Daily Thought for Change

The cause of most of your unhappiness? It’s in your head.

The best part: you can change it.

Not your circumstances. Not your past. Not other people.

Your beliefs and thoughts to keep.

In CBT, I learned this cool idea that changed how I think about life: it doesn’t matter what’s true about the world. What matters is what’s useful. Useful for adapting well. For living a life that feels good and goes somewhere you like.

This idea stopped my endless search for what’s right and what’s wrong — and started an experiment that transformed my inner life, inner peace, my wellbeing.

No extended meditation needed.

What if I just chose the beliefs that made my life work and feel better?🤔

Here are 3 that have done exactly that.

Not some bible gospel. Not exact science. Just what I’ve learned from peaceful, ambitious people, what they tend to live by.

1. The Happiness Formula

Happiness = Reality − Expectations.

I have Brad Stulberg, a high performance coach, best-selling author to thank for this one.

Think about the last time you got very frustrated — with yourself, with someone else, with how a day unfolded. Wasn’t it because something didn’t match what you expected? The outcome you’d scripted? The way you believed the person should have shown up?

Here’s what I learned: life doesn’t owe you a specific script, plan - nothing.

Nobody owes you sh*t, in fact. You are entitled to absolutely nothing.

Your expectations aren’t universal laws — they’re just your hopes. Not truth everyone should or want to live by.

Once I stopped expecting guarantees from life, the weather, or other people — and focused only on what I could actually control, my actions — everything else became lighter. Life became a pretty damn experience. Full of unexpected rainbows, dumb luck, rain, and yes, f*ckups. But when you keep moving forward, doing your best, grateful for the sheer fact of being alive today — you’ll have a good ride. No matter what.

And here’s the main bonus: when you stop expecting much, anything good becomes a cherry on top 🍒 of something already kind of mind-blowing.

So you feel like winning a lottery every day. Almost.

2. Satisficing

Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winning scientist came up with this brilliant idea. It combines “satisfy” and “suffice.” The idea: stop searching for the perfect solution and start searching for good enough.

I used to agonize over everything — the best idea, the best city to live in, the best possible partner, what book to read, where to eat dinner.

Hours. Gone.

And then you keep thinking, “What if I missed something better?”

Then Annie Duke’s work on decision-making opened my eyes and mind to something a lot more effective. 3 things she helped me see:

Most of what I’m agonizing over, I won’t remember in a week. Where to eat this weekend? Pick somewhere. You won’t remember it next weekend.

Most big, complex decisions — where to live, who to love — won’t unfold the way you imagine anyway. So set your deal-breakers, and when something clears them: choose. Your brain will never compute the “perfect” option. It doesn’t exist. And life tends to bring things together in the most beautiful way anyway, once you allow it to unfold.

When you leave your expectations at the door - most of life will feel like a cherry on top, no matter how it goes.

3. You are already doing your best

Seriously.

Right now, today, this moment — you are doing your best with the skills, knowledge, and experience you have. If you knew better, you’d do better. But you don’t. And that’s exactly why you’re here.

Yes, you can learn more. Build better skills. Make decisions that lead to better outcomes. That’s the whole point of the self work.

But right now — given everything that’s happened and every choice that’s led you here — you did your best.

So let it go.

Forgive yourself for imperfect choices, decisions, and actions.

We beat ourselves up against imaginary world standards. Standards nobody real lives by, in a world that doesn’t exist outside of your head.

You might as well forgive yourself for everything that came before and make the best possible move available to you right now.

That’s it. That’s the whole job.

I won’t claim these 3 beliefs will transform your life. I’m not selling certainty or more expectations.

I’m just the happiest I’ve ever been, living these out every day. Maybe they will be useful to you too.

Look at the beliefs and thoughts you choose to carry.

Is what’s in your head making you happy?

“Think of your shoulder injury as an invitation — to explore all the movements, recovery protocols you never had time for.”

My client chuckled. He knows me too well.

I turn every constraint into something productive. Something interesting. Something with a silver lining. So you might end up having fun doing all the right things.

I just finished “Inside the Box: how constraints make us better” by David Epstein — the book everyone is talking about right now.

The main idea: constraints don’t limit what we create. They shape it (including us) into something better.

You already know this, even if you’ve never thought about it this way.

You finish things when you have a deadline. You go all over the place when you have all the time in the world. That’s why work gets done — and why your life vision gets pushed back again and again.

Epstein tells the story of a Silicon Valley company that had everything. Money. Talent. The best technology available. And it went bankrupt. Because people were creating all day, every day — without ever needing to ship something the market actually wanted. Something that actually made sense in the real world.

No constraint. No good result to ship, it seems.

Then there are the athletes who lacked resources and had to reinvent their approach, and often entire sport — and ended up outperforming everyone doing it “the right way.” The writers who produced their best, genre-redefining work precisely because they denied themselves the old way of doing it.

Blocking your default, you usual way of doing things and imposing specific constraints doesn’t kill creativity. It ignites it. It forces you past more-of-the-same and into genuinely new territory.

The same principle helped me end my battle with food. For over a decade now!

One day I made a pact with myself: I don’t consider packaged food - food. More like some entertainment to try from time to time. What goes on my plate has to be something my grandmother would recognize — fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, natural dairy, nuts, seeds. Real things.

That one rule changed my eating for life.

Not a diet. Not a phase. A constraint that became an identity. You wouldn’t expect vegan to go and “cheat” with meat on the weekend, so why would I think of that? My cat doesn’t eat any of that. So I decided I’m gonna pass on that franken foods from now on too.

The best health researchers will tell you it’s also the best nutritional framework going now - the less processed food you eat, the better you are. But that’s almost beside the point. What mattered was that the rule was clear. No grey area. No negotiation.

Constraint.

Jocko Willink, my favorite Navy SEAL has a popular saying: “Discipline equals freedom.”

The constraint is the freedom. The box that you need to become who you actually are.

I was in an Uber recently. The driver asked me — coach to stranger — how to quit smoking. I told him the single most important thing he could do: stop saying “I’m trying to quit” and start saying “I’m not a smoker.”

Identity constraint. That’s the best move. Habit gurus like James Clear taught this to millions of people.

I tell clients struggling with food to try the same thing.

Imagine you’ve decided — like a vegan — that an entire category is simply off the table. You don’t wait for a cheat day to “not be vegan.” The constraint eliminates the decision. There’s nothing left to negotiate. You have to find a workaround. How to be satisfied with what you have.

Constraints don’t just create some of the best works of art and athletes, they give you the freedom and ease to fully live your values.

What behaviors or habits do you want to be more consistent with — and what’s the bright-line constraint that could help you to stay “in the right box”?

A client signed up for Couch to 5K challenge.

The best, most effective part of the program - it starts slow, small and totally doable.

Run for sixty seconds. Walk for ninety. Repeat. Week after week, a few days per week, not every day, the ratio shifts — more running, less walking — until one day you’re covering 5K without stopping. Something you wouldn’t be able to do at the beginning.

The program works so well because it’s designed around a truth most people ignore: capacity is built gradually, not in one leap.

Nobody goes from the couch to a marathon on willpower and motivation.

And yet.

When it comes to eating well, sleeping enough, building a business, changing a habit — we behave as if we should. We announce the new plan on Monday. Full commitment. Every day. Starting now.

0 to 100% in one move.

Here’s what I’ve learned coaching people through real, lasting change, going through it many times myself: the goal isn’t wrong. Your timeline is.

When I was quitting sugar and working through emotional eating, I gave myself a year. A full year of gradual progression. Because by that time I understood very well, failing many times, that zero-to-hero simply never works. The version of you that disciplines yourself through week one is not the same version who maintains it for life. That version needs skill, not resolution.

If you’ve been eating poorly for years and now you’re eating well 3 days a week — consistently — that’s a massive win! Not a final destination. A foundation. Lasting skill being built.

I’m in a business coaching program right now, working toward 10K a month. And I’m very clear on one thing: it’s going to be a journey. Not everything will work. The most important thing isn’t speed — it’s progress, consistency, and knowing when to scale down, work on basics, before scaling up.

Nail the basics. Then build on top.

It won’t look glamorous but it’ll work. Which one do you care about more?

Sustainable change follows the same arc: less before more.

3 days of consistency before there can be 5. One before three. Start where it feels almost too easy because that’s where the confidence gets earned and the new level can actually hold.

Almost every goal is possible. Just not on your impatient timeline.

What goal are you working on right now that might need less — fewer days, lower volume, a smaller rep count — before it can become more?

PS The best coaching programs are built on this exact same principle. That’s why they work so much better than new year resolutions.

“I think it’s been months since I felt this hungry. Now I understand why you’ve been so obsessed with helping me eat a balanced diet every day — the protein, the vitamins, all of it.”

A client of mine said this recently.

We’ve worked together for two years. Before we started, he’d feel ravenous constantly, and because of that, he’d overeat. After we worked on eating all the essential nutrients from all the right foods, things changed . He trained harder than ever. And yet, the hunger disappeared.

He lost 20 kilograms.

It turns out, our body isn’t designed to feel hungry all the time. When you give it everything it needs, consistently, it stops screaming at you that you need to eat everything you see.

The problem was never hunger.

The problem was not eating enough of the right stuff.

You can’t sleep. You’re lying there, eyes open, mind sprinting in 100 directions.

The problem isn’t sleep. It’s everything you do in the hours before it.

Your sales aren’t moving. People aren’t signing up.

The problem is rarely the selling. It’s everything that doesn’t happen before the sale even begins.

Conflict keeps surfacing in a relationship.

The conflict isn’t the problem. What’s been accumulating around it, quietly, consistently, is.

Whatever is bothering you right now — whatever feels urgent, broken, in need of fixing — is rarely the thing that needs the most work.

Weight loss is the perfect example.

Yes, eat less, move more. But that’s rarely what you need to work on. The real question is: WHY do you keep eating more and moving less?

That’s the problem underneath the problem. The root is where it all starts.

And that’s where the work is.

What has your attention right now? What feels like it needs fixing?

And is that actually the cause, or just the symptom you’ve been staring at?

“I’m the happiest person with 2.5g of Omega-3s in me daily.”

When I say this, people think I’m joking.

I’m not.

Alleviating Depression: Data compiled by Harvard Health Publishing notes that omega-3s easily cross the blood-brain barrier to interact with mood-regulated molecules. Clinical trials show they are highly effective as an add-on therapy alongside traditional prescription antidepressants. [1]

Stress and Anxiety Regulation: Omega-3s impact the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, helping the body regulate its biological response to stress and lowering excessive cortisol production.

Omega-3 fatty acids play a critical role in brain function and mental health by acting as fundamental structural building blocks and biochemical regulators

But I’m not here to cite papers at you.

I’d rather share more of my experience.

Every time I hit my therapeutic dose — daily fatty fish plus a quality supplement — something changes in me. Not a high. Not a mood. A baseline of content, or groundedness. And when something hard happens — a difficult conversation, a curveball, a day that goes sideways — I’m more calm and resilient. More effective. Less tangled in my own emotional weather.

I have another saying I love repeating:

People comment on how happy I am. How optimistic. And only I know the full story.

I wasn’t always this person.

As a kid, a teenager, into my twenties — I battled a lot of internal demons. Unhelpful loops. Stuck patterns. Yes, I did a lot of internal work — books, journaling, coaching, mindset work. All of it mattered.

But nothing made the impact that consistent like unglamorous daily healthy habits did.

Sleep. Movement. Daily walks. A balanced diet. And yes, Omega-3s as well (the right amount and quality).

Not dramatic, expensive or “magical”, not some retreat.

Just the basics your body needs, done daily.

Here’s what I believe, with great research on humans backing it up:

Your thoughts, your emotions, your energy — the things that define the quality of your life — are more a result of your biology than they are of your psychology.

It’s hard to feel bad about yourself when your body is thriving. And it’s very easy to feel bad when your body is suffering — sometimes quietly, sometimes with obvious signs.

So many people are searching for meaning these days. For inner peace. For answers. And they’re searching in the right direction — inward — but they’re skipping the foundation.

Your body is the instrument. When you tune it, the music of the Universe starts playing a different symphony through you.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Have you tried this body-first approach? And what’s one thing you could improve today, that would make your body a little happier?

Start with the Omegas perhaps🙂

“I just need to get into a routine.”

A lot of my clients would tell me at the beginning of our work together.

From the executive who can’t repeat 3 workouts. From the entrepreneur whose eating is chaos by Wednesday. From the high-performer who swears they have no discipline, when in reality, they have no system.

Here’s what they all are missing without knowing it: the habit of creating habits.

Or more precisely — your brain’s automations.

Your brain is the original programmer. It builds apps. Push a button, run a sequence, get the payoff, repeat. No thinking required. Energy saved to handle other things in your complex life.

That’s what a habit actually is - your brain’s app to save resources while getting predictable outcomes to handle more with less effort.

Here’s how habits work:

A trigger — something in your environment that signals the brain to activate a sequence of actions. Can be time of the time or something that happens before, something you see or go through.

A routine — a specific set of actions in a specific order.

A reward — the expected payoff. The reason the program runs in the first place.

And here’s the part most people miss to make it all work: repetition.

Without it, nothing automates.

Every time you sit down to write, lace up your shoes for the workout, or choose what to eat — your brain treats it like a brand new decision. Full energy expenditure. Full internal debate. A lot of opportunity to quit.

That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a programming error.

When you habituate something, when you automate it - decisions disappear. The friction disappears. What used to feel like willpower becomes just... the thing you do with no internal battle.

Start simple. Very simple.

One trigger, one routine, one payoff (make yourself feel good, know why you started). Repeat it for a few weeks before you even think about adding complexity. Let the program install fully before you start customizing it.

Because in the high-achieving, many-plates-spinning, many-balls-in-the-air life: the more you have going on, the more you need your essentials running on autopilot.

Want to scale?

Automate more moving parts!

Your sleep, your movement, your nutrition, your writing, your business essentials — these can’t be things you negotiate with yourself every day. They need to be non-negotiables, repeatable non-decisions, so your energy goes to the work that requires your brain.

Automation is the enabler of ambition. It’s the infrastructure that makes achievement and hard things sustainable with more and more on your plate.

Look at your day right now.

Where are you burning decision-making energy on things that should be simple and automatic? What do you need to habituate instead of thinking about it every day?

PS Some people you might know who really get it. I promise you there are a lot more.

Barack Obama wore only grey or blue suits during his presidency. He cited research on decision fatigue, saying he had too many decisions to make to waste energy on clothing.

Steve Jobs famously wore his uniform of a black turtleneck, Levi’s 501 jeans, and New Balance sneakers every single day. He reportedly had hundreds of the same turtleneck made by Issey Miyake after falling in love with the concept during a factory visit in Japan.

Mark Zuckerberg has worn the same grey t-shirt and jeans combination for years, explicitly calling it a way to reduce “decision fatigue” and keep his mental bandwidth free for Facebook’s actual problems.

Albert Einstein reportedly owned several versions of the same outfit so he wouldn’t have to think about what to wear — he considered fashion choices a waste of cognitive resources.

Vera Wang is known to almost always wear all-black, which she’s described as a practical creative choice that removes the morning noise.

Warren Buffett keeps his daily routine almost robotically consistent — same breakfast from McDonald’s (he picks from only three options depending on how the market feels that morning), same drive to the office, same reading schedule. He’s said that protecting his time and attention is one of his most important competitive advantages.

…

Overeating. Overdrinking. Can’t sleep.

You think the problem is your willpower or discipline, or hectic life, or your brain.

It’s not.

It’s a skill you never built because nobody ever told you it was important, or how to do it, when and why.

In my 20s, I struggled with emotional eating.

Stress from studies, work, relationships would pile up, and I’d feel this pull toward food. Like it could cushion me. Protect me. Ground me when everything felt like it was spinning out of control. I didn’t know such words as stress, emotional management, self-regulation.

It was just an urge I couldn’t control.

It was controlling me.

It wasn’t constant. But it was consistent. Every week or two, I’d have an episode — eating until my stomach hurt. Eating past the point of full, past the point of comfort, into something that felt almost like punishment.

I thought it was a willpower problem. A discipline problem. A me problem.

I told myself I’d do better next time. That it was the last time.

New life. New me. Starting Monday.

It never worked.

Because the next time stress hit — the next time anxiety crept in or something emotionally overwhelmed me (I wouldn’t have even had that language for it back then, I just knew: I need to eat, right now, a lot) — it would happen again.

Because I didn’t change myself just by thinking about it. Or wishing for it. So the behavior didn’t magically change either.

Being in the fitness modeling world didn’t help. I was a trainer. I was supposed to have my sh*t together. So I’d swing from a binge episode straight into another strict diet — some fad keto thing, another low-carb experiment, or counting obsessively my macros — disciplining my way through the week until the next stress hit.

And then, guided by luck and a few smart people, I found my way into stress management coaching and nutrition counseling.

That’s when everything started to change.

I realized there was nothing wrong with me. I just didn’t have any skills or habits to manage my stress, my difficult emotions, my anxiety and my worries. Nobody taught me this at school. If they had, I would have known — I was a straight-A student.

So I learned. I learned what stress actually is. What it does to your body, your brain, your emotions. I learned strategies to work with it — physically, emotionally, psychologically. I also learned that the way I was eating — swinging between binges and restrictive diets — was contributing to my stress and making the cycle worse.

And then I practiced. I built new habits. I built new responses. I learned what it actually meant and why it was important to eat a balanced diet.

A year or two in, something remarkable happened.

Food lost its grip on me.

I was free!

I learned how to eat to keep myself well — physically, emotionally, mentally. No diet. No guru. Just a bit more skill: self-care, stress management, emotional regulation, and actually understanding what my body needs versus what some Instagram plan says it should need.

18 years later. I’ve had my six-pack for a decade but that’s not the part that matters the most.

The best thing is that I can eat a piece of cake without needing to eat the whole thing. When stress comes, I don’t feel the need to numb it with food. My smile always comes from the inside. And I haven’t needed a diet ever since!

That’s been pretty remarkable.

And those skills didn’t just change ME around food. They changed how I approached and dealt with the whole life.

Here are the 5 strategies I learned about, practiced, taught to my clients. Not to “fix” yourself. But to build the skill set you were never given to set yourself free from habits that don’t actually serve you.

1. Sit with discomfort.

Every morning I take a cold shower or a cold plunge. Not because I love it. Because it trains my brain to stay calm inside discomfort. To know: this will pass, it’s ok. I will not die from an uncomfortable feeling. In fact, the more you sit with it — without reacting, without numbing — the faster it moves through you.

2. Breathe.

4 counts in. 8 counts out. Repeat 5 times. Eyes closed, body softening, relaxing a little more with each exhale. What you’re doing is switching your nervous system from fight-or-flight into rest-and-digest. That’s the state where urges lose their urgency. Where you get your choice back.

3. Write it all down.

Dump everything onto the page. The worry. The anger. The fear. The frustration. All of it. Brain dump, uncensored. This isn’t journaling for reflection — it’s neurological first aid. Writing activates your prefrontal cortex, the thinker, and deactivates your amygdala, the fear center. Translation: it moves you from autopilot reaction to actual thinking. From “I need to eat the entire fridge right now” to “okay. what’s actually going on here?”

4. Productively distract yourself.

Take a shower. Go for a walk. Nap for 30 minutes. Dance your ass off in the kitchen. Change your physical state and your emotional state follows. The body leads. Let it.

5. Don’t starve yourself.

This one’s underrated. You don’t have to keep yourself hungry OR binge. These are NOT the only 2 choices. Have a banana. A protein shake. A piece of fish. Some warm milk with honey.

SloOOOOOOOOw it all down.

Manage your blood sugar. Take the edge off. Give your stomach something to work with before the craving turns into a wave that overtakes you.

And then, go live your life.

Act on what you can control. Put down the rest. It was never yours to carry.

And remember that these are habits. That means they get better with repetition, better overtime, at first they feel awkward and imperfect, until they feel like a second skin.

And then one day, they’ll just be what you do. And teach others.

And then there will be freedom from all the urges you thought you needed to win.

What’s in your stress management toolkit, and what’s one thing you could practice this toolkit on today?

The Whiney Bitch Moments

You’re allowed to have one.

This morning at the gym, we got into it — that feeling when life seems to be conspiring against you. When you think it can’t possibly get worse, and then your car breaks down. Or your computer won’t turn on when you need to deliver a presentation a lot of things depend on. Or your kettle — the one thing standing between you and that first cup of coffee that keeps you going — decides today is its last day.

Go ahead. Let it out.

Name all the things going wrong. Say them out loud. Better yet, say them to/with people you trust. Not so you can wallow in it. Not so you can hand yourself a permission slip to give up and blame everyone and everything for your “misfortunes”. But for other 2 very good reasons:

A) Because other people need to see the messiness. Not your “perfectly imperfect highlight reel” messiness. The real kind. The kind that reminds us we’re all living the human condition, which includes a lot of chaos, a lot of mess, and sometimes a hole that just keeps getting deeper. It gives others a permission to feel OK with having a human life as it is, not as Instagram would show it.

B) Because venting empties the trash. When you don’t let it out, it sits inside you all day. It “stinks”. It colors everything. But when you name it and release it, you free yourself up to keep living this beautiful life, the imperfect, jaw-dropping, sunrise-and-sunset kind, while sorting out what’s still in your control.

This practice even has a name in clinical practice.

In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), it’s called the Worry Window, or what I personally call the Whiney Bitch Moments.

Instead of letting your worries bleed across your entire day (or week, or even month), you give them a designated time slot. Fifteen to thirty minutes. Scheduled. Contained. Then closed.

Here’s how it works:

Pick a time. Late afternoon is ideal, around 5 PM works for most people. Not right before bed. You don’t want this running on loop when you’re trying to sleep.

Keep a worry journal. When something hijacks your brain mid-day, write it down in your phone note app and tell yourself: I’ll deal with that at 5.

Use the window. When your scheduled time arrives, open the list. For things you can control, look for solutions. For things you can’t — just let yourself feel it. That’s enough.

Close it. When the timer goes off, you’re done. Close the notebook. Close the window. Move immediately into something that restores you — a walk, music, whatever brings you back to yourself.

This is what real stress management looks like. Not pretending nothing bothers you, or you are made of iron. Not performing toughness. Not white-knuckling your way through the day and then lying awake at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling, replaying it all.

It’s learning to let it out without letting it run the show and self-harm, while effectively dealing with what you can control.

Have you ever tried the Worry Window for when life feels like a battle field or never-ending season of rain?

My most important fitness goal is to compete in the Olympics when I’m in my 90s.

Or some version of it.

The point isn’t the exact stage — it’s the standard I’m training toward. Pain-free. Full range of motion. Mobility intact. In my 90s and all the way there. That goal tells me exactly what training to say yes to and what to walk away from.

A friend asked me recently what my ideal life would look like, viewed backwards from my 90s. I realized that I didn’t have a clear answer, and that I need to sit down and paint the specifics over the weekend — then backcast them into today’s actions.

The things that matter most in our live take the longest to build.

Quality relationships. Specific achievements. Impact, service, legacy. These don’t happen in a quarter or a year. They compound over decades. If you show up for them over decades.

Writing a bestselling book. Making the Thinkers 50 (coaching edition). Becoming a millionaire. These are available to far more people than actually get there. Not because they’re untalented or have limitations they can’t overcome. Because most people won’t stay in the game long enough. Nor do they plan for decades.

Most successful people I know eventually arrive at the same conclusion: anything you really want is possible — just on a longer time horizon than you thought.

Bill Gates said it really well:

And yet. Almost nobody builds decade-long plans.

The ones who do? They get there — more often than not.

But it’s a small club. Most people talk about the long game and play the short one every day instead, hoping to get to their long-term plans once life gets less busy, which ends up being never or too late to do anything meaningful.

I made myself a rule a few years back: never chase anything that feels like it has to happen now or never. That urgency is almost always a signal — that you’ll be just fine with never. So skip the hassle and save time for what matters in a decade just as much.

Do you have a goal you’re willing to work on for a decade?

If yes — work on that. That kind of commitment is a signal. It tells you what actually matters to you.

Do you have a clear, precise ten-year goal? And are you putting time into it today?

Your brain has a funny feature.

The moment you commit to something — a business idea, a diet, a relationship — it starts curating your reality to match that commitment. It filters what you see, what you don’t see. Highlights what confirms the story. Buries anything that contradicts it.

In behavioral science it’s called confirmation bias.

This is why we keep working on the business that keeps not working for us. Why we keep trying to make the diet stick even though we fall off the wagon more than we stay on. Why we stay in the job, or the relationship, that hasn’t felt right in months, maybe years, telling ourselves it’s just a phase. That everyone feels this way. That it’ll get better.

2 weeks ago, I shut down the B2B side of my coaching business.

I gave it 2 years of my life.

A lot of energy, time, effort. And it worked — a bit. Just enough to tease me with signs of hope. Just enough to keep me from seeing clearly what’s not working. But objectively? It never got anywhere I could call progress. Maybe it would have. In another decade. But I wouldn’t have survived that decade to find out.

So I wrapped it up. Put it in the metaphorical attic. And went all in on the 1:1 coaching that had been keeping my lights on the whole time.

Some people would call that failure.

I call it an experiment that didn’t work the way I hoped.

Here’s what years of trying things — succeeding at some, not at others — has taught me:

a) Even when you get the result you wanted, it’s often not what you imagined. I lived on a tropical island (a dream of mine). It was boring as hell. I left. The dream had been better than the reality.

b) And goals are just assumptions dressed up as destinations. Just because you have one doesn’t mean it’s possible — at least not for you, not right now. The plan is a first draft, not a guarantee contract.

Not every experiment is meant to work out. Not every goal is meant to be reached. And it’s okay to change course midway when the winds stop blowing your way⛵

Don’t believe everything you think. Don’t assume every vision is meant to become real. Pivot when the evidence asks you to.

What goal in your life, if you checked it against reality right now — honestly, not hopefully — might be ripe for a quit?

PS: One of the sharpest questions in decision-making to help you make this call: “If a complete stranger walked into my life right now, would they stick? Or would they quit?”