A newsletter for ambitious minds learning to live with more intention. Each week, you’ll get grounded reflections and practical tools to quiet your inner critic, realign with your values, and build a life that feels sustainable — not squeezed.
Stuck on the Runway (How perfectionist planning keeps you from taking off)
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I once worked with a founder who spent three weeks designing the perfect morning routine. He built spreadsheets. Drew diagrams. Color coded his journal. Except doing the routine. He was not lazy. He was caught in analysis paralysis. Planning felt safe. Starting felt dangerous. Here is the problem. Preparation looks productive. It gives you the feeling of progress. But it keeps you on the runway while the work never takes off. Here are three ways to break this loop:
When you’re stuck on the runway, getting off the ground is the first step. Mapping the terrain beyond is next. Momentum matters more than clarity. And the founder who kept planning the perfect routine instead of living it? That was me. |
The Pocket
A newsletter for ambitious minds learning to live with more intention. Each week, you’ll get grounded reflections and practical tools to quiet your inner critic, realign with your values, and build a life that feels sustainable — not squeezed.
AI is the thing we keep trying to talk around instead of about. But pretending it’s optional now is like pretending the tide might negotiate with you. It’s here. It’s powerful. It’s strange. And depending on where you’re standing, it reads as doorway, disruption, or dragon. The poet Alison Hawthorne Deming writes about the “edge effect” — those ecological borders where one habitat dissolves into another, and life explodes in variety. Marsh into pond. Forest into field. These liminal zones are...
Most of the time, we’re not short on intelligence — we’re short on visibility. These seven models won’t remove the weather, but they’ll help you drive in the rain. “We are never definitely right; we can only be sure we are definitely wrong.” — Richard Feynman A while back, I wrote about avoiding collaboration traps — the Abilene Paradox, Parkinson’s Law, and Chesterton’s Fence — with a handful of strategies for saner decisions in groups. The gist: teams drift when nobody says what they think,...
The heretical neuroscience of habit — and why rhythm beats willpower every time Everyone loves the idea of self-improvement — until they realize it’s mostly repetition in disguise. The brain doesn’t care about your goals, your affirmations, or your color-coded planner. It only cares what you do, again and again, in the same context. That’s not motivation. That’s wiring. Heresy #1: Willpower is overrated. The prefrontal cortex — your decision-making muscle — burns out fast. Every “should I?”...