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I recently bought a record player.

It’s in my office, and I listen to records while I work. Unlike Spotify, which serves an uninterrupted stream of music, the record player scratches and the music stops every few songs.

Every time this happens, I walk away from my computer to flip the record. When I return to my desk, I realize I’m working on something unrelated to the project I started a few minutes prior, and switch my attention back to the original project

After repeating this pattern countless times, it’s become clear that the “inconvenience” of the analog experience is actually helping me overcome distraction and refocus my attention on what is most important.

The record player interrupts my flow, but it’s a flow of distraction. Without something to physically pull me away from my computer, I get lost in the frictionless distraction of the digital world.

Don’t fight a futile battle

When we step into the digital world, we’re immediately exposed to trillion-dollar companies and millions of people who have very different objectives than our own.

They are fighting to pull our attention to their content, their advertising, and ultimately use us to improve their bottom line.

There is no amount of discipline or willpower that can compete with the directed forces of millions of people and billions of dollars.

Trying to fight against the digital world with willpower or discipline is like showing up with a knife to a gunfight. Our brains can’t comprehend how powerful these forces are, so we’re wasting energy fighting against them.

An environment that’s one keystroke away from switching tasks and one click away from an army of people who want us to focus on their priorities instead of our own is not convenient; it’s counterproductive.

Instead of trying to overcome digital distractions, we should embrace analog experiences.

Friction creates focus

We can spend our energy trying to create friction in digital environments (screen time limits, grayscale filters, turning off wifi, etc.), but analog experiences already have the friction required for focus built in.

Journals and pens don’t buzz when a news article is published. Typewriters are for writing prose, not emails. Going on a phone-free walk forces us to think for ourselves instead of consuming ideas from others.

When we don’t have an endless supply of apps to check or content to consume, we’re forced to be present and direct our attention to the task at hand. We learn to sit with the discomfort of boredom and redirect our attention back to our work instead of seeking comfort by redirecting our attention to something else.

The more friction required to switch tasks or redirect our attention, the easier it is to stay focused and think deeply.

Going analog is the easiest way to create the friction needed to produce our best work and remove distractions.

If it’s important, make it analog.

Prompts

1. What is the most important work you do? How can you make it analog?

2. What digital distractions are you fighting against? How can you remove them instead?

3. Where can you introduce friction in your life to create more focus?

Deep Dive

• Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

  • An explanation of why we can’t focus and a guide to think deeply again.

• Freewrite

  • A modern-day typewriter for distraction-free analog writing.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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The biggest mistake we can make is pursuing the goals.

If we choose the wrong pursuits, success will move us farther away from the person we want to become, and failure will waste our time.

If we choose the right pursuits, even failure will move us closer to the person we want to become.

It’s easy to get caught up in exciting goals, but accomplishing something on its own is often hollow and disappointing. It brings us a fleeting moment of joy and pride, but once the achievement wears off, we’re left with the sinking feeling of what to do next.

Goals are useful for directing our actions, but they are not worthwhile on their own. The point of goals is not to accomplish an arbitrary objective. The point of goals is to move us closer to living our ideal lifestyle and becoming a better person.

Beginning with the end in mind

A life well lived is not a random collection of trophies, titles, and accomplishments. Nor is it a checklist of daily habits or routines.

A life well lived is doing what we want, when we want, with whom we want, for as long as we can, while becoming a bit better each day along the way.

When planning for the upcoming year, we should start with the life we’d like to live instead of starting with goals we’d like to accomplish or habits we want to maintain.

We might want a promotion at work, only to realize that after we “accomplish” our goal, we’re working more hours, with more stress, and spending less time with our family. If we begin with our ideal lifestyle instead, we could have negotiated a raise with the same title, so we can progress our career forward without sacrificing the quality of our day-to-day lives.

Focusing on goals and habits before defining our ideal lifestyle is like getting in the car and driving for hours before we decide where we want to go.

A framework to become better

Goals and habits are still powerful tools to become better in the upcoming year, but they shouldn’t be our starting point.

Instead, we should start with our vision for a random Tuesday.

This allows us to define and understand what our ideal lifestyle looks like. The more detailed we are about what we’re doing, who we’re spending time with, and how we feel, the more likely we are to make this vision a reality.

Visualizing our ideal lifestyle forces us to start with our desired result and use goals and habits as tools to build the life we want, instead of chasing goals and implementing habits that create a lifestyle we never considered.

To create our ideal lifestyle, we should define the following in each area of our lives:

1. Desired Outcome - a detailed vision of our ideal lifestyle in a specific area of life

2. Measurable Goals - quantifiable milestones that are met if we’re living our ideal lifestyle

3. Daily Habits - actions that contribute to achieving our measurable goals

For example, if our desired outcome is to feel effortlessly strong and energetic, then our goals would be squatting 2x our bodyweight and sleeping for an average of 8 hours each night. Our habits to achieve these goals would be weightlifting 3x per week and getting into bed before 10pm every night.

This framework makes everyday life our north star, not accomplishments or external titles. It transforms goals from hollow check boxes to meaningful milestones so we can measure meaningful progress and stay motivated.

If we’re not careful, we can optimize our entire life around high-performance habits and exciting goals, only to realize we sacrificed all our time and energy to trap ourselves in a life we don’t want to live.

Creating the perfect routine and accomplishing exciting goals only matter if they create a life we’re excited to live every day.

Prompts

1. Consider a random Tuesday a few years into the future. If everything goes right, what does your ideal Tuesday look like? What time do you wake up? What do you do during the day? Who do you get to spend time with? The more detail you provide, the better.

2. What measurable goals need to be true in each area of your life to live out your ideal lifestyle?

3. What habits do you need to integrate into your daily routine to make meaningful progress on these measurable goals?

Deep Dive

• Start with Why by Simon Sinek

  • A compelling case for focusing on why we’re doing things instead of what we’re doing.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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91% of New Year’s Resolutions fail.

The reason is not a lack of motivation or time. We all have an innate desire to become better, and even when we’re at our busiest, we make time for what’s most important.

The number one reason we fail is that we set unrealistic and vague goals.

We become excited and idealistic when we’re building a vision for the upcoming year, but when it’s time to take the first steps, we don’t know where to start. Within a few weeks, we’re left feeling frustrated and hopeless and abandon our goals altogether.

The perils of “should”

We gravitate toward unrealistic and generic goals because we’re lazy.

Instead of taking time to consider what we want to pursue, we’re caught in the easy trap of chasing what we feel like we “should” accomplish. Our list of resolutions becomes indistinguishable from the next person: “lose weight”, “more time with family”, “travel”, and “eat healthy”.

We struggle to follow through because they’re not personally meaningful. They sound good, but we don’t know where to start, and we don’t care if we achieve them or not.

Goals like this are about as exciting as bland corporate mission statements and quarterly objectives. They are good goals in an abstract and generic way, but they mean nothing to us, so we’re not willing to invest the energy required to see them through.

This pattern is particularly insidious when we repeat it over and over again each year, effectively teaching ourselves that we can’t accomplish anything, making it harder and harder to achieve something worthwhile each year.

To break the cycle, we need to look back and review the past year before looking forward and creating goals for the upcoming year.

The annual review

Review comes from a Latin word that means “to see again”.

When we take the time to “see” the previous year again, we learn things about ourselves. Reflecting on how we spent our time gives us the perspective we need to identify our patterns, values, and identity.

With a better understanding of ourselves, we can create better goals. Instead of blindly choosing goals based on what it feels like we “should” be pursuing, we can align our goals for the upcoming year with who we are and what’s important to us.

We’re much more likely to accomplish goals that are personally meaningful than goals that sound good at a cocktail party.

Trying to become better is an innate human pursuit, but if we don’t review and reflect on the past year, then we’ll be choosing generic goals and setting ourselves up for failure.

To become better in 2026, we must start with an honest and structured review of 2025 to create goals that inspire us to take action.

Only after we understand ourselves can we make meaningful progress on the pursuits in our lives that actually matter.

Prompts

1. What did I enjoy most last year? How can I do more of it this year?

2. What did I hate most last year? How can I remove that from the upcoming year?

3. When I was at my best last year, I was usually…

4. When I was at my worst, it was usually because…

5. What did I continually gravitate towards without external pressure?

6. What did I continually avoid that I believed was important? Were there consequences for avoiding it?

7. What did I do last year that aligned with my values?

8. What did I do last year that was out of alignment with my values?

Deep Dive

• Conducting an Annual Review - Tim Ferriss

• Annual Planning Guide - Sahil Bloom

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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When I was 13, I used to play ping pong against my Dad every night.

After dinner, we would head out to the garage and buckle down for a 3-game series that would inevitably extend into at least 5 or 7 games as we kept playing.

For years, I would always lose. I felt like I was the better player, but could never come out on top. As a sore loser, I channeled all my frustration into trying new strategies to win. I tried different serves, crazy spin shots, and hitting it as hard as I could into the corners, but I still couldn’t beat him.

Finally, I stopped trying to win and lightly hit the ball back into the middle of the table every shot as a form of protest. After a few volleys, my Dad hit it into the net, and I won the point. I did it again, and he hit it off the back of the table.

After a few points, I was ahead and eventually won the game. I did the same thing the next game and won that one too.

Minimizing mistakes > maximizing winning

I accidentally stumbled across a strategy that would allow me to dominate my Dad in ping pong for years to come: just don’t lose.

Instead of trying to hit crazy shots and make my Dad miss, all I had to do was get the ball over to the other side of the table and let him make a mistake. I didn’t have to “win” a single point to win the game; I just couldn’t lose.

There are no style points or bonuses for hitting a “better” shot. The only thing that matters is not losing. The fancier I got, the more likely I was to lose the point.

This would never work if I were playing competitively, but it gets the job done against 90% of the ping pong playing population and most other games in life.

A winning record with worthwhile pursuits

The worthwhile pursuits in our lives don’t require high-level excellence. The harder we try, the more likely we are to make mistakes or burn out.

Staying fit, eating healthy, nurturing relationships, and progressing our careers are not games that we need to win. They are games we just can’t lose. All we need to do is show up every day and do the equivalent of hitting the ball over the net.

It doesn’t have to be pretty, it doesn’t need to be impressive, and it’s probably not all that exciting on a day-to-day basis, but if we consistently dink the ball back over the net for every day, we will have a winning record in all of the most important areas of our lives.

Prompts

1. In each of the worthwhile pursuits in your life, what does simply hitting the ball back over the net look like each day?

2. Where is trying to win backfiring for you?

3. In what ways have ordinary, but consistent actions created extraordinary results in your life?

Deep Dive

• Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

  • Advice from a Stanford behavior scientist on building lasting habits with small changes.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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Fighting for control is a losing battle.

No matter how hard we try or how many variables we remove, we cannot control what happens to us.

We can (and should) plan how we want to navigate our lives, but as soon as we take our perfectly crafted plan into the real world, the unpredictability of everyday life will thwart any chance of executing it as we expected.

How we deal with this lack of control determines how we feel about our lives and what we can accomplish.

Thriving in the ocean

When we realize we don’t have control, it’s easy to give up entirely. If life is going to knock us down no matter how hard we try, what’s the point of trying at all?

Apathy and nihilism are logical but dangerous responses to the lack of control we have in the world, but perfectionism is equally as damaging. Obsessing over things we can’t control leads to chronic stress and disappointment.

Navigating the world is a lot like navigating the ocean. It’s unpredictable and dangerous, but there are patterns and best practices that make a huge difference. They don’t let us control the water, but they let us swim without drowning.

Trying to control the ocean leads to over-exhaustion and drowning. Giving up means we’ll float out to sea.

To thrive in the ocean, we need to accept and respect what happens to us while maintaining control of how we respond.

We have to surf

No one embodies this combination of personal responsibility and acceptance better than surfers.

Surfers do not try to overpower the ocean or sit around letting the current take them.

They meticulously observe their surroundings and diligently paddle themselves into the right place at the right time so they can ride the waves the ocean gives them.

Surfing is not exerting control over the ocean or passively waiting for waves to come. It’s a deliberate and focused effort to find the best position to take advantage of something that’s completely out of our control.

This is how we should navigate our lives. We have to surf. We can’t control what happens to us, but we can’t give up.

Instead, we need to put ourselves in the best position to take advantage of the opportunities that come our way.

Some days, the waves will be small. Others, they’ll be huge. Some days, we’ll be the only ones out there catching all the waves for ourselves. Others, it will be so crowded we can’t even catch one. Some days, we’ll get pounded into the sand over and over again. Others, we’ll effortlessly glide across the waves.

We’ll never be able to control what happens to us, but we can control the position we put ourselves in.

Life is random and uncontrollable, but the more effort we spend on putting ourselves in the right position, the more opportunities we’ll have to do something great.

Prompts

1. Are you more likely to give up or try to control everything? What are the consequences of this?

2. What’s something outside of your control that’s been frustrating you? How can you focus on putting yourself in a better position instead of trying to take control?

3. What does surfing through life mean to you?

Deep Dive

• Antifragile by Nassim Taleb

  • An investigation of things that thrive in chaos and uncertainty.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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Many cliches are true. That’s why we keep saying them over and over again.

Missing the forest for the trees, working in the business instead of on the business, or getting stuck in the weeds are all timeless cliches that capture a serious problem: daily minutiae getting in the way of important long-term pursuits.

We can become so focused on our day-to-day responsibilities that we completely forget the reason we’re doing them in the first place. These daily actions start as a concrete way to make progress in an important area of our lives, but over time, the inputs diverge from the outputs.

In many cases, actions that once created meaningful progress are now preventing us from moving forward. Common examples include

• Being so busy working, we don’t have time to focus on our careers

• Spending countless hours with our spouse, but never truly communicating

• Doing the same workout every day, without considering what our long-term health goals are

There are countless different ways we can miss the forest for the trees and get so focused on the specifics that we completely lose sight of the bigger picture.

To avoid this trap, we need to create space to reflect and plan. We need to zoom out and recalibrate.

Zooming out

If we don’t create time and space to zoom out, it’s only a matter of time before we get lost in the weeds. We become so focused on our actions that they begin to obscure our true objectives.

To make sure our actions are serving our long-term objectives, we need to zoom out beyond our day-to-day habits and responsibilities and consider two things. First, we need to define (or redefine) what our goals are in each area of our lives. Second, we need to decide if the actions we’re taking today are supporting this vision or holding us back.

This ensures what we’re doing today is aligned with where we want to go and who we want to be tomorrow, but when we stop to reflect, it feels counterproductive.

It’s uncomfortable when we’re not actively working on anything, but we need to periodically stop to recalibrate our vision for the future and make sure our actions are aligned with our objectives.

We need to create regular space in our lives to ignore our to-do lists and think about the future instead.

Creating space

Saying that we need to reflect and consider a longer time horizon is one thing, but actually doing it regularly is much more challenging.

When life is busy, and we have a million things to get done, ignoring everything urgent to sit down and ponder the future doesn’t feel very helpful. It ends up being the first thing we skip to make time for everything else.

But to ensure everything we’re doing is actually worthwhile, we need to create space to zoom out and protect that time fiercely. It doesn’t matter how much we get done unless the work that we’re doing is actually moving us closer to the person we want to become.

Being busy feels productive, but if we don’t align our activities with our objectives, then we’ll never make any meaningful progress on the things that matter most.

Prompts

1. What everyday activities have started to hurt your long-term objectives instead of helping?

2. How can you create space in your week to reflect on a longer time horizon?

3. What is the cost of being busy?

Deep Dive

• Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

  • Holiday argues that the common trait amongst all great thinkers, artists, athletes, and visionaries is stillness.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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Did you make meaningful progress on a worthwhile pursuit today?

This question cuts through the noise and forces us to be honest about how we spend our time each day.

If we’re not intentional with our time, we default to moving through the day on autopilot, filling idle time with mindless scrolling or consumption. Letting days slip through our fingers leaves us feeling guilty and frustrated for wasting the limited time we have.

We should ask ourselves this question each day to keep us honest, force us to reflect on how we spend our time, and decide if our routines and habits are progressing us forward or holding us back.

Asking this question also forces us to define what a worthwhile pursuit is and what it means to make meaningful progress.

Defining worthwhile and meaningful

What makes a pursuit worthwhile isn’t how we feel about it or what area of life it’s focused on. A worthwhile pursuit is something that helps us become a better person.

Worthwhile pursuits can never be accomplished, and we would still invest our time in them if no one else were watching. Becoming a better parent is a worthwhile pursuit, but getting a promotion at work is not.

Defining these pursuits is important, but we also need to make sure we’re progressing ourselves forward within the context of each pursuit.

If all we do is clock in and clock out, it will eventually lead to some improvement, but the progress will be trivial. We can make progress just by showing up, but it won’t be meaningful.

Meaningful progress is taking intentional action to achieve specific and non-trivial advancements in our abilities.

Showing up at the gym each day is a step in the right direction, but to make meaningful progress, we need to intentionally execute a training plan that delivers the specific results we’re looking for.

With a better understanding of where and how we should be spending our time, we can audit each day to spend more time on intentional efforts to become better instead of letting each day slip by in a deluge of mindless consumption.

Accumulating purposeful habits

When we first start incorporating these intentional efforts into our day, it will be difficult to pull ourselves out of the rut of our normal routines.

But if we continue to ask ourselves if we’ve made meaningful progress every day, this prompt will catalyze us to take actions that create meaningful progress a part of our daily routine.

If we stay consistent, our default behavior will turn from mindless consumption to intentional improvement. Over time, we can accumulate new routines and habits in all the different areas of our lives until our autopilot behavior makes us a better person.

The more we can track these efforts and reward ourselves for progress, the more it will stick. Our days will stop feeling wasted and start feeling inspiring.

Instead of lying in bed at night, wondering how we wasted another day, we can sleep soundly knowing that we’re becoming better.

Prompts

1. Create a list of 5 things that count as “making meaningful progress on a worthwhile pursuit”. How can you make time to do at least one of them every day?

2. What are your status quo habits that help you make meaningful progress on worthwhile pursuits?

3. What is one new intentional daily action that you’re working on incorporating into your daily routine to make meaningful progress on a worthwhile pursuit?

Deep Dive

• Atomic Habits by James Clear

  • The best-selling book on habits and behavior change.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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We can’t change what we won’t accept.

The most damaging character flaws are the ones we’re most likely to ignore, but we can’t change them until we accept reality.

Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity, frequently discusses the phenomenon of frantic knowledge workers desperately trying to optimize elaborate task management systems or blame external forces instead of facing the reality that they have too much on their plate.

To overcome endless busyness, Newport encourages what he calls “facing the productivity dragon”. He suggests taking a step back from the day-to-day grind to take stock of everything that’s on our plates and make a complete list of our responsibilities and how long everything will take.

There’s usually not enough time in the day to do everything we’ve agreed to. Facing the productivity dragon means pausing to understand and accept the reality that we can’t continue with the same approach. We must make a change.

This stark reality is scary, disappointing, and discouraging, but identifying it and creating a realistic plan to deal with it is necessary to do our best work.

Newport speaks of this idea in the context of professional productivity, but we all have dragons we need to face in different areas of our lives.

Accepting reality

We all have something we need to fix in our lives, and we know how to do it, but we don’t.

In today’s world, a lack of information or understanding is no longer an excuse.

In moments, we can find all of the information we need to improve any area of our lives. We can even find or create personalized step-by-step guides and tutorials, or connect with a real person who has done what we want to do with a few clicks.

The reason we don’t address these things is that trying to fix them requires that we accept the fact that our approach isn’t working. To make a change, we need to face our dragon, accept that what we’re doing today isn’t working, and admit that it’s our fault.

Only after we face reality and accept ownership can we begin to implement all of the information and guidance we have available to fix it.

Becoming better

In most cases, the hardest part of facing our dragons is not adding or removing the one behavior required to fix the problem. The hardest part is adapting all of the other areas of our lives to make sure that change sticks.

Improving our diet isn’t as simple as eating different foods. It requires that we reevaluate our exercise routine, social calendar, daily schedule, and emotional relationship with food. What seems like a simple habit change on the surface is actually a deep and complicated web of transformation.

We’re not just changing our lifestyle, we’re changing our identity.

The reason we don’t fix these problems even though we’ve known about them and dealt with the consequences for years is that it’s easier to maintain our identity and live with the consequences of a damaging habit or character flaw than it is to change our identity and become a better person.

To make meaningful progress towards becoming a better person, we have to accept that we’re not the best person we could be today. That’s a difficult thing to admit.

Facing our dragons is intimidating. It’s an incredible amount of work for an uncertain outcome, but it’s the only option to become better.

We can continue to ignore the glaring holes in ourselves and accept the consequences, or face our dragons, accept reality, and do the work to become better.

We all have something we need to fix. We don’t need a better plan, better timing, or more information; we need the courage to face it and accept the person we become.

Prompts

1. What does facing your dragon look like? What is the reality you need to accept?

2. What’s the one thing you need to fix?

3. How will your life improve if you fix it? What happens if you continue to do nothing?

Deep Dive

• Facing the Productivity Dragon - The Deep Questions Podcast

  • A guide to “facing the productivity dragon” and fixing what’s broken in our lives.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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Endurance athletes obsess over their pace.

Minutes per mile, miles per hour, pedal strokes per minute, and many others are critical metrics for judging effort and performance.

When an athlete has a complete understanding of their capabilities, they know how long they can sustain different paces. This knowledge gives them the ability to run their own race and pace themselves to get the best performance given their current level of fitness.

Pacing is powerful information in the world of endurance sports, but we don’t always have the same knowledge and understanding of how to pace other areas of our lives.

Without a clear understanding of what we’re capable of, it’s harder to run our own race, and we fall back on comparing ourselves to others, giving up before we reach our potential, or burning out too soon.

To properly allocate our talent and effort, we need a deep understanding of what pace we’re capable of in each area of our lives.

Too fast or too slow

Our default tendency when searching for the right pace is to look at what others are doing.

Invariably, the pace others are performing at will be different than what’s optimal in our own lives. More than likely, the people we choose to emulate are blindly following someone else who also hasn’t thought critically about their pace for their pursuits.

Copying someone else’s pace in life is as likely to succeed as showing up to a marathon and choosing someone at random to follow for the whole race. They may have a similar level of fitness to us, but in all likelihood, we will end up running much faster or slower than we should.

Just as detrimental is pushing ourselves too hard too soon. Whether rooted in excitement or insecurity, if we come out too hot, it’s only a matter of time before we burn ourselves out.

There are no trophies for completing the first half of something faster than everyone else if it burns us out and prevents us from finishing the initial objective.

The most insidious pace is not moving fast enough or not moving at all. Often rooted in fear or uncertainty, if we never push hard enough, we’ll never see what we’re truly capable of.

Not pushing hard enough or never trying something at all is such a common regret at the end of our lives that it’s become a cliché.

If we can’t push too hard and we can’t take things too slow, then the best thing we can do for ourselves is find a pace somewhere in the middle. The ideal pace is one that we can maintain for a long period of time, but also pushes us to create results we’re proud of.

Sustainably aggressive

Two people with the same talent and effort will produce different results if they work at different paces.

Developing talent and learning to work hard are prerequisites for creating incredible results, but the pace at which we pursue these results is what really matters.

In the worthwhile pursuits we choose for ourselves, we should aim for a pace that is aggressive but sustainable. It should be something we feel confident we could continue indefinitely, but if we pushed a little harder, we would begin to burn ourselves out.

As we become more comfortable with this pace and get closer to our objectives, we can begin to push harder and slowly improve our optimal pace of performance.

The worst things we can do are push too hard too soon or never push ourselves at all, but if we can continuously maintain a pace that’s sustainably aggressive, we will be able to achieve incredible things for decades to come.

Prompts

1. In what areas of your life are you moving too fast? In what areas are you moving too slow?

2. What is a sustainably aggressive pace for you in your most important pursuit?

3. Which areas of your life are worth a sustainably aggressive pace? Are there any areas in which you’re allocating too much energy?

Deep Dive

• Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

  • A guide to finding a sustainable pace to create incredible results.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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Hard work is required to create a fulfilling life, but if we never stop to enjoy it, there’s no point in working so hard. Similarly, if all we ever do is relax, we won’t have anything worth enjoying.

We know we need a foundation of balance between hard work and leisure, but choosing the right path at the right time and feeling confident in our choice is much easier said than done.

When we choose to push ourselves to create the life we want, it feels like everyone else is sitting around enjoying themselves, and we’re missing out.

When we choose to enjoy ourselves and relax, it feels like everyone else is outworking us and getting ahead.

There is no one-size-fits-all balance of hard work and leisure, but we can become smarter about when we choose to push forward and pull back by identifying which season of life we’re in.

Seasons of life

If we’re young and single, we’re in a very different season of life than if we’re middle-aged with kids, but seasons of life occur on multiple timescales. There are macro-seasons of life that occur at the scale of years or decades, and there are micro-seasons of life that affect us on shorter time scales like injuries, breakups, moving, or the weather.

In the face of all this complexity, it’s tempting to choose a simple time-based heuristic for balancing hard work and leisure like “lock in Mon-Fri and enjoy the weekends” or “Dry January”, but these fail us in the long-term because they can’t adapt to the variance we experience from overlapping timescales.

Seasons layer on top of each other and push us in different directions at the same time. This makes it impossible to predict or plan when we should push hard to create the life we want and when we should step back to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Instead, we should assess what season of life we’re in every day and adapt our long-term plan based on how we’re feeling, the same way athletes adjust their training plans to how their body feels on a given day.

To make meaningful progress toward worthwhile pursuits, we need to adjust our plan to our season of life, and we need to define what “enough” means for us.

Defining enough

Defining what “enough” means to us is one of the core challenges in deciding when to push forward and when to pull back. We can define “enough” as simply as meeting our basic needs or as grandly as creating a lasting legacy.

No definition is right or wrong, but if we don’t understand our version of “enough”, comparison clouds our judgment. If we’re unclear about what’s important to us, when we see others working harder than or relaxing more than us, we always feel like we’re making the wrong choice.

Understanding when to work hard and make sacrifices and when to relax and enjoy ourselves makes life more fulfilling. It allows us to work hard without burning out and enjoy our downtime guilt-free.

Prompts

1. What is “enough” for you? Do you need to raise your bar? Or lower it?

2. What season of life are you in right now? Does it make sense for you to push harder or pull back?

3. When you’re firing on all cylinders, what does a day look like where you’re pushing yourself forward? When you’re not at your best or you’ve earned time to relax, what does a day to recharge and enjoy the fruits of your labor look like?

Deep Dive

• The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom

  • A simple guide to defining and measuring what’s important in your life.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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Effort only matters if it’s applied to the right things.

If we’re not focused with our action, it’s easy to waste our time and energy on things that feel impactful but don’t move us forward in a meaningful way.

Optimizing wastes our time in a uniquely insidious way; it makes us feel good and earns us praise, but it doesn’t make us any better. Building an elaborate task management system is fun and challenging, but it doesn’t help us complete the tasks on our list. The basics are boring but impactful, and optimizing is fun but inconsequential.

Building an elaborate training plan and buying new sneakers are way more fun than waking up early to run in the rain, but they still make us feel like we’re making meaningful progress as a runner. Rather than focusing our efforts on the difficult and boring work of building foundational skills, we’re often caught in a cycle of chasing fun but ultimately useless optimizations.

Optimizing before we master the basics is like polishing a car without an engine. It might look great sitting in the driveway, but it can’t accomplish the only thing that matters.

We want results but we chase dopamine

Professionals shouldn’t build elaborate workflows or AI agents to automate their work before they master the work themselves.

Golfers shouldn’t waste time and money on expensive club fittings and new technology before they learn to strike the ball correctly.

Authors shouldn’t obsess over marketing, formatting, and cover art before they sit down and write a book.

Avoiding seed oils isn’t going to change anything if we’re eating cookies and candy all day.

How we exercise doesn’t matter until we do it consistently.

If we step back to think about becoming better in the context of worthwhile pursuits like our careers, families, exercise, or hobbies, it’s obvious consistent effort directed at mastering the basics is the only way to achieve the results we want.

But in the busyness of everyday life, the bigger picture fades away and the temptation of spending our time on something that provides a quick hit of dopamine outweighs the often boring and grueling work required to make meaningful progress. We end up getting stuck in the same spot because we’re spending all of our time trying to run before we’ve learned to crawl or walk.

Optimizing a broken system gives us the feeling of making progress without the results.

Earn the right to optimize

Rather than viewing optimization as just another piece of any worthwhile pursuit alongside the foundational actions that progress us forward, we should treat optimization as a reward for ourselves once we’ve mastered the basics.

Before we go down the rabbit hole of endless optimization, we need an unshakeable foundation of skills and expertise.

It doesn’t matter how elaborate or elegant our optimizations are if we’re not capable of the basics that move the needle.

Once we’re consistently making meaningful progress towards a worthwhile pursuit, then we can begin to optimize our process, strategy, and systems to make more meaningful progress.

If we treat optimization as a reward for mastery, then we can ensure our efforts aren’t wasted.

Prompts

1. What optimizations are you focused on that are wasting your time?

2. What are the foundational actions you need to take every day to move the needle forward on what matters most?

3. What fun optimizations can you use as a reward for hitting your next big milestone?

Deep Dive

• Chop Wood Carry Water by Joshua Medcalf

  • A story about falling in love with the process.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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The internet, social media, and AI have made it too easy to create and share content.

We’re overwhelmed with pictures, videos, blog posts, podcasts, and content delivered to us in increasingly hyper-processed formats. It’s easier than ever to make content, and the incentives for getting others to consume it are increasing at a blistering pace.

With so much content served to us, our mindsets have shifted from “what should I do with my time” to “how can I make sure I don’t miss anything”.

Time we used to spend bored or creating is now spent mindlessly consuming. Our brains are drowning.

We don’t need to fill every white space on our calendars. If we have nothing to do, we should do nothing. If we can resist the urge to fill empty space and learn to embrace silence instead, we can unlock our brains to create instead of consume.

Despite what it might feel like, every minute of our day doesn’t need a job. We shouldn’t feel guilty for sitting on the couch and doing nothing. We’re not “missing out” or “wasting time” if we’re not listening to a podcast while we’re doing the dishes or watching a TikTok while we’re waiting for the oven to preheat.

We struggle to think for ourselves because we don’t give ourselves the space to think.

To live a meaningful, fulfilling, and worthwhile life, we need to do more than consume. We need to create. And to create, we need space, silence, and time.

Embrace silence

Incredible authors consume a tremendous amount of content, but they also have a superhuman ability to sit down and use everything they’ve consumed to create something new.

Incredible athletes watch more film, get more coaching, and learn more than we could ever imagine, but they leverage all of those inputs to accomplish things no one in the world has ever done before.

Executives sit in hours of meetings every single day doing nothing but consuming information, but the best executives filter this information to make extremely difficult decisions and create new strategies and initiatives that drive business growth and novel creation.

Consumption is an important part of performing at a high level and living a fulfilling life, but without intentional creation, consumption numbs our mind. It’s a socially acceptable way to shield ourselves from boredom and the discomfort of silence.

When we stop consuming and sit in silence, our thoughts turn inward to evaluate ourselves instead of judging everyone else.

It’s easier to turn on the TV, load up a podcast, or scroll social media than it is to sit with our own thoughts. But if we can’t sit with our own thoughts, we can’t create. And if we don’t create we’ll never be fulfilled.

To contribute, we need to create

Humans have a hard-wired desire to contribute.

We seek pleasure in consumption, but it’s short-lived. A fulfilling life is not one where we spend our free time mindlessly consuming what others have to say. A fulfilling life is rooted in contributing something to the world that only we could create.

We need to create something for ourselves, for our spouse, for our community, for the world, for the greater good, or for a higher power.

Contributing removes the constant itch that we should be doing more. It counteracts the small twinge of guilt we feel every time we choose to passively consume instead of actively create.

With an endless supply of the most captivating, it’s never been harder to resist the temptation to constantly consume, but the rewards for embracing silence and creating have never been higher.

To feel fulfilled, we need to contribute, and to contribute, we need to create. The next time we feel the urge to veg out and let someone else entertain us, we should try to go on a walk, sit with a journal, and give ourselves space to think instead.

In that space and silence, we’ll find what we need to create instead of consume.

Prompts

1. What do you consume the most?

2. Is what you are consuming contributing to what you create or just an escape from your own thoughts?

3. How can you create space for silence and reflection into each day?

Deep Dive

• Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

  • An investigation into why we struggle to focus and how to build the skill back.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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Just because we accomplish something worthwhile doesn’t mean we’re owed anything.

The best employee doesn’t always get the promotion. The best player isn’t always the captain. The best artists don’t always get discovered.

As much as we want to believe the world is a pure meritocracy, the reality is success alone is not enough. We can climb to the top of every mountain life puts in front of us and never be recognized for it.

If we want to be rewarded for our success, achievement alone is not enough.

A good story beats quiet talent

There is nothing noble about quietly being the most valuable employee at the company and not being properly compensated for it.

We’ll be surpassed by those who are less talented but more vocal if we don’t advocate for ourselves and advertise our accomplishments. In today’s world, our brand is just as important as our achievements. If we’re quietly achieving one groundbreaking thing after another, but we never share them with others, we’ll never be rewarded for all the hard work we’re doing.

When talent is equal, the louder voice, better story, or more inspiring brand will win.

We need to be able to articulate why we, out of the hundreds, thousands, or likely millions of other people who have accomplished something meaningful, are better than everyone else.

A compelling story without talent is enough to create new opportunities, but talent without a story won’t get us anywhere. If we have both then we’ll have no trouble creating meaningful progress towards worthwhile pursuits.

To continue moving forward we also have to develop the ability to confidently communicate our capabilities to others. Without external validation of our skills and accomplishments we’re wasting our talent and missing opportunities.

While external validation is required in most areas of life to meaningfully move ourselves forward, we can’t let it become our only objective.

Staying grounded

Chasing external validation will create opportunities, but if it’s all we’re focused on we’ll be left feeling empty. We need to root our efforts to become better in pursuits that are truly worthwhile and we need make meaningful progress in those pursuits to live a life that we’re personally proud of.

If we’re not able to make meaningful progress, then advertising our accomplishments will be nothing but lying and exaggerating. We can get away with talking the talk if we can’t walk the walk, but it won’t lead to the meaningful and fulfilling life that we’re all trying to create.

To progress ourselves forward and feel good about it, we need to make meaningful progress in worthwhile pursuits that are important to us and sell a compelling story about the skills that we worked so hard to develop.

Prompts

1. What is your most valuable skill that no one knows about?

2. Do you have more accomplishments that no one knows about or a stories that you can’t back up?

3. What is one worthwhile pursuit you’ve made meaningful progress on that you need to tell others about?

Deep Dive

• Show Your Work by Austin Kleon

  • A practical guide to self-promotion without ego.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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The phrase “that’s just my luck” should be eliminated from our vocabulary.

If we’re talking like that, then we’ve given up the agency we have to create a better life.

Bad things snowball and they feel like they’re out of our control, but the same is true of good things.

We can stub our toe and let our sour mood spiral into a fight with our spouse, emotional binge eating, and staying up too late only to continue making bad choices the next day as lack of sleep and nutrients throw our nervous system into a tailspin.

It might feel like it’s just a string of bad luck. It might feel unfair that bad things keep happening one after another. And it’s certainly easier to believe that these things are happening to us, instead of being caused by us.

For better or worse, whatever we do compounds.

Good or bad, our decisions create a snowball rolling down a hill gaining size and speed until it’s out of control.

Control the controllables

We have control over our choices but once the snowball is rolling downhill it becomes harder and harder to change its direction.

The more we start our days making the right choice (instead of the easy one), the more likely we are to create an upward spiral instead of a downward one.

When we choose to wake up early, we have time to get to the gym. After the gym, we feel great so we eat a healthy breakfast. Clean eating fuels an awesome day and the pride of our accomplishments gives us the confidence we need to start a new project we’ve been putting off for months that evening.

Choosing the right response manufactures better days which build a better life.

Our choices compound in one direction or the other. If we don’t stop to think, good days and bad days feel random or lucky, but we control how things start and which direction our snowball rolls down the hill each day.

Respond, don’t react

The key to creating more good days is learning to respond instead of react.

Whenever something happens to us there is a split second in our head between the stimulus and our reaction. The longer we can make the time in between these two things, the better off we’ll be.

Creating space between stimulus and reaction gives us time to respond instead of react. We can process what is happening, how it makes us feel, and how different responses will impact our future.

In the space we create, we can respond intentionally instead of reacting instinctually.

The power to respond to every stimulus intentionally is the power to create a meaningful and fulfilling life despite everything that’s outside of our control.

Prompts

1. What’s a moment in the last week where you reacted instead of responded? What would a positive response have looked like?

2. How can you create a bigger space between stimulus and reaction?

3. What would it mean for you to take more ownership of the bad things that seem to happen to you?

Deep Dive

• Respond, Don’t React by Brad Stalberg

  • Short and sweet blog post with a strategy to respond instead of react.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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In the pursuit of becoming better, becoming the best seems like the obvious goal.

But in practice, becoming the best gets in the way of becoming better.

Extremes are lauded in public. The world’s best athletes, entrepreneurs, and artists are constantly praised in the spotlight.

Their accomplishments become desirable goals for ourselves, but we only see a narrow version of their day-to-day lives. We see the benefits their hard work, but we don’t see the sacrifices it took to get there or the daily struggles required to stay there.

Pushing ourselves to the extremes has consequences. If we’re not willing to accept those consequences we shouldn’t idolize the best in the world because we’d be miserable if we traded places with them.

A remarkable life is more achievable and more enjoyable than we think, but it requires nuance and balance instead of chasing the extremes.

The superpower of becoming better is maintaining the middle ground, not pushing to the extremes.

The middle ground

coined the term Supermedium to describe athletes with the perfect balance of muscle mass and endurance. They are strong enough to lift heavy things and protect themselves from injury, but light enough to cover long distances efficiently.

The concept of Supermedium applies in every area of our lives and provides a simple heuristic we can use to become better without burning out.

We need to make enough money to support our lifestyles, but not pursue it to such an extreme that it takes over our lives. We need to stay disciplined and make sacrifices to achieve our long-term goals, but not become so rigid that we lose the ability to enjoy life.

Pushing something to the extreme is counterproductive. Too much courage is rash. Too much money is unbecoming. Too much exercise means our bodies can’t recover.

Conversely, not enough courage is cowardice. Not enough money makes life challenging. Not enough exercise makes us sick.

Pursuing the middle ground is not trapping us in a life of mediocrity. Pursuing the middle ground provides a foundation of balance that allows us to enjoy every day and sustainably make meaningful progress on worthwhile pursuits.

Becoming Supermedium won’t get us on TV, make us millionaires, or allow us to break any world records, but it will make us healthier, happier, and create a lifestyle that accomplishes more than we ever thought possible without the consequences of chasing the extremes.

Become better, not the best

When we’re pursuing extremes we lose sight of what actually matters. Chasing the extremes of money, fame, or physical performance often become an obsession with winning.

However, a life well lived isn’t about winning. It’s about doing something meaningful and enjoying the time we spend doing it.

Rather than bragging about busyness and wearing the consequences of pursuing the extremes like badges of honor, we should idolize accomplishments earned without sacrifice.

We all want to become better, but we shouldn’t try to become the best.

Prompts

1. Where are you pursuing the extremes in life? What are the consequences?

2. What does Supermedium look like in the most important area of your life?

3. How can you shift your focus to becoming better instead of becoming the best?

Deep Dive

• It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

  • An alternative approach to running a business from the cofounders of Basecamp.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

Join 700+ ambitious and thoughtful journalers by subscribing below.

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Focus fuels the flames of both love and hate.

The more we focus on something and the more energy we give it, the more space it occupies in our lives.

We can choose to focus on things that we hate or we can choose to focus on the things that we love.

If we focus on things we hate, they will consume our time and energy, and we’ll become increasingly frustrated and unpleasant to be around. If we focus on the things that we love, we’ll become interesting and passionate people.

Ignore Bullshit

If something bothers us, we should ignore it. The more we focus on something we hate, the more it drags us down.

When something bothers us or we feel wronged, it’s human nature to fix it or complain about it. In most cases, we can’t fix it, so the only thing we can do is complain, which makes life worse for ourselves and everyone around us.

If something is bothering us and it’s within our control, we should by all means fix it, improve it, or change it. As long as it’s within our sphere of influence, it’s our responsibility to make a change instead of complaining.

When something is outside of our control and we can’t fix it or change it, our instinct is to complain about it and share with the world how unfair or annoying it is. While we may feel justified in sharing our woes with the world, all we’re doing is adding fuel to the fire of negativity.

As difficult as it is, the best thing we can do with the things we hate is ignore them entirely. Forget they exist, never talk about them, and remove them from our lives. If we starve them of our focus and energy, they will not bother us.

Embrace Passion

To become interesting, passionate, and happy people, we should invest as much time and energy as we can into what we love.

The more we love something, the more we should focus on it. Focusing on the things we love adds fuel to the fire of passion.

Passion is what makes us capable and interesting people. It makes us enjoyable to spend time with, inspires others, and adds to the world instead of detracting from it.

When faced with a decision on how to spend our time, what to discuss with friends or family, and where to invest our energy, we need to ruthlessly focus on what we love and ignore everything else.

Life is both too long and too short to waste our energy on bullshit. Move on. Ignore it. Avoid it. Forget it. What we don’t know about things that don’t matter won’t hurt us.

Instead, we should focus on the people and things we love and enjoy every day to push the world forward instead of holding it back.

Prompts

1. What do you waste energy on that bothers you tremendously?

2. What do you love that you don’t focus on enough?

3. Who in your life do you need to ignore, and who do you need to embrace?

Deep Dive

• Letting Go by David R. Hawkins

  • A guide to letting go of challenges and hardships from a world-renowned psychiatrist.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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Life is ambiguous and qualitative.

Many individual pursuits are easy to measure, and we often cling to these numbers and metrics to ground ourselves and see how we compare to others.

We’re desperate to know not just how we’re doing as an individual, but how our performance ranks against the average and our peers. Measuring our performance in individual pursuits is easy, but at the scale of our lives as a whole, measuring performance and comparing to others becomes nearly impossible.

Thankfully, we don’t need a universal measure of success because “success” looks different for everyone. Two people can live the same life and one will be miserable while the other is beyond grateful every single day.

Although we’re drawn to comparing ourselves to others, our energy is better spent measuring our unique version of success.

Collins Scale

The “Collins Scale”, made popular by author Jim Collins, is a simple system to measure what our version of success looks like.

Every day Collins gives his day a rating from -2 to 2. -2 is a terrible day, 1 is a bad day, 0 is an average day, 1 is a good day, and 2 is an incredible day. Along with his rating he includes a few notes about what he did that day.

The system is brilliant because it’s quick, simple, and self-contained. It’s not scoring how our day compares to someone else’s, it’s just a simple measure of how we feel our day went.

As we collect this data day after day, week after week, month after month, we quickly begin to understand what creates the days we enjoy and what creates the days we loathe. Using this system turns what was once subjective and abstract into something quantifiable and concrete.

We measure how each day goes and, more importantly, we can measure trends in our happiness and success.

An Evidence-Based Definition of Success

If we ask blindly ask ourselves what success looks like and what makes us happy, our answers are going to be a guess at best. We think we know what we want but it’s hard to predict how we’ll feel until it actually happens.

The Collins Scale allows us to define success based on evidence instead of vibes. As we rate each day, we have an objective measure of the things that make our days great.

This information is powerful.

We can use it to identify what we love and what we hate and make changes in our lives to do more of the former and less of the latter.

Without a system like this in place, we can carefully measure our performance and improvements in individual pursuits, but we don’t have a clear understanding of how those pursuits or anything else we do affect us overall.

Ultimately, “success” is having as many great days as we can. What makes a day great is different for everyone and often non-obvious.

Measuring each day on a 5 point scale may seem too simple to make a difference, but our gut is accurate and it’s always telling us something. Capturing and measuring these subtle signals that usually get lost in the noise of day to day life can quickly become our the measuring stick we use to get closer and closer to living our ideal life every day.

Prompts

1. What pursuits in your life do you carefully measure?

2. What do you think are the biggest contributors to the quality of your day?

3. If you gave each day a score for one month, do you think your life would improve?

Deep Dive

• Architecting a Deep Life - Deep Questions Podcast

  • Host Cal Newport discusses the “Collins Scale” and crafting a “Deep Life” with guest David Dewane.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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Rory McIlroy won The Masters last weekend and cemented himself as one of the best golfers of all time by completing the “career grand slam”.

He did so in the messiest, most chaotic, and nerve-wracking way possible. After having a four-shot lead, he choked and hit one of the worst golf shots of his career. Then he hit several of the best shots in his career to get back into contention. And then choked again, missing a short putt on the 18th hole to drop a shot and force a playoff.

In the playoff, he played a perfect hole of goal and won in sudden death.

It was an ugly and messy way to win one of the most historic golf tournaments in the last 50 years of the sport. It was far from a commanding victory, but he got it done.

Regardless of how he won the tournament, he will forever be immortalized as one of the greatest golfers of all time. The facts are undeniable.

His victory should be a reminder to all of us that accomplishing something worthwhile isn’t easy and it’s never pretty, but the results speak for themselves.

No one will remember the details of the roller coaster ride we must endure to accomplish something worthwhile, but no one will ever forget what we’ve accomplished once we do.

A win is a win.

It’s easy to get caught up in aesthetics and narratives and any number of performative distractions. What we look like and how we do things is irrelevant as long as we accomplish something worthwhile.

Winning solves everything.

It silences the haters. It proves to ourselves that we can do it. It serves as undeniable proof that we are capable of doing incredible things.

If it’s messy, who cares? We did it.

If it’s unorthodox, who cares? We did it.

If it was lucky, who cares? We did it.

No matter what our version of a worthwhile pursuit looks like, we need to remain focused on one thing: accomplishing it. No matter the circumstances, winning changes everything and makes it all worth it.

To become better we need to be better and to be better we need to do the damn thing. Whatever it takes, however it looks, accomplishing what we’ve set out to do is what’s important, nothing else.

Prompts

1. When has accomplishing something worthwhile made your life dramatically simpler?

2. What are things that feel messy, chaotic, or embarrassing that are actually moving you closer to accomplishing something worthwhile?

3. What worthwhile pursuit are you chasing right now that, when accomplished, will drastically simplify your life?

Deep Dive

• Relentless by Tim Grover

  • A coach of some of the greatest athletes of all time, Grover shares the traits that make the greatest at what they do unstoppable.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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We will all do things that are wrong, and we will all do things that we just think are wrong.

There is no avoiding either of them, so there should be no shame in them either.

The biggest mistake we can make is mixing these two things up.

The consequences are extremely high if we do something wrong and don’t realize it or don’t do anything wrong, but believe that we did.

One punishes ourselves, and the other punishes those around us.

As humans, it’s impossible to avoid mistakes and think clearly 100% of the time, but we have a duty to ourselves and others to carefully reflect on our behavior and improve our thinking and actions.

Making a mistake is human. Repeating the same mistake over and over again is careless and insensitive.

Believing we’ve made a mistake is human. Repeatedly believing we’ve made a mistake when we’ve done nothing wrong is bordering on mental illness.

Actions themselves are not important, but the way we react and iterate over time defines who we are as people. We will all make mistakes and believe things that aren’t true, but what differentiates us is how we reflect and react.

Each of our lives is an arc progressing over time. We cannot stop the arc from moving forward, but each small action we take influences the trajectory of that arc.

The best thing we can do for ourselves and those around us is attempt to do something every day that will improve the trajectory of our arcs.

Prompts

1. What is a mistake you’ve made that you’ve learned from?

2. What is something you felt guilty about but weren’t responsible for?

3. How do you reflect on your thinking and actions to control the arc of your life?

Deep Dive

• Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach

  • Mega-bestseller detailing practices to accept ourselves and improve our lives.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

Every Sunday, Prompted shares a new idea and a few journal prompts to encourage readers to reflect on that idea in the context of their own lives.

My goal is to create a community of people trying to become a bit better each day who can share their experiences with others on the same journey to help each other along the way.

This week’s edition of Prompted will be a bit different. The ideas and prompts will be quick to encourage you to comment below with your ideas after reflecting on today’s prompts. There are more than 700+ folks in this community, so I’m looking forward to hearing what you all think!

As always, thanks for reading!

Kevin

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We all like to say we care about certain things and that some things are more important than others, but ultimately, there are only two things that show how much we really care about something: time and money.

If we really care about something but don’t spend any time or money on it, then we either don’t care about it enough or need to make a significant change in our lives.

For better or worse, these are the currencies we have to invest in what we care about, so we need to be extremely careful with how we allocate both our time and our money.

Prompts

1. What is something you care about that doesn’t show up on your calendar? How can you make time for it?

2. What is something you spend money on but don’t care about? How can you eliminate or reduce it?

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin