Week 16 · Dec 3
The last one in this run, and the most personal: crying at a cartoon dog, and refusing to be ashamed of it. If you've read this far, week after week — thank you.
I Cry at a Cartoon Dog Bluey takes me apart on a regular basis, and my daughter mocks me without mercy. The tears aren't a malfunction. They're the wiring still working.
Week 15 · Nov 26
Just one piece this week — the one I most want in front of you. It's my best attempt at the thing I keep circling: the part that actually matters can't be systematized, credentialed, or automated. Not the processing — the seeing.
Can AI Ever Really Discover Anything? AI can search the map faster than any human alive. It can't tell you the map is drawn wrong. My best attempt at why that still takes a person.
Week 14 · Nov 19
A slightly sharper week. Three pieces about a demand I've decided to stop paying: translate your truth into the approved currency — a brain scan, a dollar — or it doesn't count. There's always a golden calf; right now it wears a lab coat. And the last one pulls the lens all the way back — to how small that whole frame turns out to be once you set it next to what actually runs the world.
The Golden Calf Needs a Lab Coat Nothing's allowed to just help anymore until a brain scan signs off on it. I don't think I'll keep paying that tax.
Before Neuroscience People found relief, insight, and peace long before we understood the mechanisms — usually without intervening at all.
The Boring Job The 1920s look like another planet, but the seeds opened the same way. On what never changed, and the two levels that are both true at once.
Week 13 · Nov 12
Two pieces on what's actually underneath the fear when you finally look: not a monster, not an edge to fall off. Nothing. And a nervous system that can, at last, stop bracing.
Intransitive Faith Faith without an object — not belief in anything, just a nervous system that has stopped bracing.
The Cold Clarity doesn't make you a guru on a mountain. It just means your fever broke, and you can sit in a room full of sniffling people without catching it.
Week 12 · Nov 5
This week keeps landing on the same gesture: the open hand. Releasing the outcome — of the work, the money, even a child's future — not by cutting anything, but by unclenching.
No Matter How Good It Might Be I don't want my daughter living for the future — not even a beautiful one. The moment presence has an aim, it stops being presence.
You Weren't Late, You Were Forming The lost years weren't a detour. You can't skip to the wisdom; it settles like sediment, and takes exactly as long as it takes.
The Cord You Keep Alive by Cutting You don't get free of an old voice by fighting it — the fight is what keeps it alive. Not cutting. Unclenching.
Week 11 · Oct 29
The tender one. Three pieces about letting good come toward you — which, if you were raised on the giving side of the ledger where it felt safe, is much harder than it sounds.
The Raspberry A woman who sleeps in a car insisted on buying me breakfast. Letting her pay may be the most important thing I've done in a long time.
Walking Each Other Home I keep thinking I'm the one who shows up for people. The ones I show up for keep quietly showing up for me.
The Reconciliation A former Nazi and a Holocaust survivor, and what each wrote in the other's memoir. Forgiveness isn't a pardon. It's putting down the gavel.
Week 10 · Oct 22
Four pieces on what the actual work in any room turns out to be — not the thing on the org chart, but taking the armor out of the room and treating people like people.
The Underlying Contribution How George Harrison handled being in a band with Bob Dylan, and what it taught me about the real job in every room I've been in.
Clever or Kind Cleverness comes from tension — the need to prove, protect, stay ahead. Kindness comes from something quieter: enoughness.
The Softening Stop bracing against someone, and your judgment of them softens on its own. No forgiveness worksheet required.
Go Get Some Sleep, Fellas Ted Lasso, a torn “Believe” sign, and one line that holds most of A Course in Miracles. Sincerity as the ultimate pattern interrupt.
Week 9 · Oct 15
This week is about a confusion I lived inside for decades: mistaking being useful for being of value. A binder of proof. A client who didn't fall apart without me. A rescue that wasn't help. They turn out to be very different things.
The Binder My father bound a hundred client letters into a book of his own worth. I asked a friend to build a fire so I could burn my copy.
You Are of Value Even When You're of No Use I left a client sure the whole thing would collapse without me. Three weeks of silence taught me the difference between useful and valuable.
Available, Not Enmeshed I took the wheel of someone's life when she was scared. It worked — and it was still the wrong move.
Week 8 · Oct 8
A gentler week. Three pieces on sufficiency — the quiet discovery that enough was never something you had to earn your way into. It's the state things settle back to, given half a chance.
Manifestation Theatre The shift from scarcity to sufficiency, felt in the small things: a twenty given away, a coffee driven out of the way for. Room, not performance.
Teeth “The one who made teeth will make use of them.” On trusting the parts of you that show up without any effort at all.
Let Your Heart Be Light The magic in that old song is one word: let. Your heart already knows how to be light.
Week 7 · Oct 1
All three of this week's pieces are about money, and none of them are really about money — they're about a fear handed down, accurately, from a time when it was true, that never got the message the danger had passed.
Seeds You can't actually eat money. The richest man handed a desert and no seeds starves; a village with seeds and a little rain eats.
Who's Gonna Pay For That? A man walks away from a totaled car without a scratch, and the first question he hears is about the cost of the motel.
It's Not Your Fear Either I made a list of every strange thing I'd absorbed about money, followed the thread back to a real war, and finally handed the fear back.
Week 6 · Sep 24
We're taught that fear and urgency are what get us moving. This week's three make the opposite case — including the one I felt at school pickup, watching good, loving parents run on it. If fear actually worked, we'd all be thriving by now.
If Fear Worked The Performance Improvement Plan, and the quiet belief underneath it: that fear sharpens people. It doesn't. It just narrows them.
One Shot That Eminem line people quote like scripture. Life isn't one hallway with a single door — it's a wide field, and some of the doors you skipped, you were right to.
What Happened to You? A mom asked me about seventh grade. My daughter just finished second. What was under the joke I made.
Week 5 · Sep 17
A theme I keep circling: how much of what we're sure has to be done, doesn't. This week, three people — me included — put something down. A list, a fix, a reason to move. Things got lighter, not worse.
The To-Do List A client handed me thirty things to fix in two days. We ripped the list up; he went home and started playing guitar.
I Promised Nothing A man in an ugly divorce wanted a strategy. I promised him nothing — which turned out to be exactly what let it resolve.
Because I Want To I've never trusted “start with why.” What if the why is just: because I want to?
Week 4 · Sep 10
The dream, the news, the feed. This week is about the things that rush in to fill a quiet moment — and the quiet moment that was, it turns out, completely fine on its own.
The Intruder I woke up barking like a German Shepherd at a threat that turned out to be a dream. We do the awake version of this constantly.
Staring at Chaos Why refreshing the news feels like responsibility — and why the whisper telling you to close the tab isn't apathy, it's wisdom.
The Reach I always know the feed is nothing. What reaches for the phone isn't craving. It's a flinch away from an empty moment.
Week 3 · Sep 3
Four this week, each poking at the same strange fact: the feeling almost never comes from where we're certain it's coming from. Same job, same weather, same bank balance — and somehow the mood lifts anyway.
Wrong Side of the Bed You woke up in a mood, blamed the world, and felt fine by afternoon — with nothing about the world having changed. That's the whole proof.
The Shoulder Pain A client's excruciating pain jumped from one shoulder to the other. Tendonitis doesn't do that.
The Auto-Pilot My car slams on the brakes for dangers that aren't there. So does the mind, all day long.
The Messenger A friend's vagus-nerve exercises, and the question that stumped him: why does the nervous system ever need calming? It turns out there was nothing to reset.
Week 2 · Aug 27
This week's three all circle the same suspicion: that the exhaustion so many capable people carry isn't a problem to be optimized. It's what happens when you keep perfecting the solution to something that was never actually broken.
The Pain Isn't Structural An orthopedist found that agonizing back pain often wasn't structural at all — it eased when patients stopped believing it was. Most exhaustion works the same way.
Making Better Anchors What it's like to be genuinely excellent at something you've quietly stopped believing in.
Figuring out Life A short one. Maybe there was never anything to figure out.
Week 1 · Aug 20
Four pieces went up this week, and they turned out to rhyme. Each one is a story about a moment I was sure I had to force — and didn't — and it worked out anyway, usually better than the plan I'd have white-knuckled into place. I used to file that under luck. It's happened too reliably, for too long, to be luck.
How It Actually Happens A conversation I keep having, almost word for word: how did you get the job, meet your spouse, land the thing? Almost never the way anyone planned.
Leap and the Net Will Appear The old line says you leap and something rushes in to catch you. I've come to think the truer version is quieter — the ground was under you the whole time.
The Bar in New York I almost walked out the second he called me “bro.” Letting him crash on my couch instead rerouted the next four years of my life.
Thank God I Didn't Get That We won a big government contract, then lost it — and I wept with relief. The closed door I mistook for a loss.