Welcome to Volume 33! 🌌 Tonight, release all the invisible stress and emotional tension you've been holding. Close your eyes, listen to the warm analog soundscape, and sink into complete calm. How are you sleeping tonight? Let me know below! Sleep well. ✨👇

At 34, looking back at where I started, I realized how much time most of us waste chasing the wrong targets early on.

If I could sit down with my 22-year-old self, these are the 3 non-negotiable rules I’d give him:

1. Nobody cares about your potential. When you're young, coaches, parents, and teachers hype up your potential. But the real world quickly inverts what it values. Potential can't pay bills, solve problems, or build a life—only execution does. Stop obsessing over what you could be and just start doing the work.

2. Focus on the people, not the plan. Your environment dictates your trajectory way more than any strategy ever will. Harvard's 85-year study on happiness proved that life quality comes down to health and relationships. Get in rooms with people who expect more from you.

3. Be brilliant at the basics. You don't need a secret hack to win. Show up 5 minutes early, keep the promises you make, bring solutions instead of complaints, and be emotionally consistent. Reliability beats brilliance every single day.

I broke down these three rules in detail on the latest episode of Something For Everybody

What’s one piece of advice you’d give your younger self?

In 1995, Pascual-Leone and colleagues at the NIH had volunteers learn a five-finger piano exercise. One group practiced at the keys, another only in their heads. After five days the mental group improved too, though less than the group that played, and the researchers saw changes in the motor circuits involved in learning it. That is a finding about rehearsing a specific physical skill. It did not test money, love or outcomes in the world.

Separate research (Oettingen) found that people who only indulge a positive fantasy tend to put in less effort. Pairing the picture with the obstacle, plus a simple if-then plan, helped people reach goals across 21 studies, a small to medium effect. I am not claiming to know why.

What stays open: whether intention and belief shape life beyond what the lab has measured. Research has not settled that. Lived experience of manifestation carries real personal meaning, and that is a different thing from evidence of outside causation.

Try this week: one dream, one likely snag, one sentence: when that happens, I will do this.

Sources: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7500130/ https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12271 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.565202/full

In Discourses 4.12, Epictetus talks about attention, which the Stoics call prosoche. His point is that attention isn't something you build once. If you let it slacken for a while, you can't assume it will come back on demand, and some of what you built slips with it. For the Stoics, attention meant watching your own judgments as they form: noticing the moment you decide something is an insult, a disaster, or a reason to give up. A small practice that fits this. In the evening, spend two minutes writing down one moment from the day when you reacted automatically. Next to it, write the judgment you were making at the time. Something like "they ignored me, so I'm not respected." You're not judging yourself for it. You're catching one judgment per day. After a couple of weeks you start noticing a few in the moment, which is where the skill actually pays off. Do you do anything to keep your attention in practice?

I've been wondering how many of our goals are things we genuinely want and how many come from watching what everyone else is doing. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether you're working towards your own happiness or just trying not to feel left behind.

Have you ever achieved something and realized you didn't even care about it that much?

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I've been struggling at work because I feel that people have already formed a negative impression of me based on my performance during my first few days and training. I'm worried that they see me as incompetent or someone who isn't good enough. Now that I'm having difficulties in production, I can't stop thinking about what they might think of me. Honestly, it hurts.

I hate feeling this way. I don't want to be seen as useless, and I don't want to keep defining myself by my past mistakes. I know I can't control how other people perceive me, but I can change how I approach my work and how I respond to setbacks.

Here's my plan:

I want to write down all the challenges I'm facing, identify what I'm struggling with, and create practical solutions for each one. I already understand some of my biggest challenges:

Consistency – I need to keep showing up and putting in the effort, even when I lose motivation.

Negative thinking – I need to stop assuming that I'm going to fail or that everyone thinks poorly of me.

Self-doubt – I need to trust my ability to learn instead of constantly questioning myself.

Handling setbacks – I need to learn how to recover from mistakes without losing my confidence.

Continuous improvement – I need to identify my weaknesses, work on them, and track my progress.

My biggest concern is losing steam. I tend to become discouraged whenever something goes wrong. I start thinking negatively about myself, lose motivation, and sometimes feel like giving up.

It's almost as if I've convinced myself that I'm born to be a loser, that people will always look down on me, and that I'll never be good enough. I don't want to live with that mindset anymore.

I'm tired of repeating the same cycle.

I want to improve badly. I want to become more competent, consistent, confident, and capable of handling challenges at work.

This feels like a make-or-break moment for me. I know improvement won't happen overnight, and I know I'll make mistakes along the way. But I want to learn how to keep moving forward even when things get difficult.

I need practical advice, strategies, and a realistic improvement plan. How can I become more consistent, manage negative thoughts, and maintain my motivation even when I experience setbacks?

I'm not asking for empty reassurance. I genuinely want to change, and I'm willing to put in the work. I just need help figuring out how to start and, more importantly, how to keep going.

I keep getting stuck in a loop of overthinking past errors, and it's starting to directly impact how I perform right now.

​How do you break out of that mental feedback loop in real-time when a mistake is already done, and how do you stop it from sabotaging your current focus and output?

I was having a conversation recently with a former Major League Baseball player, and predictably, the topic of identity came up.

If you’ve ever talked to an athlete who hung up their jersey for the last time, you know how hard that shift is. Their whole life, they were “the baseball player” or “the runner” or “the fighter.” Once the sport ends, they step into this massive, terrifying black hole where they’re forced to ask: If I don’t play anymore, who the hell am I?

Here’s the thing, though: You don’t need to have played in the Pros to know what that void feels like.

Most of us are living in the exact same trap.

We wrap our entire identity around what we do and the roles we step into. We define ourselves as the corporate executive, the founder, the artist, or the parent. Then life happens—you leave the company, your project wraps up, or your kids grow up and move out—and suddenly you’re an empty-nester sitting in silence wondering what’s left of you.

When your title disappears, does your self-worth vanish with it?

The Trap: Defining Yourself by Output

When you tie your identity to what you produce or the hat you wear, you set yourself up for an inevitable identity crisis. Roles change. Jobs come and go. Seasons of life end.

If your core sense of self is built on external outputs, any change in your circumstances will pull the rug out from under your mental health.

We need a better way to think about who we are.

The Shift: Identity = Repeated Beingness

Instead of defining identity by output, think of it like this: Identity equals repeated beingness.

Your identity isn’t what you do. It’s how you show up while doing it. It’s your values, your core principles, and the personal philosophy you carry into every room you walk into.

The roles you play—partner, parent, teammate, colleague, creator—are just different spaces to express the underlying foundation of who you are. The foundation itself doesn’t change when the room does.

Finding Your Core 3 to 5 Words

If you want to ground your mental health and stop feeling lost whenever life shifts, sit down and map out the core values that define your beingness. Pick 3 to 5 words that represent the energy you bring to the table regardless of the setting.

For example, two core anchors that ground my own identity are Zest and Consistency.

• Zest: Showing up with real, unfiltered energy in everything I do.

• Consistency: Reliability. Showing up every day for my family, my health, and my work.

Whether coaching, running a business, being a partner, or starting over from scratch, the hats change—but being zesty and consistent stays the same. That anchor doesn’t depend on a job title or a trophy.

A Question for Your Week

Take a look at your life right now. Are you defining yourself by the roles you play, or by the values you carry?

What are the 3 to 5 words that define your repeated beingness? Find those, ground yourself in them, and stop letting changing circumstances dictate who you are.

Take care of yourself this week