challenge is to minimize the friction caused by misalignment. And no, it doesn’t mean I owe my boss an apology. Her alignment meetings caused more friction than they released.

Bear with me, please. Like ‘purpose’ or ‘authenticity,’ alignment is oft-maligned as an amorphous buzzword. So I invite you to hop into a huddle with me. Let’s try to align on what it means to be aligned—not as a corporate employee or a painting on a wall, but as a human (or as a lion).

Alignment seems to break down into five dimensions, each with its own way to go wrong:

1. Self: The fit between your understanding of your nature and your actual nature. Misalignment: A lion thinking it’s a dolphin.

2. Expression: The fit between your actions and what you’re built to do. Misalignment: A lion trying to swim after food.

3. Context: The fit between your environment and your needs and abilities. Misalignment: A lion living in Vancouver.

4. Relationships: The fit between your needs and abilities and the needs and abilities of others. Misalignment: A lion hunting with raccoons.

5. Time: The fit between your present choices and a coherent life trajectory. Misalignment: A lion hunting like every day is its last, every day.

I’m no lion-tologist, but I suspect those felines are simpler to align than we super mostly-hairless monkeys are. Even so, the objective is the same for us kings of the world/jungle respectively, and all other species too: Alignment across all five dimensions.

Alignment is physical and unrealistic

Physics can measure how aligned we are, theoretically at least.

More alignment = less wasted friction.

Note the importance of the word wasted. Life is not about minimizing friction in the absolute. If it were, we’d have a simple hack to win, one that many of us are trying to varying degrees but not thriving with: do nothing. Doing diddly squat creates minimal friction, but also a crappy life.

Minimizing wasted friction is a matter of efficient use of energy.

Each of us has a finite amount of energy to spend in our lifetime. Give or take 2,000 calories a day times 80 years times 365 days, which is about ~60 million calories. Or a quarter million Snickers bars, about one packed school bus.

A theoretically perfect life would align across all five of the dimensions so that every one of those calories goes toward the same job.

“Ugh Chris. This energy alignment theory of yours is ridiculously unrealistic! Zero fun either. What about sleeping, playing with my kids/self, reading awesome newsletters, or going to the theatre to watch the three-hour-long Odyssey, which I hear is a can’t-miss?”

First of all, of course, it’s unrealistic.

Second of all, my strawman overlooked the Time alignment dimension. Sleeping, playing, and maybe even Matt-Damon-watching can be efficient uses of energy if they’re part of your bigger-picture project.

What might this bigger picture project be?

I think it’s bulding your GOAT (greatest of all timelines) life. Of one million possible ways your life could go from today, it’s the one you would not trade for any of the others.

That probably involves a challenge that uses your natural talents to take on a meaningful problem. You engage in work you look forward to, enjoy, and feel proud of, and that accumulates into something useful.

The incredible game

This alignment challenge reminds me of a video game I played in the library at elementary school, The Incredible Machine.

Your life is a convoluted system of ropes and pulleys you want to arrange to do a job. The fewer knots and other sources of friction you can have in your system, the more efficient your transfer of energy, so the more you can move. The more you can move with each Snickers bite of energy, the more you accomplish and feel fulfilled. And if it’s efficient, you can keep on going.

So here’s the full theory:

Finite energy → better alignment → less avoidable friction → more energy reaches valued accomplishment → greater fulfillment

Or for those who prefer prose to arrows:

Alignment reduces avoidable friction, leaving more energy for effort that produces something of value.

The implication of this is that effort isn’t the source of burnout and dissatisfaction. Wasted friction is. Stuff like pointless “alignment” meetings.

Effort is the source of fulfillment. You want effort. You just want it to be efficient, to pull in a consistent direction that gets as much as possible out of your capabilities. Since life tends to last a pretty long time, you want to work at a radically moderate pace that allows you to rest, recover, and strengthen so you can keep going until the Grim Reaper hooks you.

Bad bosses, our natural instincts to conserve energy and avoid risk, and the standardizing systems around us create friction we can reduce through better alignment. Same for the mis-a-lion-ments: not knowing what you are, chasing food you can’t catch, living in the wrong latitude, hunting with vermin, and YOLO-ing. Then there are volcanoes, earthquakes, and mosquitoes that create friction beyond our control. All eat away at our ~60 million calories that could otherwise have generated something valuable. This makes life a tougher alignment problem than The Incredible Machine.

You can choose to burn your calories on little more than your metabolism to watch others play games on your screens. You can settle for some good enough level of friction and grind away. Or you can play life’s unrealistically difficult version of The Incredible Machine.

I choose to play and recommend others do, too. I hope we’re aligned.

Meeting adjourned,

Chris

Share

“Replaced without difficulty”

Those three words found their ikigai in my brain. They capture what I’m working against: anyone wasting their potential in a role where they can be replaced without difficulty.

Replaceable doesn’t mean worthless, but it does mean they’re shoving themselves into a box rather than sharpening their edges to make contributions they’re built for.

I’m working toward the opposite: helping more and more people figure out how to be impossible to replace, even with great difficulty.

Being Irreplaceable Is the Best

The most obvious and common example of being impossible to replace, even with great difficulty, is family. Most of us, even if we’re identical twins, can’t have our contributions to our families be replaced. We don’t simply fill some boxy role of “brother,” “daughter,” or “mother.” Kim couldn’t replace me with a premium off-the-shelf new “dad-husband” like she could her web engineer, accountant, or family doctor. I may not be the world’s best dad-husband, but my way of doing it is one-of-a-kind.

Being impossible to replace, even with great difficulty, gives meaning to what you do.

This suggests a new way of understanding the results of the nearly-century-long Harvard Study of Adult Development, which found that the single most important contributor to a happy, healthy life is relationships. Maybe what makes relationships so important is our irreplaceable role in them.

Not to stick my nose up at the Harvard Study, but as much as I enjoy time with my family and friends, I don’t only want to spend my life bestowing my one-of-a-kind-ness upon them. A happy, healthy life isn’t good enough. I’m shooting for the GOAT (greatest of all timelines) life. So, I need other roles where my contribution similarly can’t be replaced, even with great difficulty. Maybe, ideally, roles I could actually earn the title of best (and only) in the world.

Are You Really That Special?

Ask yourself:

If you were to take an indefinite sabbatical today, with how much difficulty would your contribution be replaced?

Then:

How could you change the way you contribute to make it more and more difficult to be replaced?

Being impossible to replace because you hoarded information, documented nothing, and kept the only password in your head doesn’t count. Being a human bottleneck is an anti-contribution.

Here’s a harder self-audit I dreamed up with years ago, after reading Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter then listening to Lisa Bodell’s “kill the company” exercise on an Adam Grant podcast:

Imagine another version of you arrived from a parallel dimension and wants to take over your life. How would you change your behavior to convince your spouse, children, boss, friends, and clients to choose you over them? (No killing allowed.)

Irreplaceability Goes Both Ways

Being irreplaceable isn’t squatter’s rights.

If I were a deadbeat dad whose kids loved me only because they didn’t know better, I’d be a sitting duck for a takeover by my alternate-universe self. So even with no You 2.0 breathing down your neck, you gotta keep honing your edge: look for “trifecta” contributions you’d 1) enjoy, 2) be proud to have done, and 3) want to keep doing — even after your alternate-universe self gave up.

And if you’d happily step aside to let your alternate-universe self take over, that’s a sign.

The right irreplaceable role is one you wouldn’t want to replace with anything else, either.

Demis Hassabis, Bryan Stevenson, and Joe Liemandt wouldn’t press the reset button to go back and take on different roles than leading their quests. Same with me and going back in time to try my luck with a different wife and kids. Or abandoning the quest I’m on to reduce conformity waste. No, thanks.

Find the ways to contribute where you can’t be replaced, and that you wouldn’t replace with anything else. Don’t be replaced without difficulty.

Thanks for reading.

Stay spiky,

Chris

Share

Twenty years later, Liemandt has shifted his recruiting target: kids. He wants to enroll a billion of them in his Alpha Schools. He hasn’t changed his strategy, though. Kids, like Navy SEALs and elite programmers, want to do something significant to test what they’re capable of1.

To each their own challenge

Who doesn’t want their own significant challenge?

Sure, it’s nice to read a book on the beach, order pizza, and take a rest day. But those aren’t things you’ll ever feel particularly proud of. I ask all of my clients what their proudest accomplishments are. “Making it through all seven Game of Thrones seasons and two stuffed-crust pizzas in one sitting” has never been an answer. The answer is always something hard and significant.

The most common hard and significant challenge people choose to take on and are proud of is raising kids. On a day-to-day basis, being a parent is unequivocally harder than the alternative: more responsibility, more stress, less money, less freedom. But millions of people choose it and relish the challenge every year2. The ultimate marathon. (Running a marathon is another popular, though less significant, challenge.)

For some, raising kids is the challenge of a lifetime. It consumes them and they’re glad for it, filling their lives and homes with memories they wouldn’t have exchanged for anything else.

For others, including me, raising kids is certainly a challenge, but it’s a subset of another significant challenge.

To each their own challenge. The important part is finding it.

What good is an easy life?

Jerzy Gregorek’s saying comes to mind:

“Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”

It used to resonate. Back in 2023 I included it in my 15th-ranked rule to live by. But now I think the saying is missing a beat.

I agree with “easy choices, hard life.” Easy choices lead to a hard time paying bills, getting along with people, and walking up a long flight of stairs. Those are challenges you don’t want and won’t feel proud of. They don’t test what you’re made of or tell a good story.

“Hard choices, easy life” is the part I’m not on board with anymore.

What’s an “easy life”? Collecting a big paycheck to do nothing difficult? Early retirement?

An easy life only sounds appealing relative to hard unrewarding work.

An easy life doesn’t appeal to Navy SEALs, Trilogy talent, or Alpha students. Or me. We’d rather make hard choices in pursuit of a hard life.

Hard choices, hard life.

Not a masochistic, oof-I’m-glad-that’s-over hard life. That’s just an easy choice wearing a hard hat. I mean choosing challenges that test me and contribute something useful. Choosing uncertainty and the risk of failure because it makes for a better story.

The type of hard life I’m talking about is a quest.

The decision you’d never trade away

Raising a kid becomes a quest the second its umbilical cord is cut.

Joe Liemandt’s Alpha School mission is a quest, too. He is staking his time, energy, reputation and a billion plus of his dollars to reinvent childhood education.

“[T]he best decision ever,” he calls his hard choice. “My job today is so much better than my Trilogy job, not even close.”

Two others who come to mind are Demis Hassabis and Bryan Stevenson.

Hassabis’s quest is to create true general artificial intelligence for the good of humanity. He was a child chess prodigy, but quit to look for a game that mattered. At 17, he turned down an offer of one million pounds to work for a video game company. Demis keeps making hard choices in pursuit of his quest.

Bryan Stevenson’s quest is justice for people crushed by the legal system. A Harvard educated lawyer, his hard work opened up lots of more lucrative, luxurious paths. But he made the hard choice to have a hard life.

Both of these men have books and movies about them, The Infinity Machine for Hassabis. Just Mercy for Stevenson3. They are celebrated for their commitment to their hard, significant challenge - their quests. If you offered them to go back and make the hard choice for an easier life - more money, less uncertainty - they wouldn’t even blink.

The right hard choice is hard now and easy in hindsight.

But what about the Hassabises and Stevensons who we’ll never watch movies or read books about because their quests failed? Uncertainty is the price of admission, so there have to be failures. That’s the bucket I fall in so far.

Luck is part of the equation. Like with any business venture, for any chance of success you need to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right abilities and the right people to support you.

But I’m betting it’s possible to increase your chances.

The hard hard choice

A surefire way to fail is to make the “hard” choice of taking on a quest because it’s popular or impressive. Trying to follow Hassabis’s lead and build an AI startup, for example. Or opening a restaurant. Those are easy hard choices that lead to an unrewarding hard life, for you and for others.

The hard choice that’s more likely to be the right choice is the hard hard choice, a quest that:

• most people disagree with or find uninteresting,

• you believe in on first principles, and

• others couldn’t pull off even if they tried.

This begets the quest question:

What can you build that uses what makes you different to make a difference?

If you’re unusually willing to sacrifice autonomy, interested in childhood development, and fueled by benevolence, raising a pack of kids could be the quest you’re made for.

Parenting doesn’t fully satisfy my soul’s nutritional requirements, so I need another quest to supplement raising my sons. My hard hard choice:

To decode human uniqueness. That means building an ever-improving framework for unraveling what makes a person different and putting it to work to make a difference.

The people I most want to benefit from my work are my two sons, but I aim to make a much more systematic difference. Too many people’s spiky potential is sanded down rather than sharpened. My quest is to reverse that.

It’s a recruiting challenge, really.

Just like Joe Liemandt won talent from Bill Gates, I need to attract talent away from conventional paths, both easy and hard.

Who’s interested in testing what they’re made of by building something only they could build, and that matters enough to be worth the effort?

High uncertainty, major chance of failure, and guaranteed hard work.

That’s my recruiting pitch to you. It requires a hard hard choice. But I believe it easily beats the easy life.

Thanks for reading.

Stay spiky,

Chris

InnateEdge.com

Share

Nick Gray is an unusually extreme example. I came across Nick in 2022. The bewildering variety of his endeavors intrigued me, his energy endeared me, and the lack of coherence puzzled me. He even once offered to buy my wife’s blog, FeedMyFriends.com.

What’s going on beneath the hood?

So I dug into Nick’s public profile – 30 years of personal blogs, dozens of projects, Tweets, podcast appearances, magazine profiles, investments, and more – to decode the pattern underneath.

The Lonely Friend Billionaire

In 2024, the entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson called Nick a “friend billionaire.” From throwing parties, organizing meetups, emceeing events, picking up Twitter friends from the Austin airport, and having a public phone number, lots of people know and like Nick.

Nick connects with people like billionaires make money.

In January 2024, at one in the morning, Nick posted a public call on Twitter. He was looking for a stranger to fly to Tokyo with him on an all-expenses paid blind date:

Four hundred women applied.

The first date happened, he live tweeted it, and it went viral.

No signs of a second date, though.

A few months later, on the My First Million podcast, the hosts asked Nick if he gets lonely.

“Probably,” he replied.

“I don’t exactly know what it would be not to be lonely, but I have a lot of friends.”

The kid who built ways in

Nick grew up an Air Force kid. His family moved between Arizona, California, Texas, and Georgia. He wasn’t part of the popular crowd and was really into computers.

By fourteen, he was making websites for local bands and small companies. By fifteen, he had a hosting business called vs3, priced at $14.95 a month, aimed at “the new web developer setting up a first website.”

He noticed a population blocked from the early web and built a way in for them. Early glimpses of the pattern that would later transform the geeky teenager into a friend billionaire.

At Wake Forest he joined a comedy troupe to learn how not to be shy. He also ran a software project out of his dorm called BuddyGopher, a pre-social media status feed.

After college, Nick came home to Georgia in 2005 to join his parents’ aviation-electronics business, taking on the job of introducing the company’s products to buyers who’d never otherwise have heard of the company.

Then in 2007 his family sent him to New York alone to handle East Coast sales. Arriving in the city knowing next to no one, he wrote, “It frustrated me that a city of millions could make me feel so lonely.”

So he started doing what he’s always done, creating his own ways in.

Becoming the friend billionaire

Nick approached strangers in McCarren Park, at Whole Foods, and at bowling alleys, handed them a business card with contact info, and added them to a monthly “Friends Newsletter.” He threw weeknight parties in his Williamsburg apartment with name tags and a typed itinerary sent out the day before.

By 2009 New York Magazine profiled the 27-year-old’s shindigs. The founder of Tumblr is quoted calling his parties “very culturally significant.”

Then a December 2010 date at The Metropolitan Museum of Art turned into 312 more visits over the next two years and eventually Museum Hack, tours led by stand-up comedians instead of art historians. Activities included scavenger hunts inside the museum. The company grossed over $2 million a year by 2019, when he sold it.

Nick moved to Austin, becoming a connector in the startup scene. In 2022, he published The 2-Hour Cocktail Party, a step-by-step playbook that turns hosting from an intimidating social art into a low-risk protocol including name tags, reminders, icebreakers, no plus-ones, and a strict two-hour window. My wife threw one in Cape Town. They’re great.

Then, Nick kept going with more projects:

• Mixily, an invitation platform he bought from a friend.

• PersonalWebsites.net, to help people put their best foot forward on the internet.

• Patron View, a database that pulls publicly available donor records into one searchable tool for fundraising professionals.

• Professional emceeing, to bring his unconventional connection tactics to conferences.

Nick’s monthly Friends Newsletter grew to over 20,000 subscribers.

He also registered FriendshipRecession.com in 2023, as a platform for research, statistics, and journalism on why adults are struggling to make and keep friends.

Then he posted that one a.m. call to Twitter, lonely and looking for a date in Tokyo.

The same move every time

The broad outline of Nick’s pattern is hard to miss. And it explains a lot: his “friend billionaire” status and financial success, but also his loneliness and restlessness.

The pattern’s there, but it’s never been named, honed, or aimed. So it has run wild. The results are impressive enough to catch my attention. They are also chaotic enough to make me wonder what’s going on.

Nick’s pattern is unusual, sure. But everyone has their own, too, running untamed in the background of their life, resisted and sanded down rather than sharpened.

Here’s my read of Nick’s pattern, five steps, over and over:

1. He notices a system where the way in isn’t obvious.

2. He finds the hidden friction, what’s blocking the first move people would otherwise take.

3. He builds a simple starter formula that makes the first move easy.

4. He animates it with proof, play, story, or specificity so people trust it enough to try.

5. He documents it so others can run the formula, too.

I found this five-step move in something like fifty of Nick's hustles. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Many doors, no building

Let’s call Nick’s move “door opening”.

The cocktail party book opened the door to those scared to host. Museum Hack opened the door for one unforgettable tour of a “boring” museum. BuddyGopher opened the door to your friend’s information AOL concealed from you. Patron View opened the door between donors and fundraisers.

All door-opening formulas. Dozens of them across thirty years and many different domains, but following the same five steps.

Nick has spent thirty years opening one door, then the next, then the next.

• The cocktail party ends at exactly two hours.

• The museum tours are of one museum, one time.

• The Tokyo blind date was one date.

• The Friends Newsletter is a one-way broadcast to introduce neat ideas to twenty thousand people.

This has opened up a breadth of connections that earned Nick the title of friend billionaire. But it also points at a lack of depth that leads to the loneliness Nick admitted in 2024, and multiple times prior.

What if he aimed at one target?

Nick made a breakthrough in 2025.

He met Lauren at Barton Springs Pool in Austin. He proposed to her at Big Sur a few months later. By the end of the year, they were married. Depth over breadth.

What if Nick made the same depth-over-breadth move with his pattern that he just made with Lauren?

Imagine all his door-opening energy aimed at one building: the fortress of friendship.

He could identify and open one barrier to friendship after another. Formulas for 1-on-1 time with someone you met at a 2-hour cocktail party, moving to a new city, running book clubs, you name it. Every door-opener would make friendship more accessible.

Nick could take a page from Atul Gawande.

Gawande was a practicing surgeon who started writing about one problem he felt compelled to act against: medicine knows what good care looks like but keeps failing to deliver it. He published successful books about it and could have stopped there.

Instead he built Ariadne Labs to take aim at that single problem by developing practical systems to solve it: checklists, conversation guides, and implementation programs.

Nick is already two-thirds of the way there. He’s a practitioner, with thirty years of hosting and connecting under his belt. And he has written about it — the cocktail party book, the blog, the newsletter, FriendshipRecession.com. What Nick hasn’t built yet is the lab, his version of Ariadne: one sustained effort that points all his door-opening at a single problem and keeps shipping new formulas into it.

The “friend billionaire” could do for friendship what Gawande did for care, and contribute to turning the friendship recession into a friendship boom.

There’s a coincidence that makes me think it’s meant to be. When Nick first walked up to Lauren at Barton Springs, she was reading a book. That book? Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande.

What’s your pattern?

All the above facts on Nick are true, but the interpretation is entirely mine. I’ve never met Nick and he never asked me to do this.

But I can’t help it. It’s my own pattern: I notice outliers whose surface explanations feel wrong, then dig in to figure out a structure that fits better.

We all run our own pattern that we can’t switch off. Left to its own devices, it runs us, just as Nick’s has opened a thousand scattered doors over thirty years. But if we name and aim our pattern, our effort and energy start compounding.

What might your pattern be, and what could it contribute if you finally aimed it?

Thanks for reading.

Stay spiky,

Chris

InnateEdge.com

Share

I did plyometrics, mobility, and strength training a couple of times a week. Three months later, I could barely dunk a tennis ball.

So I gave up and wrote a post on the lesson I learned the hard way (because I failed to learn it from Atomic Habits): “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

My takeaway at the time: a goal is some destination you hope to get to, and a system is the vehicle that gets you there.

But I don’t think that’s right anymore. I was too deep in the system to see what I was missing.

Not just me, either. The same goes for just about all personal- and business-development content. It’s too deep in the system to question the system itself, which is why we keep coming back for more.

Sure, setting up better systems beats pumping motivational music into your brain and charging HAM at a goal like Leeroy Jenkins. But no level of perfectly set-up practices, feedback loops, and targets can get me dunking like Wembanyama, writing like James Clear, or minting money like Alex Hormozi.

Our goals are constrained by the structural limits of our biological systems, physical and cognitive. Put more bluntly, your system is not designed to achieve most of the goals you borrowed from other people. Those goals are mimetic, derived from what others desire. But your system has its own desires.

What might your system’s desires be?

Cyberneticians still quote Stafford Beer’s answer from 1979:

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Watch What Your System Does

Our personal, biological systems are made of bones, blood, and neurons. The purpose of this system is not whatever you’re manifesting, bolding and highlighting in your Moleskine, tattooing on your forearm, or agreeing with your life coach. The purpose of your system is what it does.

Fight it, resist it, or even try to escape it as much as you want. Your biological system will keep doing what it does. All your effort accomplishes is generate friction.

So resign and align.

That starts with understanding what it is your system does, even when you wish it didn’t.

If you say you want your own business but keep polishing ideas instead of selling products, maybe your system doesn’t think your ideas are as hot as you do, starting with the idea of being an entrepreneur.

If you say you want to be bold but keep sanding off every sharp edge, maybe your system’s edge has more to do with adapting or reconciling.

If you say you want focus but keep collecting books and podcasts, maybe your system doesn’t buy into your chosen focus or wants to focus on being a researcher instead.

In the past I’ve referred to this as studying your inner species, the intuitive animal that our rational riders keep trying to tame when we should be learning to harness it. I’ve also offered the more mechanistic lens of look at it as reverse-engineering your engine that runs a specific pattern on a specific blend of fuel for a specific purpose.

Whatever frame you choose, the upshot is the same:

To understand your system’s purpose, audit your past for patterns your system keeps repeating.

I don’t mean bad habits like overthinking, behaving like a jerk, or doomscrolling. Those are surface symptoms of a misaligned system. Understand what misalignments caused your system to act out that way. Stop fighting those symptoms. Find the pattern. Then build around it until the system winning also means you winning.

Quit Wasting Effort on Dinky Levers

In Thinking in Systems, the book on systems from 2008, Donella Meadows gives us a framework for intervening in a system to align its purpose with yours:

The hierarchy of leverage points for intervening in a system.

The lower on this hierarchy, the weaker the leverage—and therefore the bigger the waste of effort it is for us to work on when the higher levers aren’t aligned.

At the lowest leverage level of Meadows’ hierarchy are the ways we’re taught to push toward what we want: targets, practices, and energy/money/time reserves.

Next up from the bottom are the more “advanced” approaches: feedback loops, personal dashboards, incentives and constraints.

Then there’s self-organization: the system’s ability to redesign itself. This is where identity, habits, environment, and “growth mindset” belong. That’s where I’ve typically stopped with my own pursuit of what I want.

But this disregards the three most powerful levers in Meadows’ hierarchy.

Start With the Strongest Levers Instead

Meadows’ three top leverage points are about aligning with your system, so the lower levers support your cause rather than create friction.

The second strongest lever is paradigms. This is the story you want to align with your system on. Feed your system nonsense like “I can be anything I put my mind to,” and it won’t bite. It’ll keep doing what it does. So I believe the most obvious paradigm to work under is this:

Life is a system alignment challenge.

One thing I know for sure: My system won’t disagree with me on this. It’s the equivalent of “Happy wife, happy life,” but with my system in Kim’s place.

This alignment story allows my system to get what it wants and do what it does. My job is to understand it, then align surrounding systems – where I live, who I spend time with, what I decide to do – within those constraints.

This brings in number three of Meadows’ top levers: Goals. Not numbers and targets, which are the weakest levers, but what the system counts as “winning.” This challenges Clear’s line from Atomic Habits:

You fall to the level of your system, which rises to the level of its goals.

Not your stated goals. The goals revealed by what the system keeps doing. Work hard toward someone else’s definition of winning and you just become better at losing their game.

Bringing these leverage points of paradigms and goals together, here is the story I’m trying to align with my system on:

I want to enjoy mastering my own game to be as useful as possible alongside others who are doing the same.

• Enjoyment comes from minimizing friction with my system.

• Mastering my own game means not getting sucked into someone else’s.

• Being useful means the game can’t just be privately satisfying. It has to contribute to causes I care about.

• Alongside others is because I’ll have more enjoyment and impact that way. Like you maybe?

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I can rewire more than I think. Maybe alignment is just endless, dissatisfied optimization in disguise. Maybe there’s some system-transcending spiritual level I can’t understand.

Please challenge me if you think so. I’m not sure I agree with my story, either.

Four years ago, I thought “systems beat goals.” Four years from now, I bet I’ll write about how mistaken I was here. That’s the top of Meadows’ hierarchy anyway: the ability to evolve the paradigm.

That’s where it starts.

Stay spiky,

Chris

Share

PS - Here’s Meadows’ leverage point hierarchy, from most to least powerful, applied to playing your own game by resigning and aligning:

1. Transcending Paradigms — “staying open” — remembering your story about your own game is a hypothesis, and updating it as you learn more about yourself and the world around you.

2. Paradigm — “the story underneath it all” — “I want what they want” keeps you playing their games. “My job is to find and play my own game” turns you toward yours.

3. Goals — “what ‘winning’ means to you” — “look impressive and beat them,” or “get great at my game and be useful.”

4. Self-Organization — “rebuilding as you learn” — Growing and adapting in your own direction, not toward someone else’s idea of success.

5. Rules — “your yeses and noes” — say yes to work that fits you, no to stuff you’re only okay at.

6. Information Flows — “the feedback you listen to” — likes and numbers from other people, or the quieter signal of what actually leaves you useful and alive.

7. Reinforcing Feedback Loops — “snowballs” — your game gets more fun the better you get, so you do more of it. The wrong game snowballs the other way: more slog, less joy.

8. Balancing Feedback Loops — “what pulls you back to normal” — the comfort that talks you out of the hard work, the nerves that hit when you put your real work out there.

9. Delays — “the wait” — how long before your work pays off. Quit too early and you miss it. Cling to the wrong game too long and you waste years.

10. Stock-and-Flow Structure — “how your days are set up” — does a normal week build skill in your game, or burn you out on stuff other people are better suited for?

11. Buffers — “your cushions” — savings, energy, the goodwill of people who like you. Spend them on the wrong game and you’ll burn through them. Find a fitting game, and they accumulate.

12. Numbers / Parameters — “the dials” (weakest) — how hard you push: hours, targets, output. Push harder at the wrong game and you just lose faster.

But then I dug deeper to find that the founder, Milly Tamati, promotes the idea that no shape can fit you. Her niche is being strongly anti-niche. Apparently generalists contain too many multitudes to fit into any label…except “generalist”.

This annoys me.

So when I had a chat with Taylor Morrison, a member of the Generalist community who prefers to call herself a “career portfolioist,” I tried my darndest to find a polite way to ask, “Aren’t broad labels like generalist / career portfolioist copouts for not making hard trade-offs to find your unique fit?”

Turns out Taylor was the right person to ask, as one item in her career portfolio is a PhD dissertation on a related topic. She’s using social identity theory of leadership to explore how a label like “generalist” can influence your career.

Embracing the identity of “generalist” gives a sense of belonging to those who feel left out for failing to fit into the specialist mold. “I’m not a semi-dissatisfied marketer/salesperson/programmer/dentist. I’m not alone either. I’m a generalist!”

Adopting this identity then shifts your behavior. “Generalists act this way, so I do, too!”

This reminded me of something else that irks me: Myers-Briggs. The unscientific typology concocted by a mother and daughter caught on because people love labeling themselves. See also: astrology, enneagram, etc.

But a client of mine persuaded me that even the most scientifically unfounded label beats no label at all. Knowing someone’s an INTJ, an 8 with a 3 wing, a Taurus, a generalist, gives you a huge head start toward understanding them (if you speak those labels’ lingo). And more power to anyone who feels less misfitting and more belonging under those identities. Each of these labels gives you some footing to explain and guide your behavior.

But if you don’t understand what compelled you to embrace those identities in the first place, each acts like a horse tied to your carriage, pulling you in its own direction.

Curate Your Identity Closet with Care

Better yet, each label is a different outfit. Some make you look attractive to others, like Startup CEO or straight-A student, or Swiftie. So you wear them even though they chafe.

Other funky new identities, like generalist, fit better than traditional outfits you’ve tried on before. But because of their novelty you might feel silly in them. So it helps to see tens of thousands of others doffing the same.

Some excessively independent-minded folk, like me, resist identities. You can’t put me in a box! I contain multitudes!

Maybe I identify as an identity nudist?

The problem with identity nudism is at least three-fold:

• You’re making it impossible for people who meet you to understand you.

• You’re letting subconscious identities influence your behavior.

• You’re rejecting the upsides of identity, like a sense of belonging and behavior change.

So I think it’s best to practice identity curation.

One highly effective approach: act like a rebellious teenager trying on a whole bunch of crazy identities to gauge your own and others’ reactions. Narrow in on what feels best for you while benefiting others.

A more pragmatic approach: use the clues from your life experiences to better understand the spiky blob that you’re trying to fit identities over. That’s where labels like INTJ, type 8 with 3 wings, Taurus, and generalist can help. Each gives you a peek from a different angle at your unique, spiky spine.

Bring enough of these lenses together and your core shape gets clearer. Then labels stop leading you astray. Fashionable identities that don’t fit lose their appeal. And you can custom tailor baggy ones like “generalist” to your liking.

Give your core an identity of its own. Then keep collecting lenses on it. Hypothesize, test, update, repeat. “Self-concept clarity,” psychologists call it. This birthday suit of an identity won’t help you find belonging with other people, but I bet it helps you find belonging with your past and future selves.

Maybe being the type of person who collects lenses and curates identities is an identity in its own right?

The name I’ve embraced is Fugawi. It comes from an old Sopranos joke about the nomadic tribe that wanders around going “where the fug are we?”

Too many of us default into the Sposta camp. Spostas force themselves to fit into identities based on external expectations of what they’re supposed to do. Fugawi work the other way. Fugawi select their fits from the inside out, trusting it as the better way to a truly impressive life.

Fugawi may not be the best name, but as Taylor convinced me, a working identity is better than nothing. I’ll wear it. Maybe even print a sticker for my computer. But I wouldn’t mind some company. So whether you’re a generalist, specialist, portfolio-careerist, INTJ, Taurus, or Type 3, I invite you to try Fugawi on underneath whatever other labels you choose. See how it feels.

Thanks for reading.

Stay spiky,

Chris

Share

I’ve been following Tim Ferriss’s work, listening to his voice, and even keeping tabs on his love life for… well… longer than I’ve been keeping track of my life, which I started in 2015 thanks to his podcast. A significant chunk of my pretty-awesome lifestyle has Ferriss’s DNA.

But when I listen to Ferriss now, I sometimes wonder whether the master shares his parasocial protege’s enthusiasm. Ferriss’s recent essay, The Self-Help Trap, supports my suspicion. He shares the suboptimal consequences of his obsessive optimization. And in a March podcast with Jim Collins, he opened up about being in a fog about his next move:

• What should he do with an 850-page manuscript called The No Book?

• How to keep his podcast ahead of the saturating wave?

• What should Tim 3.0 or 4.0 even look like?

Then Collins asked Ferriss about his “encodings,” his innate strengths. For a guy who’s spent a Lebron-esque fortune of time and money on therapists, shamans, and coaches, I was surprised by how scattered his answers were.

Tim Ferriss, one of the most successful personal-development gurus alive, can’t clearly name the driver of his success?

This sparked the driver of my own work:

Could I decode Tim Ferriss?

Or is the thought as hubristic as a Swiftie thinking they could write songs for Taylor Swift?

Can Public Data See What Ferriss Can’t?

Ferriss’s fog problem is one I’ve felt for over a decade and have been obsessively (Ferriss-ishly?) building systematic ways through.

My objective: help people decode their wiring and make it legible so they stop scattering their energy and start compounding it with confidence.

The process involves collecting data on an individual from every possible lens, finding patterns, and assembling those into a clear and exciting understanding.

In Ferriss’s case, we’ve got lots of data to work with. Not just breadcrumbs, loaves. More than two decades of books, essays, interviews, podcasts, investments, businesses, critiques, even a fantasy world called COCKPUNCH (quite the data point of a name!).

Of course, this is only public data. So we can’t get the same insight as from my typical process of interviews, assessments, and feedback from people who know him off mic. Even so, Ferriss’s prolificness exposes deeper patterns that filtering or editing can’t cover up. Enough to articulate what drives Ferriss’s success better than he has?

After weeks of analysis, here’s my read.

(For more detail, check out the extended report and appendices that follow.)

Many Labels, But Missing a Name

Over the years, Ferriss has tried to fit his “superpowers” into a long list of labels (Appendix A), each of which covers only a fragment of what makes him formidable. For example:

• “Deconstruction” names a technique.

• “Meta-learning” names a domain.

• “Competitiveness” names part of the fuel.

• “Visual acuity” names one perceptual advantage.

• “Novelty-seeking” names the search behavior.

• “Teacher” names the transmission.

Each label is true. None is complete. Ferriss built a whole mythology around this very problem, and the opportunity that solving it presents. In COCKPUNCH, the multimedia fictional world he created, boys go on a pilgrimage to receive the name that reveals what they are because “True power has one wellspring: true names..”

The Collins interview, and many prior data sources, suggest that Ferriss has yet to have found his own true name. He has found fame and fortune, but if there’s any truth to his mythology, he has yet to find his true power.

Forget Nouns, What’s the Verb?

Ferriss’s true-name problem may actually have to do with grammar.

He keeps reaching for nouns: lifestyle designer, optimizer, experimentalist, teacher, Tim 3.0, Tim 4.0. Nouns describe roles, identities, chapters. From the outside, these containers look widely varied. Restless, even. But inside the same move keeps repeating. A driver. An action.

What if Ferriss’s true name is not a noun, but a verb?

My read:

Ferriss’s verb is crack.

As in crack a code. Crack a case. Crack open a black box.

Ferriss’s signature move has four phases:

1. Notice the assumption.

2. See the hidden structure.

3. Test it under pressure.

4. Transmit the result.

First, he notices the assumed rule. Ferriss has described the first phase almost word for word: “If anyone says always, never, should, I pay attention and take note of that... if anything is said in absolutes, I like to stress test.” When it comes to noticing, he has “hypervigilance plus OCD.” Assumptions get under his skin.

Superpower labels he’s given himself like “visual acuity” and “pattern recognition” represent the next phase, seeing the structure. A sketch artist since childhood, he claims he “can probably draw the layout of every restaurant I’ve ever been in.” He has x-ray vision for structure underneath the assumptions he notices.

“Human guinea pig,” “self-experimenter,” deconstruction, competitiveness, and perfectionism are testing under pressure. Ferriss puts skin in the game and pushes hard to test the structures he sees to their limits.

Once the structure has been tested, he transmits it so other people can use it: a book, protocol, question, episode, title, or game. This is where “teacher” and “participatory journalist” fit in, often wrapped in packaging provocative enough to compel people to take a look.

Each phase is powerful in its own right. But the convergence is what makes Ferriss extraordinary.

“Crack” may not be the perfect word. Fine. The name can change. The recurring move doesn’t.

One Move, Many Chapters

Ferriss’s crack pattern shows up all along his many successful life chapters. Appendix B maps 10 of them. Here are a few examples:

• Chinese kickboxing. Ferriss found a rule other fighters were underusing, tested it with his body in the ring, and won on structure.

• BrainQUICKEN and The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss cracked the assumption that a business owner had to be constantly busy, locally bound, and entangled in every operational detail. He turned the crack into a book, a brand, and a new way to design life for people like me.

• The podcast. Each episode lets him enter a new domain, find the expert who has already cracked part of it, and use his questions to surface and transmit the structure to millions.

• Psychedelic philanthropy. Ferriss helped crack the public assumption that psychedelics were too dangerous or fringe for serious science by funding rigorous research and using his platform to make the case visible.

Ferriss has labeled this frequent moving from one chapter to the next as restlessness and novelty-seeking. But that’s the outside perspective. From the inside, it looks like the completion of his four-phased crack.

His crack loses potency without full control of all four phases. His TV show gave him a crackable format but limited control over testing and transmission. COCKPUNCH let him build, test, and transmit a world, but murky real-world assumptions. And The No Book keeps expanding because the assumption to crack doesn’t appear to be sharp enough yet. (See Appendix C for more examples.)

Then there are the costs of an unnamed drive. When the cracking is aimed at book publishing, lifestyle design, fitness, or learning, it works wonders. When it aims at things better off accepted as they are, it wreaks havoc:

• The years of handstand training that ended when his connective tissues cracked instead of the assumptions he was challenging.

• The Self-Help Trap essay’s confession that he’s suffered from pointing the drive at himself, using self-improvement as a substitute for actually living. Ferriss named the trend, “sleepwalking through parts of your life with a hammer looking for nails,” but hasn’t named the hammer.

An unnamed drive is an untamed one. It cracks whatever is in front of it. Giving it a name stops the collateral damage and channels the energy toward building something special.

Cracking Through the Fog

If the name of Ferriss’s verb is crack, the question shifts from “What identity comes next?” to “What is worth cracking now?”

Naming the drive doesn’t clear the fog but does give him a clearer view of how he’s wired to move through it, and in which directions to aim. It reframes the doubts he shared with Jim Collins:

• What to do about the 850-page No Book? → What is the live assumption to crack?

• How to keep his podcast ahead of the saturating wave? → Which conversations crack black boxes nobody else is opening?

• What Tim 3.0 or 4.0 should look like? → How can Ferriss deliberately leverage his crack abilities even more?

The last point is where the upside gets exciting. Ferriss has already evolved from solo cracking in his early book and blog days toward collaborative cracking: podcast guests, research institutions, Elan Lee on COYOTE. What would happen if he cracked cracking itself? If he stress tested the structure of his own ability thoroughly enough to teach it, transmit it, and scale it beyond himself?

That is the value of, if not a true name, a more accurate one. It organizes and orients a powerful intrinsic drive. Maybe, as Ferriss wrote in COCKPUNCH, it releases more of one’s true power.

From Hypothesis to True Power

Ferriss’s public record gives us enough to form a serious hypothesis, but not enough to actually harness his true power. The real Innate Edge process would:

• Collect first-person and third-person lenses: assessments, deep-dive interviews, work history, and feedback from people who have seen him in action.

• Stress-test the full throughline. Is the name of the verb really crack? That’s the “how.” We’d also find the violation (the why) that sparks this drive and the vision (for what) that directs it. Together, these create a focused, guiding story to build on.

• Position and put into action. How do we package this self-understanding in Obviously Awesome positioning that the world understands and wants? Then what are the real world stepping stones to test this, collect feedback, and iterate?

I believe this work would set him down a path through the fog with more focus, and confidence, and compounding results.

I also don’t believe he’ll read this.

But you’re reading.

If you’re in a Ferriss-ian fog of uncertainty and feel you’ve got the pieces but they’re not snapping together, try my X-Ray. It has nine questions and takes about 15 to 20 minutes. I’ll personally analyze your answers and send you a report showing where your self-perception may be missing a deeper pattern.

Thanks for reading.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

Full Decode File

Extended Tim Ferriss Decode with Appendices.

It includes the extended analysis, chapter mapping, pattern diagnostic, appendices, and source notes.

Full Ferriss Decode Report

97.4KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Share

Breakdancing boys, Klaudia, Hussar Grill meals, Saunders sunsets, chameleon hunting, cheetah petting, ice cream taste testing, lots of biking, hiking, and running around.

To quote the chorus of our new banger, Cape Town’s “so damn far, so damn good.” And there’s too damn much to squeeze in. I tried my best.

Pop Goes the Memories

I became a rap video producer in 2017, when my brother, our partners, and I surprised my mom with The Khop Kun Krap Birthday Rap:

It was just meant to be a fun(ny) gift and a project to keep us busy between cocktails, curry, and coconut beach bocce competitions. Oh, and an outlet for my repressed rapper fantasies.But when I watch the video now, nine years later, I get more.

A picture’s worth a thousand words, so 30 frames per second for three minutes packs, lemme see, 5.4 million! Watching it is like opening up one of those mattresses that gets delivered in a tiny box.

The tight packaging gets more potent over time. Watch it in 2018? Haha, what a dumb video. Watch it in 2026? Wow, we were so young… oh yeah that market… oh yeah that snorkeling trip… oh yeah that country club… oh yeah… oh yeah. Damn.

I wonder what it’ll feel like to rewatch in 2036.

Packed Punches Beat Bottomless Pits

The packed punch hit extra hard this past October. Maybe it’s having kids, whose development makes the passage of time way more visceral. It was wild to watch my third rap video, Sooke Ones, Part II, of a 2023 family retreat with Kim’s family, and realize how much our boys had changed.

I wished I had more time capsules like this. Of my brother, my cousin, and my “Power Brothers” Southeast Asia adventures in 2008. Of my 2013 worldwide “pretirement” tour. Of our 10-week lockdown in Plettenberg Bay, South Africa. Of our adventures last year through Australia, Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica.

Instead of videos that compress these chapters, I have a bottomless Google Drive that gives me nearly as much dread as nostalgia whenever I decide to wade through its overwhelming piles of photos. Google/Apple/Facebook and my brain try to compress those memories into ad-hoc slideshows. “Chris, here’s a slideshow from 2016!” It’s better than nothing. But it’s not the same.

So my rap video production ramped up. Blachuts to the Roots for the trip to Poland for my dad’s 70th. Buenos Dias, Barcelona for our 34 days there last fall. The Cape Town ’26 vid. And more to come.

Squeeze Those Brain Muscles

Compressing is about more than storing memories. As I try to tell myself whenever I get a crappy gift, it’s the thought that counts.

To squeeze 2.5 months in Cape Town into a 3-minute rap video, you gotta put major effort into thinking about what really matters:

• What were the real highlights of our time that can’t be cut?

• What makes Cape Town so magical that we’ve literally traveled to the other side of the world seven out of the past eight years for more?

• What will my future self want to see?

These are hard questions to answer concisely, let alone correctly. No doubt, I get some wrong. So what? Better to make choices than to make none at all. To compress is to prioritize. Every rep sharpens my perspective. Somewhat paradoxically, compressing also broadens it.

What Else Deserves Your Compression?

Rap videos to record life chapters are just one example of owning your compression.

My work decoding an individual’s wiring and repackaging it into an archetype is another. Similarly impossibly hard, never entirely accurate. But without it, your brain compresses self-perception into identities anyway. Might as well own it.

Writing too. I struggled to compress my thoughts into a portable package you might actually use. This forced me to figure out what I was actually trying to say. What really matters. Like any compression, not perfect, not entirely accurate, but better than the alternative.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

Share

“What is Zac up to?”

Kim and I were in our bedroom. Sandy was napping. Zac was supposed to be, too, or at least resting. But we could hear rummaging, self-narration, and the occasional bang and tear from the living room.

I found him with an elaborate contraption of ropes tied to sticks tied to egg cartons tied to bottles, plus a porcupine quill. “It’s to catch animals,” he demonstrated.

Zac’s constantly up to stuff like this. Hatching plans, begging me to “ask the robot” how far a leopard can jump or which fish lives deepest in the ocean. Every book he wants to read is about animal facts. He asks every Uber driver what their favorite wild animal is and why.

I log all of it under a “Zac quirks” tag in my notes. Partly to never forget, but also to collect clues on what makes him different.

Zac starts kindergarten in September. As I’ve written, I’m worried his spikiness is about to get flattened.

Perfectly Well-Rounded Falls Flat

A hundred kids can score 100% across the board. When they do, you can’t tell any of them apart. That’s the definition of well-rounded: filed down until nothing sticks out. Super solid. Also super flat.

So as much as I’m excited by schools that promise to give my kids a super solid foundation to build something spectacular on, it’s not enough.

I want my kids to get 100% at something nobody else can.

Harvard’s Dean of Admissions, Bill Fitzsimmons, agrees.

“You’re trading in your uniqueness to be like everyone else, in the hope that you can be a little bit better at the thing that everybody else is also trying to be. But if you’re just playing the averages, then, on average, it won’t work.”

Spikes I Wish Someone Had Noticed

When I was a kid, I loved riddles. I memorized facts from the Guinness Book of World Records. The first thing I looked up on dial-up internet was the skylines of every North American city. I never had a tight clique but got along with everyone: weirdos, loners, popular kids. I cruised through math and physics and couldn’t care less about art or English, except I liked writing rhymes.

These were spikes poking through, like the developing wings of an octo-falco-badger-phant. Piece them together and they point somewhere: exploring, pattern-matching, a fascination with outliers.

Nobody bothered. There was no reason to. School’s job was the foundation. And my foundation was filling in with near perfect grades.

But I wish someone had taken note:

Why does Chris not seem to care about playing video games like his friends, and is content to watch them and give tips?

I wish they’d catered the curriculum to me rather than contained me within it:

You seem bored reading about feudal farming in France. But you love pattern-matching and travel. How about researching which places in the world today are most similar to each other?

I wish they’d pushed me to sharpen my edges with real world projects:

You seem to know all these crazy world records. What about collecting Kitsilano High School records for the yearbook?

Instead, school celebrated me for having one of the highest GPAs in my class. They polished my roundedness. So when it came time to choose a university major, I had zero clue. I chose Commerce because it seemed practical and kept the most options open.

I want the opposite for my kids.

I want school to help my kids whittle their options down to those that are impractical to anyone but them.

A Twig Only Grows Once

Push a young twig slightly in a direction and it changes where the whole branch ends up. Try the same push on a developed branch and it barely budges.

Before 25, a kid’s brain is a bunch of twigs, growing fast and wildly malleable. After that, it’s all branches. You can still learn new things, but you can’t catch up to what you could have developed if you’d started earlier.

Take Roger Federer. If he’d never picked up a tennis racket until 20, no amount of practice could have made him one of the greatest ever. Or perfect pitch. Researchers taught 24 children aged 2 to 6 to develop perfect pitch, a trait found in roughly 1 in 10,000 people. All 24 developed it.

The window for perfect pitch closes around 6. Windows for everything close - or become a lot harder to fit through. So the question is which windows you choose to prioritize. Schools prioritize the ones every kid shares. I’m more interested in the ones that make my kids different, and not shoving them into boxes that irrevocably stunt them.

The Windows Are Open

As much as I hope to find a school that will help Zac cultivate what makes him different, I’m not waiting around. I’m watching what Zac gravitates to when nobody’s directing, what he rejects that everyone else seems fine with, and how he reacts every time I expose him to something new.

Same with Sandy. On the Cape Town promenade, he found empty space ten meters from the grown-up breakdancers and let loose. Thirty minutes of non-stop breakdancing. We didn’t encourage him. Strangers came over to cheer him on. He didn’t notice. Zac would have been scanning for our reactions the whole time. Sandy was in his own world, as usual. That’s data too.

What does the data mean? I don’t know yet. But I know their windows are open right now. So I’m paying attention.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

Share

What’s the word for the opposite of hollow? Solid on the inside, empty on the outside. Whatever it is, that’s the word for my professional progress last year.

The successfully dense inside?

I helped my founding Innate Edge clients decode what makes them different.

The empty exterior?

Nobody could figure out how to do anything different with that self-understanding.

So when I surveyed my first fifteen clients, they all came back with the same feedback:

• “it stops a bit short… the world is still organized to converge on conformity.”

• “the toughest part for me is having the discipline to make new realizations a reality”

• “I may know myself better, but not really seeing how I’ve changed.”

A chorus of, “Cool. Now what do I do with it?” They know what makes them different, but don’t know how to package themselves for others to understand, let alone make use of it.

This explains why you haven’t read any inspiring case studies from me. Even worse, I realized, it explains why my own case study hasn’t inspired you.

Nobody Cares to Read Your Manual

If you can’t explain to people why what makes you different matters to you them, they’ll yawn and put you into boxes you don’t want to be in.

In my case, people constantly but inadvertently get on my nerves calling Innate Edge a “coaching program.” Or “kinda like Myers-Briggs.” Or, worst of all, “cool, I do the same thing with my ChatGPT.”

No!

But instead of packaging myself into something easy for you to understand, I’ve been pointing everyone to a 150-page Google Doc with my methodology. I’m basically saying, “Read all this, be very impressed by its intricacy, then figure out for yourself why you need it.” Then I wonder why nobody lines up.

One person who showed up despite my see-through plastic bag packaging was Taylor. After finally wrapping her head around what I actually do, she said, “I almost feel like you help people market themselves.”

Yeah! I do. Except I didn’t. I’d only helped people market themselves to themselves. Now how do I help them market themselves to others?

People Need Positioning, Too

So I pulled up my notes from a book I’d read years ago, enjoyed, and done nothing with, Obviously Awesome by . Her frameworks position products. Could they also position people?

Dunford’s fundamental question: If your product didn’t exist, what would your buyer use instead?

Reapplied to individuals:

If you didn’t exist, what would the people you want to serve turn to instead?

My instinctive answer:

“Nothing, because my Innate Edge methodology is unlike anything ever seen before.”

Dunford would snort. People need contrast to understand. So she’d ask:

• What shelf do you want to be on, i.e., What other products do you stand beside?

• Who desperately needs this and will pay?

• How does your product offer different results?

After a year of decoding myself and fifteen clients, I had what I needed to answer these questions.

So I packaged my 150-page methodology into a positioning report for internal reference and a landing page for the world to see.

Packaging the People

Then I moved on to testing this packaging framework on my willing (and unwilling) clients who I’d decoded but left feeling naked without a package.

• A strategy consultant repackaged as a Value Activator PE firms call when a portfolio company should be performing but isn’t.

• A financial professional repackaged as an Independent Capital Strategist growing companies call after their first bank meeting leaves them realizing they’re in over their head.

• An urban planning expert repackaged as an Urban Risk Strategist whose methodology wins cities millions in federal grants and avoids millions in preventable damage.

And Innate Edge? The unwieldy 150-page methodology became: I decode your wiring and make it legible so you find your fit and build something extraordinary. Product-market fit for individuals.

Make Your Awesomeness Obvious

Soon I won’t have to settle for nebulous stories of internal clarity for my case studies. I’ll share my clients’ packaging: their businesses, websites, LinkedIn pages. It will be obvious what makes them different.

But don’t wait for me. Start with Dunford’s question:

If what you offer to the world didn’t exist, what would the people you’re best equipped to help use instead?

Decode what makes you different. Then package into an offer that, for the right people, is obviously awesome.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

PS - If you’ve got more in you than your current trajectory reflects, want help figuring out your positioning, and feel your situation is especially tricky, reply to this email. I’m looking for some new challenges.

So I pulled out my phone to ask:

How much money has the Spanish government dumped into this thing?

Turns out they’re not dumping dinero. They’re piling profits. Tens of millions of euros a year. The unfinished cathedral is a cash cow. Gaudí’s been dead for a century and his building is paying for itself and then some.

Starting My Own Sagrada

This realization struck me because in 2025 I started laying the groundwork for my own multi-year - hopefully multi-decade - development: the ARC methodology.

My ARC methodology is my Sagrada.

ARC is an interconnected set of frameworks that help people decode their wiring and design a life around it. Just as Gaudí’s cathedral externalizes his faith, aesthetic, and Catalonian pride, ARC is an outward-facing manifestation of my wiring, values, and weirdness.

My Sagrada is over 150 pages now, but still a rough shack with a bunch of annexes. It will never be finished. Even so, it is already my pride and joy.

Everything I learn, I view from the lens of, “How could this improve my Sagrada?” With every client interaction, I collect new ideas to add to it, or feedback to tweak it. Books or brainstorms occasionally give me a new framework to add as an additional wing. It keeps developing.

My Sagrada is so under construction that only just got around to building a landing page facade on Monday. But it is already distinct enough to be useful. That usefulness is bringing in resources to keep building. Those resources make it more useful. So the flywheel is starting to work like the one powering Gaudí’s cathedral, just mine’s much smaller, has no blueprint, and is made of ideas instead of stone.

Not Only in Barcelona

Then I got to thinking about the guinea pigs / beta testers who have already visited my Sagrada and benefited despite the under-construction mess.

Do they have Sagradas in them too?

Ross, for example. Through our work together, we found his archetype: Scoutmaster for Cities. Scouts say “Be Prepared”. Ross says it to cities, designing systems to close the gap between threat, hazard, and preparedness. He’s building a methodology around it. Every project he takes on, even tangentially related ones, adds new detail and nuance to it. That’s Ross’ Sagrada.

Or Paul. You know how boxers have cornermen? That’s Paul, but for entrepreneurs, immigrants, and anyone else brave enough to create within society rather than conform within it. He’s building the infrastructure that gives them what comes easier to conformists: financing, support, a fair shot. His Sagrada grows with every fighter he gets in the corner for.

Sagradas Don’t Have to Be Gaudí

Odds are none of us will build anything as grand as Gaudí.

Let me tell you about Santiago.

Back in 2017, when Kim and I were living in Medellín, our roommates surprised us by taking us to visit Santiago’s house.

It’s called La Casa de las Piedritas, the House of the Little Stones. It started with a single stone Santiago brought back for his wife, shaped like a heart. A token. He decided to bring a new one every day. And he has - for weeks, then months, then years, then decades. Piling one on top of each other until it became a multi-story house like nothing else in the world. Every detail handmade. Every stone a story.

Unlike the Sagrada Familia, Santiago’s house is not surrounded by hordes of tourists and trinket shops. And it’s not making millions. But I could tell from the look on Santiago’s face as he showed us every nook and cranny that he wouldn’t trade his house for anything.

I was just a travel blogger back then. I wrote that Santiago’s house was my favorite attraction in all of Medellín. Now it’s obvious why.

Give It a Decade

Santiago’s house and Gaudí’s cathedral stand out. More than ever these days, when everything else is getting shorter - attention spans, videos, job placements.

Sagradas may not look like much at the beginning. Mine sure doesn’t. Give it a decade, though, and the world can’t help but notice. Give it a lifetime, and you’ll have built something it won’t forget.

When you’re building something aligned with your nature, you don’t need extreme discipline or hustle. You can’t stop. You won’t.

Eventually, others won’t want you to stop either. And no one else can replicate Sagradas you build this way. Because no one else has your wiring, your story, or those (stepping) stones placed in that specific sequence over that many years.

So people will be impressed, even if it’s not for them or their style. The ambitious ones will feel inspired to start. That’s how Sagradas spread: from one cathedral, to a stone house, to a world full of them.

What might your Sagrada be?

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

Share

The point of self-help is that the more you consume, the less you should need. But the opposite tends to happen. You just keep gobbling — more assessments, more frameworks, more optimization. More and more, but the only exciting places it takes you are James Clear book signings and Andrew Huberman live podcast recordings.

But I think I found an escape hatch from the self-help vortex. I call it self-use.¹

Self-help asks: Who am I? What are my strengths? How do I optimize myself?

Self-use asks: What’s my fight? How do I use what I’ve got to fight this?

What pulls you out is finding your violation — a wrong you can’t unsee, something that bothers you at a moral level. Not about you — outside of you. Find it, and the seeking stops. The building starts.

A Moral Flinch

I listened to a podcast recently where the man I’d most want to have lunch with², Patrick O’Shaughnessy, was being interviewed by podcaster David Senra. Patrick is usually the one asking the questions — he hosts Invest Like the Best — so I was extra excited to hear him on the other side.

Patrick talked about spending most of his 20s searching. Thousands of books. Philosophy, religious texts, psychology, personality tests. Deep in the self-help vortex, trying to understand himself.

Then, around 2012, he found a video by a computer scientist named Bret Victor called “Inventing on Principle.” Victor makes the case that everyone has — or can find — a guiding principle: something that when you see it violated, you feel compelled to go correct it.

Victor spent about a decade searching before finding his.

Victor’s violation:

Ideas dying because creators lack immediate connection to what they’re creating.

In his words: “It hurts. It feels like a tragedy. To me, it feels like a moral wrong. It feels like an injustice.” That’s not a preference. Not even a peeve. It’s a violation. He’s built his entire career around closing that gap. Different tools, different mediums, different companies — one fight.

Victor closes with a challenge:

“You can choose to sleepwalk through your life and accept the path that’s been laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don’t have to. If there is something in the world you feel is a wrong, and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle. And you can fight for a cause.”

Obsession, Relocated

Patrick heard that challenge and chose door B. He stopped looking inward and started looking for a cause to fight for. What he found:

Extraordinary potential going unnoticed. Talent that goes undiscovered.

Once he named his violation, his obsession didn’t end. It relocated. From “Who am I?” to “Where is the overlooked potential, and how do I be useful?”

A goal would have pointed him in one direction. His violation pointed him in all of them. Every new person, project, and conversation became a signal: is there overlooked potential here? Can I act on it? It’s taken him in extraordinary directions — investment fund Positive Sum, his podcast Invest Like the Best, and now his media company Colossus — each vehicle different, all fighting the same fight. He tells Senra he no longer finds introspection interesting at all: “I have very little introspection left in my life.”

Self-help became self-use.

My Problem Had a Problem

Same thing happened to me.

Patrick shared Victor’s talk with me back in 2021. I was deep in my own vortex — seeking, writing about, testing every personality framework from CliftonStrengths to “What kind of cat are you?” I’d realized I needed what I was calling a “problem,” so I thought I had it covered. But when I rewatched the talk in 2026 after hearing Patrick discuss it with Senra, I realized I’d been missing a distinction. A problem is something you solve for a client. A violation is something you can’t stop fighting. More visceral.

So I sharpened my problem into a violation — what actually makes me want to fight:

Spikiness being smoothed down by the forces of conformity. Unique wiring — in people, ideas, businesses — getting flattened, overlooked, or left unused because the system is designed to flatten it, not to sharpen it.

I’ve been fighting this violation since I started building ARC this past year. It ozempic’d my appetite for self-help. Even my reading flipped. Personal development books do nothing for me anymore. Instead, I read stories about spikiness fighting conformity. That’s self-use.

Everyone Has One

Patrick, Victor, and I got to our violations through years of unstructured seeking. Part of my self-use is helping others find theirs faster.

What’s surprised me across the 15+ people I’ve done this with: when you collect data from different lenses — someone’s stories, their psychometrics, what they’re most proud of, what bothers them, their values, their pet peeves — a common violation stands out like the unifying theme of a book of short stories.

Some examples:

Inherited expectations channeling potential into battles it was never designed to fight.

Carelessness and mediocrity degrading the spaces, experiences, and things I have to live with.

Brave risk-takers punished by systems designed for the status quo.

Inertia keeping systems stuck even when the stagnation is killing them.

People falling through the cracks because of disorganized execution on good intentions.

Industrial conditioning treating humans like machine parts rather than ecosystems.

Different people. Different fights. Same pattern.

Self-Help Vortex → Self-Use Flywheel

Victor found his violation. He shared it in a talk. Patrick watched that talk, found his own, and built a career around it. Patrick shared it with me, and I found mine. Now I’m helping others find theirs.

Fights are contagious. When someone’s building from their violation, you can feel it. And it makes you want to find yours.

Thanks for reading!

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

Share

¹ I’m aware this idea has a name: transcendence. Scott Barry Kaufman’s book of the same title is excellent — I wrote about it back in 2020, when I still had no idea how to escape the self-help vortex myself. ↩

² Who’s yours? My wife asked me this a couple of years ago, before I’d found my violation. I had no idea. I think having an answer is a good sign you know what you’re after — and what you’re fighting for. ↩

Just look at the depressing comments on Adam Mastroianni’s article on embracing your craziness. Talented people arguing themselves into tepid resignation:

“Young people are constantly being told to find their passion etc etc but when you are 40 and can’t afford to buy a house you start caring less about how fulfilled you are at work and more about how much you can earn...”

“Depending on something you enjoy doing to pay your bills is a great way to learn to hate that very thing, which is a shame.”

“Work which needs to be done is not unique and will never be… Instead, one should find a work which he can do well, and embrace craziness in his personal life.”

“There’s fun, there’s rewarding, and then there’s ‘worthy of monetary reward’. Guess which one doesn’t fit.”

They’re wrong.

Because nobody teaches them the alternative.

The Problem: We Default to One or the Other

Take this comment from Russ Wilde, who got more 109 likes for his two cents:

“Many people, me included, will eventually have to choose between what they enjoy and what they are good at. I enjoy making music and can spend hours playing guitar. After 40 years of practice, I am almost good enough to play in the worst imaginable bar cover band. However, I am a fairly good professor and academic administrator, but it’s been a daily grind. My aptitudes and interests have never been a great match.”

These are the dirty mechanics of pure pragmatism: shove your engine into a “safe” career, ignore what actually fires your cylinders, grind it out. It pays the bills but drains your soul reservoir dry. To compensate, you need more extrinsic fuel—more money, more status, more validation, more vacation days to recover from the soul-drain.

Many pure pragmatists coast like this indefinitely. Not miserable enough to change, not fulfilled enough to thrive.

Then there’s the opposite trap: pure passion.

Find a noun that looks appealing—musician, artist, travel writer—shove your engine into it, run on intrinsic fuel alone. It feels fantastic at first. But the nouns people are passionate about are either too competitive or too unmonetizable to sustain. You burn through savings, patience, goodwill. Eventually you burn out—or drift into nihilism.

Both paths, pure pragmatism and pure passion, are wasteful. There’s a better way.

Verb vs Noun

Your verb is what your innate engine does when it’s running right—the core activity that creates both your competencies and your satisfactions.

Your noun is the vehicle you put that engine inside. It’s what other people see and call you. It’s your job title.

Most people never identify their verb. They just chase nouns—entrepreneur, writer, lawyer—and wonder why none of them fit quite right.

Russ the guitar-playing professor isn’t stuck choosing between incompatible nouns. He just hasn’t identified his verb.

Look Under the Hood

Let’s reverse-engineer the tiny bit of evidence we have on Russ’ engine:

Guitar: What if 40 years of enjoying guitar without attaining professional-level skill isn’t failure but a feature? He continues playing without caring about mastery because it’s a space to explore harmonic relationships, try new patterns, discover possibilities. The satisfaction—the source of fuel—is in the exploration itself.

Teaching? When it works, also architecting discovery spaces—designing how students encounter material, creating conditions for understanding to emerge.

Administration? Architecting bureaucratic compliance. Same design skills, soul-depleting application.

Russ’ verb: Architecting Discovery Spaces.
Russ’ fuel: Emergence and exploration.

Monetize the Verb

So how does Russ go from spewing dirty fumes in pursuit of pragmatism to pragmatic passion?

To monetize anything, you need two things multiplied together: Uniqueness and Usefulness. Being useful alone isn’t enough—water is useful but worthless when it’s everywhere. Being unique alone isn’t enough—you could be the world’s best at something nobody needs. You need both.

Monetize the verb.

Value = Uniqueness x Usefulness.

• For Uniqueness → find the verb that his engine is innately wired for.

• For Usefulness → put it in a noun that people need.

For Russ to monetize his verb, he’d ask: “Where does an engine that architects open-ended exploratory processes create unique value worth paying for?”

Maybe designing learning experiences for companies. Maybe creating exploratory tools for researchers. Maybe something that doesn’t exist yet because everyone’s too busy cramming themselves into conventional nouns and fuming through life.

But if we stop thinking in nouns and start understanding our verbs, we can design incredible, sustainable, and uniquely useful nouns.

Perpetual Pragmatic Passion

When you monetize your verb:

• Your engine runs the verb it’s designed to run

• Your work connects to real problems people will pay to solve

• Solving those problems refills you with satisfaction and money

• The system gleams instead of grinds

Not balance. Integration.
Not compromise. Compounding.

My Bet

My verb? Reverse-engineering people’s operating systems and helping them position themselves into unique and useful nouns.

This ARC work aligns with my wiring. My engine runs clean. But is it commercially viable, or just a passion project I can afford to pursue for now?

Based on the trickle of extrinsic fuel I’ve attracted, yes. But the trickle is steadily increasing in volume. I’m learning to run my engine more effectively and connect it to real contribution. And I’m still building the vehicle—my noun, Human Uniqueness Engineering. So I’m very optimistic.

So why share this “monetize the verb” framework before I’ve proven it myself?

If I call it now, people who see the logic don’t have to waste years churning in misalignment while waiting for me to prove it. You can start looking under your own hood now.

And in a couple years, this either compounds into a real business or it doesn’t. Either way, I’ve called my shot - so you’ll know if verb engineering actually works, not just whether I got lucky.

Your Turn

Start looking under your own hood. Quit looking around at others for nouns you’re qualified for or passionate about.

Reverse-engineer the verb your engine is actually built to run. Build around that for pragmatic passion. The world needs a lot more of it.

Thanks for reading.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

Share

The problem with following your passion isn’t the passion part. It’s the package.

You’re working within a generic label (writer, coach, consultant) without understanding the unique, underlying source that makes you passionate about it in the first place.

I just realized I’ve been doing this for a decade. Here’s what I finally figured out, delivered in 14 slides instead of my usual 2,000-word posts.

The format is part of the experiment. Let’s see if it proves or disproves my hypothesis.

Thanks for reading.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

Share

“What would my 95-year-old self think?” isn’t meant to be just a thought experiment.

Your 95-year-old self wouldn’t exactly be ecstatic to see you “thought-experimenting” or “journaling” or “meditating” about them. “Oh great, pretending to care about me, again. Like my child popping by the retirement home while scrolling their phone the whole time.”

The frame I use: my 95-year-old self is the Chairman. He sees the big picture of my life, while I’m just a lowly VP reporting an update from operations. I can’t BS him, because he’s way wiser than me. And I desperately want to impress him. No, I NEED to impress him.

So I went beyond thinking about what my 95-year-old self would want to know. I wrote him a report. What I built, what failed, what that means.

Already write annual reports for your business? Those don’t count. Shareholder priorities and 95-year-old-self priorities don’t fully overlap. You decide whose priorities are more important.

Here’s mine. Year 1 of ARC—my methodology for helping people stop wasting potential on conforming paths and start compounding advantage by building around their spikiness.

The external numbers look rough: $5,456 revenue, 410 lost subscribers. But compressing the year into one page forced clarity I didn’t have before—like that four of my five failures shared the same root: inability to externally communicate what ARC produces. The methodology evolved. So did my understanding of my own wiring. My ability to translate it outward lagged behind.

I invite you to read this as a board observer. Chime in with advice, criticism, or input.

And consider:

What would YOUR report to your Chairman say?

Not the LinkedIn version—the one you’d be nervous to show a friend acting as a proxy for your 95-year-old self.

Speaking of which, if you actually make one, I’d like to see it. If you don’t, I’d like to hear what your 95-year-old self thinks.

Thanks for reading.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

Share

What would your 95-year-old self pay you $95,000 to do next year?

What’s something you’re convincing yourself you don’t need to do, but which could pay major dividends in the long run? Better yet, something that’s not even on your radar.

Move to a new city? Quit your job and try something different? Hire a coach? Go back to school? Get a nose job?

That’s the question I’m going to work on for my year-end review. Because I’ve learned that year-long plans, goals, and resolutions never make it that far. So instead, I just want to start 2026 with a bang: something that shakes things up, challenges my self-perceived limits, and earns me new information.

Even if it doesn’t work out, I’ll learn something about myself. And that data helps me make better decisions going forward.

The Corporate Ladder of Your Life

To figure out what my 95-year-old self would bribe me to do, I’ll use data from my system. I log my life, review it weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly, and plan accordingly. It’s basically a corporate reporting structure where Daily Chris reports up to Weekly Chris, who reports to Monthly Chris, all the way up to 95-Year-Old Chris.

Why? Because my brain is a spin doctor.

Last year, I fed all my logs into AI and asked it to analyze my patterns. One of the findings: “Stop wasting time writing blog posts and newsletters that get minimal engagement.”

It stings because it’s true. I’d been telling myself I was “building an audience” when really I was avoiding the scarier work of actually testing my frameworks with real people. My memory wanted to give me credit for effort. My logs showed I was hiding under a cozy cognitive security blanket.

Without the system, I’d still be congratulating myself for being “productive.” With it, I caught myself stalling and could actually fix it.

That’s why my system is priceless to me. You couldn’t pay me to give it up.

Which made me wonder:

I suspect many people’s 95-year-old selves would pay them $95,000 to install their own systems.

Coincidentally, Shaan Puri posted this in his latest newsletter on December 26th:

Shaan’s objectively successful. From what I can tell, he has similar priorities to me. He wants a system. He can’t make it stick.

Why?

If someone smart, self-aware, and motivated like Shaan can’t implement something he intellectually agrees would help him, then something deeper is going on. I wish I knew what it is.

My 100% Failure

One of the most unfortunate realities I’m going to have to face when reviewing 2025:

I had a 100% failure rate getting anyone else to implement their own system.

Early this year, I recruited five beta testers for my new ARC program. I promised to act as an agent on behalf of their 95-year-old selves to help them implement operating systems for their unique wiring so they’d stop scattering effort and start compounding it down deeply rewarding paths.

The “Innate Edge” mapping—where I help people identify their superpowers—resonated with everyone. They loved it. Success!

The systems part?

It started well. Everyone logged their lives. Every week, we’d meet one-on-one to discuss: What’s going well? What could be better? What patterns are emerging? How can you act differently?

Lots of insights. Combined with their Innate Edge clarity, everyone was ready to blast off.

Then things went sideways. Everyone loved discovering what made them unique. They hated the daily work of leveraging it.

Within a month or two, everyone’s systems were gathering dust (except one person who already had a system before we started). Their rationalizations:

• “I’m busy right now.”

• “I’ve been journaling from time to time.”

• “My life’s going so well, I don’t need it.”

Reactive, not proactive. Everyone reverted back to working in their lives, not on them. Back where they started.

My mission is to become world-class at helping people engineer extraordinary lives… but I can’t even get my own wife to stick with a system. Kim is super capable, has seen firsthand what this system does for me, and can’t ghost me and my check-ins. If it doesn’t work for her, that’s a data point I can’t rationalize away.

So what’s going on? What am I missing?

The Three Trickiest Disconnects

I put my system into action to diagnose why my system fails for others.

I pulled my data: transcripts of client calls, their psychological profiles, personal reflections, detailed overview of my ARC frameworks. Then I asked my “AI Board of Directors” to help me spot patterns I couldn’t see. I also consulted BJ Fogg, James Clear, and Daniel Kahneman, by way of uploading their books to LLMs.

I—we?—unearthed 14 potential disconnects. Here are the three that seem to be the biggest culprits.

(Full list here if you’re interested.)

1. Discovery vs. Discipline

When I spot a negative pattern in my logs—”Oh, I’m polishing my frameworks again instead of testing them in real life”—I get excited. It’s like finding a bug in code. Now I get to fix it.

Every blindspot I uncover makes my life more effective and energizing. More energy makes things easier. So to me, discipline is downstream of discovery. My system generates energy.

But when one client saw a similar pattern in his logs—another week of saying he’d work on his business but spending Saturday on other chores instead—he didn’t think, “interesting data.” He thought: I’m a fraud.

For me, data strips the emotional noise of remembering and judging. For him, data creates it. A red X on my spreadsheet is a bug to fix. A red X on his spreadsheet is proof he’s defective.

For him, the system wasn’t a discovery tool. It was a discipline tool. A boss in his pocket—his past self giving his present self orders, with the looming pressure of his weekly self’s critical review. The whole process felt like work he had to do instead of a useful tool for making his life feel less like work. It sucked motivation instead of generating it. So he pulled the plug.

2. Credit vs. Critique

At the beginning of August, before I looked back on July 2025, my brain was complaining, “Rough month. Didn’t make enough progress on ARC. Got zero responses to outreach.”

But when I looked at the logs of what actually happened, the story was different: the Parksville trip, the FUKITS workouts I kickstarted, the processes I streamlined, the orcas I saw. So much that I actually wrote to myself, “Whoa, I can’t believe the 1st week of July was the same month.”

Without the system, I would have filed July away as a failure. With it, I realized it was one of the richest months of the year.

Just as much as my system reveals hidden biases I need to correct, it gives me credit for things my memory is dismissing.

My clients experienced the opposite problem. Their brains already told them comforting lies—rationalizing scattered effort as “exploration,” endless research as “preparation.” But then the system exposed their brain’s ego-soothing BS.

Clients didn’t find pleasure in treating their logs as a treasure map in pursuit of suboptimally optimizing their lives. Their systems felt like a constant dissatisfaction generator. Always critiquing. Always needing more optimization. Never good enough.

3. Humility vs. Humiliation

When I look at my logs and see, “Yikes, I spent so much time cold emailing people about ARC and got zero responses,” my reaction is: Chris, you moron. Obviously your emails suck or they think what you’re doing isn’t worth their time. Stop wasting your time, too.

It’s amusing evidence of my naive optimism. I take the “insult” as personally as when my wife tells me my hair looks stupid. She’s objectively right. Why be upset about the truth?

My clients seem to be more sensitive.

One told me explicitly: “It was making me feel worse.” Another said seeing unchecked boxes “creates an even bigger heaviness.” Facing their “failures” strikes them as humiliation rather than humbling feedback.

The system is a mirror. If you don’t like what you’re seeing, the simplest solution is to stop looking.

A Solve-able Problem?

How do I fix these disconnects? Can I? Should I?

I don’t know.

Maybe some people genuinely can’t enjoy working on their lives. Maybe they need extrinsic scaffolding—coaches, peer pressure, stakes, rewards—that I’m not wired to provide. Maybe the curiosity-to-confidence path only works if you already have enough autonomy and patience to experiment.

Likely, I simply suck at installing systems for others.

But do systems simply suck for some people? I’ve tried as hard as I can to come up with a good reason why someone’s 95-year-old self would say, “I’m glad I never had any sort of system. I’m glad I just went with vibes and trusted my gut and hoped for the best.” I’ve yet to find a convincing argument.

I keep coming back to the same analogies. A business wouldn’t run without reporting. An astronaut wouldn’t fly without a dashboard. These comparisons hit home for me. But they clearly don’t convince others. Which means either I’m missing something fundamental about how other people work, or I’m right but explaining it wrong, or life is different from businesses and spaceships in ways I’m not seeing.

Maybe my system works because I’m already wired for it—high conscientiousness, low compassion and neuroticism (so I don’t flinch at bad news), analytical by nature. Maybe trying to export it to people with different wiring is like installing a submarine’s navigation system into a private jet.

But I can’t shake the feeling that everyone’s 95-year-old self would want them to have some version of this. Not my version. Their version. I just don’t know how to help them build it yet.

Without a system, most people hand the steering wheel to their co-pilot I call “Landon”—the evolutionary wiring that wants you safe, comfortable, and conforming. Landon doesn’t care if your life’s extraordinary. Landon wants you to survive. The system is the only thing I’ve found that consistently beats Landon.

But I’ve failed to help others consistently beat their Landons.

What Does Your 95-Year-Old Self Think?

What would your 95-year-old self bribe you $95,000 to do next year?

Not what you already think you want to do. Not what would impress other people. What would the most fulfilled possible version of Future You, the one who’s already lived through all the consequences of your choices, bribe young(-er), naive, biased Present You to start right now?

Maybe it’s building a system. Maybe it’s something you can’t even see yet because you don’t have the data.

I still don’t know why systems work for me but not for most people. But I’m going to keep using mine to figure it out.

Thanks for reading.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

Share

I set out to write a rebuttal to a rebuttal I’m fed up hearing:

“I don’t want to optimize right now.”

But choosing not to optimize for X means you’re optimizing for something else. And you probably don’t know what that something else is. Not optimal, in my books.

Ironically, writing this has not gone optimally.

Which isn’t a bad thing. Actually, that might be the point.

What Are You Actually Optimizing For?

Speaking of optimizing: What’s the point of me writing this?

Why not give Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT the points I want to make and let them whip something up? Or why bother at all? Why not skip the writing and… I dunno, what? Relax? Play more with my kids? Give Kim a massage? Ask her for a massage? Write cold outreach emails to see if I can actually make money from my ARC program so I can splurge on massages?

The question I keep coming back to:

What would my 95-year-old GOAT want me to do?

GOAT means “greatest of all timelines.” If my exact self lived a million parallel lives and we each saw all our other selves’ lives, which one would the largest number of us Chrises say, “Whoa, he killed it”?

Would my 95-year-old GOAT want me to spend a huge chunk of precious solo time drafting, then discarding, then drafting again?

I don’t know.

But I am confident in the fundamental principles of what 95-year-old me wants: The 3 Cs. He wants me to progress with intention toward a life that is congruent (fits my spiky wiring like superhero spandex), coherent (every part working together along the same story, not scattered or even “balanced” whatever that means), and contributing (having impact on things I care about beyond myself).

Figuring out how to accomplish each of those requires one main input: Information.

What is my wiring? What is the world around me? How do I fit the former within the latter?

Information—or clarity—is what I think I’m optimizing for. This is subject to change. In 2021, I thought growth was my Y-axis in life. By 2024 it was energy. Now it’s clarity. I suppose you could say I’m optimizing what I’m optimizing for.

Asking the question is what matters most.

Because not asking, i.e. saying “I don’t want to optimize,” hands the steering wheel to your co-pilot: your evolutionary wiring.

The Shortsighted Co-Pilot

I call my evolutionary wiring Landon. Full name: Landon C. Pymeceus—an anagram for “delusion complacency.”

Landon doesn’t care whether my 95-year-old self feels like he both gave and got the best from life. Landon wants to make it through today with as little friction as possible. Don’t expend unnecessary calories. Reduce stress immediately. Stay with the tribe. Avoid uncertainty. Repeat what didn’t fail miserably yesterday.

So when people irk me by saying “I don’t want to optimize,” Landon jumps into action, thinking: How do we relieve Chris’ stress, ASAP?

One easy option—and Landon loooves easy—is to vent on my newsletter. Teach those autopilot folks a lesson (even though this approach teaches nobody anything). Show them how smart I am (even though this has the opposite effect). Celebrate with beer and ice cream. Then move on to whatever Landon recommends next.

My 95-year-old self appreciates Landon for maintaining my healthier habits and saving me from gambling my life savings on a single stock. But he disagrees with Landon’s instincts.

Validating myself and pushing my ideas onto others cements ignorance. Testing myself and expressing my doubts collects information. Is the latter harder than Landon’s approach? Yes. But, unlike Landon, I’m not optimizing for easy.

If It’s Not Energizing, You’re Doing It Wrong

Not easy doesn’t have to mean unpleasant. That’s another thing that annoys me when people say “I don’t want to optimize.” The underlying assumption is a false dichotomy:

Optimizing for the future = Dissatisfaction with the present.

Nonsense.

Defaulting to delayed gratification is lazy thinking, just as defaulting to immediate gratification is lazy behavior.

Sure, sometimes you need scary, unpleasant challenges that test what you’re capable of. Misogi-style all-day adventures. Experiments like multi-day fasts. Those make good stories. But my 95-year-old self doesn’t want me to exhaust myself chasing the perfect newsletter, morning routine, or eating interval. He wants radically moderate progress—steady, compounding growth through ‘trifecta’ activities I:

1. enjoy in the moment,

2. look forward to beforehand,

3. and look back on proudly.

Writing meets the trifecta criteria. Not lazy dump-my-thoughts-and-be-done writing, though. Challenging thought assembly. How would a devil’s advocate pick this apart? How can I get my ideas past the defenses of my readers’ Landons?

I struggle to write this way. But I enjoy the challenge. And the better I get at it, the better I get at thinking clearly, which feeds everything else.

My Suboptimal Conclusion

Sometimes I overoptimize. This post is almost certainly an example. I’ve rewritten it many times before giving up and going with this meta approach that may or may not resonate with you.

But acknowledging my mistake is information. If I apply it to make better decisions next time, that’s progress.

So what emerged from all this?

Something more nuanced than my original argument that “optimizing is not optional.” The real insight:

It’s not about optimizing well. It’s about optimizing consciously.

Conscious suboptimal optimization means staying at the wheel—collecting information, adjusting course—even when you’re not sure you’re driving well. Landon doesn’t get to steer just because the road is unclear.

After debating the case for “good enough” in my last piece, I find it ironic that I’ve landed here:

Consciously suboptimal optimization is optimal.

Who’s Driving?

I look forward to fine-tuning this suboptimal hypothesis over time. It’ll be a fun challenge. And I’m pretty sure my 95-year-old self will be glad I tried.

What about you?

What are you optimizing for? Are you calling the shots?

Let me know.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

Share

I’d just explained ARC to my cousin, the frameworks I’m building to give people data-driven clarity on their innate edge. She told me it was “really cool” and genuinely meant it. But when I pushed (”If you weren’t my cousin, would you actually pay for it?”), she gave me the truth:

No.

I’ve heard versions of this from dozens of people. Honestly, part of me suspects they’re right.

My cousin has a solid income, strong relationships, engaging work, good health, well-trained dog. She’s not posting happy photos on Instagram then crying herself to sleep. She’s genuinely... fine.

But...

Why settle for fine?

She, like all of us, has untapped potential. Like an engine built for the Autobahn but used for grocery runs. Or Schwarzenegger impressing ladies at the lake before he left Austria. Doing well. Comfortable. But not exploding with the extraordinariness she’s capable of.

Or am I wrong?

I’ve spent most of my adult life attempting the opposite, to explore and exploit my own extraordinariness. That might sound like a recipe for constant dissatisfaction, especially given my lack of external success. But I genuinely believe I’ve enjoyed it, and that I wouldn’t trade it for my cousin’s path.

More critically, I suspect she’d prefer a more ARC-esque approach, too. The upside seems unlimited, the downside minimal. Or am I just intent on dragging contented humans into a game they never asked to play?

I couldn’t resolve this as “cousin Chris” or as “Chris the ARC engineer.” So I did what I do when I can’t resolve something myself:

I ran the case through my AI-simulated “Board of Humanity,” a thought experiment I use to stress-test my thinking from multiple angles.

What follows is the transcript. Maybe you’ll recognize someone in it.

The Board of Humanity Convenes

Case File #4,527,271: The One Who’s Fine

Is “Fine” Enough?

The conference room exists outside of time. Three figures sit around a table made of something that might be mahogany, but looks even more expensive. The coffee is still terrible, though.

A file sits in the center. It’s thick, but not unusually so.

A fourth chair sits empty at the head of the table.

Devil’s Advocate: Before we start, I’ve reviewed this file three times. I don’t understand why we’re here.

CEO of Humanity: We’re here because the file is on the table.

Devil’s Advocate: The file is always on the table. That’s not a reason. This human is doing fine. Career stable. Relationships intact. Health reasonable. They genuinely like most of their life—and I checked, that’s actually true, not the performed version. Why are we wasting a session on someone who isn’t broken?

HR Manager: “Not broken” isn’t a classification we use.

Devil’s Advocate: It should be. We have actual crises to review. Burnouts. Collapses. People livestreaming their nervous breakdowns and turning their divorces into TikToks. But instead we’re discussing someone whose biggest problem is... what? A vague sense they could be doing more? That’s not a crisis. That’s a Tuesday.

CEO of Humanity [glancing at the empty chair]: Is the Chair joining us?

HR Manager: I asked. They declined. Emergency session about AI doomerism, apparently.

Devil’s Advocate [smirking]: See! Even the Chair thinks this file is a waste of time.

HR Manager: They said, and I quote, “I review system failures. Call me when there’s something to adjudicate.”

Devil’s Advocate: I’m liking the Chair more every day.

CEO of Humanity: Fine. We’ll proceed without them. HR, walk us through the file.

HR Manager [opening file]: Subject is mid-career. Consultant. Knowledge work. Reasonably successful by conventional metrics—income in the top quintile, stable relationship, social life adequate. No major trauma. No acute distress. They’d score well on any standard well-being inventory.

Devil’s Advocate: So we’re done here.

HR Manager: They’d score well on hedonic well-being. Comfort, pleasure, absence of pain. But their eudaimonic scores—meaning, growth, purpose—are notably lower. They’re comfortable. They’re not flourishing.

Devil’s Advocate: “Flourishing.” That word always sounds like a wellness retreat trying to upsell me on a juice cleanse.

HR Manager: The research is robust. There’s a measurable difference between “not depressed” and “thriving,” and it predicts long-term outcomes across domains. This human is in the gray zone more often than they realize. Not severely. Just... consistently.

CEO of Humanity: What does their energy pattern look like?

HR Manager: Net positive, technically. They produce more than they consume on most days. But the margin is thin, and most of their effort goes toward maintenance. Keeping the current system running, not building anything that compounds.

Devil’s Advocate: That’s called “having a job and a life.” Most humans operate that way.

CEO of Humanity: Most humans are running at a fraction of their capacity while reporting adequate satisfaction. You’re describing the norm as if it’s a defense.

Devil’s Advocate: Maybe it is. Maybe “more than adequate satisfaction” is the appropriate target for organisms trying to survive in a complicated world. Not everyone needs to be extraordinary.

CEO of Humanity: No one needs to be. The question is whether this particular human—with their particular wiring—is making an informed choice or just drifting.

HR Manager: The file suggests drifting. Seven distinct “I should figure out what I want” moments in three years. Four abandoned attempts to articulate their professional positioning. Two near-pivots that dissolved into “maybe later.” The pattern isn’t instability—it’s productive drift. They’re moving. The direction just changes with whatever current is strongest that month.

Does Clarity Actually Change Anything?

Devil’s Advocate: That’s not drift. That’s adaptation. Flexibility. Responding to circumstances.

CEO of Humanity: It’s responding without a filter. They know what opportunities show up. They don’t know which ones actually fit their wiring versus which ones just seem good in the abstract.

Devil’s Advocate: And you think some process of “self-clarification” would give them that filter?

CEO of Humanity: I think operating without one is expensive. Every hour spent in diffused effort—working hard but unfocused—is an hour that doesn’t compound. They’re strong but scattered. Like a flashlight with the beam spread wide: functional, but it doesn’t cut through anything.

Devil’s Advocate: Poetic. But you’re assuming there’s a tighter beam available. What if they’re already operating near their ceiling?

HR Manager: Then we’d expect to see less rumination. The file shows not infrequent “what am I doing with my life?” thinking, subtle jealous comparisons to others, plus multiple spikes of “this is a waste of my time” in meetings and in front of glowing rectangles. Not enough to qualify as distress—just a persistent background hum they’ve learned to tune out.

CEO of Humanity: That’s not noise. That’s signal. Their system is telling them something doesn’t fit, and they’ve normalized ignoring it.

Devil’s Advocate: Or—and hear me out—it’s just the standard human condition. Everyone wonders if they’re on the right path. It doesn’t mean they’re not.

CEO of Humanity: Everyone wonders, but not everyone is right to dismiss the wondering. For some people, the flicker is just anxiety. For this human, I think it’s accurate information.

Devil’s Advocate: Based on what? Your intuition about their untapped potential?

CEO of Humanity: Based on the gap between their capacity and their deployment. This isn’t someone of modest ability living a modest life. This is someone with genuine horsepower who’s using it to... commute. The engine is fine. The application is the problem. It’s like harnessing a sled dog to run laps on an asphalt track at noon and wondering why it keeps overheating.

Devil’s Advocate [leaning back]: Alright. Let’s say I grant—hypothetically—that there’s a gap. That this human could be operating at some higher level of alignment or energy or whatever we’re calling it. What’s your proposal? That they take a battery of personality tests, start journaling, hire a life coach, maybe go on an Ayahuasca retreat in Peru, get a shiny report telling them they’re a “visionary connector” or whatever, and then... what? Metamorphize?

HR Manager: That’s a fair critique of most approaches. Insight rarely changes behavior on its own. The research on this is humbling—intentions don’t reliably translate to action without structural support.

Devil’s Advocate: So you’re agreeing with me.

HR Manager: I’m agreeing that insight alone is insufficient. But insufficient isn’t useless. A map doesn’t walk the territory for you. It’s still better than wandering without one.

Devil’s Advocate: Unless the map is wrong. Or oversimplified. Or gives them false confidence that they’ve “figured themselves out” when they’ve just acquired new vocabulary for the same confusion.

CEO of Humanity: That’s possible. It’s also possible that genuine clarity—hard-won, not just received—changes the decision calculus entirely. When you actually understand your wiring, decisions get easier. Not easy. Easier. Because you can ask “does this fit how I actually operate?” instead of “does this seem generally good?”

Devil’s Advocate: You keep saying “wiring” like it’s a fixed thing. What if it’s not? What if selves are fluid, contextual, constantly reconstructed? Maybe the whole project of “clarifying your true nature” is building on sand.

HR Manager: There’s genuine debate on that in the literature. But even the constructivist camp acknowledges that some patterns are more stable than others. Personality traits show remarkable consistency across decades. Values hierarchies shift, but slowly. The question isn’t whether the self is perfectly fixed—it’s whether there’s enough stability to make mapping useful. For most adults, there is.

Devil’s Advocate [to CEO]: Let me try a different angle. Even if the mapping is possible and accurate, there’s still the question of whether it’s worth doing. This human has finite time, finite energy, finite attention. Is navel-gazing really the highest use of those resources? They have a job. A family. Obligations that don’t pause for existential inventory. And that’s before we consider the millions who don’t even have the slack for that kind of reflection.

CEO of Humanity: For them, this isn’t theoretical. They’re relatively privileged—time, money, stability. The ones with no slack are a different case. But for someone like this, treating untested “fine” as the end of the conversation is a peculiar choice. You’re framing self-understanding as a luxury. I’d argue it’s infrastructure. The people who most need clarity are the ones with heavy demands on their time—precisely because they can’t afford to waste effort on misaligned work.

Devil’s Advocate: “Waste.” There’s that word again. You keep implying that anything less than optimal deployment is waste. That’s a value judgment dressed up as physics.

CEO of Humanity: It’s an observation. This human expends significant energy maintaining their current equilibrium. That energy could be doing other things if the system had less friction. I’m not making a moral claim. I’m describing thermodynamics.

Devil’s Advocate: Metaphorical thermodynamics.

CEO of Humanity: Obviously. But the metaphor tracks. Misalignment generates heat. Friction. Drag. The organism works harder to achieve the same output. That’s not a tragedy—it’s just expensive. And over decades, the expense adds up.

The Difference Between Rumination and Examination

Devil’s Advocate [pausing]: Here’s what I actually object to. This whole framing—”you’re fine but you could be so much more”—is the exact move the self-help industry uses to manufacture dissatisfaction. Create a gap, sell the bridge. Are we serving this human, or are we feeding a meta-economy that profits from making functional people feel inadequate?

And there’s something else. You’re asking this human to trade a stable identity for a permanent state of becoming. Always optimizing, never arriving. That’s not flourishing—that’s a treadmill with better marketing. At least “fine” has an endpoint. Your version never does.

[Silence. HR Manager and CEO exchange a glance.]

CEO of Humanity: That’s a real concern.

Devil’s Advocate: Thank you for acknowledging it.

CEO of Humanity: It’s a real concern and it doesn’t change my position. Yes, the dissatisfaction-industrial complex exists. Yes, plenty of people profit from telling functional humans they’re broken. That’s not what’s happening here. We’re not telling this human they’re broken. We’re observing that their system has friction they’ve normalized, and asking whether they want to keep normalizing it.

Devil’s Advocate: And if they do? If they say, “Actually, I’m happy, thanks for your concern”?

CEO of Humanity: Then they’ve made a choice. An informed one. That’s different from never examining the question.

Devil’s Advocate: Is it? Maybe they’ve examined it plenty. Maybe those seven “what am I doing” moments were the examination, and they concluded: this is fine. Who are we to second-guess?

HR Manager: The file suggests those weren’t examinations—they were ruminations. There’s a difference. Rumination is cycling through the same concerns without resolution. Examination is structured inquiry that produces conclusions. This human has done a lot of the former and very little of the latter.

Devil’s Advocate [sighing]: You two are relentless. Fine. Let’s say I accept—provisionally—that some form of structured self-examination might be useful. I still have concerns about risk.

CEO of Humanity: Go on.

If It Ain’t Broke, Examine It

Devil’s Advocate: You’re treating “fine” as a stable platform to experiment from. But stability is valuable. This human has built something that works. Maybe not optimally, but it works. Poking at it—introducing new frameworks, new expectations, new criteria for success—could destabilize the whole thing. We’ve all seen people blow up perfectly good lives chasing some idea of their potential. There’s a reason “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” survived this long.

HR Manager: That’s a legitimate risk. The literature on life transitions supports it—large, sudden changes based on incomplete information often backfire.

Devil’s Advocate: Thank you.

HR Manager: But that’s an argument against reckless action, not against inquiry. There’s a difference between “examine your life” and “explode it.”

CEO of Humanity: The proposal isn’t revolution. It’s reconnaissance. Small experiments. Low-stakes tests. “What happens if I spend more time on X and less on Y?” “What if I tried this environment instead of that one?” Reversible moves that generate data.

Devil’s Advocate: And if the data destabilizes them? If they discover they’re fundamentally misaligned and can’t un-know it?

CEO of Humanity: Then they have information they can use. Ignorance isn’t protection—it’s just delayed reckoning.

Devil’s Advocate: Sometimes delayed reckoning is the smart play. Sometimes you run out the clock.

CEO of Humanity: This human isn’t on a short clock. They have decades of potential alignment or decades of potential friction. The compound effect of that choice is enormous.

How to Navigate the Unknown?

The door opens. The Chair enters—unhurried, unsurprised, as though they’d been listening the whole time.

Nobody speaks. The CEO straightens almost imperceptibly. HR suppresses a smile. Even DA sits up slightly.

The Chair takes their seat at the head of the table.

Chair: I was told there was nothing to adjudicate. Then I eavesdropped for five minutes.

Devil’s Advocate: CEO is trying to manufacture a crisis from contentment.

CEO of Humanity: And DA is trying to protect stagnation by calling it stability.

Chair [mildly]: You’re both half right and going nowhere fast. Which is why I’m here.

[They pull the file toward them, leaf through it without appearing to read.]

Chair: Let me see if I understand the dispute. CEO believes this human is running a suboptimal configuration—genuine capacity deployed in a generic environment, producing adequate results at elevated cost. DA believes “adequate results” is a reasonable target for a finite organism in a complicated world, and that pushing for more introduces unnecessary risk.

Devil’s Advocate: That’s a fair summary.

CEO of Humanity: Adequate.

Chair: HR, what’s your read?

HR Manager: Both positions have merit. The question is how to weight present stability against long-term compounding. CEO is right that friction accumulates. DA is right that stability has value. The research doesn’t definitively resolve it—it depends on individual risk tolerance, resources, and what they’re optimizing for.

Chair: What are they optimizing for?

HR Manager: Unclear. The file shows someone pursuing “good” without a precise definition. They’d probably say they want to be successful, happy, respected, making a difference. The usual grab-bag. But they haven’t operationalized any of it in a way that would let you measure progress or make tradeoffs explicit.

Chair: So they’re navigating without coordinates.

HR Manager: Essentially.

Chair [to DA]: Your strongest objection. Give it to me clean.

Devil’s Advocate: Three points.

1. First: miswanting. Humans reliably mispredict what will make them happy. This human might chase “alignment” and discover it doesn’t feel any better than what they had.

2. Second: satisficing is rational. Given limited cognitive bandwidth, stopping the search once life is pretty good is a defensible strategy—every hour spent optimizing is an hour not spent enjoying what exists.

3. Third: the whole exercise assumes a stable “true self” to clarify. Selves might be more fluid than that. Over-defining their wiring could fossilize them.

Chair [to CEO]: Your response?

CEO of Humanity:

1. On miswanting—yes, humans mispredict. But they also adapt. If this human experiments and finds their predictions were wrong, they’ll adjust. That’s information, not tragedy.

2. On satisficing—it’s rational when search costs exceed expected gains. Here, the search costs are low and the potential gains are high. It’s asymmetric.

3. On self fluidity—fair, but practically irrelevant. Even a partially accurate map beats no map. We’re not promising certainty. We’re offering better navigation.

It’s Not About Optimization

Chair [nodding slowly]: Here’s what I observe.

[Chair closes the file.]

Chair: You’re arguing about whether this human should optimize. That’s the wrong frame. The question isn’t optimization. It’s testing.

Devil’s Advocate: Testing what?

Chair: The hypothesis that their current configuration is the best available to them. Right now, “I’m fine” is an assumption, not a conclusion. They’ve never actually tested whether a better-fit exists. They’ve just... stayed where they landed.

CEO of Humanity: Exactly.

Chair: That doesn’t mean CEO wins. DA is right that large changes based on fantasy are fragile. We won’t recommend that. But never testing the hypothesis—running out the clock without gathering any data—is its own form of recklessness. You’re betting decades of energy on an untested assumption.

Devil’s Advocate: So what’s the prescription?

Chair: Small experiments. Reversible. Time-boxed. Designed on purpose, not just occasional acts of boredom or desperation. “I will spend the next thirty days tracking what gives me energy and what drains it.” “I will try one project in this domain and see how it feels.” Low commitment. High information value. Even that 30-day log would move them from rumination to observation—from “what am I doing with my life?” to “here is what the last month actually did to my energy.”

If the experiments confirm their current path, they’ve gained confidence—real confidence, not just inertia disguised as contentment. If the experiments reveal friction, they have data to act on.

Devil’s Advocate: And the treadmill problem? Always becoming, never arriving?

Chair: The experiments have endpoints. That’s the point. You’re not signing up for permanent existential audit. You’re running a time-boxed test and then deciding—with data—whether to keep going or stop. Arrival isn’t forbidden. It’s just earned.

To Experiment or Not to Experiment, That Is the Decision

Pause.

Chair: I want to be clear about something. We are not commanding this human to transform. We are not declaring their life invalid. They have every right to choose stability, choose comfort, choose “fine.” What they don’t have is the right to pretend that choice is neutral. Not running deliberate experiments is a bet. It has consequences. We’re simply asking them to make the bet with open eyes.

Devil’s Advocate: quietly And if they run the experiments and still choose this life?

Chair: Then we record it as a deliberate trade: surplus for safety, examined and accepted. The file closes. Different from never having looked.

CEO of Humanity: It’s the looking that matters.

Chair: It’s the looking that makes the choice real. Without it, there’s no choice—just momentum.

The Chair stands.

Chair: We’ll reconvene when there’s new data. Until then, the file stays open. Not because this human is failing. Because they haven’t yet run the only experiment that could tell us—and them—whether they’re succeeding.

They exit.

Devil’s Advocate: after a moment I still think we’re massively overthinking someone who is, by any reasonable metric, okay.

CEO of Humanity: I know.

Devil’s Advocate: But I’ll admit—the asymmetry argument is hard to dismiss. Low-cost experiments with potentially high upside versus never knowing what was possible.

HR Manager: That’s the whole case, really. Not “you must change.” Just “it would be strange not to test.” If they keep living Tuesdays, at least let them be Tuesdays on purpose.

Devil’s Advocate [standing]: Fine. The record reflects my objections.

CEO of Humanity: Noted. As always.

Devil’s Advocate [at the door]: For what it’s worth—I hope they run the experiments. I just don’t want us to pretend we know what they’ll find.

CEO of Humanity: We don’t know. That’s rather the point.

The file remains on the table.

The Board can’t make them look. But they can refuse to pretend that not-looking is the same as having looked.

[End of transcript]

Back to Earth

How does the Chairman of the Board’s verdict land with you?

My takeaway:

It’s hard to argue against running a few deliberate, low-risk experiments beyond your status quo. The downside is some mental effort and time you could’ve spent on “the usual.” The upside is insight that could nudge your trajectory and compound over decades.

But I’m biased, biologically I bet, toward thinking this way. So help me see what I can’t.

Here’s my actual question for you:

Is your “fine” a deliberate choice you’d defend to the Board, or is it momentum you’ve called contentment?

I’m not being rhetorical. I genuinely want to know:

• If you think the Board got it wrong: Tell me why. The Devil’s Advocate would love more ammunition. What’s the case for leaving well enough alone that I’m missing?

• If you’re in the gray zone: What’s one small stepping stone experiment you could run in the next 30 days? Something low-risk with high information value.

• If you’re already running experiments: What are they? I want to hear what intentional exploration looks like for others.

Hit reply. I read and respond to everything.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

P.S. — Want your own Board of Humanity? The AI “Board of Humanity” format is something I’ve been using for my own decisions for a while now. My clients also tell me it’s their favorite part of the Innate Edge Reports I prepare for them. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll share how to set one up for yourself in a future post.

Share

And I’m not ready.

It’s not a mental thing. It’s physical. I’m not ready because I don’t have any plan for preventing the same thing that happened to me from happening to him.

Back to the Same Factory I Came From?

If you’ve been zagging with me for a while, you might remember my Fugawi philosophy, that intentional exploration beats following prescribed paths.

Fugawi comes from a Sopranos joke that’s been stuck in my head for 22 years:

Tony Soprano is filling his plate at the buffet of a Native American-owned casino and says to his capos, “Whenever I’m in one of these places, I remember that my grandmother was part Fugawi. Maybe I should do something about it.”

“Bullsh*t,” responds his slick sidekick, Silvio.

“’Oh no, it’s true,” retorts Tony. “They were a nomadic tribe. They wander around, they get lost, and they go ‘We’re the Fugawi’ [pronounced ‘where the fug are we’].”

Since introducing the Fugawi concept, I’ve realized two things:

1. Fugawi aren’t some backwards tribe to be made fun of. They’re the MOST advanced.
   
   The ability to explore intentionally, check your position regularly, and course-correct—that’s the crucial skill for navigating a world with infinite possibilities.
   
   School should teach kids to be Fugawi.

2. The opposite of a Fugawi isn’t someone who knows exactly where to go. It’s someone who follows. Let’s call them Spostas—the “supposed tos.”
   
   Spostas trudge along the path they’re supposed to without questioning whether it’s right for them. Spostas work hard at school. Spostas compete for praise and promotion at work. Spostas follow the financial plan for retirement… where they’re not Sposta do anything but relax anymore. And Spostas ensure their kids follow along. It’s not that these things are necessarily wrong. It’s that they were never consciously chosen.

I was a Sposta for 27 years, then it took me 12 years of deconditioning and training to become a Fugawi.

And now I’m supposed to send my kid into the Sposta factory I came from?

The Crack in the Matrix

On a sunny Tuesday morning in Geneva in 2010, I had to take time off work to get my broken nose looked at. As I biked across the city’s main shopping strip on the way to the doctor, something struck me. The street was busy. People of all ages, out and about like it was Saturday.

Didn’t these people have jobs or school?

…Lucky them.

…[Lightbulb flash.]

If they could make it their reality, why not me?

Until then, I’d been a perfect fit for the production line: school, University of Toronto Commerce, Procter & Gamble Corporate Finance. Easy. Smooth. I molded into what the system was designed to produce: a standard successful Canadian adult.

But that Tuesday in Geneva made the first crack in my polished veneer. The crumbling continued until, three years later, I fell off the production line’s rails entirely.

I felt like Free Willy out of the aquarium into the wild.

I had to learn how to fend for myself and find my place in the ecosystem—all things my trainers at school never taught me.

In the adventurous but frustrating years that followed, I kept thinking:

Why did I have to figure all this out myself? Where were the guides?

Sure, my parents helped me enormously. But why wasn’t this part of my education? Isn’t preparing kids for adulthood the point?

What Are We Optimizing For?

The fundamental question most parents can’t or won’t answer is this:

What are you optimizing for in raising your kids?

The boilerplate answer: “I just want them to be happy.”

Well, I don’t. I want my kids to live what I call trifecta-filled lives. Life full of activities they:

1. ☑︎ enjoy,

2. ☑︎ look forward to, and

3. ☑︎ feel proud of afterward.

That might sound selfish. But it’s also the surest path to contributing meaningfully to the world. So it’s selfish-less.

To design such lives, my kids need to understand their unique values and potential, and develop the ability to fulfill them within society.

So that’s my answer. That’s what I’m optimizing for as a parent. Same thing as I’m optimizing for myself.

School struck out on the trifecta criteria for me.

• ☐ Enjoy? Nope. Never did I think, “Yay, it’s Monday. Yay school holiday’s over.”

• ☐ Look forward to more? Heck no. I watched the clock in class waiting to be free.

• ☐ Feel proud of afterward? I have zero recollection of graduating. Just remember being glad to be done so I can move on.

Zero for three.

Instead, my K through 12 years pounded into me a belief that life requires sucking it up and sacrificing. That fun and responsibility are separate. You grind through things you dislike to get to things you love. A solid strategy, I suppose, for schools that optimize for efficient production of “standard adults.”

But why would I choose to send my kids down those tracks?

“But what about socialization?”

“Socialization” is my reasonable friends’ number one defense of conventional school.

For most of my life, I agreed. I was proud to have gone to a public school with kids from all walks of life. I learned to interact with people I didn’t like and do work I didn’t want to do.

Now I think “socialization” is actually the number one reason I’m not in favor of conventional school.

• ❌ Age segregation isn’t socialization.

Why did my brother and I grow up on separate batches of the conveyor belt instead of learning together? In real life, we work and play across ages, learning and teaching each other. That’s what I want for my sons.

• ❌ Learning to suck it up and do stuff you dislike isn’t socialization.

There is a massive difference between discipline and submission.

School teaches kids to tolerate unpleasantness only when it’s mandated by an authority figure. I want my kids to develop the ability to push through the “dip” because they see the other side, not because they fear punishment.

• ❌ Following a rigid schedule isn’t socialization.

I don’t want my kids conditioned to split “school and work” from “life.” I want them to integrate it all.

• ❌ Being trapped isn’t the same as being resilient.

I want my kids to face real friction—losing a game, failing a project, getting rejected—not the artificial friction of asking permission to go to the bathroom.

• ❌ Playing predefined status games isn’t socialization.

School rewards GPAs and popularity. Life rewards outliers who wrap their lives around their spiky edges like superhero spandex.

Here’s what I actually want:

Something closer to the kind of upbringing kids had before industrialized schools. Multi-age relationships. Learning from elders and experience. Apprenticeship. Gradually assuming larger roles in society under the watchful eye of the community.

That’s not anti-social. That’s the MOST social.

True socialization prepares our children for real society, not pre-manufactured paths.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on conventional schools. But too many fellow parents lean too hard the other way with their “socialization” defense.

The Dark Cloud Threatening to Rain On Our Parade

For the last eight years, Kim and I have migrated between Vancouver and warmer places, mostly Cape Town. It’s not just about avoiding Vitamin D deficiency. It’s about building a life where, when the grass looks greener, we can jump the fence. It’s about not accumulating crap that weighs us down, but being forced to stay light by constantly packing up. It’s about the global perspective and cultural exposure. It’s about delicious, cheap wine.

It’s about intentionally pursuing a trifecta life.

School’s the approaching dark cloud on the horizon threatening to end that.

Sure, settling down has its plusses. More investment in the community. Less hassle planning and packing — and, if you smash those two words together, panicking. More professional “productivity.” Less expensive.

But I dread a 365-day-in-Vancouver lifestyle where our routine erodes into a rut too big to climb out of. Where Kim and I look forward to the freedom of becoming empty nesters, then look back wondering where the time went. Where we get accustomed to settling for too many anti-trifecta trade-offs—and teach our kids to do the same.

So we’re in Spain right now. Scouting cities with schools that optimize for something closer to what we want. Options are limited, but we found promising options, like LearnLife, that optimize for the same thing as us.

But just as I drafted this, we got an email: The LearnLife campus we loved is closing.

[Sigh of exasperation.]

This is the trade-off. The Sposta path is rigid but stable. The Fugawi path is exciting but uncertain.

But I’d rather my kids see me fail trying to design an aligned life than never try and accept the default. Plus, the people who send their kids to LearnLife-esque schools share a similar Fugawi outlook. That’s the community I want for my family. So be it if the conventional crowd (and my younger self) thinks we’re weird.

Still, I wish it were easier. I wish Vancouver had more options—so much so I’m wondering whether I need to play a part in making it happen. Get involved with starting my own school or something.

Lots of doubts. But I’m quite confident that standard education is changing. Ten years from now, there will be more, better choices. A generation from now, my grandkids won’t believe the way we old farts were brought up.

So if that’s where we’re headed, why not join the forefront rather than stay stuck in the past?

So… We’re the Fugawi

I hope what I’ve written doesn’t come across as too confident or dismissive.

I don’t have this figured out. I know the principles I’m optimizing for. But I don’t know if I can pull it off.

Maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe I’m underrating ‘socialization.’ Maybe my kids will resent me rather than thank me for being “out there” and taking them off a standard track. Or maybe I’ll succumb to the lowest friction path and send them into the system I spent 12 years unwinding myself from.

I don’t know. Like I said, I’m not ready.

But I do know this: I’d rather be a Fugawi who’s lost on purpose and exploring intentionally than go back to being a Sposta marching down a path I never chose. And I want my kids to learn the Fugawi ways, too.

So maybe all this doubt is a good sign. Spostas don’t doubt. They follow. Fugawi stop and check, especially when something doesn’t feel right.

So whatever happens, my family and I will keep exploring, stopping, sniffing the air, and asking: “Hey guys, we’re the Fugawi.”

And we’ll course-correct as needed.

30-Second Summary

Conventional school teaches us to be ‘Spostas’—to follow the supposed-to path without questioning it. It took me 12 years to become a ‘Fugawi’—someone who explores intentionally and course-corrects when needed.

Now I’m supposed to send my kid into the same factory?

I think it’s worth articulating what we’re actually optimizing for as parents, and questioning whether “socialization” might be the worst argument for conventional school, not the best.

Teach Me

I suspect many of you are wrestling with similar questions—whether about school, career, or life design in general. And I want to know where you’re at.

So I’m asking you:

• What are you optimizing for? Have you articulated it explicitly?

• Where do you disagree with me? I want to be challenged. I might be wrong.

• What does ideal education look like to you?

Hit reply. Comment. Challenge me. Teach me.

And keep doing exciting things,

Chris

Share