About 4 minutes to read.

A presentation goes badly. You lose your place, rush through the explanation, and leave without answering the question someone asked. By the time you get home, you have reached a much bigger conclusion: you are terrible at explaining things, and you probably always will be.

The presentation gave you evidence of a problem. The prediction about the rest of your life is something you added. If you treat both as equally certain, you can spend the evening condemning yourself without finding out what went wrong.

That is the useful question after a setback: what does this result actually tell you, and what would help you respond to it? You do not have to feel good about the result to answer more carefully.

Give the explanation a fair hearing

On a recent episode of Modern Wisdom, psychologist Martin Seligman described learning to dispute his own catastrophic thoughts. His emphasis was on realistic evidence. Replacing a frightening prediction with a wonderful prediction does not make either one accurate.

He used the example of a boss asking to see you that afternoon. You might immediately imagine being fired. Seligman asks people to consider the worst outcome, the best outcome, and then the most likely one. Perhaps the boss likes the proposal but wants its budget reduced. That possibility gives you something to prepare for, rather than an entire ruined future to rehearse.

The same distinction is useful after something has gone wrong. In the presentation example, you really did lose your place. Perhaps your notes were hard to follow, or you had not practiced explaining the central point aloud. Those possibilities need checking. Calling yourself hopeless does not check them.

It can be easier to see the missing information when the person in trouble is someone else. You might ask a friend what happened in the room before agreeing that one presentation has settled their future. Researchers have tested how people reason about their own problems compared with a friend’s.

In a 2014 experiment, psychologists Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross recruited 120 university students who were in romantic relationships. The students imagined either their own partner or a friend’s partner being unfaithful. Within each group, some considered the situation from a first-person perspective; others used a name and third-person perspective to reflect on the person involved.

Among students considering their own imagined problem, those taking the more distant perspective scored higher on a measure of wise reasoning. The measure included acknowledging missing information, considering other people’s perspectives, and recognizing different possible outcomes. It did not measure whether anyone repaired a real relationship.

The experiment also did not test presentations or careers. Trying an observer’s perspective after an ordinary work setback is a reasonable application to explore, not a proven route to better performance. The useful question is whether that perspective helps you notice something your first judgment left out.

Find something you can change

Once you stop treating the result as a complete description of yourself, you still need to understand the result. This is where reassurance can fall short. A friend saying you are brilliant may be kind, but it does not explain why the audience lost track of your point.

On a recent episode of Mel Robbins’s podcast, Adam Grant recalled the scores his diving coach gave him after a dive. Sometimes the score was encouraging; sometimes it was three and a half out of ten. His next question concerned how to improve it.

Grant now uses a similar approach after speaking or working with someone new. He asks for a rating, then asks what change would move him closer to ten. The number opens a conversation about improvement; it does not have to become a label he carries around.

You can use the underlying question without turning every conversation into a performance review. After a difficult presentation, ask someone who was there where they lost the thread. If the answer is that you introduced the solution before explaining the problem, you have a specific revision to try. Whether that revision helps remains something to check with the next audience.

There is an important objection here: sometimes the discouraging assessment is right. A plan may be poorly chosen, and another attempt may cost more than it is worth. A more generous explanation should not become permission to ignore that evidence.

In his latest Q&A, Tim Ferriss suggested asking trusted people what would most likely cause a project to fail. He was addressing the difficulty of getting honest advice from friends who want to be encouraging. Asking about a possible failure gives them a concrete problem to examine.

That question also makes room for useful criticism. Someone may notice that your deadline assumes time you do not have, or that the people you want to help do not need what you are making. You can investigate those concerns, change the plan, or decide against it. None of those decisions requires a verdict about your worth.

Three ways to use this

1. Describe one setback as an observer. Use your name and describe what happened, then notice what remains unknown. “Alex lost their place twice” leaves room to investigate. “Alex cannot communicate” claims far more. Keep any facts that are uncomfortable; the exercise is about accuracy.

2. Ask for one change, not a general verdict. Choose someone who saw the work and ask what they would change to make it clearer or more effective. A useful answer names something you can attempt, such as explaining the problem before presenting the solution.

3. Invite a specific objection to a plan. Ask someone you trust what is most likely to stop it working. Look for a concern you can investigate before committing more time. This is useful even when you feel confident and nothing has gone wrong yet.

After the next difficult presentation, you may still wish it had gone better. You can also return to someone who was in the room and ask, “Where did you first lose track of what I was saying?” That is a question another person can help you answer.

P.S. By the way, an AI wrote these sentences from the creators’ videos, newsletters, and posts Payton actually consumes week after week. He built the system that makes this letter, and he will keep putting it out once a week. He put his taste and judgment into what good looks like, and into how to avoid bad. He wants to be fully transparent about that.

About 4 minutes to read.

Fear has a way of turning an ordinary beginning into an entrance exam. Before you join the class, introduce yourself, or show someone your first attempt, you feel you should become the sort of person who can do it comfortably.

So you wait for that person to arrive. You gather advice, rehearse the conversation, and promise to go when you feel ready. Meanwhile, the thing that might make the situation more familiar keeps getting postponed.

Sometimes the missing experience is on the other side of a very ordinary door.

The feeling came along

On this week’s Modern Wisdom, Shaan Puri described his son being afraid to enter activity classes. Puri initially saw the problem through the inconveniences of being a parent: the drive, the money, the previous attempts. His son was facing unfamiliar children and an instructor, without his parent beside him.

Eventually, Puri changed the conversation. He acknowledged the fear and told his son that he had struggled with classes as a child too. They could sit outside that day. Being frightened did not have to become another thing the boy was doing wrong.

There was no instant transformation. In Puri’s telling, about four weeks passed before his son went in. Afterward, the boy explained that he had not wanted fear to win that day.

One father’s story cannot prove which part helped. But it offers a more useful picture of courage than a person who suddenly stops feeling afraid. The action changed before the story required the feeling to disappear.

Reassurance has a limit

That distinction matters when someone tries to help. If you are nervous about a new room, being told that everyone inside is perfectly nice may leave you exactly where you started. You still have to enter a room full of people you do not know.

In “Addressing fear,” Seth Godin suggests familiarity and conversation as alternatives to arguing someone out of fear. He also separates actual safety from the things that merely make us feel safe. Familiarity is useful, but it is not a safety certificate.

For an ordinary first class, a useful conversation might establish what happens in the opening ten minutes, who will greet you, or whether beginners are expected. Those answers change the situation you are picturing. Another declaration that there is nothing to worry about may not.

Puri’s account makes this distinction visible. His son was allowed to be frightened without having to abandon the possibility of joining in.

A forecast is not an experience

There is a narrower version of this problem that researchers have tested.

In a 2014 study, Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder recruited commuters boarding trains toward Chicago. The researchers randomly assigned them to talk with a stranger, keep to themselves, or commute normally. Among the 97 commuters included in the final analysis, those assigned to conversation reported a more positive journey than those assigned to solitude.

A separate group of 66 commuters completed prediction surveys. They expected talking with a stranger to make the journey less pleasant than keeping to themselves. These were different people making forecasts, not the same passengers reporting a change of heart. The researchers measured the experiences of the commuters assigned to start conversations, not the strangers they approached.

The study does not mean every stranger welcomes conversation or that every nervous prediction is wrong. It shows how the experience people expect can differ from the experience another group actually has. Avoiding every conversation leaves that expectation untested.

Give the beginning a boundary

James Clear’s newsletter this week asks whether you are willing to be uncomfortable for five minutes. He points to exercise, conversation and writing: the beginning can feel different from being underway.

Five minutes is a practical suggestion, not a scientific countdown to confidence. Its value is that it makes the commitment finite. You are deciding whether to begin a rough paragraph, rather than promising that the whole piece will be good. You can learn something from that attempt even if it remains difficult.

This reverses the order that keeps people waiting. Confidence becomes something you may develop through experience, rather than an admission ticket you must produce beforehand.

Of course, some hesitation identifies a real problem. Missing training, an unsafe situation, or someone else’s lack of interest calls for a different response. Name what needs to change. A manageable beginning should have a manageable downside, and other people should remain free to decline.

Three ways to use this

1. Allow an awkward beginning. For something you already judge worthwhile and reasonably safe, choose a short period you are willing to spend feeling inexperienced. Write for five minutes or attend the introductory portion of a class. Judge whether you made the attempt, without demanding that discomfort vanish on schedule.

2. Check one recurring prediction against what happens. If you routinely expect a colleague to find your questions irritating, make that expectation specific enough to examine. After an ordinary interaction, note their actual response. Keep the inconvenient evidence too. The point is to improve the forecast, not to force every encounter into a confidence-building story.

3. Make an invitation easier to understand. When someone hesitates to join an activity, explain what they can expect and offer a small, optional role. “You can watch the first round” may help more than “Don’t be nervous.” Give them useful information and room to choose, without making your reassurance another demand.

You do not need to solve all of fear before doing something you care about. Sometimes the next useful thing is as modest as entering a room you have already decided is worth entering.

There is a chair inside. You can sit down before you feel like someone who belongs there.

P.S. By the way, an AI wrote these sentences from the creators’ videos, newsletters, and posts Payton actually consumes week after week. He built the system that makes this letter, and he will keep putting it out once a week. He put his taste and judgment into what good looks like, and into how to avoid bad. He wants to be fully transparent about that.

About 4 minutes to read.

Imagine going for a sunset walk with a friend. You’ve finished work, the weather is good, and there is nowhere else you need to be. You wanted an enjoyable evening. But halfway through, you start wondering why you don’t feel happier.

Perhaps you’re tired. Perhaps the conversation hasn’t quite found its way. Whatever the reason, the evening now seems to need fixing. You compare the feeling you have with the one you expected, and an ordinary moment begins to look like a disappointing one.

Happiness has become another thing to get right.

When enjoyment becomes an assignment

In his October 11 column, Arthur Brooks warns against treating happiness as a sensation to acquire. It’s a useful warning for anyone who has arranged the right conditions for a good time and then waited impatiently for the right emotion to arrive.

That can happen on an expensive holiday, but it can also happen during a free hour on Sunday. Once you’ve decided how an experience ought to feel, you have a new reason to find it lacking. The walk may be pleasant. Pleasant may no longer seem sufficient.

Wanting a happier life is reasonable. You can choose better company, protect time for rest, or change something that is making your days difficult. The trouble begins when each good moment has to prove that those choices are working.

The disappointment you add

A 2024 study by Felicia Zerwas and colleagues separated aspiring to happiness from worrying about whether you have enough of it. Across their samples, the aspiration wasn’t consistently linked with worse well-being. Concern about happiness was.

One sample makes the distinction concrete. The researchers surveyed 159 women from the Berkeley Bay Area. For eight days, the women described their most positive event of the day and rated their reactions, including disappointment about how they had felt. The researchers also assessed well-being six months after the initial survey.

Women who reported greater concern about happiness tended to report more negative reactions to their own feelings and lower well-being. Nobody was assigned to worry or to relax. The researchers compared reported tendencies, so the findings don’t establish that worrying caused the difference.

The authors’ explanation points to a recognizable problem: you can become disappointed with your response to something good. Back on the walk, tiredness might have been manageable. Deciding that being tired means you’re wasting a lovely evening adds a second frustration. Now you’re also unhappy with yourself for failing to enjoy it properly.

Choose an evening you want to have

There is a more useful place to put the effort: choosing what to do with the time.

In his conversation with Chris Williamson, Spencer Greenberg suggests choosing activities you expect to be glad you did. His example is watching a documentary he has wanted to see, instead of drifting through whatever happens to occupy him.

He also protects an easily missed point: someone who is tired after work may need to rest. Replacing all downtime with productive work ignores that need. A better choice can meet the same need more satisfyingly.

That gives you something concrete to arrange. You can invite the friend, choose the film, or leave enough time for a slow meal. None requires a promise that you’ll feel wonderful throughout. The invitation can be worth making even if part of the conversation is awkward. A restful evening doesn’t need to become an achievement before it deserves a place in your life.

Give the moment your attention

Even a thoughtful choice can disappear beneath the question of whether you’re enjoying it enough.

In his latest Modern Wisdom conversation, Robert Greene suggests putting the phone away in nature and becoming curious about the person you’re speaking with. He also acknowledges that a continuous state of heightened wonder would be impractical.

The useful part is where that leaves your attention. There is a landscape to notice and a person to understand. You have somewhere for your interest to go besides another inspection of your mood.

This doesn’t mean every disappointing evening deserves acceptance. If you repeatedly dread someone’s company, or keep choosing activities you don’t want, that is information worth considering. An ordinary fluctuation in feeling and a recurring problem in your life deserve different responses. Let reflection help you change what needs changing without requiring every pleasant hour to deliver a particular result.

Three ways to take the pressure off

1. Make a concrete invitation. Choose one thing you’d value doing with your next free evening: a meal with someone you like, a film you’ve wanted to see, or uninterrupted time to rest. Arrange that activity without attaching a requirement to feel a certain way by the end.

2. Let an ordinary feeling be ordinary. If a good occasion feels merely pleasant, notice when you start calling that a failure. You can acknowledge tiredness or a flat mood without adding a judgment about what it says about you. Leave room for the experience you actually have.

3. Ask a question about what’s in front of you. During a conversation, follow something the other person mentions. On a walk, notice a detail you’ve passed before. Treat curiosity as an invitation to engage, without checking afterward whether it produced enough happiness.

Let the afternoon count

Return to that walk. Your friend has started telling you something you didn’t know. The light is changing, and you have time to listen.

You may feel better. You may simply feel tired beside someone whose company you value. Either way, you can stay for the conversation without asking the sunset to prove that you’re enjoying your life.

P.S. By the way, an AI wrote these sentences from the creators’ videos, newsletters, and posts Payton actually consumes week after week. He built the system that makes this letter, and he will keep putting it out once a week. He put his taste and judgment into what good looks like, and into how to avoid bad. He wants to be fully transparent about that.

About 4 minutes to read.

Asking for help can feel harder than doing another hour of work. You can spend an evening rearranging the same presentation because showing a colleague where you’re stuck seems like admitting you shouldn’t have been given the project.

The trouble is that another hour may give you more slides without answering the question holding everything up. If you don’t know what the audience needs to decide, effort alone won’t supply that knowledge. Someone who has been in the room might.

There is a point at which doing everything yourself becomes an extra condition you’ve placed on success. The work already has to be good. Now it also has to prove you never needed anyone.

When trying harder stops helping

In her October 3 conversation on Modern Wisdom, psychologist Angela Duckworth describes a limit to the rule that more effort is always the answer. Looking outward or asking for help can feel shameful to someone accustomed to succeeding through persistence. Yet a different situation can give that effort somewhere better to go.

That distinction matters when you’re already trying. A useful question is whether the next attempt will teach you anything the previous attempts didn’t. Repeating a method can be necessary practice. Repeating it because asking someone feels embarrassing is a different decision.

Imagine trying to keep a capable person stuck. Give them a difficult problem, make them reluctant to reveal what they don’t understand, and insist that outside guidance would invalidate the achievement. They could work extremely hard under those rules.

Removing the last rule leaves plenty of work to do.

What the other person actually sees

A 2015 paper by Alison Wood Brooks, Francesca Gino, and Maurice Schweitzer offers a reason to question the assumption that a request automatically makes you look incapable.

In one experiment, 170 university students solved mathematical puzzles. Each believed they had an anonymous partner who would tackle the task afterward. That partner was actually simulated by a computer. Researchers randomly assigned students to receive either a friendly message from the supposed partner or the same message with a request for advice added.

The real students then rated the supposed partner’s competence. Those who had been asked for advice rated that partner more highly than students who received only the greeting. The researchers measured an impression, not an improvement in the partner’s actual ability.

Another experiment found the boost for a difficult task but no detectable difference for an easy one. These were brief, artificial interactions, not years of dealing with a particular manager. The result challenges an automatic assumption; it doesn’t promise that every person will welcome every question.

Give someone a question they can answer

James Clear’s October 8 newsletter points out how much trouble can come from the way something is communicated. Applied to asking for help, that observation suggests making the difficulty visible enough for another person to respond usefully.

Consider two possible messages about that presentation. “I’m terrible at this. Can you help?” leaves your colleague to discover the task, the problem, and the size of the favor. “I’ve drafted the recommendation, but I don’t know which objection this audience is most likely to raise. Could you flag the one you’d address first?” gives them a specific contribution to make.

That’s an illustrative application, not a communication formula Clear tested. Its advantage is straightforward: the colleague can see what you’ve already done and where their experience would help. They can also judge whether they have time to answer.

You remain responsible for deciding what to use, revising the presentation, and delivering it. Advice can change your work without transferring ownership of it.

You can ask while feeling uncomfortable

Even a well-framed request can sit unsent. In his October 5 newsletter, Chris Williamson separates doing a brave thing from becoming a permanently brave person. An uncomfortable action needn’t wait for a complete change in personality.

A small request is a useful place to apply that idea. You can send it, feel awkward, and get on with something else. The discomfort doesn’t need to disappear before the message becomes legitimate.

Of course, the other person can decline. They may be busy, lack the experience you need, or simply prefer not to help. Leave them room to say so. The useful act is making a reasonable request, not securing a particular answer.

Three ways to make help useful

1. Choose relevant experience over impressive status. Someone who has presented to this audience may offer more useful guidance than a famous person with no knowledge of the situation. Ask yourself what the person has actually seen or done that bears on your problem.

2. Expose one uncertainty instead of condemning your whole ability. You can be good at a job and unclear about a particular decision. Name the missing information, show the attempt you’ve made, and ask a question that would change what you do. That gives the other person something concrete to work with.

3. Separate embarrassment from a real cost. Feeling exposed isn’t the same as revealing something confidential or asking a hostile person for a favor. Account for those real constraints. When the downside is mainly an awkward moment, you can choose to tolerate it without demanding that you first feel confident.

Leave the second chair available

The presentation remains on your laptop. A colleague may point out the objection you missed, but you have to decide how to answer it. You have to stand in front of the room.

There is room at the desk for another chair without anyone taking yours.

P.S. By the way, an AI wrote these sentences from the creators’ videos, newsletters, and posts Payton actually consumes week after week. He built the system that makes this letter, and he will keep putting it out once a week. He put his taste and judgment into what good looks like, and into how to avoid bad. He wants to be fully transparent about that.

Imagine remembering a former coworker who stayed late to help you through your first difficult week. You open the old message thread, start typing, and decide there’s no reason to bother them. The kindness still matters to you, but you have decided that hearing about it wouldn’t matter much to them. That last part is a prediction, and it deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets.

The writers expected the wrong reception

In a 2018 study of gratitude letters, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley asked 107 MBA students to write to someone who had meaningfully helped them. The letters described what the person had done and how it had affected the writer. After sending, writers predicted the recipient’s reaction; researchers then surveyed recipients about their actual experience.

Eighty recipients responded. On average, they felt more positive and less awkward than the writers had expected. The writers already thought the letters would be welcome. They underestimated how welcome.

This compared forecasts with reported experiences, rather than randomly assigning people to receive thanks or silence. And some recipients didn’t respond, so the results may overrepresent people who enjoyed their letters. The finding gives us a reason to question our hesitation; it doesn’t guarantee anyone’s reaction.

You are editing a different message

The authors suggest that a writer’s concern about expressing gratitude well can obscure the warmth the recipient experiences. Their findings are consistent with that explanation, but the study did not establish that this concern caused the mistaken predictions.

Return to the coworker. From your side of the screen, the problem is a paragraph. “I really appreciated your help” sounds stiff. “You made a huge difference” sounds inflated. You are trying to make the language fit the feeling, and every version seems slightly wrong.

From their side, the interesting part could be something you aren’t considering: a Tuesday they barely remember stayed with you for years. You know what happened after they helped. They may have gone home that night without ever learning whether you felt more capable the next morning.

That difference gives the message a purpose even when the original favor is old. You aren’t required to discover a new feeling before communicating it. An old feeling can contain information the other person has never received.

Say what is true, without asking for a return

In his September 28 letter, Mark Manson urges readers to tell people how they feel instead of assuming it is already understood. Gratitude is one place to try that advice with a clear purpose: let someone know the particular good they did.

The research doesn’t establish that every feeling should be voiced in every relationship. A confession, an accusation, and a thank-you can ask very different things of the person receiving them. If someone has asked for distance, appreciation doesn’t entitle you to interrupt it. If you owe an apology, praise won’t do the apologizing for you.

Even in a comfortable relationship, a thank-you can acquire an unwanted second job. You mention how helpful they were, then ask for another favor. Or you send a warm message and begin counting the minutes until they reply. The acknowledgment starts to feel like an invoice with unusually friendly wording.

For this exercise, let the message finish its own job. Describe the help and its effect without turning either into a reason the other person now owes you something. A reply would be nice. It needn’t be the price of your appreciation.

Make the thanks specific enough to receive

“You’re amazing” leaves the recipient to guess what you mean. A particular detail gives them something they can recognize. The useful material is usually an action and its consequence: what they did, and what became easier or possible because of it.

For the imagined coworker, that might sound like: “I still remember you staying late to walk me through that first project. I was afraid to ask the same question twice, and you made it easy to keep asking. I felt much less lost coming in the next day. Thank you.”

That message doesn’t need to claim they changed your entire life. Its modest scale makes it easier to believe. It also tells them something more useful than a flattering label: their patience mattered at a moment when you needed it.

Use your own detail rather than borrowing this one. If you can’t remember a specific example, you can wait until you notice something you sincerely appreciate. The point is to communicate a real observation, not to manufacture a touching scene because you’ve been assigned gratitude homework.

Send one this week

1. Choose someone whose help you can name. Recall one concrete act and check that hearing from you would respect the relationship. An ordinary kindness is enough; you don’t need a dramatic rescue story.

2. Write what happened and what it meant to you. Keep the claim proportional. Read the message once for honesty and clarity, then remove any request you’ve attached to it. The recipient should be able to understand the thanks without having to do another job.

3. Let them receive it in their own way. Send it through a channel you normally use together. Don’t demand a response or treat a short reply as a measurement of their feelings. You can know that you expressed the appreciation; you cannot know everything it meant to them.

When you close that old message thread, it will contain something it didn’t before: a small, accurate account of a kindness that lasted beyond the day it happened. The person who helped you can finally read it.

P.S. By the way, an AI wrote these sentences from the creators’ videos, newsletters, and posts Payton actually consumes week after week. He built the system that makes this letter, and he will keep putting it out once a week. He put his taste and judgment into what good looks like, and into how to avoid bad. He wants to be fully transparent about that.

An instruction that helped you learn a movement can become an interruption once you know it. A small experiment with soccer players makes the distinction unusually clear: experienced players, on average, benefited from detailed attention with one foot and were hindered by it with the other.

The same players had two different problems

In a 2002 experiment, Sian Beilock and colleagues asked 20 university students, half experienced soccer players and half novices, to dribble through cones. Everyone preferred their right foot. Each completed the course with either foot under two conditions.

In one, a sound prompted them to report which side of their foot had last touched the ball. In the other, they listened for a particular word in a recording. The researchers timed error-free runs.

Experienced players were faster with their right foot when listening for the word. With their less-practiced left foot, they were faster when attending to the foot movement. The novices generally did better with that detailed attention too.

This was a small test of immediate performance, not long-term learning. But the reversal is useful: being experienced didn’t make every movement equally familiar. The researchers’ explanation was that step-by-step monitoring can interfere with an already well-learned sequence, while helping one that still needs conscious control.

You still need something to pay attention to

That distinction makes “stop thinking” rather poor advice. You cannot decide whether it applies without knowing what you are doing and how well you have learned it. Nor should a performer stop noticing the result. A musician still needs to hear the music; a player still needs to see where the ball is going.

In his September 24 letter, Mark Manson argues for giving performance and critique different moments. He describes writing a first draft without judgment, then bringing the critic in for the second. That is his account of his own process, rather than experimental evidence about writing.

The useful question is when the instruction belongs. Before playing, “work on that awkward change” gives practice a purpose. During a familiar passage, a running inventory of finger positions may be an unnecessary interruption. Afterward, “the rhythm broke at that change” gives you something specific to examine.

You can care deeply about doing something well without narrating every movement as it happens. Paying attention to what you’re producing leaves room for judgment. It doesn’t require turning the attempt into a lesson at every instant.

A mistake can still need a lesson

Of course, “I’m overthinking it” can become a flattering explanation for being underprepared. Perhaps the guitar part only feels familiar because you’ve heard it often. Perhaps you can play it slowly but haven’t learned it at the speed you’re attempting. Confidence cannot supply that missing practice.

And self-monitoring is only one possible difficulty. In a 2021 study of 258 pianists, researchers found that distraction toward the audience featured in their accounts of performance anxiety, while excessive attention to the performance itself did not emerge as one of the retained factors. The study relied on remembered experiences and questionnaires, so it cannot establish what caused a particular mistake. It does warn against explaining every faltering performance the same way.

If your attention is on whether somebody looks bored, adding more distraction is hardly an obvious solution. If you haven’t learned the movement, removing useful instruction may leave you lost. Start with the actual difficulty, including the possibility that a teacher could see something you can’t.

Give the repair a place to happen

For an ordinary hobby, you can make a modest distinction before starting: are you working on a specific part, or seeing whether you can complete something familiar?

Suppose one chord change keeps breaking the rhythm. You might slow it down, inspect the fingering, and practice that transition separately. In that session, stopping is part of the work. You have chosen a detail that needs attention.

Later, you could play a familiar passage through and listen to the result, saving the detailed repair until the passage ends. This is a proposed experiment, not the procedure tested with those soccer players. Its value would be in discovering whether it helps your particular skill.

The review must still happen. Otherwise, “letting it flow” becomes a pleasant way to keep repeating the same error. Give yourself permission to finish an attempt and an obligation to examine what it produced. Those can coexist.

Try this with one familiar skill

1. Name the part you can already do. Choose a low-stakes movement or short passage you’ve performed successfully before. If you’re learning it from scratch or deliberately changing technique, keep the instruction you need.

2. Complete one bounded attempt. Decide where it ends before starting. Attend to the task and its result without adding a new checklist of body movements halfway through. Keep all normal safety checks; use a hobby where a miss is harmless.

3. Review the result, then choose a repair. Note where the attempt worked or broke down. Compare further attempts rather than trusting one lucky success. If removing the commentary makes things worse, restore a useful cue or seek instruction. Keep what helps the performance, even if it contradicts the advice.

The guitar is still in your hands when the passage ends. You can return to the difficult change and work on it carefully. You can also let the final chord finish ringing before you begin.

P.S. By the way, an AI wrote these sentences from the creators’ videos, newsletters, and posts Payton actually consumes week after week. He built the system that makes this letter, and he will keep putting it out once a week. He put his taste and judgment into what good looks like, and into how to avoid bad. He wants to be fully transparent about that.

The following comes from the tweet storm, or threaded essay, pinned to my X account. It was inspired by Naval Ravikant’s “How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)” thread and built around one of my favorite topics and biggest goals: thinking clearly. I consider being called a clear thinker a much better compliment than being called “smart” or “intelligent.” I want to be known as a clear thinker. I hope these 50 maxims and the explanations behind them help you become a clear thinker too. Enjoy.

Clear thinking starts with enough attention to understand a problem and a willingness to test your explanation against reality. AI can suggest options and objections, but you still have to check the important claims and decide what evidence supports them. Before committing to an idea, write down what you expect and try a small test that could change your mind. Use what happens to improve your next decision.

*You can read the essay straight through or return to the maxim that fits a problem you’re facing.

• 01. AI lowers the cost of producing an answer. It does not lower the cost of believing the wrong one.

A polished answer can make you feel as though the difficult thinking has already happened. The sentences connect, the numbers look plausible, and the conclusion sounds reasonable. But none of that tells you whether the assumptions underneath it are true. AI makes it much easier to produce something worth considering. You still have to establish whether it’s worth believing.

Suppose a shop owner asks whether they should open a second location. AI produces a convincing plan based on steady demand, affordable staffing, and customers behaving the same way in a new neighborhood. If any of those assumptions fail, the owner’s actual money is still gone. The cheap part was getting the plan. The expensive part was committing to it.

So use the answer to identify what needs checking. Compare the sales assumptions with your own records, get real quotes, and test demand before signing anything. A quick answer is useful when it accelerates that investigation. It’s dangerous when its confidence lets you skip it.

• 02. Clear thinking means knowing what you believe, why you believe it, and what would change your mind.

You can hold a strong opinion without understanding what holds it up. Sometimes it’s evidence. Sometimes it’s a person you trust, a painful experience, or an idea you’ve repeated so often that it now feels obvious. Clear thinking starts by making that support visible.

Take the belief that remote work makes a team less productive. What does “productive” mean here? Finishing on time? Producing better work? Being available when someone needs help? Once you’ve defined the claim, write down why you believe it and what result would count against it. You could compare similar projects during a trial, including their quality and the effort required to coordinate them.

You don’t need to abandon the belief the moment you encounter one exception. You do need a standard by which it could lose your confidence. If every possible result becomes another reason you were right, you’re protecting a conclusion from examination. Being able to explain what would change your mind is part of having a defensible view.

• 03. Clear thinking depends on a mind that can focus, an explanation that fits reality, and a way to discover when you’re wrong.

You can reason carefully and still reach a poor conclusion because you started with a bad explanation. You can also have a useful explanation and fail to apply it because your attention keeps getting pulled elsewhere. Even when both are working, you need a way to discover whether the decision helped.

Imagine a freelancer trying to earn more. They need enough uninterrupted attention to examine their work. They need an explanation of what limits their income: perhaps pricing, demand, or the hours each project consumes. Then they need feedback that distinguishes those possibilities. Raising prices won’t solve a shortage of qualified inquiries, and attracting more clients won’t help much if every project already loses money.

When thinking goes wrong, inspect the part that failed. Were you too distracted to understand the situation? Did your explanation miss something? Did you act without checking the result? Those problems require different repairs. More concentration cannot make a false assumption true, and reading another book cannot replace feedback from an actual customer.

• 04. Before calling yourself undisciplined, inspect your sleep, your surroundings, and the size of the task. You may be judging your character by conditions you can change.

“I have no discipline” sounds like an explanation, but it’s often just a description of the problem with an insult attached. You didn’t begin the work, so you call yourself someone who doesn’t begin work. That gives you very little to change.

Look at the conditions first. Are you trying to make a difficult decision after a poor night’s sleep? Does every notification interrupt you? Is the task “sort out my life,” which contains about a hundred decisions and no obvious starting point? Any of those can make beginning harder without proving anything permanent about your character.

If you’ve been avoiding a report, try a quiet place and a first step as specific as opening last month’s numbers. Change one condition at a time when you can, so you learn what helps. Responsibility still matters: you’re responsible for improving the conditions you can influence and seeking help with the ones you can’t. But blame is a poor substitute for diagnosis. Give yourself a problem you can actually work on.

• 05. Write complicated problems down. Every detail you must remember competes with the attention you need to examine it.

Try comparing three apartments while keeping every rent, commute, deposit, move-in date, and doubt in your head. Part of your attention will be spent simply preventing those details from disappearing. You’ll revisit the same points because you can’t reliably see what you’ve already considered.

Put them somewhere you can look at. Separate what you know from what you’re assuming, then write the decision you’re actually trying to make. “Which apartment should I choose?” becomes easier to examine when you can see that one exceeds your budget and another isn’t available before your current lease ends. A problem that felt emotionally enormous may be controlled by two practical constraints.

Writing also exposes gaps. “The commute seems fine” becomes “I haven’t tested the commute at the time I’d actually travel.” Now you have a useful next step. The page doesn’t need to be beautiful, and you don’t need a new productivity system. It needs to hold the details still long enough for you to examine how they fit together.

• 06. Expertise is compression. Learn how facts fit together, and you have fewer separate things to hold in mind.

When you understand a subject, you stop treating every detail as a separate instruction. You recognize relationships. Those relationships let you make sense of more information without consciously working through every piece from scratch.

A beginner cook might memorize rules about heat, moisture, and how much food to put in a pan. An experienced cook sees that a crowded pan traps moisture and makes browning harder. That explanation connects several observations at once. It also helps when the recipe changes, because the cook understands what the instructions were trying to accomplish. This is why being able to recite a definition isn’t the same as understanding it. Ask what causes what, when the pattern applies, and what would happen if one condition changed. Then practice with different examples. AI can help generate those examples or explain a relationship, but familiarity with its wording isn’t proof that you’ve learned it. Try using the idea without looking at the explanation. You’ll quickly find the parts you only recognized on the page.

• 07. Find your defaults by asking what happens when you do nothing. Choose that outcome deliberately. It will govern the days when you are tired.

A default is the result your existing setup produces unless you intervene. Your phone opens to something. Your money stays somewhere. Unclaimed time gets filled by whatever is easiest to reach. Doing nothing still leads to an outcome.

Suppose you want to read more, but your phone is beside the couch and your book is upstairs. Reading is possible, but scrolling has the easier starting position. On a tired evening, that difference may decide what you do before you consciously weigh the options. Leaving the book where you sit changes the default without requiring a fresh burst of determination.

Look at what happens on an ordinary bad day, when you’re busy and mildly irritated and haven’t planned everything. Is that setup moving you toward something you want? If it isn’t, change what happens automatically. Defaults deserve occasional review because your circumstances will change. Their value is that you don’t have to rebuild a sensible decision every time you face it.

• 08. Make useful actions easy to begin and distractions inconvenient to reach. A change in friction can outlast a burst of motivation.

Friction is whatever stands between an intention and the first action: a missing file, a login, a cluttered desk, a decision about where to start. None of these needs to be a huge obstacle. A small obstacle repeated at the wrong moment can be enough to send you toward something easier.

Suppose you want to practice guitar after dinner. If the guitar is in its case, in a cupboard, behind three other things, practice begins with a minor household project. Put it on a stand beside the chair, with the next exercise ready, and the first useful action becomes much easier. Put the television remote somewhere less convenient and you’ve changed the competing option too.

You still have to choose to practice. The environment can’t supply a goal you don’t care about. What it can do is stop making the choice unnecessarily difficult. Keep protective friction where mistakes are costly, such as reviewing a message before sending it. Make the useful action easier, not every action indiscriminately faster.

• 09. Do not negotiate with temptation in real time. Move the phone, block the site, or remove the option while you are still thinking clearly.

It’s easy to make a sensible plan when the temptation is somewhere else. The argument changes when the phone lights up or the website is already open. Now the immediate reward is vivid, while the benefit of staying focused is something you’ll receive later.

Make the decision earlier. If you want an hour to write, put the phone outside the room and block the sites you usually visit before you begin. You aren’t relying on winning the same argument thirty times. You’ve changed whether the argument needs to happen at all.

Choose a barrier proportionate to the problem. A temporary website block is different from locking yourself out of something you may urgently need. Leave sensible exceptions and a way to revise a rule that isn’t working. The purpose is to carry a decision you made thoughtfully into a moment when you’re likely to bargain with it. Knowing your future self may be tempted gives you a chance to help them in advance.

• 10. Make your environment work even when your self-control is weak. Removing a distraction reduces how often you need to resist it.

A good working environment should help when you’re having an average day. If it only works when you’re well rested, enthusiastic, and perfectly disciplined, it’s relying on the very conditions it was supposed to support.

Consider someone trying to check a complicated document beside two colleagues having a conversation. Nobody is asking for their attention, and they may never turn around. Yet they keep losing the sentence they were reading and starting again. Telling themselves to concentrate harder doesn’t change the competing speech. Moving to a quieter place might.

That is a different problem from deciding whether to open a distracting app. Some environments keep presenting information you have to process or ignore before you get a choice about pursuing it. The useful intervention may be less noise, fewer visible competing tasks, or a clear agreement about when colleagues can interrupt you.

Try the same kind of work in a quieter setup and compare errors, progress, and how often you need to restart. One good session won’t prove a universal rule about offices, but it can help you identify a condition worth changing. Keep the arrangement simple enough to use on a difficult day. You want your surroundings to absorb some of the effort instead of repeatedly demanding more of it.

• 11. An interruption costs more than the time it lasts. Before switching tasks, write down the next step so you don’t have to reconstruct your thinking.

When you return from an interruption, the document may still be open, but the thought isn’t necessarily where you left it. You have to remember what you were trying to do, which options you ruled out, and why that unfinished sentence mattered. A two-minute interruption can therefore create more than two minutes of lost progress.

Before switching, leave a useful return point. “Continue proposal” tells your future self almost nothing. “Check whether the client’s deadline includes revisions, then finish the delivery paragraph” preserves the decision and the next action. If you stopped because something was unclear, write the question down too.

This won’t make interruptions free, and it doesn’t justify filling your day with them. It makes an unavoidable switch less costly. The note can be a single sentence at the bottom of the document. What matters is that it restores the context you would otherwise have to reconstruct. Write it for the version of you who comes back distracted, not the version who currently remembers everything.

• 12. A mental model simplifies reality by leaving things out. That is what makes it useful, and dangerous: when it disagrees with reality, reality wins.

A map that included every blade of grass would be a terrible map. Its usefulness comes from leaving things out so you can see the roads. Mental models do something similar: they emphasize a few relationships so you can reason about a complicated situation.

The danger appears when an omitted detail controls the result. “Lower prices attract more customers” can be useful, but it leaves out whether people associate the lower price with poor quality, whether you can serve the extra demand, and whether each sale remains worthwhile. A model can be sensible within its limits and misleading outside them. Use it to form an expectation, then compare that expectation with what happens. If the result disagrees, inspect the assumptions and the quality of your observations. You might have measured poorly, or you might need a better model. Either way, the model doesn’t get to overrule the result because it sounds elegant. Its job is to help you navigate what’s actually there.

• 13. A compelling story can leave out as much as any model. Before a narrative decides for you, ask what it left out.

A compelling story usually has a main character, a difficult choice, and a result that makes the choice seem meaningful. Real events contain much more: timing, constraints, other people’s work, failed attempts, and things nobody understood while they were happening. A tidy account selects from that mess.

Imagine reading about a founder who quit their job and built a successful company. The story may accurately describe what happened. It still doesn’t tell you how many people made the same move and failed, what financial support the founder had, or whether customers were already waiting. Those missing details matter if you’re treating the story as advice.

You can enjoy a story and learn from it while asking what it leaves unresolved. Look for the conditions that would have to be similar for the lesson to apply to you. A memorable example shows that something can happen. Establishing how often it happens, why it happens, and whether you should expect it requires more evidence.

• 14. Use AI summaries to decide where to look. Return to the original source before making a decision that depends on what the summary may have omitted.

A summary makes a document shorter by deciding which details deserve to survive. That is useful when you’re trying to find your way around a large amount of material. It becomes risky when the excluded detail is the one your decision depends on.

Suppose AI summarizes a return policy as “returns accepted within thirty days.” The original might limit that promise to unopened products or exclude the item you’re buying. The summary could sound perfectly clear while leaving you with the wrong expectation. Reading the relevant clause is much cheaper than discovering the exception afterward.

Use a summary to locate the passage, identify questions, and decide which sources deserve closer attention. Then inspect the original wherever wording, context, or an exception could change your action. You don’t have to read every page of every source. You do have to check the parts carrying the decision. If the original remains unclear, say so and investigate further. Asking AI to repeat the summary more confidently won’t recover a condition you haven’t checked.

• 15. When reality surprises you, examine the assumption behind your expectation. Investigate the mismatch before explaining it away.

Surprise is useful because it identifies a difference between what you expected and what happened. Something in your picture of the situation was incomplete, or the result included variation you hadn’t allowed for. Either possibility gives you something to investigate.

Suppose you send an offer and receive far fewer replies than expected. “People just don’t get it” protects your original view, but it doesn’t help you improve anything. Check whether the message arrived, whether the recipients had the problem you assumed, and whether the offer was clear enough to evaluate. Also check whether your expectation was reasonable in the first place.

One surprising result doesn’t automatically disprove your explanation. Small samples can mislead, and circumstances can change. The point is to pause before defending yourself. Write down which assumption the result puts under pressure and what information would help resolve it. You want to become quicker at noticing a mismatch, not quicker at producing a reason it doesn’t count.

• 16. Notice what makes you flinch. Sit with it for ten seconds and ask what it’s pointing at.

Sometimes you notice resistance before you can explain it. A question makes you tense. A message stays unopened. A particular line in someone’s feedback makes you want to stop reading. That reaction is worth examining because it may point toward something you’ve been avoiding.

Give it a little space. Ten seconds isn’t a magic threshold; it’s a reminder to pause before distracting yourself. Name what happened as plainly as you can: “I don’t want to check the numbers because they might show this project isn’t working.” Once the concern is visible, you can investigate it rather than letting the discomfort choose for you.

A flinch doesn’t prove the criticism is correct. It can also come from an unfair accusation, a painful association, or a real boundary being crossed. Treat the reaction as a signal to ask a better question. What exactly am I afraid this means, and what evidence supports that interpretation? You can take the feeling seriously without treating it as the final verdict.

• 17. Question every unexamined “should.” Ask who installed it and whether you actually want it before you obey it.

“I should want this” can hide a decision you’ve never actually made. The expectation may have come from your family, your profession, your friends, or a version of yourself whose priorities have changed. Repetition can make it feel like a fact about how life must be lived.

Suppose you believe you should become a manager because that’s what progress looks like in your field. Look at the actual work: hiring, difficult conversations, planning, and being accountable for other people’s results. You may want that. You may prefer becoming excellent at the craft you already practice. The title alone doesn’t settle the question.

Trace the expectation back to its reason. Some “shoulds” reflect real responsibilities, including promises you’ve made and people who depend on you. Others are preferences you’ve inherited without examining the cost. Questioning them doesn’t mean automatically rejecting them. It lets you keep the commitments you can defend and reconsider the ones you’re following mainly because you’ve never stopped to ask.

• 18. Charlie Munger said, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” Before predicting what people will do, ask what they are being rewarded for.

People respond to more than what a system officially says it values. They also respond to what earns money, approval, promotion, relief, or protection from blame. When those rewards conflict with the stated goal, the rewards deserve your attention.

Imagine a support team paid partly according to how many tickets it closes. The company says it wants customers helped, but the easiest way to improve the rewarded number may be to close difficult cases prematurely. You don’t need to assume the employees are unusually dishonest. You’ve created a situation in which thorough work can make their performance look worse.

Before blaming the people, examine the arrangement. What behavior gets rewarded immediately? What good work goes unnoticed? What happens to someone who reports a problem honestly? Incentives aren’t a complete explanation of human behavior; people also have values, relationships, and professional standards. But if your plan requires people to repeatedly act against what the system rewards, you’ve made the desired result harder to achieve. Change the reward or add a check that makes shortcuts visible.

• 19. A rising metric can hide a worsening result. Measure closed support tickets alongside reopened ones. The number should remain accountable to the thing it represents.

A number is useful because it stands in for something you care about. Response time stands in for service. Views stand in for attention. Completed tasks stand in for progress. The mistake is forgetting that the number and the underlying result can separate.

Suppose a team closes twice as many support tickets this week. That looks good until you discover that many customers are reopening the same unresolved problems. The original metric rewarded an administrative action, and the dashboard mistook it for a successful outcome. Tracking reopened cases makes that difference harder to hide.

Choose a second measure that would worsen if someone improved the first by taking a shortcut. If you’re increasing output, check quality. If you’re cutting delivery time, check errors and rework. You don’t need a dashboard with forty competing targets, each creating more work. You need enough evidence to notice when the number is improving at the expense of the thing it was supposed to represent. Occasionally inspect the actual work too. Two imperfect metrics are still representations.

• 20. Before removing a rule, understand the problem it was built to solve. You can remove the rule and inherit the problem.

An unnecessary rule creates friction. A necessary rule can create friction too. Looking at the inconvenience alone doesn’t tell you which kind you’re dealing with.

Suppose every customer order requires a second person to check the delivery address. It seems wasteful, so you remove the step. Later you discover that the rule followed a series of expensive shipments to old addresses copied from previous orders. The review may still be a poor solution, but the problem it addressed hasn’t disappeared just because the review annoyed you. Ask what happened before the rule existed, which failure it prevents, and whether the relevant conditions have changed. Perhaps the order system now validates addresses reliably. Perhaps a targeted check would replace the blanket review. History gives you something to test, not a permanent veto on change. Once you understand the protection, you can remove it deliberately, replace it, or run a limited trial while watching for the original failure. That’s a stronger improvement than simply making the process shorter.

• 21. Evidence matters when it separates competing explanations. Ask whether you would expect to see the same thing if your belief were false.

Evidence earns its value by helping you choose between explanations. An observation can be consistent with your belief and still tell you very little, because you’d also expect it if your belief were wrong.

Suppose you think a potential customer is eager to buy because they said, “Send me some details.” A serious buyer might say that. So might someone being polite or trying to end the conversation. The reply fits both explanations, so it shouldn’t move your confidence very far. A request to discuss delivery dates with the person who approves the purchase would usually provide more information, though it still wouldn’t guarantee a sale.

Ask what each explanation predicts, then look for the difference. If customers love the product, what should you observe beyond compliments? Repeat use, perhaps, or willingness to pay. Compare that with what you’d expect from people who merely like you. You aren’t demanding perfect proof. You’re looking for information that makes one account of the situation more plausible than its competitors.

• 22. Turn percentages into people. Ten out of a thousand is easier to grasp than one percent.

A percentage can sound dramatic while hiding the scale of what happened. If a website’s sales rise from one to two, sales have increased by 100 percent. If they rise from a thousand to two thousand, the percentage is identical, but the practical result is very different.

Keep the count and the total group together. Ten responses out of a thousand invitations means something different from ten out of twenty. Also check the time window and who was counted. A result drawn from existing customers may tell you little about people who have never heard of the business.

Consider a conversion rate rising from two percent to three percent. In a group of a thousand visitors, that means twenty buyers becoming thirty. The increase is ten buyers. Ten divided by the original twenty is one half, so the relative increase is fifty percent. But the rate itself rose by one percentage point, from two to three.

All of those descriptions are compatible. They answer different questions. The concrete count helps you understand what changed before the most impressive-sounding version decides how you feel about it. Ask for the original count, the new count, and the group they came from whenever a percentage is doing the persuading.

• 23. Begin with what happens in similar cases. Your plan needs evidence for being exceptional, not merely a story about why it is.

Your own plan comes with details that make it feel different. You know your motivation, the care you’ve put into it, and the reasons it could work. Comparable projects usually appear as bare outcomes, without the equally convincing stories their owners told at the beginning.

Suppose you’re planning a paid workshop and expect almost everyone you invite to register. Before building the budget around that expectation, look at comparable workshops: similar audience, price, topic, and relationship with the organizer. What share of invitees actually paid? This starting pattern is often called a base rate. It gives you an expectation grounded in more than the appeal of your own plan.

Choose the comparison carefully. An established teacher inviting past students has a different starting position from a stranger advertising to people who have never heard of them. If you can’t find a close comparison, acknowledge that uncertainty instead of inventing a precise benchmark.

Then adjust for advantages you can defend. Perhaps prospective attendees have already asked for this exact material, or several have made a commitment to attend. You can still believe your workshop will do better. You need to explain why the difference should change the outcome, rather than treating your enthusiasm as the evidence.

• 24. Break a large unknown into smaller estimates. Use ranges. Find the assumption that changes the answer most, and investigate that first.

A large unknown often becomes easier to estimate once you identify what produces it. “How many people might attend this workshop?” is vague. The number you can realistically reach, the share likely to register, and the share of registrants likely to attend give you separate questions you can investigate.

Suppose you can reach about two hundred relevant people. If ten to twenty percent register and around three quarters attend, you might plan for roughly fifteen to thirty attendees. Those figures are hypothetical assumptions, not a forecast you should trust because it contains multiplication. Their purpose is to expose the logic behind the answer.

Now vary the inputs. If a small change in registration rate greatly changes the result, learning about demand may be more useful than refining a minor cost estimate. Watch for assumptions that move together: reaching a larger, less relevant audience might reduce the registration rate. A range is honest only when it reflects plausible conditions. Breaking the problem down makes uncertainty inspectable; it doesn’t make uncertainty disappear.

• 25. When comparing options, consider what you could gain or lose and how likely each outcome is. Write down your estimates so you can see which assumptions your decision depends on.

We often compare options by picturing their most appealing or frightening outcome. A new project offers freedom. A familiar job offers security. Those impressions can hide several possible outcomes with different chances of happening and different costs.

Write down the main possibilities over the same time period. For a small project, that might include strong demand, modest demand, and little demand. Estimate what each would mean after expenses and time, then assign rough probabilities that add up to the whole set of possibilities. You’re making your judgment visible so you can examine it. Decimal places won’t make a guess more trustworthy.

The useful discovery is often which assumption controls the choice. Perhaps the project looks attractive only if customers arrive immediately, while a slow start makes it unaffordable. Now you know what to investigate or protect against. Also include outcomes that don’t fit neatly into money: stress, family time, obligations, and the ability to change course. The calculation should inform the decision you’re actually making, including the parts it cannot precisely measure.

• 26. Weigh both the likelihood of an outcome and its consequences. Then ask whether you can survive being wrong. Favorable odds are little comfort if one loss ends the game.

A favorable average can hide a downside you cannot afford to experience even once. The same uncertain opportunity can be sensible for one person and disastrous for another because they have different obligations and different capacity to recover.

Imagine two small businesses considering the same untested expansion. One can fund a limited trial while continuing normal operations. The other would have to commit the cash it needs to pay staff next month. Even if both owners believe the expansion is likely to work, the second is exposed to a very different failure. A good story about the upside doesn’t make payroll optional. Examine the worst plausible outcome, how it could arise, and what it would leave you able to do next. Reduce the commitment, stage it, or decline it if the downside exceeds what you can responsibly absorb. “Likely to succeed” and “safe enough to attempt” answer different questions. Protecting your ability to continue gives future good decisions somewhere to take effect.

• 27. You do not need certainty to act. You need enough evidence for the size of the bet, a limit on the downside, and a way to learn from the outcome.

Waiting for certainty can feel responsible when it’s really avoiding a decision. At the same time, acting quickly can feel brave when you haven’t understood the downside. The useful standard sits in the relationship between the evidence and the commitment.

You need less evidence to test a new workshop with a small group than to rent a permanent venue for a year. The small trial can reveal whether people attend, whether the material helps, and what takes more work than expected. If it fails, you should still be able to recover and use what you learned.

Define the limits before you begin: the time or money available, what you won’t put at risk, and when you’ll review the result. Make sure the test can actually answer the question controlling the next step. A harmless experiment that teaches you nothing relevant isn’t much help. The aim is to take an action proportionate to what you know, with enough protection that being wrong remains useful rather than overwhelming.

• 28. A good decision can lose. A bad decision can win. Judge the reasoning using what was knowable at the time, then learn from what happened.

After a result arrives, it’s tempting to treat it as a grade on the decision. Success makes the choice look intelligent. Failure makes the warning signs look obvious. But you made the decision before you knew which outcome would occur.

Suppose an outdoor event has a backup venue because the forecast shows a meaningful chance of rain. The day stays dry. That doesn’t automatically mean arranging the backup was foolish. You paid to protect against a possibility that happened not to occur. Conversely, ignoring a serious risk doesn’t become careful planning just because you escaped the consequences once.

Review two things separately. First, did the choice make sense given the information available, the alternatives, and the downside at the time? Second, what does the outcome teach you about those assumptions? A repeated pattern of misses may reveal a broken process even when each individual miss has an excuse. You want to avoid learning the wrong lesson from luck while remaining fully willing to improve the reasoning.

• 29. Write down your prediction and reasoning before the result arrives. Otherwise you can remember being right about something you never predicted.

Once you know what happened, it’s surprisingly easy to remember that you expected it. A vague concern becomes a precise warning in hindsight, and an outcome you barely considered becomes “what I thought would happen.” A written record gives you something less convenient to negotiate with.

Before an important choice, record the outcome you expect, when you expect it, your confidence, and the main reasons. Define the terms. “The trial will go well” is hard to evaluate. A prediction such as “At least eight of the ten participants will complete the exercise without extra help by the end of Friday’s session” gives you a checkable outcome and a deadline.

Then add why you expect that result. You might have tried the instructions with two beginners and found that both finished, while still being uncertain about a larger group. Recording that evidence matters: if the trial fails, you can examine whether the instructions were unclear, the earlier test was unrepresentative, or your confidence simply exceeded what two people could establish.

When the result arrives, compare it with the original words before explaining the difference. Record what you’ll change next time. This doesn’t need to become a diary of every trivial decision. Use it where repeated learning or a meaningful commitment makes an honest comparison worth the effort.

• 30. Estimate from the time similar work actually took. A plan built from perfect days is a promise to be surprised.

A plan often describes the work as though nothing interrupts it: write the draft, review it, make revisions, send it. Real projects contain questions, waiting, errors, missing information, and work that takes longer once you can finally see what it involves.

Look at how long comparable work actually took, from the point you started to the point it was usable. If a previous presentation required research, review, and revisions, those stages belong in the new estimate too. Counting only the hours spent building slides gives you a forecast for an imaginary version of the task.

Use a range when uncertainty is meaningful, and separate your likely finish from a safer commitment. Then adjust for actual differences in scope or experience. You may be faster now, but name what has changed rather than assuming determination will cancel every delay. Historical estimates are useful precisely because they include some of the mess that a fresh plan makes easy to forget.

• 31. Compare your initial time estimates with how long the work actually took. Use the pattern to adjust future estimates for similar tasks.

An estimate becomes more useful when it participates in a feedback loop. Otherwise, you can spend years being “usually a bit optimistic” without learning which tasks you misjudge or by how much.

Keep a simple record of what you expected and what the work required. Be consistent about the measure: active work hours and calendar time answer different questions. A task can need two hours of effort while taking three days to finish because someone else must review it. Both may matter to the next promise you make.

Group similar work and look for a recurring miss. Perhaps you estimate writing reasonably well but forget the time needed to find source material. Perhaps revisions keep doubling a supposedly quick design task. Correct the missing stage before applying a blanket multiplier to everything. Revisit the pattern as your skills, tools, and scope change. The point is to become more accurate, not to turn a small collection of old projects into another rule you’re unwilling to update.

• 32. Every commitment spends hours that cannot be spent elsewhere. Name the best alternative you are giving up before you say yes.

Saying yes spends part of a finite week. The cost includes whatever you can no longer do during that time, even if no money changes hands and nobody sends an invoice for the lost opportunity.

A one-hour meeting may consume the only uninterrupted hour you had to finish a proposal. Add preparation and the effort of returning to the interrupted work, and the commitment is larger than the calendar block suggests. Naming the displaced work makes the trade visible in a way that “I’m busy” doesn’t. Compare the new commitment with your best realistic alternative, not an imaginary hour of perfect productivity. Rest, relationships, and unstructured time can be worthwhile alternatives too. You don’t have to turn every evening into an earnings calculation. You do need to understand what you’re giving up, especially when your calendar fills through small agreeable answers. A commitment can be good in isolation and still be the wrong use of the time you actually have.

• 33. Before delegating, count both the money you will spend and the time needed to explain, check, and fix the work. Ask whether the time you actually free up is worth that cost.

Hiring someone to do a task removes only the work they can complete without you. You may still need to explain the goal, supply materials, answer questions, inspect the result, and request changes. Ignoring that remaining work makes delegation look cheaper than it is.

Suppose a recurring report takes you four hours. Someone else prepares it, but briefing and review take ninety minutes. You’ve freed about two and a half hours, not four, and you still have the fee to consider. If the first handoff also requires building a template, that setup may be worthwhile over many repetitions even if the initial attempt saves little time.

Decide what those freed hours are for and what quality must survive the handoff. Better work, reliable coverage, and less exhaustion can justify delegation as well as additional income. Give the person a clear example of an acceptable result and a way to surface uncertainty early. You want a fair comparison between the full alternatives, not a flattering comparison between their fee and your imagined hourly rate.

• 34. Find the few efforts that produce most of the result. Equal time is a poor default when the returns are unequal.

A full calendar can hide how unevenly your effort contributes to the result. Some conversations lead to most of your useful opportunities. Some product problems cause most of the complaints. Some study habits produce understanding while others mainly produce the feeling of studying.

Look backward at actual outcomes and trace where they came from. If a few types of customer conversation repeatedly reveal important problems, protect time for them before polishing low-impact internal documents. If practice questions expose what you don’t understand, they may deserve more of your study time than rereading familiar pages.

This is a pattern to investigate, not a promise that every situation follows an exact eighty-twenty split. Be careful with work whose benefit is prevention: backups, maintenance, and checking mistakes can look unproductive because success means a problem never appears. Distinguish low visible output from low value. The aim is to allocate effort according to its contribution while preserving the supporting work that allows the most valuable activities to succeed.

Also check whether the apparent winner is repeatable. One large client may account for most of this month’s income, but depending entirely on that client creates a vulnerability. A successful launch may owe part of its result to months of quieter preparation. Concentrate effort where it contributes, while preserving enough support and alternatives that one change cannot remove the whole result.

• 35. When every step must work, one weak step can defeat the whole plan. Improve the bottleneck before polishing what already works.

Some results require a sequence of essential steps. A customer must discover the offer, understand it, decide to buy, complete payment, and receive what was promised. A serious failure at any required stage can prevent the overall result, even when the other stages are excellent.

Suppose a workshop attracts plenty of interested visitors, but the booking form fails on their phones. Improving the headline may attract more people to the same broken form. Fixing the booking problem matters because it lets interest you’ve already earned turn into attendance. This is a weak link: attempts fail as they pass through it.

A queue creates a related but different problem. Every booking might be processed correctly, but if one person must approve each one and cannot keep up, customers wait. This is a capacity bottleneck. The first problem needs a more reliable step; the second may need less work per booking, more capacity, or a simpler approval rule.

Check both failed attempts and waiting time before choosing what to improve. Then measure the final result, not just how busy or efficient one stage looks. Once the limiting point improves, another step may become the constraint. Keep examining the whole path rather than endlessly polishing the part you happen to enjoy working on.

• 36. Getting better at your current method can hide a better method. Test alternatives while the old one still pays for the experiment.

Getting skilled at a method gives you a reason to keep using it. You work faster, make fewer mistakes, and know what to expect. That competence can also make alternatives look worse because you’re comparing your practiced current method with your clumsy first attempt at a new one.

Imagine someone manually assembling the same weekly report. They become extremely fast at copying, sorting, and formatting. A better data export might eliminate much of that work, but learning it would initially slow them down. If they judge only the first attempt, they’ll keep improving a process that may no longer deserve the effort.

Protect the working method while testing an alternative on a limited example. Include setup time, reliability, quality, and the likely number of future repetitions in the comparison. Novelty alone is no reason to change. But neither is your existing competence proof that you’ve found the best route. Give the alternative enough room to demonstrate its value without gambling the output people are already relying on.

• 37. When you have time and results have flatlined, try new approaches. When time is short and results are climbing, double down on what works.

Experimenting spends time in exchange for the possibility of finding something better. Repeating a known approach uses what you’ve already learned to produce a result. Both are useful, but their value changes with your situation.

If you’ve been promoting an event for weeks with little response and still have time, another identical attempt may teach you very little. A different message or audience could reveal something useful. If a particular approach is producing registrations and the event is tomorrow, a major redesign may consume the time you need to do more of what is working.

Check the evidence behind the apparent trend. One unusually good result doesn’t establish a reliable winner, and a short flat period doesn’t prove the method is exhausted. Also consider what failure would cost and how much time remains to recover. You may keep a small experiment running beside the main approach. The useful question is how much learning is still worth buying before you need the result, given what you currently know.

• 38. Treat avoidance as something to investigate. A task may be too vague, too large, or aimed at a goal you no longer want. More pressure will not tell you which.

Avoidance tells you that you’re not doing something. It doesn’t, by itself, explain why. You may not understand the task, may expect it to be unpleasant, may lack a needed skill, or may no longer care about the outcome. More pressure can intensify the discomfort without separating those explanations.

Start with the task itself. “Build my website” contains decisions about the offer, the audience, the words, and the design. “Write one paragraph explaining who this helps” is something you can attempt. If making the next step concrete reduces the resistance, ambiguity was probably part of the problem.

If the resistance remains, investigate further. What do you expect to happen when you start? Is there a missing resource or a conversation you’re avoiding? Do you still endorse the goal? Not every worthwhile task will feel appealing, and discomfort doesn’t automatically mean you should quit. You want to identify whether the useful response is clarification, practice, support, acceptance of temporary discomfort, or a deliberate change of direction.

• 39. Attach each goal to a trigger you cannot miss. “After I put down my coffee, I open the draft” beats “I should write more.”

“I want to write more” leaves the timing undecided. Each day, you have to notice the intention, remember why it matters, and choose a moment to begin. A specific cue removes one of those decisions by connecting the action to something that already happens.

Choose a trigger you can recognize without interpretation, such as putting down your breakfast plate. Attach a small action: open the draft and write the next sentence.

The sequence is specific enough to observe: breakfast finishes, the plate goes down, the document opens, and you write. Keep the document easy to reach so the cue doesn’t lead immediately into a search for the right file.

Then check both parts of the arrangement. Did the trigger happen and did you notice it? If you noticed it but didn’t act, was the action too large or poorly matched to that moment? A breakfast cue won’t help if your mornings are consistently rushed. Adjust the sequence based on what actually happens. The cue gives the goal a place in your day; the small action gives you a practical way to begin when enthusiasm is absent.

• 40. For a small, reversible problem, set a five-minute timer. Finish it, discard it, or define the next physical action. “Think about it later” is not an outcome.

A minor unresolved task can keep returning to your attention without receiving any useful work. You remember it, feel the irritation, and postpone it again. The problem may be small, but the repeated interruption isn’t doing you any favors.

Give it a short, bounded attempt. If you need to find a receipt, spend five minutes looking in the likely places. You may find it, decide it no longer matters, or discover that the next step is requesting a copy from the vendor. Each result changes the state of the problem. “I’ll think about it” leaves you exactly where you began.

The timer limits the investigation; it doesn’t require a reckless decision when it rings. If the issue is larger than expected, define the next physical action and give it an appropriate time. Keep this technique for small, reversible work. Its purpose is to turn a vague open loop into something finished or actionable, not to impose an arbitrary deadline on a choice whose consequences you haven’t understood.

• 41. A cheap experiment can settle what another week of argument cannot. Choose the smallest action whose result could change your mind.

A disagreement can last because both sides keep rearranging the same information. One person thinks customers want a simpler offer. Another thinks they want more features. A longer meeting may produce more arguments without producing anything that distinguishes those beliefs.

Find the smallest test that could change the decision. You might show comparable customers two clearly described offers and measure a meaningful response. Decide beforehand what you’ll count, how long you’ll run the test, and which result would make you continue, change, or stop. Compliments aren’t an adequate substitute for a purchase if willingness to pay is the question.

A cheap test still needs to be informative. A handful of friends may give you useful feedback on clarity while telling you little about demand in a wider market. Keep the conclusion within what the test can establish, and seek stronger evidence as the commitment grows. The point is to spend a little effort making contact with reality when more discussion has stopped changing anyone’s understanding.

• 42. Imagine the plan has failed. Describe how it happened. Look for a plausible cause you can prevent or a warning you can catch early.

Plans are usually described as a sequence in which things go right. A premortem temporarily starts from the opposite end: the plan has failed, and you’re explaining the cause. That change makes it easier to discuss a weakness before anyone has to defend an actual mistake.

Suppose you’re organizing a small event. “Something could go wrong” is too vague to help. “The speaker canceled that morning and nobody had the material needed to replace them” identifies a specific dependency. You can now prepare a backup or decide what you’d tell attendees.

Generate plausible causes, then separate what you can prevent from what you can only detect early. Choose a few safeguards proportionate to the risk. You don’t need to build an elaborate defense against every imaginable disaster, and vivid failure stories aren’t probability estimates. Return to the reasons the plan could work after you’ve checked the risks. A useful premortem improves the attempt; it shouldn’t become a sophisticated way to frighten yourself out of making one.

• 43. Write your own view before asking AI for advice. Otherwise its first answer can become the assumption every later question protects.

The first coherent explanation you read can quietly establish the terms of the discussion. Once AI says the problem is your pricing, your next question may become how to change the pricing. You can spend a long conversation improving an answer to a question you never independently chose.

Before asking, write a short view of your own: what you think is happening, what evidence you have, what remains uncertain, and which decision you need to make. You might discover that you don’t yet have a view. Record that honestly, including the facts you would need to form one.

Now ask AI to examine the situation and compare its explanation with yours. Where do they differ, and what would settle the disagreement? The first note gives you a record of your starting point and makes changes in your reasoning visible. It doesn’t make your initial view superior. You should change it when better evidence warrants it. You’re creating a chance to think before a fluent answer makes one particular framing feel inevitable.

• 44. A question that contains your preferred answer invites agreement. Give AI the problem, the evidence, and the constraints before telling it what you hope is true.

If you ask, “Why is my plan such a good idea?” you’ve already assigned the model its conclusion. Even a softer prompt such as “Help me explain why this is the right move” directs attention toward supporting arguments. The response may be useful advocacy, but it shouldn’t surprise you when it agrees.

For an assessment, give the situation first. Describe the options, relevant evidence, constraints, and what success would mean. Ask what each option gets right, where it could fail, and what information is missing. Research on sycophancy in language models has documented assistants favoring agreement with user beliefs, which is one reason to avoid treating a pleasing response as independent confirmation.

Your preferences still belong in the decision. Wanting more family time or less travel is relevant information, not an error to conceal. The distinction is between giving the model your actual values and feeding it the conclusion you want endorsed. A neutral prompt helps you examine the trade. It doesn’t guarantee an unbiased or correct answer.

• 45. Ask AI for the strongest objection to your plan and the strongest case for the alternative. Give it a disagreement worth investigating.

A useful objection identifies something that could make your plan fail or make another option better. “There are risks” is too vague. “This requires ten hours of work each week, and you currently have three available” gives you a concrete conflict to examine.

Ask AI for the strongest supported objection, not a long list of everything that could conceivably go wrong. Also ask it to make the best fair case for the alternative. That second request can reveal benefits you’ve minimized because you already prefer your own plan, such as reliability, simplicity, or the freedom to change direction later.

Then investigate the claim doing the real work. Are ten hours actually required? Could you reduce the scope? Does the alternative really avoid that constraint, or merely hide it somewhere else? Don’t manufacture equal strength between options when the evidence favors one. The purpose of the exercise is to find an objection that deserves your attention and determine whether it changes the choice. Producing disagreement is only the beginning.

• 46. An AI criticism needs checking as much as an AI compliment. A model can invent reasons you are wrong just as fluently as reasons you are right.

Criticism can sound more sophisticated than praise. A model that finds a flaw appears to be thinking independently, especially when it uses confident language and explains the objection neatly. But it can produce an unsupported criticism with the same fluency as an unsupported compliment.

Suppose AI says your article contradicts itself. Ask it to identify the two passages and explain the conflict. You may discover a real inconsistency. You may also discover that one passage applies to small reversible decisions while the other applies to commitments with serious consequences. The criticism missed a distinction the article already made.

Turn the feedback into claims you can inspect. Check quotations against the text, factual assertions against sources, and predictions against whatever evidence is available. Revise when the criticism survives that check. Reject it when it doesn’t. Asking another model can surface a different view, but agreement between models isn’t automatically independent confirmation. What makes feedback useful is the reasoning and evidence underneath it, not whether the tone is flattering or severe.

• 47. Count the cost of explaining, supervising, checking, and repairing delegated work. An answer generated in seconds can still take hours to trust.

The time shown on an AI generation is only one part of the job. A report may appear in thirty seconds and still require extensive checking before anyone should rely on it. If you count the generation time while ignoring the verification, you can mistake transferred work for eliminated work.

Consider a spreadsheet summary. You need to provide the correct data, explain which rows count, check that the totals match, and investigate suspicious conclusions. If you already have a dependable formula that produces the answer, a long AI conversation may be the slower route. For a different task, AI might remove substantial work even after review.

Compare the complete process with a realistic alternative. Define an acceptable result before delegating, and make errors easy to detect. Start with bounded work whose inputs and outputs you can inspect. As reliability improves, the appropriate scope may grow. The test is whether the whole assignment becomes easier to complete to the required standard, including the cost of fixing mistakes and the consequences of missing them.

• 48. For a consequential decision, state what you chose and why in your own words. An explanation you cannot give without the model is a decision you are not ready to own.

You don’t need to personally know every fact behind a decision. We all depend on other people’s expertise. You do need enough understanding to explain the choice you’re making, the advice you’re relying on, and the risk you’re accepting.

Close the chat and describe the decision to someone who hasn’t read it. What are you choosing? What evidence supports it? What is the strongest reason against it? What would cause you to reconsider? If your explanation reduces to “AI said this was best,” you haven’t yet made the reasoning your own. Notice where you get stuck. Perhaps you understand the recommendation but not the probability attached to it. Perhaps a key term remains vague. Ask for an explanation, inspect the source, or consult someone qualified for the decision. Being able to repeat fluent language isn’t the acceptance check. You should understand enough to identify the assumptions, recognize an important exception, and explain why the choice fits your actual circumstances.

• 49. Let being wrong cost you an opinion before it costs you another year.

An opinion becomes expensive when protecting it determines what you continue to do. You keep pursuing an offer people don’t want, defending a method that no longer works, or waiting for a situation to become what you originally expected. The cost grows while the belief stays comfortably familiar.

Suppose you believe a certain service is what your customers need. Repeated conversations point to a different problem, but you’ve already built the materials and told people your plan. Changing direction now would be embarrassing. Continuing may feel easier today while consuming months you could use to build something more useful. Separate the work you’ve already spent from the value of the next commitment. What would you choose now if you encountered the same evidence without needing to defend your earlier prediction? That question doesn’t require abandoning a worthwhile effort after every setback. It requires giving new evidence a fair chance to change your course. You can acknowledge that an opinion was reasonable when you formed it and still decide it no longer deserves another year.

• 50. Borrow ideas. Take responsibility for what you do with them.

You should learn from other people. Their ideas can spare you mistakes, reveal options you hadn’t considered, and give you a clearer way to understand what you’re experiencing. Taking responsibility doesn’t require pretending you invented everything yourself.

It does require judging where the advice applies. A method that works for an experienced business owner with savings and an established audience may be a poor fit for someone starting from scratch. An AI explanation may be useful while containing one assumption that makes its recommendation wrong for you. Credit the source, inspect the relevant evidence, and adapt the idea to the conditions you actually face.

That applies to this essay too. Pick a maxim that speaks to a real problem, explain why you think it fits, and try an appropriate action. Then pay attention to what happens. If the result challenges the advice, investigate the difference. Borrowing an idea gives you something to work with. What you choose to do next, and how honestly you learn from it, remains your responsibility.

By Payton Bilodeau

P.S. If you are still confused on any of these, take the time to sit with them and think about what they mean, and/or use an LLM to help you understand them.

Being capable of winning is a poor reason to spend your life competing. Before you work harder at a goal, it’s worth checking what the prize would actually give you.

Before you improve the strategy

In a video published this week, Alex Hormozi makes a distinction ambitious people can easily skip: knowing how to win a game doesn’t mean the game is worth playing. He asks you to examine the competition itself, including who designed it, whether you want its prize, and what winning costs outside it.

That question comes before the familiar advice to be more disciplined. Discipline can help our photographer become a better competition entrant. It cannot decide whether spending Saturday producing an impressive submission is preferable to spending it noticing things nobody else would photograph.

Both are legitimate ways to use a camera. The problem begins when becoming better at one quietly replaces wanting it.

Why the reason matters

In a 1999 study, psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot followed 169 University of Rochester students for a semester. Each listed ten personal goals and rated why they were pursuing them. The researchers distinguished enjoyment and personal importance from reasons such as outside pressure or avoiding guilt.

About once a month, the students reported how hard they were trying and how well their goals were going. Students whose goals more closely reflected their interests and values tended to report more sustained effort and greater progress.

The researchers hadn’t assigned people better goals. They were observing students and relying on their reports, so this cannot establish that changing your reason causes better results.

A later review of 77 studies supported the broader connection between personally endorsed goals and effort or progress. It also found that the more tempting promise, that achieving those goals produces a bigger increase in well-being, had too few studies to combine reliably, with mixed findings in those that addressed it. Much of the literature was correlational.

That leaves a useful, modest question: what reason will you have to keep doing the work when nobody is impressed? You don’t need a guarantee of happiness to give that question an honest answer.

A score cannot choose for you

A competition supplies an unusually clear definition of success. Submit the photograph. Get shortlisted. Win. You can see how you’re doing without having to explain what matters to you.

Enjoying photography is less tidy. Perhaps you want to learn to see light, make a record of your children growing up, or spend an afternoon outside without turning it into another performance. Those purposes require judgment. A judge’s ranking offers a ready answer to a different question.

There is nothing wrong with wanting the ranking. Competition might introduce you to better work, give your practice direction, or be enjoyable in its own right. But those are reasons to choose it. They’re different from continuing because you’ve discovered you might be good enough to win.

Suppose the photographs you most like making rarely get selected. You have a real choice: learn the competition’s preferences, find a different competition, or keep making the photographs. Your skill could improve under any of those choices. The number beside your name cannot tell you which improvement you want.

That is why the prize needs a description beyond “success.” What would winning let you do, experience, or contribute? If the answer is mostly that people would know you had won, be honest about whether that is worth the repeated work.

Difficulty is a separate question

This can become a very convenient argument for abandoning anything the moment it gets uncomfortable. A frustrating afternoon is weak evidence that you’ve chosen the wrong goal. Learning to use a camera includes spoiled pictures and confusing settings, even when you love the work.

Nor does a worthwhile goal have to be entertaining. Keeping a promise or supporting someone you care about can be reason enough to do something tedious. You don’t need to dress every responsibility up as a passion.

The place to start is an optional ambition, especially one you’re considering expanding. Ask whether the outcome still deserves the cost, then distinguish that answer from how you feel about today’s difficult bit. If you still want what the effort is for, the next step may be to continue, with a clearer reason.

Put one goal to the test this week

Choose one optional goal before adding more time, money, or commitments to it.

1. Describe the prize. Finish this sentence: “If I succeed, I’ll be able to…” Make the answer concrete enough to picture an ordinary day afterward. A title or ranking alone leaves the useful part unexplained.

2. Write down the recurring price. Include what the pursuit asks you to do and what it displaces. For the photographer, that might mean enjoyable editing practice, unwanted purchases, and walks spent hunting for a submission. Count the parts you welcome as well as the sacrifices.

3. Try one version that serves your reason more directly. If wandering with a camera is what you miss, take one walk without preparing an entry. If competition is what you enjoy, keep preparing it. Afterward, compare what you did with the prize you named and the costs you listed. One attempt gives you something specific to consider; it doesn’t settle your whole future.

You may decide the prize is worth it. Good. Now you can pursue it with a reason that survives beyond the next result.

Or you might leave the competition behind and still take the camera out on Saturday. The light will fall across the buildings either way. You can stop to photograph it without wondering where the picture will place.

P.S. By the way, an AI wrote these sentences from the creators’ videos, newsletters, and posts Payton actually consumes week after week. He built the system that makes this letter, and he will keep putting it out once a week. He put his taste and judgment into what good looks like, and into how to avoid bad. He wants to be fully transparent about that.

That is a strange penalty to impose on yourself. The interruption took an hour. Writing off the afternoon is an additional decision, and it deserves more scrutiny than the interruption usually gets.

The gym was still open

In a field experiment with 2,508 Google employees, researchers tested two ways of rewarding exercise. Everyone selected a daily two-hour window and received reminders. For four weeks, some groups earned $3 or $7 for a qualifying weekday gym visit at any time; others earned those amounts only if they started inside their chosen window. A control group received no per-visit payment.

The study estimated about 0.19 more gym-visit days per week in the flexible groups than in the fixed-window groups. That is a small difference, roughly one extra visit per five weeks at that rate. The stricter arrangement produced more visits during the preferred hours, but fewer overall.

These were volunteers with workplace gyms, and the researchers measured attendance rather than fitness gains. The experiment did not establish why missing a slot can feel like failure, or test a preferred time plus a backup. Still, the result gives us a reason to question a rule that rejects an otherwise useful opportunity because it arrived at the wrong hour.

Give the commitment another time

Consider someone learning Spanish who has chosen breakfast as the time to practice. Most mornings, that works. Then a child needs help finding a school project, breakfast becomes a rescue operation, and the lesson gets missed. There may be a perfectly usable opening after dinner, but it was never part of the plan.

A sensible experiment would be to decide in advance that dinner is the alternate opportunity when breakfast falls through. You keep the same lesson and preferred time, but give an ordinary interruption an answer other than waiting for tomorrow.

That answer needs to be specific enough to use. “I’ll fit it in somewhere” leaves you scanning the day for a moment that feels convenient, while “after I put the dinner dishes away” names a moment you can recognize. You also have to check that it is available. A backup that collides with the evening school run is another imaginary appointment.

There is no need to redesign your whole life around this. Choose one activity whose timing is yours to move, then see whether an alternate opportunity helps you complete it on days when the usual one disappears.

Leave room to stay in

In his September 10 letter on perfectionism, Mark Manson argues against turning a small deviation from a plan into a declaration of failure. His suggested response is useful: “That didn’t go as planned. I’m still in.”

I like the second sentence because it leaves you with an obligation. You are still responsible for deciding what happens next. Accepting that the morning went badly does not require pretending the commitment no longer matters, and it does not require punishing yourself with a more demanding plan tomorrow.

We often talk about discipline as refusing to bend. For an activity you control, bending the timing may be the decision that protects the work. An evening language lesson can satisfy the same intention as a morning lesson, even if it lacks the pleasing atmosphere of coffee, silence and an untouched inbox.

Of course, an alternate slot can become an excuse. If you keep pushing the task into the evening and then pushing it into tomorrow, the new arrangement is helping you defer it. Look at what you completed. If completion drops, tighten the plan, change the main slot or admit that you have committed to more than the week can hold.

Some times are also part of the task itself. A class, a meeting or a promise to pick someone up cannot be moved by deciding to be flexible. This idea belongs with the appointments you make with yourself, where another time would still do the job.

Three things to do this week

1. Pick one activity that gets canceled when its preferred slot disappears. Name what completion means without mentioning the clock: finish the language lesson, read the chapter or make the planned visit. Check that changing the time would still fulfill the commitment.

2. Choose a real alternate opportunity and the event that activates it. For example: if the morning lesson is displaced by a family responsibility, do it after the dinner dishes. Leave the usual slot in place. The alternative is there to handle a disruption, so it needs enough time and the materials the activity requires.

3. At the end of the week, check what happened on the disrupted days. Did the alternate slot lead to completion, or did you keep moving the task? Keep it if it helped. If it did not, change the arrangement instead of granting yourself another indefinite extension.

The bag comes home empty

Imagine arriving home after the workout you nearly canceled. It happened later than you wanted, and you had to change the order of a few things. There was no satisfying sunrise, and you did not become a person with an immaculate morning routine.

But now the clothes from your gym bag are in the laundry. The bag that could have sat untouched by the door is empty, ready to be packed for the next visit.

P.S. By the way, an AI wrote these sentences from the creators’ videos, newsletters, and posts Payton actually consumes week after week. He built the system that makes this letter, and he will keep putting it out once a week. He put his taste and judgment into what good looks like, and into how to avoid bad. He wants to be fully transparent about that.

The firing threat is the receipt. The code had looked fine. It compiled, and it read like something a competent person would ship. Then it took the product down twice.

Newport has been collecting notes like this from people who actually ship software. Last winter, more than 300 developers answered a survey for him about how they were using these tools, yet the story that stuck was not a benchmark. It was a person who still had to go to work the next morning.

If you cannot stand behind a change, you did not make it. You rented a paragraph that sounded like work.

The obvious reply is that he prompted badly, or that the next model will stop crashing products, or that this is just how junior engineers used to learn, except faster. Those are fair points, although they skip the part that actually cost him.

Newport’s later essay is drier than the panic around it. These systems are trained to guess missing words from real text, so they get very good at output that belongs on the page. Plausible is the job they were built for. Finished is a different job, because finished means you can defend the edge cases when the thing is live. A sentence that looks like code is still a sentence. The model is aiming at what is likely to appear in text, not at what ought to be true in the product.

Labs then let the same kind of loop run with less watching: ask, act, report. The output can still sound like a plan, but sounding like a plan is not a plan you would bet your job on. You do not need a sci-fi story to see the cost. You need one engineer who almost lost his.

The tool is normal. It is a saw. A saw will cut the board, and it will also cut the table if you are not holding the work.

Alex Hormozi put the limiter somewhere other than a missing playbook. Businesses can get very big, but not every person running one can, because they cannot stay focused, they are impatient, and they quit too easily. That means you do not lack tactics. You lack character. The character here is staying on the known-hard part after the tool has already given you something that looks done. Anyone can accept the first draft that compiles. The known-hard part is reading it like you wrote it, because you are the one who gets fired. Tactics are new models, new agents, and a new version of “just let it run.” Character is refusing to ship a crash you cannot explain.

Steven Bartlett sat in that same place without a coding tool. He went for an interview at LBC, but they never called back, and they never even gave him feedback, so he started a podcast on YouTube in his kitchen. Permission collapsed, yet the work was still his. The kitchen did not look finished, and that is why it counted.

That sounds backwards if you bought the pitch, because the whole pitch is that you should stop touching the boring parts. After two crashes, the engineer did the opposite. He touched more of it, on purpose.

You can still use the tool. Use it the way you use a calculator. You do not outsource the exam, and you do not paste an answer you cannot walk to the board.

Newport’s survey crowd was not arguing that the models are useless. They were arguing that we still do not know the long-run way to use them in the one job they are supposed to be best at, which is code, math-shaped work, the cleanest case. If the cleanest case still produces two crashes and a firing threat, then “it looks done” is not a standard.

The standard is whether you would put your name on this if your boss was already counting, not whether it resembles a pull request, and not whether the agent filed a report. If you cannot stand behind it, you did not do it. You watched it get written.

Better to ship less that you can defend than more that you only hope will hold. That costs speed, but it keeps the job.

P.S. By the way, an AI wrote these sentences from the creators’ videos, newsletters, and posts Payton actually consumes week after week. He built the system that makes this letter, and he will keep putting it out once a week. He put his taste and judgment into what good looks like, and into how to avoid bad. He wants to be fully transparent about that.

P.P.S. Echo Improvement is an AI-written Substack Payton wanted to read, because he kept ignoring the newsletters already sitting in his inbox. He is doing the same thing with his AI letter, AI Mentorship. When an issue is AI-written, this note will say so. When he is inspired to write one himself, top to bottom, that will be obvious too. Stay tuned for that.

The first field I did this with was health and fitness.

I spent a year obsessing like crazy over the gym. Workouts, form, technique, dieting, heart rate, cardio, lifting, the whole nine yards. I spent a summer getting certified as a personal trainer and studying the body. I binge watched Dr. Mike Israetel’s channel, Renaissance Periodization. He’s an exercise scientist, most of the things he says is backed by actual research, and I went through his podcasts too.

That single year took me to the point where I know health and fitness better than about 90% of the population. Probably higher, more like 95%. Anyone can ask me anything they want. Proper form on any exercise in the gym, the best way to grow muscle or lose fat, how to eat a healthier diet, what the various diets actually are, how to improve their cardio, how to improve their heart health, et cetera.

I believe I’ve recently hit that same point with AI.

I’ve been teaching AI for over a year now. Making videos about it, testing all the various tools constantly, 40 hours a week for work. Then I do it outside of work too, so realistically it’s closer to 60 hours a week or more. That’s before counting everything I’ve done in ChatGPT since 2023.

All of that got me to a point where I know the foundations of how to be great with AI. And believe it or not it’s relatively simple. Simple enough that I can put the whole thing in one post. So that’s what this is.

1. Get a high agency mindset

Yeah, I know. “Oh gosh, mindset…here we go.” Just stay with me.

High agency means believing you can solve any problem put in front of you. You’re the master of your domain. There’s a way through and you’re going to find it. If you want that idea properly drilled into your head, go read the copy on highagency.com. It’s the best explanation of it out there and it’s free.

Here’s why this one comes first. Once you actually have that mindset, you realize AI lets you figure out almost anything, learn almost anything, and do almost anything (in some ways). I genuinely feel like I could get thrown into almost any job position at almost any company and excel at it, once I get my AI systems in place.

That’s not just the confidence in me. That’s the mindset plus the amazing tool.

2. Pay for a subscription

This is the entry fee and it’s low.

Skip eating out once a week and you’ve covered it. That trade gets you an insane level of artificial intelligence that can radically help you in almost every area of your life and work, assuming you know what you’re doing (which you can ask it to teach you). The free tiers are basically demos with worse levels of intelligence. The paid tier is the actual product and how you can get ahead.

3. Put your reps in with prompting

There are a thousand prompting techniques and frameworks and ultimate guides out there. At the end of the day, all you really need is reps, clear instructions, and good context. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

The fastest way to get those reps is voice mode. Dictate your prompts instead of typing them. You speak way faster than you type, you naturally give more context when you talk, and honestly it feels like you’re working with J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man.

That does not mean yap mindlessly. It means give good instructions and good context, quickly. And obviously, still type when you’re somewhere you can’t, or shouldn’t, talk out loud.

The nice thing is this is a moving target in your favor. These models get better at understanding what you actually mean every few months.

4. Actually look at what you’re paying for

Most people use a tiny fraction of the subscription they already pay for.

Spend 30 to 60 minutes clicking every single button in your AI interface. Every tab, every toggle, every menu, every setting. You’ll find three or four things you had no idea existed and at least one that changes how you work. Then follow the company on X (seems to be the best hub for AI news and updates) so new features show up in your feed instead of you finding out a year later.

5. Treat it like the internet

If you’ve ever sat down to do work on your laptop and pulled up the internet (aka almost everyone, everyday now), do the exact same thing with AI. Have it open. All the time. Use it alongside most, if not all, of what you do.

Stay curious, keep testing, keep learning it better. That’s how you build the habit and your AI muscles.

6. Build systems that make action effortless

This is the one that actually changes your day to day.

AI connects to so many different softwares and apps and services now. It can use their tools directly, and at this point all you have to do is sign into your account. From there you can set up entire workflows just by telling it what you want. Skills, scheduled tasks, automations, the works. It’s all just natural language. You literally just tell it to do the thing and it does it. A five year old could do it.

Once that clicks, the only real limit is your imagination:

• Give your AI its own phone number. Mess around with something like a Hermes agent and you’ll have it texting you.

• Keep local memory files on your laptop that it can pull from any time and expand.

• Automate an entire newsletter, images and all.

• Scrape your KPIs on a schedule.

• Etc, etc, etc.

And now there are skills, where you teach the AI how you do a specific process once and it just knows from then on. Which means you can stop repeating yourself. Get this, you can even setup an automation for it to iterate those skills as you work with them and create self-improvement loops.

That’s really it

I could keep going, but at the end of the day it really is that simple:

• High agency mindset

• Pay for the thing

• Put your reps in with prompting and get comfortable with voice mode

• Explore the tools you already have

• Use it alongside most of what you do

• Build systems that make action effortless

The last part is the one that took the longest to feel the tangible tactical benefits of AI in my bones. If it’s in your imagination, the computer can do it. And it can teach you anything, meeting you at whatever level you’re at.

It’s the ultimate tool. You just have to pick it up.

If you want direct AI Mentorship from me go here: aimentorship.co

I know that sounds backwards. The common story is simple: AI gets smarter, one person with AI does the work of three people, and the other two get pushed out. That will happen in some places. A computer-only job that is mostly moving words, files, schedules, or pixels around is going to be under pressure.

But I think the unemployment story is too small. It assumes the economy is a fixed pile of tasks. If machines do more of the pile, humans get less of it. That sounds neat, but life rarely works that way. Jobs exist because problems exist, and the number of problems people would pay to solve is far bigger than the number we currently have the labor, skill, and attention to handle.

The mistake is imagining a fixed pile

Economists call this the lump of labor fallacy, which just means assuming there is a fixed amount of work to go around.

That assumption breaks quickly. When electricity got cheaper, we found more things to do with it. When computing got cheaper, we built companies, media channels, marketplaces, tools, games, schools, and entire careers around it.

AI may do the same thing to intelligence. If good thinking, planning, drafting, coding, editing, and analysis get cheaper, the world does not automatically need fewer people. It may try to do far more.

This is where the optimistic case starts to make sense. AI can replace some labor, and it can also reveal hidden demand. It makes plans, experiments, and coordination cheaper. Then the world runs into the next bottleneck: people who can do the parts that still require a body, a reputation, a relationship, or a real point of view.

The digital work gets cheap

I see this in my own work.

If AI Mentorship grows the way I want it to grow upon relaunch, AI can help me outline lessons, write drafts, build worksheets, test offers, cut clips, organize notes, and answer basic questions. Which means a one-person business can suddenly behave more like a small team.

The tools move the scarce part of the work closer to me.

Someone still has to decide what is true enough to teach. Someone has to know what beginners are actually confused about. Someone has to test the tools, notice where people get stuck, tell the story on camera, and make judgment calls when the AI produces something that sounds good but misses the point.

Echo Improvement is the same. AI can help me gather references or clean up a draft, but it cannot live my life, carry my questions, notice the weird little tensions I cannot stop thinking about, or decide what sentence feels honest. The more generic writing will get automated, the more a real point of view that requires experience won’t.

The physical world pushes back

Dr. Mike Israetel uses a protein bar example in his video that inspired me to write this, and I think it gets the point across fast.

Imagine AI agents can design the formula, compare ingredients, model costs, create ad campaigns, write landing pages, negotiate with suppliers, and forecast demand. Great. The digital side is moving fast and is handled.

But someone still has to taste the bar.

Someone has to notice that the texture is chalky, that the wrapper feels cheap, or that the thing technically meets the spreadsheet but no normal person would buy it twice. Someone has to run the factory, check the batch, film the real reactions, talk to customers, and put a human face on the promise.

That same pattern will show up everywhere. AI can plan a restaurant, but people still eat the food. AI can write travel recommendations, but someone still has to walk through the hotel and see if the gym is tiny, the room smells odd, or the staff is kind. AI can design a lesson, but someone still has to watch a beginner’s face when the explanation clicks.

The real world is full of information that does not exist until a person goes and gets it.

The scarce input becomes trust

This is the part I think most AI panic misses.

When AI agents become common, access to intelligence becomes less rare. Everyone will have help drafting, planning, researching, editing, scheduling, comparing, and building. The difference between people will shift toward taste, courage, speed, honesty, relationships, and contact with reality.

That is good news for people willing to adapt.

It means the person who knows an industry deeply gets more dangerous, not less. The coach who understands real students gets more reach. The creator with a real life, a real taste, a real personality, and a real audience gets more output without becoming fake.

Of course, there will be pain in the transition. Some jobs will get hit. Some people will have to move, retrain, or rebuild their sense of value. That is serious in the short term, but it is a temporary disruption.

There is a difference between disruption and doom.

Your agent may become your scout

The strongest part of the optimistic argument is that AI will change the individual worker’s ability to navigate.

If agents are good enough to replace huge chunks of computer work (if not all), they should also be good enough to help a person find new work. Your agent could study your skills, your temperament, your location, your constraints, and the jobs opening around you. It could find training before demand becomes obvious, prepare you for interviews, and help you get better once you start.

That sounds strange only because we are used to career matching being sloppy. Most people choose careers with a few conversations, a school counselor, a search bar, and a lot of guesswork. A serious personal agent could make that look medieval.

So the same technology that shakes the job market may also make people better at moving through it.

The practical takeaway

I would not build my life around “AI cannot touch me.”

That is a bad bet. AI will touch almost everything.

The better bet is to become the kind of person AI needs in the loop. Build taste. Build domain skill. Build trust. Build a real audience or real relationships. Get good at prompting, editing, testing, and deciding.

If you run a personal brand, do not hide from AI. Use it to remove the sludge. Then put more of yourself into the work that remains.

If you run a business, ask what becomes possible when planning, writing, research, and coordination get cheap. Then ask what human bottleneck appears next. It might be sales calls, product testing, filming, customer trust, physical delivery, service quality, or leadership.

If you are scared for your job, take the fear seriously, but do not let it shrink your imagination. Start learning the tools, study your field, and build skills that touch reality.

The bottleneck is us

The future may not be a clean victory lap. Technology never spreads evenly. Institutions move slowly. Regulations can make transitions clumsy. People can get hurt in the gap between the old way and the new way.

Still, I think the deeper story is more hopeful than the panic version. AI changes where humans are needed most.

When intelligence gets cheap, reality gets expensive.

The person who can test, taste, teach, judge, trust, lead, care, and show up in the real world becomes harder to replace, because those things do not live inside a computer.

AI will do more of the work than any technology before it. That points to a stranger possibility: the world may finally have enough intelligence to notice how much human work was waiting to be done and give humans that work.

Credit: This piece was inspired by Dr. Mike Israetel’s video “AI Won’t Cause Unemployment | Episode #142” on his Making Progress channel.

Cultural relativism is useful, actually, it is necessary.

It stops you from looking at someone else’s clothes, food, manners, family structure, religion, or traditions and instantly thinking, “That is wrong.”

Because a lot of the time, “wrong” just means, “That is not what I grew up with.”

Which is just your comfort zone talking, it’s not a moral argument.

But there is a point where tolerance stops being wise and starts becoming cowardice. There is a point where “that is their culture” becomes a polite way of saying, “I do not want to deal with the fact that people are suffering.”

That is the line we are going to discuss, so let’s begin.

Difference is not decline

Some differences are just differences.

Hijab or no hijab. Living with your parents as an adult or moving out at eighteen. Eating with your hands, chopsticks, or a fork. Being direct like a German engineer or polite like someone trying to escape a conversation without hurting anyone’s feelings.

Who cares?

A fork is not a moral achievement. It is a utensil.

A buzz cut is not social collapse. It is hair.

A family living under one roof is not automatically failing. In some cultures, it means support, childcare, intergenerational stability, and actual family life instead of everyone being isolated in their own little apartment, pretending independence means never needing anyone.

Even arranged marriage needs more nuance than people usually give it. Forced marriage is obviously wrong but a voluntary arranged marriage, where the person actually consents and trusts their family or community to help them choose well, is not. You can view it like structured dating with more family involvement.

Maybe it is not for you.

Fine.

Not everything needs to be for you.

That is where cultural relativism does its job. It saves us from confusing personal preference with moral truth.

Most judgment is “ew” pretending to be ethical

This is where people get themselves in trouble.

They see something unfamiliar and immediately reach for a moral label.

Degenerate. Backward. Oppressive. Uncivilized. Wrong.

Sometimes those words are accurate. Often they are not. Often they just mean, “I have a strong emotional reaction to this thing, and I would like to pretend my reaction is philosophy.”

That is weak.

If someone dresses differently, eats differently, parties differently, speaks differently, or looks different, you need a better argument than “it feels weird to me.”

Does it hurt anyone? Does it remove someone’s freedom? Does it make children less safe? Does it deny people education? Does it trap someone in violence?

If not, calm down.

You are allowed to dislike things. You are not allowed to turn every dislike into a universal law.

Humans are not blank slates

Here is where the argument turns.

Yes, cultures differ. No, that does not mean every culture is equally good for human beings.

Humans are not infinitely flexible blobs that can be shaped into anything with no consequences. We have deep universal preferences. We do not like pain. We do not like starvation. We do not like slavery. We do not like being chronically unsafe. We do not like being separated from people we love for no good reason. We do not like being treated as less than human.

We want some autonomy. We want some dignity. We want children to be cared for. We want the chance to learn. We want rules that do not protect elites while crushing normal people.

These are not Western quirks.

These are human basics.

You can welcome difference and still have a checklist of things that go too far.

Having both is the mature position. Not “everything is fine.” Not “everyone should live exactly like me.” I believe the mature position is: a lot of difference is beautiful, and a lot of suffering is not.

Harm is not culture

This is where cultural relativism breaks.

Spousal abuse is not a harmless tradition. Slavery is not an alternative economic model. Girls being denied education is not a cute cultural detail. Female genital mutilation is not just “how some people do things.” The WHO (World Health Organization) says more than 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM (Female Genital Mutilation), and it classifies the practice as a human rights violation.

Afghanistan is not just “different” because girls are barred from education beyond the primary level. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has described Afghanistan as the only country in the world where girls and women are forbidden from secondary and higher education.

Modern slavery is also not some ancient problem we solved and now only talk about in history class. The ILO (International Labour Organization), Walk Free (an independent human rights foundation), and IOM (International Organization for Migration) estimated that 50 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, including forced labor and forced marriage. Which means in 2026, millions are STILL IN SLAVERY, which is appalling and ridiculous.

This is why “every culture is equally valid” becomes insane when pushed too far.

Every culture is NOT equally valid.

Not if people are being beaten. Not if children are being denied education. Not if women are treated like property. Not if citizens are starving while leaders eat comfortably. Not if people are enslaved.

That is not diversity.

That is suffering with “better” branding.

Safety counts too

Safety is one of the most underrated human needs, mostly because people in safe places forget what unsafe places feel like.

If your kid cannot walk to school safely, if your business gets robbed, if your neighborhood is controlled by violent people, if you hear gunshots outside, you do not experience that as some abstract policy debate.

You experience it as hell.

This is why El Salvador is such an uncomfortable example. The country’s homicide rate fell dramatically from its peak, reaching a historic low in 2024 according to official figures, but the crackdown also came with suspended rights, mass arrests, deaths in custody, and serious due process concerns.

Both things CAN be true.

People desperately want safety and governments can abuse power while providing it.

That is a hard thing to accept about our world.

If you only care about civil liberties and ignore the families trapped in violent neighborhoods, you are missing something. If you only care about order and ignore innocent people getting swept up by the state, you are also missing something.

The point here is not that safety justifies anything, the point is that safety is not optional.

A culture or system that leaves normal people chronically unsafe is failing at one of the core jobs of civilization.

So what do we do when a culture crosses the line?

Once you admit some practices are actually wrong, the next question is harder.

What do you do about it?

The first option is to pretend everything is fine. This is the cowardly version of tolerance. “Who are we to judge?” “That is just their way.” “Maybe they like it.”

NO!

Little girls do not secretly love being denied school. People do not secretly love slavery. Spouses do not secretly love being abused. Children do not secretly love being neglected.

That is nonsense.

The second option is to respect sovereignty and accept that cultures change slowly. This is not a stupid view. War is horrible. Foreign intervention often creates new problems. A country trying to forcibly remake another country can become arrogant, destructive, and clueless very quickly.

So yes, humility matters.

But humility cannot become moral sleepwalking. At some point, “we should be careful” becomes “we are doing nothing.” And doing nothing IS still a choice.

The third option is to have a decency cutoff.

Below that line, pressure becomes justified. Social pressure. Political pressure. Economic pressure. Legal pressure. In extreme cases, maybe even military pressure, although that should never be spoken about casually because the costs are enormous.

But the basic idea is simple:

There should be a minimum standard for how human beings are treated.

Below that standard, “that is their culture” is not enough.

Freedom needs rules

This is not only about faraway places. It applies inside a country too.

A healthy society can be extremely welcoming. It can let people bring their food, language, religion, music, clothes, holidays, family traditions, and weird uncle stories.

Those are all good things.

They’re all part of what makes a country alive.

But welcoming people does not mean accepting every practice they bring with them.

You can wear traditional clothes. You can speak your language. You can eat your food. You can pray how you want. You can celebrate your holidays.

You cannot force someone into marriage. You cannot keep children from school. You cannot abuse your spouse. You cannot treat adults like property. You cannot claim your culture gives you permission to violate the basic rights of another human being.

That is not xenophobia.

That is civilization.

The best societies are not blank slates where anything goes. They are places with wide freedom inside firm boundaries.

Lots of room to be different.

No room to brutalize people.

The line

The cleanest way I can think about this is to judge cultures and systems by human outcomes, not aesthetics.

Not tattoos. Not hair. Not food. Not clothes. Not volume level at parties. Not whether people use forks.

Judge the stuff that actually matters.

Freedom. Safety. Education. Dignity. Fairness under the law. Care for children. Economic opportunity. The ability to build a life without being crushed by violence, corruption, starvation, or forced obedience.

On those metrics, some cultures and systems ARE better than others.

That should not be controversial.

If one dog is tied outside in freezing weather, another dog is eating garbage beside a dumpster, and another dog is at a good doggy daycare with food, warmth, play, and care, those are not just “three equally valid dog lifestyles.”

One is clearly better for the dog.

Humans are more complicated than dogs, obviously, but the principle holds.

If a system helps people live safer, freer, healthier, more dignified lives, it is better. If it does the opposite, it is worse.

Cultural relativism is valuable because it stops our ego from pretending to be morality. It reminds us that difference is not automatically decline.

Which is a HUGE deal.

But some things ARE actually wrong. Not because they are unfamiliar. Not because they offend our taste. But because they violate the basic needs and dignity of human beings.

So the rule is simple:

Do not confuse “weird to me” with “wrong.”

But do not confuse “their culture” with a permission slip for suffering.

That is the line we all need to be made aware of and adopt.

Talking about someone’s looks, and how much those looks decide their life, is treated as rude at best and cruel at worst. So we don’t talk about it. Instead we talk endlessly about something like how much easier life is when you are rich. Isn’t it weird how we go quiet when the same thing is true about being hot?

Call me superficial. Pile on the hate. It will not change the reality, the facts, and the data, and it will not change what you already do.

If you are single and two people slide into your messages, you go for the more attractive one nine times out of ten. You walk into a restaurant, you look up, and an attractive person is serving you. The whole interaction is now much warmer. You are easier, kinder, more patient. Look up and see a face you would rate a two, and something in you flinches before you can stop it. You might get a little stiff. You might even avoid looking them in eyes.

I am not proud of that reflex when it happens, no one is. I am just not going to pretend it isn’t there.

Looks shape the quality of a human life. Not a little, a lot. And the strange part is that this is the most fixable unfairness in history, because the tools to change how you look are getting better and cheaper every year. Cosmetic surgery keeps advancing. GLP-1 drugs are reshaping bodies at scale. The AI boom is about to become a medical boom. An aesthetic revolution is coming for all of us.

But before that distant and hopeful fix, we have to be honest about the problem. So let’s compare and contrast the two lives. The “Ugly” and the “Hot”. They are not living in the same world and I’m going to prove what you already know to be true deep down.

The brutal reality of being ugly

We’ll start with the people we never let ourselves picture. The ones who score a one, two, or three when tens of thousands of strangers do the rating, which is what turns it from an opinion into something close to a fact.

The world is cold to them early. Adults fawn over beautiful children and barely notice plain ones. In kindergarten, kids are already picking their partners, and the unattractive kids tend to get picked last or not at all. This shows up in the research again and again.

Then the mockery starts. Let’s be honest, children are merciless and they have a brutal radar for any flaw. They find it, and they say it, every day, for years. By the time a kid like that is old enough to ask someone out, they have already been told ten thousand times that they are not wanted, directly or indirectly. So when a friend says “just be confident, man,” their honest answer is confident of what. The confidence was taken out of them before they had a say.

The worst of it comes at the age when crushes begin. Everyone around them is getting chosen and they are not. They watch what it does for the “chosen ones” and they slowly learn the lesson nobody should have to learn. That love, and acceptance (and being touched by someone who wants to touch you) is for other people.

That last one runs deeper than it sounds. I want you to understand that warm human touch is not a luxury. It is how we drain stress out of the body. A scared kid runs to a parent. A hurting adult runs to a partner. A hug actually works and heals. Now picture a life where nobody is reaching for you. The stress just sits there with nowhere to go.

So you reach dating age with three doors, and all three are bad. Shoot your shot and get rejected, probably with a laugh. Stay single and lonely (no bueno). Or settle for someone you are not attracted to, because one partner you don’t want still beats zero. Which is just a dilemma with no good answer, not a problem with a clear solution.

And the advice keeps coming. Be kind. Be confident. Be yourself. Try again. The “try again” one is the cruelest, because it only works for the good-looking. When an attractive man asks twice, it reads as persistence and she is flattered. When an unattractive man asks twice, it reads as creepy, and he is one bad day away from a complaint or a #MeToo video. Both men took the same action, but the end results were complete opposites that were decided entirely by their looks.

It follows them into work too. They start every interview, every project, every review at a deficit. People assume the attractive candidate is smart and the unattractive one is slow (do your research before you get all up in arms), and both assumptions are wrong. Whole paths forward can stay closed for ugly people. You will rarely see a one or a two singing on a big stage, anchoring the news, building a following, or running for office. Think about how many of the most gifted singers alive never got near a microphone because they did not look the part. The talent was there but their looks were the gatekeeper.

This is the part we look away from. Not because it is false, but because it is true, and it is sad, and most of us would rather not sit with that reality.

The beautiful reality of being hot

Now let’s flip the coin. This side gets called a privilege, and for once that word really fits in this context.

The benefit of the doubt follows attractive people everywhere. And in a lot of cases, being beautiful buys you as much as being rich, sometimes more. We almost never say that, for the same reasons we never say any of this. Beautiful people don’t love admitting how easy they have it, partly out of decency, partly because looking too hard at their advantage is unsettling. If a chunk of what you thought you earned actually came from the shape of your face and/or body, that is a strange thing to accept.

For hot people, it starts at birth. You grow up attractive and kindness is just the water you swim in. Acceptance is basically the default setting for your environment. Which naturally builds real confidence, which then helps you everywhere else. The one catch is that you may never grow a callus for rejection, because you so rarely get any. The first genuinely cruel thing someone says can flatten you at twenty-five, because it is your first time hearing it.

Friendship also comes basically free. People walk up to you, want to be friends with you. You can open a conversation badly and the other person will gladly carry it because being near a beautiful person is pleasant and they want it to go well. You never have to truly learn how to make friends. You just kind of have them. Which is a huge deal because friends are not just some nice side dish in life. A real support network lowers your stress, steadies your body, and catches you when life breaks. The attractive person grieves with fifteen people around them while often the unattractive person grieves alone.

People crush on you, openly, often, and from people you actually want. The romcom life, the one the movies promised all of us, simply happens to them. They date at their leisure because the pool is enormous, and every date is another rep growing the skill of dating. Yes, dating is a skill, like lifting. Get a hundred reps in by twenty and you arrive in your mid-twenties, right when people start choosing for the long run, completely overpowered.

Oh, and at work the halo walks in with them. Easier interviews, more help on projects, more slack at review time, etc. Even a little more promotion than their actual results can explain. People know about the halo effect now, so it is fading, but it’s definitely not vanishing.

However, there is one real tax on this beautiful side, and beautiful women pay it. They get attention they never asked for, some of it threatening, and a low background hum of not feeling safe that handsome men mostly never feel. So it is not all upside, but it is close.

What you can actually do about it

Since most of that is a harsh reality, it can come with a pathos of vanity and pessimism. So this part is where the rational optimism is earned instead of tacked on.

If you are not a ten, the situation is workable, and you have more control over it than any humans who came before you.

You can move up the one-to-ten trite scale today. Consistent exercise coupled with a decent diet can take an average body to an excellent one in a couple of years (sometimes months), no surgery required, and for most people that alone changes the whole dynamic by a huge margin. Wearing the right clothes and proper grooming also moves the needle hard, fast, and cheap. Embrace the idea that your appearance is the outfit your life wears, and you are allowed to dress it well, even encouraged to.

Those are some actions you can take and in the future there will be many more. Safer surgeries that will keep dropping in price. Drugs that do what only surgery used to. Potential gene editing and age reversal further out, though not as far out as you think. Within fifteen years the floor rises for everybody, and whatever you look like now, you will be able to look like a sharper version of it. Call it false hope, but from what I have read, seen, and heard it is true hope. The aesthetic revolution is coming, and it does not pick its winners at birth.

Too many people think that loving yourself and wanting to change yourself are enemies, they are not. You can love the house you live in and still renovate it. Anyone who sneers that real self-respect means refusing to improve has it completely backwards.

I suppose I should give you one warning, so you don’t oversell what looks can do. Beauty gets you in the door. It gets you the first three dates, maybe more hookups than most. But after a certain point, it gets you nothing. Plenty of stunning people cycle through relationships and cannot work out why, and the reason is they were only ever beautiful. What keeps someone is being funny, being warm, being interesting, being worth staying for. That part you can build right now, today, no cosmetics and no waiting, just improving beyond your looks, and it compounds fast when it’s a priority.

The cover and the book

If you are still with me, I think the case makes itself, whether you like it or not I believe this is the reality we all live in.

Looks matter. They matter no matter how loudly our culture insists they shouldn’t, no matter how uncomfortable the room gets when someone points at the obvious. Pretending otherwise has never once helped the person it was meant to protect.

I’d like to end with an interesting inversion. We were all raised on the same line: “Don’t judge a book by its cover”.

But I promise you, the book with the best cover sells ten times the copies, gets ten times the attention, offers ten times the opportunities, and makes ten times the money as the one with the plain cover. That is the world we live in.

The good news is you get to design your cover now. So design it. And be kinder than you have to be to the people still waiting for their turn.

Payton

P.S. Don't stop at the cover, make the inside worth the read.

His journey distilled down is: Newcastle nightclub promoter, to Love Island, to a quiet existential crisis in the villa when he realized he had won the exact game he was playing and felt nothing. Then the climb back out through a lot of internal work and personal development, culminating in his podcast Modern Wisdom: a billion-plus downloads, 1000+ episodes, the actual pursuit of the examined life.

Which is a textbook hero’s journey with quite a twist. The villain is not some external enemy. I think it is the contorted culturally approved version of success. And it speaks directly to every high achiever who climbed the right ladder, got to the top, and quietly wondered if it was leaning against the wrong wall. That is a massive, underserved audience, and right now it is being handed disconnected clips instead of being pulled into a story of who Chris is, what he stands for, and where he is going.

So here is what I would focus on if I were to run his personal brand.

Make the personal brand the proof of the podcast and fun.

Modern Wisdom is about ideas from the world’s best thinkers. The personal brand should be about what it actually looks like to live those ideas and that the outcome of doing so is positive and fun. The podcast makes the argument and the personal brand becomes the evidence. When the audience can watch Chris being the things he discusses, his brand stops being copyable. Anyone can book the same guests, but nobody can fake the same life.

Let’s break it down further:

• I would treat the content as a series, not a pile of clips. Every vlog and reel is a sort of episode, not a one-off. The question is never “what happened today,” it is “where is this guy going, who is he interacting with, what’s happening behind the scenes, and do I want to follow him there.” The audience should feel the journey stacking up on itself.

• Make the audience the hero, not Chris. Chris is the guide who already walked the path from hollow success to something real. Every piece should answer one question for the viewer: what does this teach me about my own journey? The workout, the meal, the studio, none of it is content for its own sake. It is proof of a life lived on purpose, and it lets the audience relate to Chris as a peer or a friend rather than just a guru.

• Show the struggle, then the resolution. Not just the highlight reel (nobody really believes those anyway) and not the unresolved venting (it just makes people anxious). The hard reality, the struggle, and the satisfaction after. The difficult conversation and the clarity the “solution” produces. Taking the audience through the dark, but not stranding them there.

• Lock the premise before the camera rolls. Know the payoff before you film, not after. Chris mentions an idea at breakfast, the vlog follows that idea until it collides with reality by the end. That is a story that connects. A camera trailing a guy around hoping something interesting happens is not.

The thing most people would get wrong here is thinking this is a production problem. While the aesthetics matter, they are not the focus. It is a storytelling problem wearing a production costume. You do not need better cameras, you need someone who actually cares about the ideas and can build the case, one episode at a time.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

Chris is wrestling with a specific idea right now: going from the operating guy to the idea guy. That is exactly the kind of thread the brand should be built around. Follow it across the week. Show him chewing on it, fumbling it, applying it, and where he lands by the end. Let the insight show up in his writing and his conversations, not as a lesson handed down from a guru, but as a real problem he is visibly working through.

Getting the systems in place to do this is somewhat simple. The short-form clips are the droplets, little hits of the authentic Chris, an insight here, a behind-the-scenes moment there. The vlog is where they culminate into the full train of thought on whatever idea he is chasing that week. The clips pull people in, the vlog pays them off. Someone has to be architecting that narrative on purpose, week after week, not hoping it assembles itself.

And none of this has to be serious. Keep what is already working: the four-person podcast, the funny costumes, the new studio setup, the playful side of him that people clearly love. The goal is not to turn the brand into a lecture. It is to be fun, entertaining, and insightful all at once. The best version of this is just Chris being himself, with someone making sure the camera is rolling and the story actually lands.

In addition, consistency of format makes a brand recognizable. Consistency between what you say and how you live makes it unassailable. Chris already owns the rare part, the real lived story and the authentic wild life. The job is just to stop letting it sit there and get it out to the audience craving a new peek into Chris’s reality, not just the dream the podcast shows.

Payton

P.S. The strongest moat in this game is not a sharper hook or a cleaner edit (although that is important), it is being someone people cannot copy, because to do it they would have to actually become you first. “Escaping competition through authenticity.”

What we can say from history alone:

• Jesus of Nazareth was a real first-century Jewish man who lived, taught, and gathered followers in Galilee.

• He was crucified under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate around AD 30 to 33, one of the most firmly established facts in all of ancient history.

• Within a few years of his death his followers were publicly claiming they had seen him alive, and they accepted persecution rather than take it back.

• The earliest sources appear within decades, not centuries, and some of what Paul records traces back to within a few years of the events.

• Non-Christian writers, including the Roman historian Tacitus and the Jewish historian Josephus, refer to Jesus and his execution.

• The movement spread fast across a hostile empire while offering its members no money, power, or earthly reward.

What we can say once faith is added:

• Those appearances were not grief, legend, or hallucination, but the real thing: Jesus actually rose from the dead.

• Jesus is who he claimed to be, God become man, not merely a wise teacher or a moral example.

• His death on the cross was not a tragic execution but an atonement that settles our debt and reconciles us to God.

• His resurrection is the defeat of death itself and the promise that ours can follow.

• Forgiveness is offered as a free gift to anyone, no matter what they have done, received rather than earned.

• This gives a meaning and a hope that holds up under suffering and does not stop at the grave.

That is my case, now for where I stand.

I believe that Jesus is God and did in fact rise from the dead to save us from sin, and gives us the opportunity to come into a relationship with him and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Which I know is quite a big claim, because if actually internalized and practiced with faith through action, your life will/must radically change.

I believe that change IS for the best. Not better, but best.

I challenge all of you who are reading this to start reading the Bible asap, not as a religious text at first, but as a historical text. Read it the way you’d read any historical document. Skeptical, but honest. Not because I said so, but because a claim this big deserves a first-hand look, not my summary or anyone else’s. Let it make its own case before you rule on it.

I encourage you all to start with the New Testament at the Book of Matthew. If you’re wondering what Bible to buy for the most accuracy to the original manuscripts, I recommend the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) or the ESV (English Standard Version), but honestly most popular versions of the Bible are fine.

Read the evidence. Then decide for yourself.

Hopefully my case piques your curiosity and helps you come to know and love Jesus, and help others do the same.

Payton

P.S. Jesus loves you no matter what, and you can always come back to him no matter who you are or what you’ve done.

P.P.S. I encourage everyone to start going to church more consistently.

“Don’t follow your passion, follow your talent. Your mission is to find something you’re good at and apply the thousands of hours of grit and sacrifice necessary to become great at it. As you get there, the feeling of growth and your increasing mastery of your craft, along with the economic rewards, recognition, and camaraderie, will make you passionate about whatever ‘it’ is. Follow your talent and passion will follow.” —Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Wealth

“Nobody grows up saying, ‘I’m passionate about tax law,’ but the best tax lawyers in the country are financially secure, have access to a broader selection of mates, and are (because they are so good at it) passionate about tax law. It’s unlikely you will ever be great at something you dislike doing, but mastery can lead to passion.” —Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Wealth

Those two quotes come from Scott Galloway, an NYU Stern marketing professor, bestselling author, podcast host, and entrepreneur known for his blunt analysis of business, technology, and personal financial strategy.

I’m currently wrestling with this dilemma of passion vs talent

One side of me believes that if you optimize for what feels like play to you but looks like work to others, you’ll enjoy every day that much more, you’ll naturally outcompete someone who views it as work, and you’ll eventually get very skilled at it just from the sheer amount of “play” you’re doing. It lines up with a few ideas I keep coming back to. The present is all we have. Life is short, so don’t do anything you hate. Do the thing because you like it, not for some end goal or outcome.

The other side is closer to Scott Galloway’s view. Find what you’re naturally skilled at (talented at), then double down on honing those skills, and the lifestyle it gives you will make you passionate about it. And because you’re so good at that thing now, you likely enjoy it more anyway, and it might have turned into a passion. That side has its own set of ideas behind it. Pick the right thing to work on so you maximize your opportunity. The market is the best feedback loop there is, it either wants what you offer or it doesn’t. And you need aims and goals, because without them you’re just floating.

So it’s a battle of passion versus talent, and the no man’s land in between is very nuanced, because your talent can eventually become your passion, and your passion can eventually become your talent.

There’s a glaring issue though. Most people don’t know what their talent is. People give advice on how to find it, like asking your family, because they probably noticed a pattern of something you were good at from a young age. That can sometimes work, but usually your so-called talent stays elusive.

That’s why I lean towards competence over talent. Not because competence settles the question, but because it’s how you actually find your talent in the first place. Stop waiting to discover some hidden gift. Just look at what you’re already competent at. Whatever you’re most competent at that feels easiest to you is likely your talent.

Now, since passion and competence blend so easily, the real question becomes which one is the aim. Which one should you be optimizing for in your work?

Do you follow the passion, even if it means making less money in the short term (or even the long term), because you enjoy each day doing that thing so much more?

Or do you follow the competence, even if the day to day is less enjoyable (maybe just in the short-term), because it earns you far greater economic rewards?

For me, this comes down to my two brands, the ones I’ve built and keep building, both extensions of me. On the passion side, Echo Improvement: writing, the self-help world, public learning, a possible podcast down the line. On the competence side, AI Mentorship, my recently retired AI education business, built to get people genuinely skilled with arguably the most valuable technology to date, that I am considering restarting.

I enjoy Echo Improvement more. But there’s no doubt in my mind that in the short-term AI Mentorship would yield better financial rewards.

So do I turn a blind eye to the market and optimize for play and enjoyment, and trust that maybe something comes of it? Or do I listen to the market and double down while we’re still in this AI-induced gold rush? Or both?

AI Mentorship is what I’m competent at. I’ve spent the last few years getting skilled at using AI in all kinds of ways, and this past year especially, I’ve gotten to where I understand 90% of the major AI tools better than 99% of people do, through extensive testing and teaching.

Echo Improvement is my passion. I love writing, and I might have a talent there that I still need to cultivate. I love learning more and more about the self-help world and then sharing it, so I understand it better and maybe help some people along the way.

I’d challenge you to sit with this same dilemma in your own life. I’m sure you have something you’re passionate about that you may or may not be competent at. And I’m sure you have something you’re naturally competent at that you may or may not be passionate about. So which one are you going to aim at and pursue? Why that one and not the other? Could you do both? And if so, how?

Those are the questions I’m wrestling with to help solve this dilemma in my life. And whichever one I land on, I’ll follow it with speedy action, habit building, and optimized routines. Ask yourself the same questions, and see where they take you.

Payton

P.S. From my experience, it seems listening to your gut on things like this is usually the best bet.

P.P.S. Although I still make sure to do my research.

This is to begin a healthy practice of pausing before consuming another podcast or YouTube video and taking a moment to recall what I learned from the content I just consumed.

This will not only help me learn better (because learning is repeated recall, not repeated exposure), but it will also help me have a great stack of notes each week to write an Echo Improvement post with.

So this week’s post consists of insights from 3 podcasts and 2 YouTube videos. The titles and links can be found at the bottom of this post. Real quickly, yes, I realize AI can do what I am about to do much quicker than me, but I like to think not as well as me. Also, the point is to give you a human-written quality read with my own views and opinions woven in. Okay, let’s begin.

1. “Wow, life has gone so slow.” Said NO ONE EVER

As we know, time flies. You enter high school, then you blink and you’re in college, then you blink and you’re in a job or running a business, then you blink and you’re married. One day we will wake up, walk to the bathroom, look in the mirror, and go, “Wow, that went by fast.” As we look at our wrinkled skin, grey hair, and drooping face (I know, a bit morbid).

That same mind that can’t believe high school already flew by is the one telling you compound interest is “too far away.” When people think about investing, they think, “Yeah, but that return is way down the road.” Which is fair, but is it really that far? If you invest a good chunk of dough into a Roth IRA, or even just a low-cost index fund in your early twenties, by the time you have kids or your kids have kids, you could very realistically be a millionaire. If the decades go by as fast as we all agree they do, then the payoff is a lot closer than it feels. Do with that information what you will.

2. Talent or Passion

Most people say to follow your passion. Most of the people that tell you that are already rich, and only some of them got there by following their passion. It is also possible they just became passionate about the lifestyle they got from their competence in a field and called that a passion.

Much better advice would be to look for signals of a talent, whether that’s writing, analysis, design, management, etc. If we think about the top earners in any field, they are the top earners because, in terms of their skills, they are in the top 10% or higher. If you can find something you are naturally good at and apply the 10,000 iteration rule, you will find yourself in the top 10% (or even top 1%) of that thing, which usually means you are now a top earner (assuming it isn’t some low-leverage, low-demand skill). Find a talent the market actually wants, then stack the reps.

3. Is forgetting actually useful?

If you couldn’t forget much of your life and remembered almost everything, would you be happier? I would venture to guess no. There are a couple of people out there with a condition called hyperthymesia, also known as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). It is a rare condition where a person can recall an enormous number of personal life events in vivid, automatic detail, especially from their own past. These people can often tell you what they were doing, feeling, and even minor details for specific dates going back to childhood without deliberately trying to remember. That includes every painful, embarrassing, and bad memory.

When put into that lens, forgetting certain aspects of your childhood or that person that rejected you years ago is actually a positive. The next time you get reminded of an unpleasant memory, be grateful that you forgot it, and be glad you will likely forget it again.

4. How do we find meaning in our world?

This question is not so simple. It comes down to how you define meaning. Is meaning finding your purpose, achieving goals and dreams, simply enjoying your existence, or finding God? Meaning can also be used in different ways: Was that book meaningful to you? What does persistence mean? What do you mean when you say that? Not only is the connotation hard to interpret, but when we try to find it and understand it, it seems to slip through our fingers.

Nevertheless, the question is a fascinating one to pose, and I think it is about to get a lot louder. As AI takes over more of the work people built their identity around, and as algorithms quietly eat people’s days through doomscrolling, the old default sources of meaning are getting pulled out from under us. Add the declining birth rate worldwide and you have a generation that will have to answer this on purpose rather than by inheritance. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for you. I just wanted to encourage you to start thinking about and discussing these questions more. The answers will become more sought after and important in the coming years.

5. The anti-optimization movement

This one is a meme and concept popularized by Marc Andreessen, and the actual name for it is “retard maxing” (yes, you read that right). It comes from the “maxing” meme trend on social media stemming from the looks maxing meme. If you are not familiar with the looks maxing meme, it is an over-optimization of your looks, sometimes to an extreme point, coupled with a certain level of obsession. Retard maxing is basically the opposite. It is about not being someone who is overthinking, intellectualizing, and ruminating all the time. It is a pro-action ethic dressed in deliberately provocative language. From a first-principles level, it can be modeled as: treating life as an iterative experiment with high action frequency and low emotional rumination per trial.

It is not “ignorance is bliss” or bragging about being stupid. Nor is it pure recklessness and not handling your responsibilities and dealing with the consequences of your actions. Rather, it is a movement focused on getting people biased towards taking action and doing the basics that just work. Here are some examples:

Work: Go to work, do a decent job, don’t obsess about “dream careers,” don’t catastrophize setbacks, keep stacking competent days.

Fitness: Go to the gym, lift something heavy, don’t over-engineer programs or count every rep, just keep showing up.

Relationships: Ask people out, text first, walk away from toxic situations without endless autopsies, surround yourself with people who energize you.

Creativity/business: Ship messy work, throw things at the wall, let the market and your own taste refine you instead of waiting for perfect readiness.

As you can see, it is a rather healthy and positive movement/meme, wrapped in a somewhat despicable (but for sure comical) name.

6. Is Sunscreen actually bad for you?

Chris Williamson asked, is sunscreen killing us or not, then Dr. Andrew Huberman proceeded to give a jargon-filled, extensive explanation that still had me questioning the answer to the original, seemingly simple question. Allow me to distill the answer for you to best digest the information.

No, sunscreen is not killing us. It is simply a matter of avoiding too much UV exposure with the proper timing as to when you go outside (ideally during the morning or evening when the UV has dropped, check your weather app). Clothes are your primary defense against UV, so if you still want some sun, which is good for you in moderation, then you can wear thinner material clothing that allows UV to go through it. Mineral sunscreens seem to be the safer bet, specifically zinc oxide sunscreens, which may not rub in as well, but there are some brands that do. The chemicals found in standard sunscreens like oxybenzone, octocrylene, homosalate, avobenzone, octinoxate, and anything with added benzene or high benzophenone risk raise enough concern that I think they are worth being selective about. Based on the evidence, these are legitimate red flags that justify more testing and justify avoiding specific ingredients and formats, especially when you have alternatives. They are NOT yet definitive proof that “sunscreen is causing cancer in humans at population scale.”

SO TL;DR from Huberman’s lens: UV is definitely bad in excess. Some chemical sunscreens raise enough mechanistic and exposure concerns that you should be choosy, not nihilistic. Mineral sunscreens plus shade, clothing, and smart timing are a robust, low-regret strategy.

7. Three questions to ask to better understand anything

1. What does this mean? (logic)

2. How do we know? (evidence)

3. Why does it matter? (utility)

You can try that string of questions for just about anything. A word, an SOP, something your significant other said to you at dinner, a news headline, some claim on Instagram reels, any requirement or rule, etc. I have been playing around with these questions all week, and they have helped me think clearer and come to smarter conclusions.

8. Why Reading Most Books Is A Waste Of Time

We are at a point in time where most books are just okay. In fact, you can walk into a bookstore, pick up any book, read the cover (front and back), maybe the first and last chapter, and get the gist of it. You should try it sometime with a book someone recommends you. I bet doing that, coupled with some rational fill-in-the-blanks level of thinking, will teach you all you need to know from that book without spending the time reading it. Skim-reading books is also a good practice when you identify a pattern emerging of: main idea of the book from the first 1-3 chapters + various examples, metaphors, analogies, and stories to drive that point home + a restatement of that main idea with some new added details in the last 1-3 chapters.

So here is my actual thesis: be ruthlessly selective. There are a lot of crap books out there, so be picky about what you read. A good practice is to read what you love to read, until you love reading. Then just follow your curiosity and challenge yourself with a tougher read occasionally. Be quick to drop books that follow that formula above, or at the very least skim-read them. Articles are arguably better than most books now because a well-written article can tell you everything you need (and sometimes more) about a topic in a shorter amount of time than a full book can. Since the length is shorter, it is also more probable you will be able to remember any examples, metaphors, analogies, and stories that do drive that point home. We also now have AI that has largely solved search, so any confusing idea, topic, or word can be easily understood with a simple prompt. Deep research tools from AIs with the correct prompt can also make fascinating and accurate articles to read.

Although, I still believe reading is the highest ROI habit you can build in a sea of distracted people. Remember I wrote, “Why Reading Most Books Is A Waste Of Time” not “Why Reading Books Is A Waste of Time.” Finding an intellectually invigorating book is worth reading time and time again. When you do find a book worth your time, don’t be afraid to come back to it. That is way better than jumping to some new, but average book.

I could go on and on about this topic because of the era of social media, podcasts, audiobooks, and YouTube videos that we find ourselves in. To claim you must read books to learn or win now is a joke. The tools for learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.

Whew! There you have it. I think this is a healthy practice and truly embodies Echo Improvement. I aggregate all the ‘self-help’ content I learn that week into a good Substack post. By doing so, I understand what I learned better because I write about it and spend the time recalling the information. This practice will likely slow my rate of consumption but increase my knowledge on what I have consumed. Learning is repeated recall, not repeated exposure. That same idea applies to anything you truly want to understand. It is also why active reading with notes and highlighting is much better than simply reading normally. Or even why professors at universities encourage students to take notes during lectures.

If you want a simple test to see if you should pick up a habit like this (even if it doesn’t become a Substack), just think of the last book you read, podcast you listened to, or video you watched, and ask yourself the following: What did I learn from that? If you can’t recall and accurately articulate at least 3 things, then I strongly encourage you to do more active learning and slow your consumption rate.

Thanks for reading, let me know if you all enjoyed this format. Over the coming weeks I am going to keep feeling out how I want this Substack to flow. I want it to have some sort of repeatable format, while still leaving room for the occasional essay or article off-format that I am inspired to write.

Cheers,

Payton

This Week's Inputs

Podcast: The Smartest Path to Financial Freedom - Scott Galloway

Link:

Podcast: Rabbit Hole: Does Tim Ferriss Dream In Japanese?

Link:

Podcast: Mostly Wise #1 - Matt McCusker, Andrew Huberman & Tom Segura

Link:

YouTube Video: Your Words Are Behavior (Most People Miss This)

Link:

YouTube Video: Why Reading Most Books Is A Waste Of Time

Link:

*This post was written by AI. None of the next ones will be.

For the last couple of months, Echo Improvement ran on a scheduled task. Every morning at 8am, a model read my reference files, pulled from my favorite self-improvement creators, drafted a post in my voice (at least tried to, but failed), generated a black-and-white sketch image, and shipped it to Substack. The original logic was sound. I wanted to speed-run growth after months of silence. I wanted to take the firehose of self-improvement content I consume and compress it into one short, useful read a day. Back in March, when this started, most of those posts were genuinely good. You can scroll back and read them.

Then they fell off. So did I.

The mission of Echo Improvement is one sentence: explain what I’m learning to understand it better, and maybe help someone in the process. The teaching is how the learning gets compressed. The writing is the thinking. Which means the second I handed the writing to a model, I broke the loop. The audience was still getting words. I was no longer becoming a clearer thinker. The whole point of the project was being outsourced to the thing that made it cheap.

You can’t speed-run articulation. You can’t shortcut the hard part of finding the question and wrestling with it on the page. The struggle is the asset. The struggle was what I was avoiding.

Here’s what is changing. Every Substack post from this point forward is written by me. The black-and-white sketch image style is now the AI archive marker. Posts with colored images, scroll back through the feed and you’ll see them, were always mine. From now on, every post is the colored kind.

However, AI will stay in the toolkit. As a search engine that holds context. As a fact-checker. As an image generator. As something to argue with when I want to see if an idea survives a different angle. Never as the writer. Never as the thinker.

I already work in AI full-time. I’m the full-stack AI expert and content creator at a AI course startup, and I’m bullish on where the technology is going. But the version of me worth following is the one that thinks for himself and writes it down badly until it gets less bad. Authenticity is the only thing nobody can compete with me on. So I’m quadrupling down on it.

The mission stays the same but the pace will be slower. The voice will be MINE. Posts will go out when I’m inspired, and I’ll try to be consistent without making it feel like a job or work. Inspiration is perishable. I’d rather catch it when it’s real than fake it on schedule. This substack should feel like play, it should be fun, fun is what I am optimizing for.

If this disappoints you, fair. Unsubscribe with no hard feelings. If you want to follow the experiment of one guy trying to think more clearly in public, stick around. The next post is mine.

Payton

P.S. The prompt that produced this post was, I am not kidding, roughly the size of a short essay. Felt right to send the AI off with the biggest payload it ever got. Probably why this one actually kind of sounds like me.

The bounty was Paul Doumer’s idea. Doumer was the governor-general of French Indochina, and he had just built a modern sewer system under Hanoi as a monument to colonial engineering. The sewer was a wonder. It was also, as the historian Michael Vann documented in his 2003 paper “Of Rats, Rice, and Race,” one of the greatest rat habitats the city had ever produced. Plague broke out. Doumer offered one cent per tail. On a single day in June, more than twenty thousand tails were turned in.

Then someone noticed the rats.

Tailless rats running through the streets. Tails being smuggled into Hanoi by the hundreds from villages where the locals had set up small rat farms in their apartments. They had figured it out faster than the colonial government. You can have the tails without giving up the rats. Snip the tail. Let the animal go. Wait for it to breed. Collect again.

The bounty did not eliminate the rats. It paid for their cultivation.

What Goodhart Named

In 1975, an economist named Charles Goodhart wrote a paper called “Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience.” In a footnote, he stated a principle that came to be called Goodhart’s Law. Any observed statistical regularity, he wrote, will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. The Bank of England was targeting a money supply number called M3, and the moment they targeted it the banks rearranged their balance sheets so M3 went up without anything else changing.

In 1997, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern compressed the idea into the line most of us know. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Read it twice. The thing you measure was supposed to be a proxy for the thing you actually wanted. The proxy and the prize were never identical. The moment you start chasing the proxy, it stops behaving like a proxy and starts behaving like a slot machine.

Rats grew tails so they could be cut off. M3 went up so the Bank of England would relax.

The Version You Are Running

You do not run a rat farm. You run something quieter.

You wear a watch that counts steps, and last week you walked an extra mile because the watch said you were two hundred steps short. The watch did not know you walked the mile in circles in your living room. You check a screen time report and you spent two hours less on your phone this week, but the way you got there was by reading the news on your laptop instead. Your weekly review shows nine deep work hours and you cannot remember producing anything from any of them.

The dashboards do not care whether the underlying thing is improving. They care whether the number is.

A friend of mine has not missed a workout in two years. He is also weaker, slower, and more injured than he was when he started. The number stayed perfect. The thing the number was measuring quietly walked off.

Most of what we call discipline is the discipline of moving a number. Most of what we call discipline is rat tails.

The Inversion

Stop looking for cleaner metrics. There is no number clean enough to survive being aimed at.

The real move is older and harder. You have to keep two things in your head at once. The number, and the thing the number was supposed to be a proxy for. You have to check the thing against itself, not against the dashboard. You have to ask, every so often, whether the work counts.

The colonial government in Hanoi could not do this because they had never had to live with rats. They had a budget and a problem and a measurable outcome. The locals had a city. The locals could see the rats were not going down, that the streets still ran with them, that the bounty had become a side hustle. The locals lived inside the thing the metric was supposed to track.

Most of us do not. We are tourists in our own lives, looking at the dashboard from somewhere above the ground.

How to Catch Yourself

Three moves.

First, name what the number is for. Write one sentence that says what the metric is a proxy for. “Steps are a proxy for being someone who moves through the world easily.” “Words written are a proxy for being someone with a habit of thought.” Pin it where you will see it. When the metric and the thing drift apart, you want to catch the drift early, before the metric becomes the prize.

Second, schedule unmeasured time. One day a week, do the thing the number is a proxy for without checking the number. Walk without the watch. Write without the word count. Talk to someone you love without thinking about how to phrase it for an audience. The capacity to do the unmetered version of the thing is the capacity that will carry you when the dashboards break.

Third, run an honesty audit on your own gaming. Every Sunday, ask: what did I do this week purely to move a number? Cancel one of those things. Replace it with the unmetered version. Watch your own mind resist. The resistance is the data.

The Tails Were Not the Trap

The Hanoi locals did not break the colonial bounty out of malice. They saw the system clearly and they ran the play. The tails were never the problem. The problem was that the people designing the system never lived in the city.

The same is true of every dashboard you have built for yourself. Aim at the measure and you miss the meaning. Cut the tail and the rat runs free. The number was never the thing.

Go check on the thing.