I’m going to be taking a step back, but at the same time I set out this year with a goal to post every week. I believe in the consistency of showing up on Substack, which is something people talk about a lot, but more importantly I think it’s important to have the discipline. So this is the first time I’ve ever written posts ahead of time. Normally my rhythm is to sit at this desk a night or two before, jam something out that’s top of mind, and send it the next day, which is exactly what I’m doing right now. I love that pace, but I also want to have twelve weeks of posts scheduled when I’m out, so here we are.

What I decided was to come up with twelve things I wish for my kids. One a week, while I’m gone, each one a different wish, the traits I hope Lettie and her brother grow into, the stuff I want them to know about being a person in the world, written down somewhere they can find later. I wanted to write something for them. That’s the whole reason. I’m not going to overthink it.

If you’re new here, welcome. I’m Max, and I usually write about the work of building things and the work of being a person and what it looks like when those two pull in different directions. This series is the same thing from a different angle. The most important thing I’ll ever build is a family, and these twelve posts are me trying to put some words around what that actually means to me right now, while the baby is still on the way and Lettie still calls his room baby brother room.

I’ll see you on the other side.

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At DoorDash there was a company value about holding two opposing truths simultaneously. It sounds abstract initially, but as a leader you are weighing perspectives that are not your own, sometimes ones you disagree with, and still arriving at a decision that is good for the business. It is not about who is right. Both sides can be right. The work is being able to hold a belief you do not possess, understand it on its own terms, and let it sit next to your own without one canceling the other out.

I struggled with this for a long time. I wanted to win the argument and prove the point. The thing that has changed it for me is respect, and the way I have come to understand it is different from how I used to. I used to think respect was earned. You proved yourself and then it came to you, and the people who had not proven themselves had to wait. That is half of it. The other half is that respect is offered. It is something you decide to give, before anyone has earned anything, because of who you want to be in the room. It is not a verdict on the other person. It is a posture in yourself.

When you hold respect that way, the question of whether you agree stops being the point. The point is whether you can make space for someone to be who they are. That is what lets you sit with a perspective you do not share without needing to defeat it. That is what lets you take feedback without making it about you. The more I have leaned into this, the lighter I feel. The politics feel smaller. The disagreements feel less personal. It is the first thing I bring into the room, not the last thing I give out.

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We are told over and over that the schedule is what saves us, that the regimen is how you stay on top of things, that the disciplined person is the one who gets things done. There is truth in this. When I have a list and a deadline I execute better. There is always something I need to be doing, whether it is the next move on the side hustle or the work someone is waiting on or the post I want to get out this week. Sometimes the urgency is the only thing that gets me to do the thing at all, because if it is not urgent I will get pulled toward whatever is more interesting in the moment.

The other side of it is that when I hop on the computer and start reading an article and follow it somewhere I did not plan to go, that exploration is often where the real work begins. The execution mode keeps things moving and the wandering mode is what lets me see what is worth working on in the first place.

I have not figured out which mode I should be in at any given moment, and I am starting to think the figuring-it-out is not the point. I am not someone who builds a big schedule. I am building something slower, the kind of work that compounds over years rather than weeks, and a life like that does not run on a perfectly clean calendar. Schedules help, because the sooner you knock things out the sooner you are free to explore, but they can also start to feel like a trap, because there is always more work to do and the list never empties.

What I am noticing is that we have built a culture around one of these modes and not the other. Focus gets celebrated. Wandering gets tolerated, at best. But the wandering is doing real work too. When systems can execute faster than I can, executing is not where my leverage is, knowing what to execute on is. That knowing does not come from the schedule. It comes from the wandering, from the article I was not supposed to be reading and the thread I followed because it pulled on me. It comes from the part of you that is still curious about something nobody assigned, the part that has not been fully scheduled yet.

The point is not to pick one. The point is that both modes are doing something necessary and the life worth building holds them together. The spreadsheet keeps the work honest. Curiosity keeps the work worth doing. Focus gets you through this week. Wandering tells you whether the next one is worth showing up for.

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This is the part of the day I have started to romanticize. Showing up when the tank is empty. Pushing through when it would be easier to close the laptop and go to bed. The effort is what I am proud of, because I have spent a career learning that good outcomes come from high effort. The hustle is purer when it costs you something. The post written at 11:30 means more than the one written at noon, because 11:30 is the one that proves you meant it.

I was going to write that essay tonight. It would have landed with the subscribers who are already rooting for that version of me. It also would have been a way to avoid the essay I actually need to write.

The problem is not the 11:30 laptop. That time is mine to spend. The problem is the 6 PM phone, in the window between signing off and dinner, the only protected family time I have during the week. I have been walking across it with my phone in my hand, checking one more thing, finishing one more thread, staying half in the day I just said I was leaving.

Andrea has called me out on it more than once. I have been calling it a bad habit, a small debt I will clean up later. It is not a habit. It is a decision I keep making, and calling it a habit is how I keep making it without having to look at it straight. The phone at 6 PM is not a productivity issue. I am choosing the work over the window I promised, and then telling myself the choice does not count because it is only a few minutes.

A few minutes is the whole trick. A few minutes is how you stay in the identity of the guy who does not let anything slip, while letting the thing that matters most slip. A few minutes is the size of the compromise you can make without ever admitting it.

The hustle essay I almost wrote tonight would have celebrated the effort without naming the window where it does not belong. That is the move I keep making. I take the belief that makes me good at my job and apply it to a part of my life where it is not supposed to win. The discipline that built my career is the same force pulling me across the line at 6 PM, and I have been too proud of it to see what it is costing.

I am writing this at 11:30 because it feels like progress. Naming the pattern on the page is a move I know how to make. It is also easier than the thing I have been avoiding, which is sitting with the fact that I keep choosing the phone, not because I am short on time, but because I am more comfortable closing the loop than closing the laptop.

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Ray Dalio built the all-weather portfolio at Bridgewater Associates around a simple idea: you can’t predict what’s coming, so instead of optimizing for one scenario you hold assets that respond differently to different conditions and let the environment decide which ones carry the weight. You don’t sell everything when one position cools off. You hold it, you let the other positions work, and you pay attention to where the momentum is actually flowing because that’s the market telling you what the current landscape favors.

Most of us miss this about our own lives. The conditions change, and the portfolio is supposed to respond. The mistake people make with their careers and their side projects and their creative work is treating every season like it should look the same, equal allocation across everything, all the time, as though discipline means identical intensity in every direction at once. But that’s not how growth works and it’s never been how growth works. Things compound when you let capital concentrate where the conditions favor it and give yourself permission to run lighter everywhere else. The card business has my evenings right now because I love the space and the opportunity is real and taking shape. My day job is in one of the most exciting stretches I’ve had in my career, with new people on the team and big initiatives I’m genuinely proud of. I’m not walking away from anything. I’m letting different things lead.

The community I’ve spent the last year building is a different part of the portfolio entirely. It compounds slowly and sustains itself because the people in it keep showing up and keep making it real whether or not I’m pouring into the infrastructure every week. That work doesn’t need constant intensity to hold its value. It needs to have been built with care, and it needs people who stick around even when the rhythm changes, and I’m grateful it has both.

The anxiety most people feel about changing priorities comes from confusing commitment with consistency of intensity. We tell ourselves that if we care about something we should be pouring into it at the same rate forever, and that any drift is evidence we weren’t serious. Dalio’s whole thesis is that uniform intensity is actually the riskiest strategy there is. Real durability comes from knowing what you hold, trusting the balance, and having the confidence to let different things lead at different times. If you’re feeling pulled toward something new and guilty about what’s cooling behind you, that guilt is worth sitting with because it might be showing you the difference between loyalty and rigidity. The portfolio doesn’t ask you to love every part of your life equally in every season. It asks you to trust the architecture and let the rebalancing do what rebalancing is designed to do. That process isn’t free. The evenings I spend learning product are evenings I’m not spending on other things that matter to me, and I feel that, and the people closest to me feel it too. But I look at where my attention is right now and where it was six months ago and they’re completely different landscapes, and I don’t know exactly how all of it resolves. The shifting doesn’t scare me though. It feels like the portfolio doing what I built it to do.

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I spent years at DoorDash watching merchants through the glass of a platform. Restaurants and shops and corner stores, people who had built something with their name on it and were trying to figure out how to grow inside someone else’s ecosystem. My job was subscriber retention. I was scaling DashPass, making the platform stickier, making the economics work for our side. I was good at it. The people I couldn’t stop thinking about were on the other side. The ones who opened the store every morning not knowing if anyone would show up. The ones whose entire livelihood depended on whether the thing they made was worth coming back for. There was no safety net underneath them, no flywheel spinning in the background. Just a person and a product and the daily question of whether it was enough.

That image never left me. It followed me to AG1 and then to Oats Overnight, where I run retention, and it followed me into the hours after my daughter falls asleep, where I’ve been building a small e-commerce business of my own. I’m not ready to talk about it yet because it’s not ready to be talked about, but I’m behind it with my money and my time and whatever hours I can find. Even in the planning stages, before a single transaction, the act of building something that’s yours changes how you see everything.

My great-grandfather Max Nimaroff was a merchant. My grandfather was a merchant. For generations, the people in my family have been builders of small things. They manufactured clothing and owned ice cream stores and shoe stores. They were also dentists and doctors and lawyers. The thread that runs through all of it, the thing that connects the professional practice to the storefront, is the act of standing behind something with your name on it and saying this is worth what I’m asking for it. This is not a coincidence and it is not a metaphor. It is the actual history of my family and it runs through me whether I want it to or not.

Being Jewish and being a merchant are tangled up in ways that are complicated and sometimes painful and also deeply true. For centuries, Jewish people across Europe and the Middle East were pushed toward trade because they were pushed out of everything else. Land ownership, guilds, professional classes. What remained was commerce. The act of buying and selling, of building relationships across borders, of creating value in the spaces between. My ancestors didn’t choose merchant life the way someone today chooses a career path. They chose it the way you choose to breathe when the room is running out of air. They did it because it was what was available, and then they got good at it, and then it became who they were. It became who I am.

I think about this every time I work on my own thing after hours. There’s a specific loneliness to building something that doesn’t exist yet, a silence where the validation should be. No customers, no revenue, no proof that any of it will work. Just the quiet act of showing up to something that hasn’t shown up for you yet and choosing to keep going anyway. It is not glamorous and nobody is watching and there is no platform underneath me making the match. It’s just me and an idea and a bet that the people who care about this thing will find me if I show up consistently enough and honestly enough to deserve it.

That feeling, the quiet tension of it, is something I recognize from the stories I grew up hearing. The feeling of being the node on the network. The one who has to be there for the transaction to exist at all. The people who came before me didn’t have Shopify. They had storefronts and relationships with their customers and the stubborn belief that what they were offering was worth what they were asking. The tools change. That feeling doesn’t.

I walk past old delis in New York sometimes, the ones that have been there for decades, and I think about what it took to build something like that. Not the business model or the margins but the act of it, the opening every morning and the standing behind the counter and the being there when nobody asked you to be. Those places are weathered and essential and unmistakably real and they were built by people who didn’t have an exit strategy. They had a trade and they practiced it and the neighborhood grew up around them. That’s what the people in my family have always built, in one form or another. My version happens to live on the internet, in storefronts I’ll build with code and fulfillment centers I’ll never visit. The thing underneath is the same. You find something worth selling. You stand behind it. You figure out the rest as you go. I’m not early and I’m not late. I just started, which is the only timing that actually matters.

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I’ve been grinding. That’s the truth of it. Lettie, our daughter, is almost two, and the stretch since we found out about this pregnancy has been one of the most intense seasons of my life. New job, new team, building a community, writing here every week, learning to work alongside AI as it reshapes everything I do, trying to be a good dad and a good husband while also being someone who is building toward something bigger. I have been so locked into forward motion that the baby almost became an abstraction, this beautiful thing on the horizon that I acknowledged but hadn’t really let in. I was too busy becoming the person I wanted to be by the time he arrived to actually stop and feel the fact that he was coming.

Then the furniture started showing up. An armoire and a dresser, delivered to our Brooklyn apartment, carried into the small room right off our bedroom that used to be my office and is becoming the nursery. There’s a carpet in there now too. It’s not finished — more is coming — but something about watching Andrea start to build that room, watching it stop being the place where I worked and start becoming the place where our son will sleep, broke something open in me. I keep finding myself standing in the doorway just looking at it. Yesterday it was the room where I wrote these posts and took my calls and ground through late nights, and today it’s becoming someone’s first home, and you can feel it changing even though it’s just wood and carpet and paint. The whole thing is happening right next to where we sleep, not down some hallway but right there, and there’s something about that closeness that makes it impossible to keep the baby abstract anymore.

Lettie knows something is happening in that room. She doesn’t fully understand what’s coming, not really, but she runs to the door and tells us to open it and says “baby brother room” and then rolls around on the carpet like it’s the most exciting place in the apartment. She does this constantly. She just wants to be in there. Watching her claim that space, watching her roll around on the floor of a room that belongs to someone she hasn’t met yet, is the thing that finally made it real for me. I could suddenly see it. Not the idea of two kids but the actual picture: Lettie in there with her brother, the two of them in that little room next to ours, a family that’s bigger than the one I have right now. Something about watching Lettie in that room unlocked a feeling I hadn’t let myself have yet. Not the engineered readiness I’d been chasing for months. The kind where your heart is open and you’re not afraid of what’s next.

I spent so long in laser focus, grinding to set my family up financially, trying to make sure we’d be taken care of, that I hadn’t given myself the space to just be excited. I was happy, but I wasn’t ready. The nesting wasn’t the furniture. The nesting was the moment I finally looked up from everything I was building and let myself feel how full my life already is.

I’m going to be a dad of two. Lettie is going to have a brother. It’s going to be a ton of work and not enough sleep and more chaos than I can probably imagine right now, but I’m not thinking about any of that. I’m thinking about my daughter rolling around on a carpet in a room that’s almost ready, saying “baby brother room” to no one and everyone, and how lucky I am that this is my life. I’ve been writing here for almost a year about ambition and building and showing up, and all of that still matters to me. But right now, in this season, the most important thing I’m building is a family. Everything else is just furniture.

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I have felt this for most of my life. Relationships that tilt. Friendships where I’m the one reaching out, checking in, holding the thread. I used to think I expected too much from people, and maybe I do. I work on that. But here’s the thing about spending years on the giving end of a lopsided equation: it trains your eyes. When you’ve spent a long time not being met, you develop this almost involuntary ability to recognize the people who show up for real. Not because they’re performing or because they want something, but because they genuinely cannot help it. You learn to spot the quiet ones.

Years ago I mentored in an online bootcamp, helping people transition into technology strategy roles. I mentored a bunch of people over the course of the program, and the format involved group projects where you’d come up with strategies for solving real problems in marketplace businesses. Most people coast, show up late, contribute the minimum, let someone else carry the load.

One of the people I mentored was a guy named Edwin. He stood out. He took the work seriously when others didn’t, approached problems with real curiosity, and conducted himself with the kind of quiet effort and authenticity that you can’t fake. In a room full of people going through the motions, he was actually there.

Over the years we’ve stayed in touch. I helped him land a role at DoorDash. He’s now an active member of 500+, my Discord community. We’ve found a mutual love for Substack, a platform he’s building on now in his own right. But what stays with me most about Edwin isn’t any of that.

Every lopsided friendship in my life was building toward something I couldn’t see at the time. I wasn’t just the person who gave more. I was becoming the person who could tell the difference between people who perform and people who mean it. When I met Edwin, I didn’t have to think about it. I just knew.

The quiet ones don’t ask to be seen. They just keep building, and most of the time the world looks right past them. I know what that feels like from the other side. I also know what it feels like to finally recognize someone who builds the way you do.

That’s what I want to be for people. The person who looks up and says I see you, you’re doing it right. Edwin, I see you. Keep building.

Follow Edwin’s journey on Substack here.

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For a minute it was great. I sat at a table and started doing the thing you do. Introductions, backgrounds, the little ritual of figuring out who everyone is and where the overlaps might be. I was in it. I was energized. Then the room started to come into focus. Groups of people who already knew each other. Coworking space managers. Community industry people. The more conversations I had that day the more I realized this was a conference for the community manager. The person inside the company whose job title has the word community in it. I had stumbled into it thinking it was my room. It wasn’t. I was a founder building something from nothing and most of these people were building something inside of something else. Both are real. They’re not the same.

At some point in the afternoon the table cleared out and it was me and one other person I hadn’t connected with yet. I started making conversation. Then a guy walked over and just sat down. Didn’t ask to join. Just sat down. He was doing his rounds. He asked me what I did and I told him about my community and I could feel the judgment arrive before I finished the sentence. He didn’t get it. He didn’t try to get it. He told me about the six-figure community business he ran and I asked if he’d started it and he said no. I sat there thinking: you interrupted my conversation to big-league me with someone else’s company. I’ve met this guy a hundred times. The person who measures your thing against their thing in real time and needs you to know where you land. He’s not a bad person though.

The thing that saved the day was someone I almost didn’t talk to. A woman at my table building a leadership community for women in science. Ten years in. We had nothing in common on paper and everything in common underneath it. I asked her something I don’t usually ask people I’ve just met. I asked her how she knew she was on the right track. I wasn’t asking for advice. I was asking for something closer to permission.

She didn’t give me a framework. She didn’t give me a shortcut. She looked at me like she was looking at someone earlier on a journey she recognized, and she told me the truth, which is that the path goes in directions you can’t plan for and that the challenges I was facing weren’t signs that something was wrong. They were the work. She validated every step. Not with encouragement. With recognition. The kind that doesn’t tell you to keep going. The kind that says I see where you are.

She had ten years on me and nothing to gain from that conversation and she gave me twenty minutes of her full attention because something in my questions reminded her of something in her own beginning. That’s not networking. That’s not even mentorship. That’s someone who remembers what it felt like to be early and chooses to turn around.

I walked out of that conference with two things. A handful of real connections I’ll keep building on and a clear picture of who I want to be when I’ve been doing this for ten years. Not the guy who sits down uninvited and judges. Not the room full of people optimizing the same job. The woman at the table. The one who had every reason to look past me and chose to look at me instead.

I’m early. The world is smaller than it looks from the outside. The outside is closer to the inside than it feels.

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It didn’t build. It just arrived. No warning, no slow thaw, just a sudden shift and a city full of people adjusting in real time. That’s what sudden change actually looks like. Not a slope. A cliff. One day the world is one thing and the next day it isn’t and the space between those two days is where your whole life can pivot.

We know these moments. The diagnosis and the move and the job that vanishes and the relationship that changes shape while you’re still inside it. The phone call that splits your life into before and after. The morning you wake up and the rules are different and nobody asked if you were ready. Change doesn’t send a calendar invite. It just shows up and sits down at your table and waits to see what you do.

Most people grab for something solid. Some people freeze and let the current choose for them. A few, sometimes out of courage and sometimes out of nothing left to lose, point themselves into the new direction. It is never graceful. It was never supposed to be. The beauty is in the choosing.

Nobody teaches you how to do this. You learn it from a winter that almost broke you. You learn it from watching someone you love walk straight into something impossible and realizing they didn’t have a gift you lack. They just moved. The change came and they let it carry them somewhere new and they kept going. That’s all adaptability has ever been. Not a skill you sharpen. A willingness you practice. A quiet trust that what comes next might be worth the discomfort of getting there.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. The good changes and the hard changes are not separate things. They are the same thing at different stages. You don’t get the exhale without the months of holding your breath. The loss and the doubt and the long stretches where nothing seems to move are not obstacles on the way to the good moments. They are the good moments unfinished. You cannot have one without carrying the other.

My zayde used to talk to every stranger he passed on the streets of New York. Didn’t matter who, didn’t matter where. He had this love for the ordinary moment, for the small unremarkable interaction that most people walk right past. I think about him on days like today. The whole city doing exactly what he did. Strangers becoming neighbors for an afternoon. The ordinary made sacred by attention.

If you make it through a New York winter, really make it through, the first warm day doesn’t just feel like relief. It feels like something you built. Like a song that needed every quiet measure to earn the crescendo. Like the city was holding a note this whole time and today, finally, it resolved.

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At my first job out of college, I worked at a market research firm during the day and spent my evenings at General Assembly learning Product Management. At my next company, I pulled late nights teaching myself to code, and by the time I was leaving, I’d added business school to the evening rotation. When I started at DoorDash, I was still finishing my second year of classes at night. When I graduated, I filled those hours teaching at a bootcamp. At AG1, I started building 500+, pouring evenings into a Discord community that didn’t yet know what it wanted to be.

I’ve always had two jobs. The one that pays me and the one I’m building toward.

Now things have ramped up again. I’m running an eBay store, writing on Substack, still showing up for my Discord community, and building a new team at Oats Overnight. I keep picking things up and trying things and starting things. I’m not burned out. I’m building and I’m motivated and I’m hungry.

But I am running hot. It is a lot. I’ve quietly removed TV nights with my wife from the routine and during the week I’m pulling hours at my computer long after Lettie’s gone to sleep. On weekends I do my best to turn off and be present with my family, and that’s where I find my rest along with the occasional vacation. But Monday through Friday I am going.

I never quite feel like I’ve done enough.

That’s the part I’ve been thinking about. Every project I’m working on needs more work. None of them are where I want them to be. I have dreams for my family, real dreams, and they’re big enough that everything I’m doing right now feels small by comparison. I can see at every step that there’s more in front of me than behind me. So I keep going.

But here’s what I’ve started to notice. All of it is compounding.

I have a portfolio now and it is expanding. Not a resume, a portfolio. Each thing feeds into the next. Through the Discord, I learned how to meet new people, how to embarrass myself and start something from nothing. I learned to keep going even when you get nothing in return, because along the way you help people more than you realize. That community gave me a playground to build things, to experiment without asking permission.

Because of the Discord, I found Substack, which gave me a place to clarify my thinking and discover a real love for storytelling. That opened a door to a community of writers and thinkers I admire. It’s also what led me to take action after watching King of Collectibles, starting a Pokemon collecting side hustle that reconnected me with something I loved as a kid and sharpened my skills in e-commerce, data modeling, and building with AI.

Each thing made the next thing possible and each thing made me better at the last thing. It all connects to the work I do professionally, building retention systems at high-growth brands. The side projects aren’t side projects. They’re the same muscle trained from a different angle.

What I’ve learned about myself through all of this is something simple. I’m someone who doesn’t wait. I build systems and I follow through. I start small and I iterate. I look forward to the start of the week and to getting things done and to building. It energizes me in a way I don’t think I could explain to someone who doesn’t feel it.

But there’s a deeper thing underneath all of that energy, and I’m still learning how to talk about it. My dreams are so big that the work in front of me always feels insufficient. I can feel the distance between where I am and where I’m going, and it’s that gap, not the accomplishments, that keeps me moving.

I don’t think that gap ever closes and I don’t think it’s supposed to. I think the people who build things, who really build things, carry it with them everywhere. It’s the thing that wakes you up early and keeps you at your desk late. It’s not ambition exactly. It’s closer to a kind of faith that if you keep going and keep compounding and keep showing up for the work even when no one’s watching, something takes shape that you couldn’t have predicted from the beginning.

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Accuracy was binary. Did the signal land inside the point of interest? Yes or no. Was the person actually at that Chipotle, or was the signal just bouncing off a nearby building? That’s accuracy. You’re either on target or you’re not. Precision was different. Precision was about consistency. As the phone threw off more signals over time, were they clustering near the original? Were they telling the same story? The precision is what gave you confidence that the accuracy wasn’t a fluke. One signal inside the building could be noise. Ten signals inside the building was a pattern.

I think about that framework a lot, and not just in the context of GPS data. In the workplace you hear people say it all the time. Take more shots on goal. If you’re aimed at a target, shoot enough times and eventually something lands. That’s an emphasis on accuracy. Volume solves the problem. And most high-growth companies operate this way. Ship fast. Launch more. Test everything. Throw a bunch of stuff at the wall. Precision doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like hesitation. So you rarely hear anyone emphasize it.

But precision is a different thing entirely. It requires training, experience, and the kind of focus that doesn’t come from just firing more shots. It comes from slowing down long enough to understand what you’re aiming at, why, and whether you’re actually getting better at hitting it. I’ve seen the difference play out my entire career. The peers who were always moving fast, pulling late nights, always busy, never had time for anyone. They got the hustle credit. The reputation. The visible grind. But when I’d take a step back and actually look at what they accomplished versus what I accomplished, we were getting the same results. I was just doing it with half the effort. Not because I was smarter. Because I was more focused on where I aimed before I pulled the trigger. People emphasize speed, but what they actually want is results. And if you focus on being a good shot, you need far fewer shots on goal.

I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics the last couple weeks and there’s a sport that perfectly captures this. Biathlon. Athletes ski at full speed, heart rate through the roof, legs burning, and then they stop at the range. They have to slow their breathing, steady their body, and shoot at targets the size of a golf ball from fifty meters away. Miss one and you ski a penalty loop. The best in the world can go from full exertion to dead calm in seconds. That’s precision under pressure. It’s not about being slow. It’s about knowing when to be still.

Now imagine someone who just keeps skiing and shooting without ever settling down. Firing while their heart is still pounding, hoping volume makes up for aim. Eventually something might hit. But even when it does, it feels like luck. There’s no momentum in a lucky shot. You can’t build on it. You can’t repeat it. You’re just back at the range, guessing again. And that’s the part people miss. Precision doesn’t just get you a hit. It gives you momentum. When you know why something worked, you carry that into the next one. Each shot builds on the last. But when you’re spraying and something finally lands, you have no idea what you did right. So the next attempt starts from zero. You never compound. You just keep pulling the trigger and hoping.

Speed matters. I’m not arguing against speed. The faster you move, the more you can do, and there’s a real advantage in that. But speed without precision is just noise. The way I think about it is this. You want to be precise with the shot, but fast with the reload. Know what you’re aiming at. Take the time to focus. Make the shot count. And then move. Get the next thing in the hopper. Keep going.

The calmness is not the opposite of urgency. It’s the thing that makes urgency productive.

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I was overexerting myself and I knew it. My body was telling me to stop and I kept going anyway. And the truth is, it wasn’t just the virus. I’ve been carrying a lot. Work has been intense. On the side, I’ve been pulling out more and more. Advisory work, the Discord community, writing here, and now the Pokemon card business I’m trying to build from scratch. I’m doing all of it because I have to provide. That’s how I’ve always thought about it. You do whatever you can, because that’s the job.

And through all of it, I keep coming back to the same thing. I don’t ask for help. I am fiercely independent. I don’t like relying on people, even the people closest to me. I think there are two sides to it, and they reinforce each other in a way that makes the pattern really hard to break.

The first is that I genuinely feel like I can’t. When I look at Andrea, who is exhausted and carrying just as much as I am, the thought of saying I need a hand feels selfish. When the work keeps piling up and I know there’s more to build, the thought of slowing down feels irresponsible. The circumstances always seem to justify keeping going. Someone else is more tired. Someone else has more on their plate. So I absorb it.

The second is what happens over time when you keep absorbing. The weight doesn’t disappear just because you’ve gotten used to carrying it. It accumulates quietly, in your shoulders, in your sleep, in the shorter fuse you didn’t realize you had. I’ve written before about resilience being a double-edged sword, and I meant it then. But this week it hit differently. It’s one thing to understand the concept. It’s another to be lying in bed at two in the afternoon on a Thursday, unable to get up, knowing you made it worse by not stopping sooner.

This week my body made the decision for me. I hit a wall where pushing through wasn’t even an option anymore. And in that moment, lying in bed, I started thinking about what it actually means to reclaim your time. Not in some productivity sense, but in the most basic sense. Recognizing the moment when you’ve crossed from determination into stubbornness. Giving yourself permission to go a bit further, because that’s who you are, and then pulling back. Not because you want to. Because the alternative doesn’t serve anyone. Not Andrea, not Lettie, not the work, not the things I’m building on the side.

I think for people like me, people who are wired to keep going and keep providing, the hardest lesson is that your body is talking to you all the time. It’s telling you when enough is enough. And the question isn’t whether you hear it. The question is whether you’re willing to listen.

There was no big moment where it all clicked. The virus ran its course. I got better. But I came out of it knowing something I didn’t let myself know before. That I can’t keep going like this without something giving. And that maybe the first thing to give should be the idea that I have to do it all alone.

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I’ve heard this before. Not in those exact words, but the sentiment. The energy shift after I lay out a vision. The look on someone’s face when something clicks and they realize what they’re a part of. It’s happened enough times now that I’ve stopped treating it as a coincidence.

I play the coach role at work. Not officially, not in any title, but in practice. It’s become part of my operating system. The way I open meetings. The way I frame problems. The way I talk to people about their potential in the context of our team, our goals, what’s at stake. I didn’t set out to be this person. But I’ve realized that the moments I’m most effective as a leader aren’t the ones where I’m organizing a project plan or reviewing a dashboard. They’re the ones where I’m standing in front of people and making them believe that what we’re doing matters and that they’re capable of more than they think.

I grew up on sports movies. Coach Carter. Friday Night Lights. Miracle. Remember the Titans. We watched them over and over as a family, and they’re some of my favorite memories. I loved those movies. The games, the drama, all of it. But the scenes that stayed with me longest were always the speeches. The locker room moments. The turning points where someone looks a group of people in the eye and changes how they see themselves. Those scenes did something to me. They taught me that the right words, delivered with conviction at the right moment, can shift the trajectory of an entire group. Building a new team has me reflecting on that more than usual.

There’s a reason we remember certain coaches, even fictional ones. Coach Carter locked his undefeated team out of the gym because they weren’t holding up their end of the academic contract. Everyone turned on him. But he didn’t care about the winning streak. He cared about whether those kids understood they were more than basketball players. That’s not strategy. That’s something else entirely. It’s the understanding that performance is downstream of belief. That people don’t do their best work because you tell them what to do. They do their best work because you help them understand who they are and what they’re capable of when they commit fully.

That’s what I try to do. Every day.

I won’t pretend it’s easy. Right now I’m pulling long days building strategic plans for the team, then pulling late nights working on my side projects, then waking up and chasing after a toddler. After a couple days of back-to-back meetings your social battery is completely drained. You get fried. But you still have to bring it. The coach doesn’t get to walk in at sixty percent. Your team reads your energy before they read your Slack messages. If you walk in flat, they feel it. If you walk in locked in, they feel that too.

I take this seriously because the difference between a team with a great coach and one without is not incremental. It’s night and day. It’s the difference between people doing their job and people doing their life’s work.

It feels a little strange to call myself a coach. I was never on any team. I grew up in a sports family though. My dad played college basketball. But the more I lean into this role, the more I realize it’s where I’ve always been headed. I had people who loved me and supported me growing up. But the specific thing I’m talking about here, someone standing in front of you with fire in their eyes telling you that you’re capable of something extraordinary, I never really got that. What I got instead was my back against the wall and no choice but to believe in myself. I had to try things I didn’t think were possible and find out what happens when you bet on yourself with no safety net. That experience shaped me. And maybe that’s why I feel so strongly about being that person for others. I’ve seen what belief can unlock. I just had to find it on my own first.

For years I’ve been helping people do their best work. Turns out, there’s a word for that.

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Sunday, I dropped Lettie with her grandparents. Tonight, Andrea’s at dinner with friends and I’m home with sushi and silence.

Here’s the thing about shooting stars: by the time you realize you’re seeing one, it’s already disappearing.

Precious time works the same way. The moment the window opens, the clock is running. And immediately, things start pulling at your attention. The phone. The half-finished errand. The easy dopamine. They don’t announce themselves as waste, but that’s what they are.

I’ve learned I need a goal before the window opens. Sunday it was a haircut. Tonight it was this post. Both simple. Both restorative. Both things that would’ve cluttered my week if I hadn’t done them now.

But here’s what I’ve been sitting with lately. I can’t rest without forward motion.

A nap doesn’t restore me. Television doesn’t either. Even reading only works if I’m learning something I can use. The activities that actually fill me back up, writing, running, a long walk, the quiet of a barber’s chair, they all share something. They let me recharge without sitting still.

I used to think this was a flaw. Hustle culture brain. The inability to just be. Now I’m not so sure.

Think about surfers waiting for a set. They’re not resting on the beach. They’re in the water, watching the horizon, ready to move when the moment comes. The opportunity isn’t the wave. It’s being positioned to catch it.

I think some of us are wired to find rest the same way. Not by shutting down, but by changing modalities. Working the rest of the body. Writing instead of building. Running instead of sitting in meetings. Finding the motion that fills us back up instead of draining us further.

I’ve stopped trying to rest like other people rest. I’ve stopped waiting for stillness to feel like peace. The next time a shooting star shows up, I won’t waste it wishing I was someone who could sit still. I’ll already be moving.

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I thanked her. And then I felt embarrassed. Not proud. Not grateful. Embarrassed.

I’ve been thinking about why. The easy answer is imposter syndrome. I use AI to clean up my grammar, I didn’t study writing, I don’t feel like a “real writer.” But that’s not it. Not really. The truth is simpler and harder: being witnessed by someone who knows your face is different than being witnessed by strangers on the internet. With strangers, there’s distance. Their judgment floats somewhere out there, abstract and survivable. But when someone from your actual life reads your actual thoughts, someone whose opinion of you is still forming, suddenly you’re exposed. The walls come down. They’ve seen something you made, and now they’re looking at you differently. That’s the vulnerability. Not the tools I use. Not whether I’m a “real” writer. Just being seen.

I don’t feel like a writer. But I know I’m a storyteller. These are different things to me. Writers craft prose. Storytellers shape meaning. I’ve been doing the second one my whole life. I just didn’t have a place to put it until now.

Growing up, I was never good at writing. My parents helped with every paper. My college essay would not have gotten done without my mom. But I was obsessed with stories. Movies, specifically. My DVD collection overflowed my shelves. Every Friday night, my two brothers, my sister, and I would sit down with our parents in what we called “the other den” to watch a film together. That was our ritual. I’ve had narratives running in my head for as long as I can remember. Science fiction worlds. Imagined conversations. Entire arcs playing out while I drove to school or sat in traffic. The stories were always there. I just didn’t have a way to get them out.

Then Substack happened around the same time as ChatGPT and Claude. And suddenly, the barrier dropped. I could put words on a page without needing anyone to clean them up for me. I could shape my thoughts and finish them myself. For someone like me, independent to a fault, uncomfortable asking for help, always afraid of being a burden, this was freedom. So I started writing. Or whatever you want to call it. I started telling my stories.

The other thing is that I’ve been practicing this for years. Just not on paper. I had a direct report once who was drowning. New role, high intensity, everything felt like too much. He was grinding himself down trying to keep up. So I told him a story. About goals. About how the things we chase can either feel like weights dragging behind us or wind at our backs, and that the difference isn’t the goal itself, it’s the angle. The next day, he was different. Not incrementally. Completely. Something had shifted. That’s what stories do. They unlock something that frameworks can’t. I’ve had hundreds of these conversations over the years. Not every one lands like that. But enough do that I know the craft is real, even if the medium was always verbal. Substack didn’t make me a storyteller. It just gave me a new place to practice.

So when someone calls me a writer, I flinch. Not because I’m using AI. Not because I feel like I don’t deserve it. But because the label doesn’t fit the way I see myself. I’m a storyteller who happens to publish on Substack. My prose needs help. My narratives don’t. Maybe that distinction only matters to me. Maybe it’s just semantics. But it feels important to name it, because I’ve spent my whole life feeling like I didn’t quite fit the categories available to me. Always in the grey area. Always living in the edges between the nodes. I’m still there. And I’m still sharing my stories anyway.

What I’m learning is this: when perception and reality don’t match, it’s worth paying attention. Not to abandon your reality, but to check your blind spots. That woman who called me a writer saw something I wasn’t letting myself see. Not that I’m a writer. I’m still not sure about that word. But that the thing I’m making is reaching people. That it matters to someone other than me.

After she walked away, I stood there for a second. Embarrassed, yes. But also something else. Seen.

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Everyone knows this about farming. Almost no one applies it to anything else.

A couple months ago, I reached out to someone I’d known for years. We’d helped each other here and there, though the relationship had always felt a little uneven. When I needed an intro, they offered to interview me for a role on their team instead. They made an offer. I countered. They pulled it.

They could have just said no.

The pattern was there all along. I just didn’t want to see it.

And that’s what patience is actually for. Not delayed gratification. Filtration. Time reveals truth, if you’re willing to look.

But it works the other way too.

My friend Ish joined my Discord early on, and we started connecting slowly. Eventually we did business together: I worked with her company while I was at AG1. No rush, no asks. Just two people showing up over time.

When I was looking for my next role, Ish showed up in a way no one else did. She checked in on me daily and made intros without being asked. Not when things were easy, but when things were uncertain and she had nothing to gain.

Same field. Same patience. Different outcome. (If you want to see what she’s building, check out The Tapp.)

I used to think I was building an audience so I could eventually get something from it. Now I see it differently. I’m not farming to harvest. I’m farming to find my people.

Long term, I want to build a community unlike anything we’ve seen online. A room where someone you met through a screen becomes someone you’d trust with your life. Not everyone gets to come.

Right now, I’m still proving my worth. But I’ve learned to pay attention to who shows up when it counts.

The hardest lesson I’ve learned is that I cannot rush this. Time is in the way, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Anything I force will only ruin it. All I can do is keep showing up and stay prepared.

The field will tell me who’s ready.

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I wonder too. And I think the strangeness is exactly why you should pay attention.

I’ve spent my career being a ruthless operator. I’ve built teams at DoorDash and AG1 that moved fast and hit numbers. I’ve pulled myself from academic probation to top of my class. I’ve built a reputation as someone who delivers, who figures out hard problems and gets results.

People who’ve worked with me will vouch for that.

And here’s what I’ve learned: the results come from the stuff no one talks about.

Not the tactics. Not the frameworks. Not the bulleted lists of top books to read. If that’s all you consume, you stay average.

To be great at anything, you have to be your own person. Fully. No one can copy being you. And yes, we all have things to learn. But the real work is building the confidence to do what you want. To reach a point where you apologize to no one, without being an asshole about it.

I can’t tell you how to do it. No one can. All I can do is share glimpses of how I think, through stories, and trust that you, the pattern-matching human you are, will pull something useful from my context.

So you won’t find lists here. You’ll find stories.

I want you to engage. But this isn’t for everyone. It’s for the ones who feel it.

This is for me as much as it is for you. I want to write. I want to grow. I want to find my people.

I don’t want to be alone anymore. The world is larger than the people I’ve met conveniently.

If this is your wavelength, we’re probably going to be good friends.

I still have my whole life ahead of me. New dad. Growing family. Making a life in Brooklyn. And you’re part of it now.

So thank you for reading. Thank you for finding this.

I cry during romantic movies with my wife. I also get shit done at the office. These aren’t contradictions. They’re the whole point.

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The first is the one my wife grew up going to. It’s perfectly nice. We get seated quickly, the omelettes are better, the service is good. Nothing wrong with it.

Then there’s the other place. They bring cheerios for my daughter before her food arrives. The staff plays with her, shows her things on their phones, gives her coloring books. They do it because they genuinely love kids and love connecting with us.

The food is not as good, but you can’t beat it.

That restaurant has become more than a place to eat. It’s become a place where we feel something. And I’ve been thinking about why.

Soul is like a current running beneath everything. It’s always there. Your job is to channel it.

Most people never access it. They’re moving too fast, not paying attention, not caring enough to tap in. But when you get present, when you fall in love with the work, you channel it. The work becomes charged. And others feel that charge when they experience it.

That’s what’s happening at the diner. The staff aren’t just doing their jobs. They’re accessing something. They care, they’re present, and that energy flows into every small gesture. The cheerios, the coloring books, the way they play with my daughter. We feel it. It’s why we keep going back.

The other diner has better food. But there’s no current running through it. Nothing to feel.

I know when I’m channeling and when I’m not.

When I sit down to write, the first stretch is robotic. I’m trying too hard. The words come out stiff. But if I push against that inertia, if I stay with it, eventually something shifts. Like going for a run. The first mile is a lie. You’re not running yet. You’re just moving your legs and waiting for the real run to start. Then at some point, you fall in.

That’s the shift. Once I’m there, my fingers type and I lose time. The work becomes joyful. I’m not forcing anything. I’m channeling.

But if it never clicks, you stop. And I think most people stop too early, before they ever feel the shift. That’s why most work has no soul. Not because people can’t access the current. Because they quit before they break through.

Soul is not talent. I’ve seen enormously talented people produce hollow work.

Soul is not effort. Plenty of exhausting work has no life in it.

Soul is not even craft, though craft gets closer. Craft is what lets you shape the current once you’ve accessed it. But craft alone doesn’t guarantee anything will flow.

Soul is what happens when you care enough to get present, stay long enough to fall in love, and let the current move through you into the work.

Allen Stone can sing a simple line and make you feel like he’s reaching into your chest. The man learned to sing in a tiny church in rural Washington, and you can still hear that in every note. The wood pews, the sincerity, the lack of pretense. A more polished vocalist could hit the same notes and leave you cold. The difference isn’t technique. Stone opens himself up. The current runs through him. And when you listen, really listen, you feel it.

One person can tap in. But what happens when you need ten people? A hundred? A thousand?

I’m not sure I’ve ever been on a team that truly channeled together. Maybe once, in the early days working on DashPass. There was a moment where it felt like we were building something that mattered and everyone was locked in. But it didn’t last. And I’m not sure I could tell you exactly what made that window different from everything before or after.

Most teams will never experience this. They optimize for “top talent” without understanding that talent is insufficient. They hire the best people, assemble them, and expect output.

But you can’t force people to access the same current. Everyone has to get present on their own. Everyone has to care. That’s almost impossible to create and very easy to destroy.

I don’t have a formula for it. I’m not sure anyone does.

Strip away all the productivity advice, the growth hacks, the strategies for success. What’s left?

You have to know what you want. You have to commit before the path gets hard. And you have to channel soul into the work.

The first two are obvious. Everyone preaches goals and commitment.

But that third one, soul, is the ingredient most people skip. It’s the hardest to explain and the only one that determines whether your success feels empty or actually means something.

We spend our lives wanting to feel connected. To others, to our work, to something larger than ourselves. That connection is the current. It’s always there, running beneath everything, waiting. Most people are too busy, too distracted, too afraid to slow down and access it.

But when you do, when you get present, care deeply, and let it flow through you, the work becomes charged. Others feel it. And for a moment, you’re connected to something bigger than yourself.

That’s what makes a diner more than a diner. That’s what makes work more than work.

Is the current still running beneath you, waiting?

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For the record, I’m an average negotiator. In business school, we ran simulations in our negotiations class. I almost always ended up with a good deal, never the best. But I’ve come to believe that consistently good deals compound into something better than occasional great ones. And people have told me I negotiate well. So maybe average is underselling it. Or maybe I’ve just learned to work with what I’ve got.

Here’s what I’ve got: I can’t bluff.

I tell too easily. My face, my voice, something gives it away. So I’ve never been able to sell a position I don’t actually hold. For a long time, I thought this meant I couldn’t play my cards close to my chest. That I was stuck being readable, and therefore stuck leaving value on the table.

But I’ve learned something. People can’t always read me the way I think they can. The gap between what’s happening inside and what people actually see is bigger than it feels. I assume I’m transparent. I’m not always. None of us are.

This is the art of leverage. Not lying. Not bluffing. Just understanding that you don’t have to reveal everything to be truthful. Omission is not deception. Timing is not manipulation. You can hold cards without hiding them. You just choose which hand to play them in.

Think about it like a card game. You may have collected certain cards over the course of play. But when you play them, and in what combination, determines whether you win. The cards don’t change. The sequencing does. The context does. The read you give your opponent does.

In a negotiation, you might have multiple truths. You have other options. You have constraints. You have priorities. You have flexibility in some areas and not others. All of these are real. But which ones you lead with, which ones you hold back, which ones you reveal only when asked directly: that’s the craft.

I’m not suggesting you lie. I’m suggesting you recognize that truth has structure, and structure has power.

The other thing I’ve learned is that this doesn’t come naturally. At least not to me. My instinct is to put everything on the table, to be fully transparent, to let the other side see exactly where I stand. It feels honest. It feels fair. But it’s also how you give away leverage you didn’t need to give away.

Emotional players do this. They react. They reveal. They let the pressure of the moment override the strategy they planned. I’ve done it. I’ve watched myself do it and known I was doing it and still couldn’t stop.

But knowing it’s a pattern is the first step to breaking it. You can learn to pause before you speak. To ask yourself: does this need to be said right now? Does revealing this help me or hurt me? Is this truth serving my goals, or am I just uncomfortable holding it?

It’s a skill. Like any skill, it gets better with reps. And like any skill, the people who treat it seriously outperform the people who wing it.

You have a duty to set yourself up for success. No one else is going to do it for you. The other side of the table is thinking about their leverage, their timing, their sequencing. If you’re not doing the same, you’re not being noble. You’re being unprepared.

The cards you hold matter. But so does knowing when to play them.

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