Almost everything I know about personal finance and building wealth comes from two things: Reading books and studying people who are good with money.

Investing, in particular, is one of the best skills you can learn from books. You can study the principles that successful investors have used for decades before putting your own money to work. You don’t have to discover everything through trial and error.

Of course, you still have to manage your emotions when your own money is involved. Understanding patience is easy. Being patient when you’re scared or tempted to chase a quick return takes practice. There’s no secret you can read that will do that part for you.

But imagine learning about all of this earlier. How to invest, manage your desires, decide what to spend on, and avoid the mistakes people keep making with money.

I think I’d be further ahead today if I’d learned those things sooner.

Still, better late than never.

We pick up ideas about money long before we learn how to manage it. And when you look around, a lot of what passes for normal doesn’t make much sense.

We earn more and immediately spend more, feel guilty about wanting to earn well, or save for a future we’re never willing to enjoy.

You have to question those ideas, even when they sound responsible.

Here are four beliefs I’d look at first. Then I’ll share a simple exercise to help you catch these things in your own decisions and do something about them.

In the rest of this guide, I’ll break down four money beliefs that quietly shape bad decisions about earning, saving, spending, and comparing yourself to others, plus a short exercise to catch them in your own life before they cost you.

If you haven’t upgraded yet, become a paid member to unlock the rest of this guide and the complete Wise & Wealthy Academy archive.

Read more

We’ve been living in a heightened state of economic uncertainty since March 2020.

A lot has happened and is still happening. This platitude seems more relevant than ever:

“Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.”

But we also have to be honest. The Stoics talked about preparing for the worst 2,000 years ago. In a letter to Lucilius, Seneca wrote:

“We should therefore reflect upon all contingencies, and should fortify our minds against the evils which may possibly come.”

And while you’re preparing for what could go wrong, you can also work toward what you actually want. Maybe that’s a different field, your own business, or work that gives you more freedom.

Recently, a 33-year-old reader shared the following with me:

“I am currently and slowly working on a plan B for my career, which requires some time and planning, and my current job is actually convenient for the type of preparation needed before making the leap. I just find some days are harder to cope with than others and I find myself being impatient at times because I’d like for this plan B to come faster.”

I can relate to this. Once you’ve decided you want something else, it can’t happen fast enough.

So how do you build the career you want while dealing with the reality of life? And when do you actually go for it?

Here’s how I’d approach it.

What do you even want?

One of the biggest challenges right now is that there are so many opportunities, it’s hard to decide what you want.

And there’s another thing I’ve faced for many years. I still deal with it whenever I make a big career decision. What do you prioritize?

1. Money

2. Mastery

It’s important to make a distinction between these two things. You can want both, but which one is leading your decision?

Here’s the thing about money. We’re not good at judging whether something will make money or not. We just see things from the outside.

For example, a lot of people think that all social media influencers and YouTubers are rich. This isn’t true. That’s what we think from the outside. We see the successful ones and assume that’s what the career looks like.

So we think, “I should pursue that career because everyone doing it is rich.”

That’s a bad way to make a decision.

The right way to make a career decision is to look at your skills, look at your passions, and see where there’s an overlap. Be realistic, and be blunt about what you’re good at.

Where does your potential lie?

This is the question you must answer first. If you don’t answer it, you don’t know what you should do. You don’t have a direction.

If you don’t have a direction, you’ll keep chasing whatever looks attractive from the outside.

Mastery means choosing something you want to spend years getting better at. Can you see yourself doing the work, including the boring parts? Can you get good enough to provide real value to people?

Get clear on this and make a decision. And don’t make it with resentment, like, “Well, there’s no other option. I don’t have a choice.”

There are a lot of things you can do in the world. You have to think in possibilities. Choose something you want to pursue, then give yourself a real chance to get good at it.

Gravity is working against you: Focus on momentum first

Look, the odds are against you. There are a lot of factors working against you.

There’s competition, but there’s also you. We’re always distracted. Entertainment is always calling us. We can spend our entire days consuming content, going to the mall, restaurants, bars, whatever.

There are a million things you can do.

All those things have a pull on your attention. And your career gets whatever attention you have left.

Think about launching a rocket. It takes an enormous amount of force to get off the ground. This is how I look at building momentum in a career. Getting started requires a lot of energy, and you have to keep putting in the work after the excitement wears off.

When I started writing seriously, I knew it would take years. I’d already tried freelancing, so I’d had a taste of how hard it was to get something off the ground.

Especially in the first several years, it takes a lot of time and dedication. You have to be clear with yourself and the people around you: This is what I want to do, and this is what it requires.

That means making sacrifices for several years.

Less entertainment, fewer evenings out, and less time jumping from one interest to the next. You can’t keep doing everything you did before and expect to build a completely different career.

But you don’t make those sacrifices with resentment. You do it because you want to. You want to get better at your work and build something. So it doesn’t feel like you’re missing out on everything else.

If you’re truly committed to starting something, get started. But keep going. Don’t use all your energy getting off the ground and then quit before you’ve given yourself a chance.

Subscribe now

The paradox: The more you want something, the more desperate you become

Now you know what you want, you know it requires work, and you’ve decided to dedicate yourself to it.

Here’s the paradox. If you want it too much, you get in your own way. I think of this as one of those unwritten rules of life: The more desperately you want something, the less likely it is to come.

The best things often happen when you don’t expect them. You’re doing your work, meeting people, learning things, and something comes out of it that you couldn’t have planned.

You have to work from a place where you accept any outcome. Enjoy the process so you don’t put too much emphasis on the end result. Sure, you’re dedicated and you want to achieve something. But if you put too much pressure on yourself to succeed, you’ll suffer for years and make desperate decisions along the way.

You’ll accept work you don’t want, let people keep you waiting with promises, or fall for someone who tells you they can make you rich quickly.

That’s why it’s so important to crave less. In a letter to Lucilius, Seneca wrote:

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”

The money rules are simple:

• Live below your means.

• Don’t upgrade your lifestyle every time you earn more.

• Stay out of consumer debt.

• Keep enough money set aside that you don’t have to accept just any job or client to pay the bills.

With that financial cushion, you can make better decisions. You can pursue a better career without needing every opportunity to work out immediately.

And always do the honest thing. Don’t go for shortcuts. Don’t fall for get-rich-quick schemes or follow people who are just in it to scam others. Surround yourself with positive people who really want to make a change and who do things for the right reasons.

Your intentions matter. Sure, honest people get screwed too. That’s why you also have to be strategic.

This is why I like Robert Greene’s work so much. Books like The 48 Laws of Power and The Laws of Human Nature are perfect weapons of self-defense for people with the right intentions.

I understood that life was hard and a lot of people had bad intentions. By reading about human nature, I could guard myself better and make better decisions. You can do the right thing and still pay attention to what other people are doing.

When do you make the move?

You start now. Don’t wait.

Everything you do now should lead to something. Networking, talking to people, helping them, providing value, starting a blog, building a brand, starting a business.

What can you do now that will lead to a better outcome in the future?

You can start doing those things while you still have your current job. That’s exactly the opportunity the reader has. You don’t have to wait for the day you quit to take your next career seriously.

Set some big goals for yourself, things that really motivate you. Break them down into daily habits and start working toward them.

• Want to be a writer? Make sure you write every day.

• Want to build a business? Work on generating revenue every day.

I don’t need to tell you all this stuff. You read self-improvement articles. You know what it takes to learn a skill, finish a project, or get better at your work. We often just lack the drive and motivation to go for it.

I hope this gives you some of that drive. Because we can’t afford to keep waiting for the perfect moment.

The more action you take, the more you put yourself out there, the more you try, the higher the odds of succeeding at some point.

It’s simply a matter of when.

If I didn’t have AI, I wouldn’t be publishing articles every week. I’m 100% sure of that.

Taking care of our 9-month-old son with my wife has been hard.

This is a bit embarrassing to admit, but I actually thought that parents who were saying that nursing a baby is hard work were exaggerating.

Well, they were right.

Anyway. We all have our reasons why we’re tired. And when we’re tired, it’s damn near impossible to focus on your work.

That’s because any type of knowledge work requires mental energy.

And when there’s a lot going on in your mind, your work suffers.

In the past, when I had stressful periods, I would still write a decent amount, but I would never get around to publishing my drafts.

Now, I write, and my AI agents help with what comes after it. I still check what goes out. I just don’t have to carry every step around in my head anymore.

That’s made a real difference during a period when I don’t have much mental energy to spare.

The name of the game is removing friction

Most people talk about AI in terms of speed. How much faster can you write an email? How many hours can you save? How much more can you produce?

Those are the wrong questions. I focus on this:

How can I remove any type of friction in my work?

Look at it this way. We already have work, family responsibilities, bills, and all kinds of things on our minds.

If you want to get better at what you do, you need some mental space to think, come up with ideas, and focus.

That’s why I look at the things around the work itself.

In my case, I’d finish writing and think, now I have to format this article, add hyperlinks, create an image, and put it on Substack and my website.

Just thinking about all those steps took extra mental energy. And I had to do them again for the next article.

Those tasks need to get done, but the thinking and writing are where I have something to contribute.

So I’ve set up my AI agents to handle the repeatable publishing work. I still check what goes out, but I can focus on creating without having to do every step afterward.

That’s what I mean by removing friction. You make it easier to do the work you care about. And I’ve seen the same thing happen for people around me.

Subscribe now

• My father speaks English and Dutch as his second and third languages. Before, he regularly ran his communication by other people. Now, with AI, he has more confidence handling it himself. He knows what he wants to say. He has help expressing it.

• My friend Kian runs his own Substack while working full-time and raising a child. AI helps him keep it going alongside everything else in his life. I can relate to that. Having something you want to share and having the energy to get it out into the world are two different things.

• Then there’s my friend Chris, who runs a sales training company. We talk every week, and when I told him how I use agents, he wanted me to show him.

His dream was to run more of his business from his phone. He’s often in meetings or on the go, so he wanted to dictate what needed doing, then read and approve the work.

We spent about 20 minutes connecting his apps and setting up a central place for his material.

Now, his meeting transcripts feed into a process that prepares follow-up steps and drafts emails. He can spend more of his attention on meetings and solving problems, the work he loves.

My wife uses AI at home too. She often speaks to it instead of typing, asking it to help find things we need for our son. With browser access, it can help with the shopping instead of only giving her another list of things to do.

These are ordinary parts of life.

Communicating, raising a family, running a business, and making time for something creative. That’s why I find this so useful. You can start with a problem you already have.

What could you take off your mind?

If you want to get to the next level in your work, look at how much of your attention goes to everything around it.

There will always be bills, paperwork, emails, and things to sort out. Doing every little task yourself can leave you with very little energy for the work that’ll actually help you move forward.

That’s why I think it’s worth looking at your work as a system. You figure out which tasks repeat, how you want them done, and where you need to check the result. Then you can get help without having to explain everything from scratch every time.

It’s also why I created AI Pro. In the course, I share the mental models I use and show you how I automate repeatable tasks with AI agents. So you can focus on the core of your work without feeling drained by everything around it.

If that’s something you’re interested in, check out AI Pro here.

When I was 17, I got into reading in my free time. I remember reading books like Crime & Punishment, American Psycho, Post Office, etc.

I loved it. Before I finished one book, I would buy the next one and got excited about starting it.

Reading was so important to me, that I had this urge to write books myself.

But it wasn’t until I was 28 that I actually started writing a book.

Before that, I tried to start a few times, but it never amounted to anything.

So when someone tells me they’ve wanted to start a business, write a book, or learn a skill for years, I understand.

You can genuinely want something and keep putting it off. And after a while, you get so used to talking about it that you barely notice another year has passed.

What are you waiting for?

It can be many things. Maybe you’re worrying about failure. Maybe you just don’t know how to start.

But you can overcome those things, right?

And yet, we just don’t start.

What are you avoiding?

In 2013, I felt stuck in my career. I’d started a business with my dad two years earlier, and I wanted to do more and learn more.

I tried freelancing. I built websites, did copywriting, content marketing, and some design work. But it didn’t take off. I avoided the uncomfortable work that came with growing a business.

I had skills I could sell. But I still had to go out and sell them.

That part is easy to leave out when you imagine working for yourself. You think about the freedom, the work you enjoy, and the income you could earn.

Then you have to approach someone, explain what you can do for them, and risk getting ignored.

And suddenly you find something else to do.

I recognize that tendency in my writing too. When the writing gets hard, answering emails or reading another article can become very attractive. I can fill a whole day with useful activities and still avoid the one thing I intended to do.

That’s why I think it helps to be specific about your procrastination.

Which part are you putting off? Making the offer? Finishing the draft? Showing someone your work?

Once you name it, you can do something about it.

“I need to work on my business” gives you plenty of room to stay busy. But it’s too vague.

Sending one potential customer an email gives you a task you can actually finish.

Subscribe now

You don’t need permission to begin

I was 28 when I wrote my first book, Win Your Inner Battles. People around me didn’t really take it seriously. Some thought it was just a gimmick, especially because I self-published the book.

I hadn’t trained as a writer, and I wasn’t a psychologist either. But I’d applied ideas about dealing with fear to my own life, and I had something I wanted to share with the world badly.

There was something inside me that told me, “You have to share this. Maybe one person needs to hear this message.”

I could’ve spent more years wondering whether I was qualified to write it. Instead, I wrote the book.

That doesn’t mean everything you make will find an audience. You might put something out and get very little response. You might realize your idea needs work. But now you have something you can improve.

Before that, you’re trying to judge a thing that doesn’t exist.

I’m a big believer in education. And some professions require qualifications for good reasons. But you don’t need a degree or certificate to write an article, practice a language, or start a business.

It’s worth looking at the conditions you’ve attached to your goal.

Which ones are actually necessary? And which ones have you added because beginning makes you uncomfortable?

Give yourself something you can do today

You don’t have to make a dramatic change to take a goal seriously. If you want to start a business, you can keep your job while you test an idea. If you want to write, you can begin with a paragraph.

The first step should fit the life you actually have. Otherwise, you’ll keep waiting for a different life.

If your week is already full, take a look at Hourlift, the free tool I made. It suggests recurring work you could delegate to AI, so you can make a little more room in your day.

I’ve felt stuck quite often in my writing career over the last decade. But since I’ve learned how to use AI in an effective way, I can never use excuses anymore.

Because I delegate so much work to AI, I can always make time for some creativity.

Look, I get it. Life is demanding and there’s currently a lot of pressure on us to succeed.

But let me tell you something: Life is not going to get easier, no matter how long you wait.

In fact, it will only get harder! So you might as well start whatever it is that you want to do now.

Here are a few tips to make it easier:

• Pick one thing. If you’ve been talking about five ideas, choose the one you want to try first. You can come back to the others.

• Define a small piece of real work. Write the introduction, make the sample, or send the email. Choose something that gets your work off the ground. You just need to get going.

• Give it a place in your day. Look at your calendar and decide when you’ll do it. Even 20 minutes gives you a starting point.

• Decide when you’ll return to it. One productive afternoon feels good, but you also need to work on the thing after the initial excitement wears off.

And let yourself be a beginner. Your first attempt can be disappointing without meaning you should give up.

If you don’t know how to do something, learn enough to make the next attempt. Reading and studying are useful. I do both. But you want to give yourself a chance to apply what you learn.

In On the Shortness of Life, Seneca wrote:

“The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

You can’t know exactly where a project will take you. I certainly didn’t know where writing would take me.

But I know that the years I spent wanting to write didn’t produce a book. At some point, I had to sit down and write it.

What’s the equivalent for you? Give yourself some time today and do that.

My new course, AI Pro, is out now.

Learn more about AI Pro

When I feel good and ambitious, I can come up with a dozen goals and think I can work on all of them.

Can you relate to that?

• “I want to get in better shape.”

• “I should start a new business!”

• “Let’s travel more!”

• “I want to learn a new language.”

• “Maybe I should finally write that book.”

All good ideas.

The thing is, you can’t realistically do everything at the same time. And this is something we all know deep down.

But somehow we keep falling for the same mistake of always trying to do more, more, more.

You can pursue a lot of these goals over your lifetime, but each one needs more attention than whatever time you happen to have left.

And choosing is hard because you genuinely want all these things. Delaying one can feel like giving up on it. So you keep trying to fit everything in, even when you can see that it isn’t working.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to decide what needs your attention first, reduce the work around it, and plan a week you can actually follow. We’ll also look at how to tell whether your priorities are producing better results.

Read more

Most people think trading means you need to be active. You sit in front of several screens, watch every price move, and buy and sell stocks all day.

I do the opposite.

Sure, I follow the market every day. I read earnings reports, look at charts, and track companies. But I don’t trade daily. My goal is to find one or two good opportunities a year.

That’s all.

That also means that I don’t find any opportunities most of that time.

That’s fine because my long-term investments keep compounding in the background.

Trading is simply part of my investing strategy. I do it because I enjoy studying businesses and market psychology.

And yes, I want to make a profit.

Let me tell you how I do that.

My 90/10 rule

Let’s start off with the mindset.

My investing philosophy is simple: Build wealth over the long term and don’t take risks that affect your sleep.

That’s why I use my 90/10 rule. I generally put 90% of my stock allocation in an S&P 500 index fund and use 10% for individual stocks.

That ratio isn’t fixed forever. Sometimes I use 80/20 when I have more conviction and see a strong opportunity. And when the market is too volatile or I don’t see a good setup, I use 100/0.

That doesn’t mean I sell my long-term holdings. It means I allocate nothing to active trades. With long-term investing, I want to stay invested and add more when the market is down.

But trading individual stocks is different. There, timing is the whole game.

Sometimes you should go fishing

Here’s a line attributed to Jesse Livermore, one of the greatest traders in history:

“There is a time to go long. There is a time to go short. And there is a time to go fishing.”

He learned that lesson the expensive way. In Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, the character based on Livermore says he lost his first $10,000 because he traded “in and out of season, every day, whether or not conditions were right.”

Many traders still assume that following the market means they need to have a position.

You don’t.

I watch because I want to be ready. Most of the time, I do nothing. I’m waiting for the moment when the business, valuation, sentiment, and price action come together.

What makes a stock interesting?

A stock isn’t interesting because it has dropped 30%, 50%, or even 70%. Sometimes it’s cheap. Sometimes the business is slowly dying.

So I separate the quality of the business from the quality of the stock at the current price.

When I research a company, I look at several factors. I talk more about that in this lesson of the $1M Course (that you have access to as a paid member of my newsletter).

To keep it short, here are five of the most important things:

1. Does the company have a real competitive advantage?

2. Are revenue, margins, and cash flow getting stronger or weaker?

3. What expectations are already priced into the stock?

4. Why did the stock fall, and is the long-term thesis still intact?

5. What could change the market’s perception of the company?

I look at about 12 quarters of financial results. One quarter doesn’t tell you much.

And I always ask: What does the market believe, and what does the evidence show? That gap often creates an opportunity.

Timing is the trade

People often say, “You can’t time the market.”

For long-term index investing, I agree. I learned that after the 2008 crash. I sold, stayed out, and missed years of gains.

But don’t let anyone tell you timing doesn’t matter when you’re trading individual stocks. You can buy a great business at the wrong time and lose money for years.

Look at Nike. The company still makes good money, but I see a business suffering death by a thousand cuts. It’s facing Hoka and On in running shoes, plus Alo and other online brands in apparel. A famous brand doesn’t guarantee future growth.

PayPal is another example. People still use it. But where will the growth come from?

Netflix is different. The company is still growing. It’s expanding its advertising business and moving into live programming and sports. But even a growing company can become a bad trade when the stock price reflects too much optimism.

These stocks will turn if the business proves the market wrong. That’s the key. I wait for evidence of a reversal.

Subscribe now

I look for the right side of the V

After a major decline, I don’t want to blindly catch a falling knife. I’d rather buy a little higher after the stock shows that a bottom may have formed.

Maybe bad news stops pushing the price lower. Maybe the stock forms a higher low or starts outperforming the market. At the same time, I want to see the fundamentals stabilize and expectations come down.

Google was a good example. Between January 2024 and the middle of 2025, the stock mostly went nowhere. The dominant story was that Google had lost the AI race.

I became interested in early 2025. The business was still strong, but sentiment had become negative. I bought around May and rode the reversal to a nice return.

Then I sold too early. That happens too.

How I put the trade together

I never buy the entire position at once. If I want to put $10,000 into a stock, I normally build that position over two or three days.

Let’s say the stock trades at $100. I might start with $2,000. If it falls 2% later that day, I add another $2,000. If it trades around $99 the next day, I might buy another $2,000. And if it drops another 3%, I add the final $4,000.

The exact sequence changes. This is a dynamic process. But I decide on the $10,000 maximum before I place the first order. I don’t keep increasing that number because the price goes lower.

And this is where the distinction matters: I might average down while I’m still building the position. I don’t average down after the trade is fully established.

Once the full $10,000 is invested, I don’t add another $1,000 or $2,000 if the stock keeps falling. If it drops about 10% below my average purchase price, I sell and wait for a better entry. Otherwise, you can get stuck in a losing position while telling yourself you’re getting a better price.

So my rules are:

1. Decide on the maximum position before buying.

2. Build it over two or three days and stay under that maximum.

3. Use the average purchase price to set a stop-loss around 10%.

4. If the stock doesn’t start moving within about two weeks, or the reason I bought changes, get out.

5. Once I’m up more than 20%, take the profit or use a 10% trailing stop.

Remember to sell!

Remember this: You’re only a trader when you buy and sell.

When you invest for the long term, you can hold through corrections. But when you enter a trade, you need an exit plan.

Before I buy, I want to know:

• Why am I buying?

• What would make my idea wrong?

• How much am I willing to lose?

• What signs would tell me the move is ending?

When a trade works, I take profit. You don’t need to sell everything at once. But you must avoid turning a good profit into a loss.

Selling too early hurts. I know that feeling.

But riding a winner all the way back down hurts more.

Build your own trading system

Everyone needs a trading system that fits their personality, knowledge, and tolerance for risk. My system might give you ideas, but you shouldn’t copy it blindly.

Read the best books you can find. I learned a lot from Jesse Livermore, the Stock Market Wizards series, and Stan Weinstein. Study how they think about timing, losses, and trends.

Then observe yourself.

Do you become impatient when you’re in cash? Do you hold losers because you don’t want to admit you’re wrong? Do you sell winners because you’re afraid of losing a small profit?

Your answers matter more than another technical indicator.

For me, good trading means following the market every day and acting rarely. I wait for a good business, lower expectations, negative sentiment, improving fundamentals, and a price reversal.

One or two opportunities a year is enough. The rest of the time, I keep investing, protect my capital, and go fishing.

This article is for educational purposes and isn’t financial advice.

My new course, AI Pro, is out now.

Learn how much time you can save with AI

Sometimes I’m so consumed by all the new features and capabilities of AI that I forget about how great it is to actually write something by yourself.

Maybe it’s a classic case of nostalgia, but sometimes I miss the “simpler” times.

The time that I had to push through mental barriers, frantically going through my notes, picking up physical books and reading my highlights.

Or browsing Google for research, studies, and stories about the topic I was writing about.

I don’t do most of it anymore. Especially not browsing Google.

Who does that? It’s not 2022 anymore!

That sounds ridiculous.

Anyway, writing is fun.

We should do more of it.

Here’s why.

But first, why did I miss writing?

I’ve been writing online since 2015. And during the periods that I wrote every day, I always felt more engaged with my work and life.

Writing gives your creative energy somewhere to go. You start with a thought, a feeling, a problem, or something you noticed. Then you sit down and try to make sense of it. By the time you finish, you often understand the topic and yourself a little better.

That’s what I missed.

I didn’t only miss publishing articles. I missed the act of sitting down and discovering what I wanted to say. Sometimes you think you know what you believe. Then you try to write it down and realize your thinking is all over the place.

William Zinsser wrote this in On Writing Well:

People are prevented from doing useful work because they never learned to express themselves. Contrary to general belief, writing isn’t something that only “writers” do; writing is a basic skill for getting through life.

That last part is important. You don’t need to write books or publish articles to benefit from writing. You can journal, write project notes, explain a decision, prepare for a difficult conversation, or simply put an idea into words.

What does writing every day give you?

Over the years, I’ve noticed that a daily writing habit improves almost every part of your life.

• Clearer thinking and better decisions. A thought can feel logical in your head until you see it on the page. Writing slows you down long enough to spot gaps, assumptions, and contradictions. This is also why I like to write before I make an important decision.

• More self-knowledge. When you write about what bothers you, what you want, and what you keep avoiding, patterns become hard to ignore. You learn what drives you and what holds you back.

• More discipline. Writing every day teaches you to work without waiting for the right mood. Some days the words come easily. Other days you struggle through a single paragraph. Both days count.

• More empathy. Good writing requires you to leave your own head and think about the reader. What do they know? What are they worried about? What would help them? That habit also makes you better at dealing with people.

• A way to process life. Writing has always been therapeutic for me. It helps me turn a vague feeling into something I can understand. And once I understand it, I can usually do something about it.

Writing has also improved my career more than almost any other skill. I’ve used it for articles and books, but also for sales, emails, courses, business plans, and explaining ideas. If you can think clearly and communicate what you mean, you become more useful in almost any line of work.

If AI is so good at writing, why should you write anything yourself?

Well, you don’t need to choose between AI and writing.

Writing is simply the act of translating your thoughts into words and presenting them in a way that another person can understand. AI has made that process more accessible. A lot of people who never considered themselves writers can now organize their thoughts, improve a draft, or finally share an idea.

I think that’s a good thing.

If AI helps you write more, you win. There’s no need to look down on someone because they used a tool. We’ve always used tools to write, from dictionaries and editors to spell-checkers and search engines. The tools keep changing.

But the reason you write still matters.

Are you trying to understand something? Do you want to make a better decision? Are you sharing an experience that could help another person? Or do you simply enjoy creating something?

When you know why you’re writing, you can decide where AI helps and where you want to do the work yourself. Sometimes I want speed. Sometimes I want to sit with an idea and see where it takes me. Both have a place.

How do you start writing every day?

Stephen King wrote in On Writing:

The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.

That’s still the best writing advice. Start.

Here are a few things that have helped me to keep a daily writing habit:

1. Keep reading and studying.

2. Set the bar low. Commit to writing an introduction, one paragraph, or ten minutes. A low target removes the pressure to produce something great. And once you start, you often keep going.

3. Make writing part of your routine. Pick a time and place that you can return to. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Consistency matters more than the app, keyboard, notebook, or setup you use.

4. Remove distractions for a short period. You don’t need three hours of silence. Even twenty focused minutes can be enough to follow a thought before your attention moves somewhere else.

5. Use AI deliberately. Decide what kind of help you want. You might use it to ask questions, organize notes, research, edit, or improve clarity. Or you might open a blank document and do everything yourself that day. There’s no fixed rule.

And you don’t have to publish any of it. The habit itself is useful. A private journal can change the way you think just as much as a public article.

Why am I writing every day again?

Because I feel better when I write.

It gives me more clarity, discipline, and energy. It helps me understand what I think, and it gives me a way to create something that might be useful to another person.

AI can make the process easier, faster, and more accessible. I’m glad it does. But I don’t want convenience to make me forget why I started writing in the first place.

I missed that feeling.

That’s why I’m still writing every day again.

My new course, AI Pro, is out now.

Learn how much time you can save with AI

Switching careers feels like you’re throwing away everything you’ve built.

Your experience, reputation, income, and identity are tied to what you do now.

Even if you know you want a change, the practical questions can keep you stuck: What should you do next? Which skills still matter? How will you pay the bills? And what if you make the wrong move?

I’ve changed directions several times.

I started in our family business, later worked at Gartner, and then built a career as a writer and educator. Every move involved uncertainty, but I never truly started from zero. I carried skills, experience, relationships, and lessons from one chapter into the next.

That’s how a good career switch works.

The resignation usually comes near the end. Before that, you figure out what needs to change, test a new direction, close your skill gaps, and build enough proof that another person is willing to give you an opportunity.

Most career advice starts too late. It focuses on résumés, job boards, and interviews. Those things matter, but they can’t rescue a weak direction or replace real ability.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through the full process I would use today.

You’ll learn how to diagnose the real problem, choose a direction that fits you, translate your existing experience, build proof, create financial room, and know when you’re ready to move.

This is the guide I wish I’d had the first time I wanted to leave a career that no longer fit me.

If you’re not a paid member yet, this is where you upgrade. You’ll unlock the rest of the guide, plus the full Wise & Wealthy Academy archive.

Read more

Who else hates marketing?

What about posting on social media like a self-absorbed and inconsiderate jerk?

Self-promotion is a necessary part of work, but it feels unnatural to many of us.

A lot of people grew up with an old-school work ethic: Put your head down, do good work, stay modest, and don’t draw attention to yourself.

You learn to fly under the radar and hope your results speak for you.

But if you’re an artist, writer, freelancer, or entrepreneur, people first need to know that your work exists.

And that’s where the discomfort starts. You want to share your work without becoming someone who turns every conversation into a sales pitch.

I’ve been writing online since 2015, and I’m still not interested in becoming an internet personality. But I’ve learned how to promote my work in a way that fits me.

Here are five things that helped me.

1. Accept marketing as part of the work

The first step is accepting that marketing belongs to the work.

To be honest, I don’t love the commercial side of my career. I don’t enjoy the pressure of constantly putting out books, courses, and articles that also need to perform financially.

But I know myself. Without a financial incentive, I probably wouldn’t do the work with the same urgency and discipline. An idea becomes more serious when customers, expenses, and revenue are involved.

That’s simply how our society works. Money creates an incentive to make something useful, finish it, and keep improving it. You don’t have to worship money, but it makes no sense to pretend the incentive isn’t there.

The starving artist idea has always bothered me. Some people act as if earning money ruins the purity of creative work. But if your work can’t support you, something else has to. And that usually means you have less time and energy for your art.

So I see marketing as part of the creative process. I make something that can help people. Then I explain what it is, who it’s for, and how they can get it.

There’s nothing dirty about that.

2. Choose a medium that fits your personality

You don’t have to promote yourself in the way everybody else does.

I’m a talker, but I like to go deep. I have a hard time connecting with people who always stay on the surface and only want to talk about gossip, trends, or the latest news.

Writing fits my brain. I can take an idea, think about it, and explain it properly. That’s why I use articles, Medium, Substack, and email. TikTok and Instagram don’t give me that same feeling, so I don’t direct my energy there.

Fortunately, there are more ways to share your work than ever:

• If you think through writing, use articles, newsletters, or essays.

• If you like speaking but prefer being alone, record a podcast or talk to a camera.

• If your work is visual, show the process, details, and finished result.

• If you prefer one-on-one contact, use conversations, referrals, or personal emails.

Pick the medium that makes it easiest to express what you actually think. You might still feel vulnerable, but at least you won’t also feel like you’re playing a character.

And give one medium enough time. Constantly moving from email to Instagram to YouTube to whatever comes next is exhausting. You never stay long enough to become good.

3. Give people the information they need

This is the most useful lesson I’ve learned from studying copywriting.

I’ve read people like David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert, and Claude Hopkins, who wrote Scientific Advertising. Their work taught me to look at marketing as informing the reader.

You can’t convince someone to want something they don’t want. You can make your offer clearer and more attractive, but you can’t force genuine interest.

So answer the questions a reasonable person would have:

• What did you make?

• Who is it for?

• What will it help them do, feel, or understand?

• Why did you make it?

• What does it cost?

• Where can they get it?

Good marketing makes those answers easy to find. It gives people enough information to make their own decision.

This mindset removes a lot of pressure. You don’t need to manipulate anyone or act excited all the time. You simply say, “I made this. Here’s why it might be useful to you. Take a look if you’re interested.”

Some people will buy. Most won’t. That’s normal.

Subscribe now

4. Write for one person

The word “audience” can make marketing feel more intimidating than it is. You imagine a large crowd judging every sentence.

I don’t find that useful. When I write an article or email, I think about one person with one problem.

In this case, that person is the painter who feels uncomfortable emailing customers. She doesn’t need to reveal her entire inner life to sound authentic. She can write something as simple as:

I just finished a new series of five paintings. I started working on them after noticing how different the same landscape looks in the early morning. You can see the full series here. If one of the paintings speaks to you, they’re now available.

That’s personal, clear, and useful. And it doesn’t turn the email into a diary entry.

Authenticity comes from telling the truth about your work and your intentions. You can keep private things private. You can also be direct about the fact that something is for sale.

Before you publish or send anything, ask yourself: “Would this help one person understand my work better?”

If the answer is yes, send it.

5. Don’t take silence personally

This is probably the hardest part. You share something that matters to you, check your inbox, and nobody replies.

Your mind immediately turns that silence into a judgment: Nobody cares. The work wasn’t good. I made a fool of myself.

But you don’t know why someone stayed silent. They might have read the email while waiting in line, liked the work without needing to comment, decided the offer wasn’t for them, or planned to come back later and forgot.

The only useful approach is to treat marketing as a game you’re learning to play. Every email or post gives you information.

• If few people open, work on the subject line.

• If they open but don’t click, make the offer clearer.

• If they click but don’t buy, look at the product, price, timing, or sales page.

• If one person replies, pay close attention to what resonated.

Don’t judge yourself after one email. Look for patterns over several attempts.

And adopt a little more of a “who cares?” mindset. People have opinions about everything. If you hold on to every reaction, or every lack of reaction, you hand strangers control over your work.

You sent an email. You didn’t commit a crime.

Learn from the result and send the next one.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable

Some people say you’ll get used to putting yourself out there. To be honest, I don’t think you ever fully do.

You can get better at marketing, sure.

You’ll learn to write better emails, explain your work more clearly, and deal with silence without taking it personally.

But talking about yourself will probably always feel a little uncomfortable.

This is cliché, but we just need to get comfortable with that feeling. Don’t use it as a reason to hide.

You never know whose life your work might change. But you’ll never find out if you don’t make yourself available and give people a chance to see what you can do.

My new course, AI Pro, is out now.

Learn how much time you can save with AI

“The age of abundance is here!” they say.

AI is going to change the economy, transform entire industries, and create enormous wealth.

Meanwhile, our work hasn’t changed much.

Sure, we have ChatGPT and other chat boxes that help us write emails, etc.

But our work is still largely the same.

Except there’s more pressure on us to make money because everything is more expensive.

That’s why we think about work all day long.

But I think things are changing. AI is no longer a chat window. It actually lives inside your work.

Over the past few months, I’ve seen a big shift in my own work. I can now finally teach an AI agent how I do something and let it do that work for me.

These agents can work across your connected apps, use your material, and carry out tasks on your behalf. You give them direction and decide what needs your approval.

And when you learn how to use that, you can start taking back parts of your day you thought you’d always have to spend working.

More time = Wealth

Look, money is important. But what’s more important is to feel like you’re in control of your life.

If you make more money but spend every waking hour working or thinking about work, how much freedom do you actually have?

You might want more time with your family. Or a few uninterrupted hours to build something of your own. Maybe you just want to finish your day without a dozen small tasks still running through your head.

To me, that’s a part of wealth too.

And it’s the AI opportunity I care about most. I don’t need to wait for some future breakthrough to benefit from it. I can use what’s available now to reduce how much of my life work consumes.

Take email. AI drafts replies using my material and the way I’ve taught it to respond. I read them, make a change if needed, and send. Email barely takes any of my time anymore.

With publishing, I keep approved articles in Notion. An agent can take one, prepare it on the publishing platform, and schedule it according to my instructions.

I still write and decide what I want to say. But once an article is ready, I don’t need to carry it through every step myself.

Those jobs used to keep coming back to me. Now, I can review the work instead of starting from scratch.

How can you put AI to work in your own life?

Start with something you do every week that you’d happily stop doing yourself.

You don’t need to automate your entire job. Look for one process with a clear result: a reply ready to review, a customer follow-up prepared, or a finished article ready to publish.

Then think about how you’d teach someone to help you:

• Give them the material they need. Previous replies, relevant documents, or approved articles.

• Show them how you want the job done. Explain your preferences and correct the work until it’s useful.

• Decide what you still want to approve. Sending an email, spending money, and publishing under your name are decisions you can keep.

You can approach an AI agent the same way. Connect it to the relevant apps and material, teach it your method, and let it prepare the work before you sit down.

If you need help with this, I made a free tool called Hourlift to help you spot those opportunities.

It suggests work you could delegate and estimates how much time you could save.

And if you’d like help putting this into practice, AI Pro is where I teach you my approach to using agents, from choosing the work to teaching them your methods and checking the results.

It’s the approach I use to get more control over my own time.

Life is so paradoxical. Take quitting.

Most of us believe that it’s wrong to quit. That quitting is for losers. And that if you want to achieve anything worthwhile, you just need to keep going.

I understand where that idea comes from. You shouldn’t quit simply because something is hard. If you give up every time you’re frustrated, tired, or not getting the results you want, you’ll never become good at anything.

But quitting is also important. In some cases, it’s the only way to grow.

Henry Cloud, the author of Necessary Endings, wrote an entire book about this subject. He said it really well:

“Getting to the next level always requires ending something, leaving it behind, and moving on. Growth itself demands that we move on. Without the ability to end things, people stay stuck, never becoming who they are meant to be, never accomplishing all that their talents and abilities should afford them.”

When I look at my own life, quitting has often led to something better.

I quit working at our family business and found a job at Gartner. During that period, I learned a lot about business, corporate careers, goal setting, personal responsibility, and living in a big city.

And then I quit that job too. I felt stuck in a career I didn’t like. The pain of that experience pushed me to become a writer. If I had stayed because I was afraid to quit a good job, I don’t know whether I would’ve made that change.

In 2022, I went to Spain with the idea of living there. After four months, I realized it wasn’t the right time for me to stay. So I quit that plan and moved back.

People often see quitting as a failure of commitment. But life moves in seasons. Some things serve you for years, some things for a few months, and some things turn out to be a bad fit almost immediately. You can appreciate an experience and still decide it’s time to move on.

I like a boring lifestyle on a day-to-day basis. But when I look back at a year, I want to see movement. I want to feel like I’ve learned something, made progress, tried something new, or changed direction when I needed to.

Being stuck is one of the worst feelings in life. And often, the answer is right in front of you: You need to quit something.

The hard part is knowing what to quit and when to quit.

In this guide, I’ll share how I think about that decision, how to tell the difference between a difficult period and a dead end, and how to end something without creating unnecessary damage.

I’ve sat on decisions like this for way longer than I needed to. Every time, the actual ending turned out easier than the waiting.

If you’re not a paid member yet, this is where you upgrade. You’ll get the rest of this guide, plus the entire Wise & Wealthy Academy archive.

Read more

In January 2015, I don’t think I got a single good night's sleep.

My grandmother had been in the hospital while I was away on a New Year’s vacation with my girlfriend at the time. My family back home hadn’t told me how serious the situation was. After my grandmother passed away, my mind kept going back to the same question:

What if I hadn’t gone on that vacation?

The relationship wasn’t in a good place either. So that created a new set of questions. What if I had ended it earlier? What if I stayed? What if I ended up alone?

My job also felt wrong. I was dealing with a teammate who was backstabbing me, and I kept thinking: What if I had seen it earlier? What if I quit? What would a hole in my résumé do to my career?

And then my mind moved further into the future.

What if I keep living like this? Where will I end up?

One thought created another. The past gave me regret, the future gave me fear, and the present disappeared somewhere in between.

I remember thinking: There must be a better way of dealing with your thoughts. This can’t be it. This is no way to live.

There is a better way.

You stop assuming that every thought is true, important, or worthy of your attention. You learn to observe what your mind produces without immediately becoming part of it.

That’s the main idea I want to share with you: You have a mind, but you are not every thought that appears in it.

Your mind will create fear, memories, plans, judgments, fantasies, and worst-case scenarios all day. You can’t stop every thought from appearing. But you can decide whether you will follow it.

That small space between noticing a thought and following it can change your life.

Your mind keeps offering stories

A thought often feels like reality because it appears in your own voice:

• You should’ve known better.

• This will probably go wrong.

• You’re falling behind.

• What if you never find another job or relationship?

The mind says these things with confidence. And when you don’t create any distance, you start living according to them. You delay a decision, stay in a situation that doesn’t work, lose sleep, or mentally replay something that can’t be changed.

But where did the thought come from? Did you choose it? Did you carefully examine the facts and reach a conclusion?

Usually, no. It simply appeared.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore your mind. Some thoughts are useful. They point to a real problem, help you make a decision, or show you what needs to change.

The goal is to stop treating every thought the same way.

When you notice yourself drifting into another loop, ask:

Is this thought useful?

If it helps you solve a problem or take action, use it. If it only creates another hour of worry, let it pass and return to what you’re doing.

That’s what I meant when I wrote Stop Spending So Much Time in Your Head in 2016. Your mind is a tool. It should help you live. You shouldn’t spend your whole life trapped inside it.

What did the Stoics understand about thoughts?

I knew a little about Stoicism and mindfulness in 2015. I had read about those ideas, but I hadn’t studied them deeply and I certainly wasn’t applying them consistently.

Epictetus wrote this in The Enchiridion:

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”

That line doesn’t mean painful events are imaginary. Loss hurts. Betrayal hurts. Uncertainty can keep you awake.

But the mind often adds a second layer. Something happens, and then you create ten stories about what it means, what should’ve happened, and what might happen next.

That was exactly what I was doing in January 2015. I was dealing with real pain, but I also kept feeding it with one what if after another.

The Stoics trained themselves to examine what they called impressions. A thought, feeling, or first reaction could appear without permission. Their responsibility was to decide whether they agreed with it.

You can do the same. When your mind says, “Everything is going wrong,” you don’t have to argue for an hour. Pause and look at the thought.

Is everything going wrong? Or are two parts of your life difficult right now?

That question gives you perspective.

Pain finally forced me to change

I believe change often comes from pain.

If your job is okay, you can stay there for years. You’re not happy, but you can deal with it. If a relationship isn’t good but also isn’t terrible, you keep postponing the decision. You tell yourself it will probably get better.

That middle position is dangerous because you can tolerate it.

But sometimes several things come together. You experience a loss, your relationship ends, work becomes unbearable, or you get fired. The pain becomes too large to ignore, and it forces you to move.

That’s what happened to me. Everything came together, and I reached a point where I felt I had nothing to lose. I thought, Screw everything. I’m going to quit my job, move back in with my parents, and rebuild myself from the beginning.

Subscribe now

And that’s what I did.

Observing your thoughts doesn’t mean you become passive. Sometimes you notice that the same thought keeps returning because you refuse to deal with a real problem.

The skill is knowing the difference between a useless loop and a message that requires action.

“What if I ruin my career?” kept me frozen. “This job and life no longer work for me” helped me make a decision.

One created more fear; The other gave me a direction.

How do you create distance from your thoughts?

Understanding this idea helps, but you need to practice it. I use a few different ways to maintain that distance.

Write down what’s in your mind

Journaling has been one of my most useful practices because a thought changes when you put it on paper. You can see what you’re saying instead of hearing the same sentence repeat in your head.

Write the thought exactly as it appears. Then ask:

• Is this true?

• Is it within my control?

• Does it require action?

• What’s the next thing I can do?

You’ll often notice that the thought is vague. “My career is going nowhere” feels enormous. “I need to have a conversation with my manager” gives you something concrete to do.

Practice awareness during ordinary moments

Mindfulness doesn’t have to mean sitting cross-legged for an hour. You can practice while walking, working, eating, or talking to someone.

Notice when your attention leaves the present. Then return to what’s in front of you. Feel your feet while you walk. Listen to the person who is talking. Read the sentence on the screen instead of thinking about tomorrow.

The practice is the return. You will drift again. Fine. Notice it and return again.

Use meditation if it works for you

Meditation is one way to train awareness, but it isn’t the only way. I’ve tried it during different periods of my life, and it hasn’t always worked well for me.

Maybe you benefit from ten minutes of sitting quietly. Maybe you get the same distance through journaling, exercise, a long walk, or simply doing one thing without your phone.

Use the practice that helps you observe without getting pulled into every thought.

Act when the thought points to reality

You can’t journal your way out of every problem. If you’re in the wrong job, relationship, or environment, awareness should eventually lead to a decision.

Don’t use mindfulness to tolerate a life you know you need to change.

First observe, then decide, then act.

You never fully master your mind

It’s now about 11 and a half years since that period in 2015. I’ve spent those years writing about practical philosophy, thinking, mindfulness, and Stoicism. And I still don’t feel like I’ve mastered my mind.

I don’t think there will ever be a point when the training is finished.

Your mind keeps playing tricks on you. It pulls you toward fear, regret, distraction, and chaos. When you stop paying attention, you slowly lose the distance you worked to create.

The same thing happens with your health. You can be in excellent shape, but if you stop moving and stop watching what you eat, your condition changes. You don’t get to keep fitness forever because you trained hard ten years ago.

Mental awareness works the same way. If you stop journaling, reflecting, or practicing mindfulness, you become more likely to get lost in your thoughts again. You forget that you’re observing the mind and start believing the illusion that every thought is you.

So keep training. The next time your mind starts another chain of what ifs, don’t try to answer every question. Notice what’s happening and ask whether the thought is useful.

If it points to an action, take it. If it only pulls you further away from reality, come back to the life in front of you.

You will have to do that for the rest of your life.

And that’s fine.

All the best.

-Darius

My new course, AI Pro, is out now.

Learn how much time you can save with AI

You don’t have eight equally useful hours in a workday. Nobody does.

But most people plan as if they do. They make a list, look for an empty space on the calendar, and put the work there. If the morning fills up with email and meetings, the important task moves to the afternoon. If the afternoon gets busy, it moves to the evening.

Then they sit down at the worst possible time and wonder why the work feels so hard.

I think this is one of the biggest mistakes we make in personal productivity. We pay too much attention to time and not enough attention to the quality of our energy during that time.

Right now, I do my best work in the morning. That fits my current life and responsibilities. I use the later part of the day for routine work and then I recover.

But I haven’t always worked this way. I’ve also had periods when my best work happened in the late afternoon, evening, or even at night. During those periods, I started the day with admin, exercise, or lower-intensity work and saved the difficult work for later.

So I don’t believe everyone should wake up at 5 AM and do their most important work before breakfast. That advice sounds good on social media, but it ignores how people actually live.

You have classes, working hours, meetings, children, exercise, relationships, and a body that doesn’t produce the same level of energy all day. Sometimes you can adapt your responsibilities to your rhythm. Sometimes you need to adapt your rhythm to your responsibilities.

Either way, you need to understand the three windows that shape your day:

• Your peak

• Your trough

• Your recovery

If you don’t get the match right, you’ll always feel like you’re forcing yourself. You’ll feel behind even when you have enough time because you keep using the wrong type of energy for the work in front of you.

And there’s another problem: Many people give the best hour of their day to everybody else.

They use it for email, Slack, meetings, or work that could easily wait. Then they give their own book, business, studies, health, or future the exhausted leftovers.

If that’s you, I want you to change it.

In the rest of this guide, I’ll show you how to identify your peak, trough, and recovery windows, match different types of work to each one, fit the cycle around a job or class schedule, and protect at least one of your best hours for your own future.

If you haven’t upgraded yet, become a paid member to unlock the full guide and the complete Wise & Wealthy Academy archive.

Read more

A reader recently asked me this to write about balance:

“I’d like to read your takes on how to balance the tendency of slow living or the one-thing-at-a-time approach to life and staying current in the fast-paced world.

Moreover, how to balance honoring decisions to slow down and also not fall into irrelevance, especially when you’re pursuing professional goals or passion projects you’d like to flourish.”

I had a similar conversation with a friend who runs his own business. He told me, “Man, I’m so inconsistent.”

He kept feeling that he should do more.

His wife finally asked him to stop for a moment and look at his results so far this year. When he checked, he realized he was outperforming last year on all of his goals and targets.

So why did he still feel behind?

His perception had little connection to his actual progress. And I recognize this pattern in my own work too.

When you’re ambitious, your mind keeps moving the finish line.

Even when things are going well, you still hear the same thought: I should be doing more.

You can’t be in go time all the time

Most ambitious people have this false belief that they should always be in go time.

They want to be fit, social, have a good romantic relationship, spend time on their hobbies, see their friends, learn new skills, travel, and do well at work.

When I list all of this, it sounds ridiculous. How can one person push hard in every area of life, every single day?

You can’t.

Your energy level is never the same all the time. Sometimes you have a great run and get a lot done. And sometimes you feel tired for a week or two, even when you’re sleeping enough.

I think that’s normal. Life has a natural rhythm, and I don’t expect my body and mind to perform at the same level every day.

But ambitious people often interpret a drop in energy as a problem. We immediately start looking for a way to fix ourselves because we want to get back to go time.

What’s the difference between quiet focus time and go time?

Go time is when you push. You execute ideas, meet people, travel, train hard, learn new skills, take on projects, and move things forward. Your energy goes outward.

Quiet focus time is when you slow down and narrow your attention. You read, think, write, plan, recover, or work on one important thing without trying to do ten other things at the same time.

You need both modes. And the balance between them keeps changing.

Some weeks call for more action.

You have a deadline, launch, trip, or important goal, so you go all in. Other weeks are naturally slower. You spend more time thinking, recovering, or quietly working on what matters.

A good year has both. A good life does too.

Seneca wrote about quiet focus in Letter 56. He was staying above a noisy bathhouse when he wrote:

“For I force my mind to concentrate, and keep it from straying to things outside itself.”

The outside world doesn’t determine whether your mind is quiet. You still have to protect your attention.

Stop trying to manufacture the same energy every day

When ambitious people feel their energy drop, they often try to manufacture more of it.

They rely on caffeine, supplements, stimulants, or a new routine because they want to be extremely productive every day.

I understand the urge. If you can force yourself to feel energetic, you can keep doing everything on your list.

But I don’t think that’s a good long-term strategy. You can override tiredness for a while, but eventually you pay for it. I don’t want to use up my body just so I can feel productive every day.

So I try to go with my natural flow.

• If my energy is high, I use it.

• If it’s lower, I keep moving but reduce the intensity.

• I don’t turn every slower period into a personal crisis.

That last part is important. A quiet week doesn’t mean you’re becoming lazy or irrelevant. It may simply mean your body and mind need a different pace for a while.

Subscribe now

Recovery is the name of the game

My friend asked me something else: “What about recovery? Mine isn’t very good on a daily basis.”

I think recovery has two parts: Physical and mental.

You need both, and they work best when you build them into everyday life.

For physical recovery, I keep it simple:

• Walk. Walking gets the body moving without adding more strain. And it often clears my mind at the same time.

• Stretch and use a massage gun. I have a small Hyperice Go massage gun that I take with me everywhere. I use it on my hips, calves, legs, and the bottoms of my feet, especially when I’ve walked a lot.

• Use the sauna. I do this a few times a week. It helps me physically, but it also gives me time to sit quietly.

• Protect your sleep. Sleep is the foundation. The other things can help, but they can’t compensate for a routine of poor sleep.

Mental recovery is less visible. You need some downtime every day, even if it’s only 10 or 15 minutes. Journal, read, think, or simply be alone without filling the silence.

Sometimes you can combine physical and mental recovery. The sauna does that for me. Walking can do the same because your body is moving while your mind gets a break.

And you need to plan these moments. If your work is demanding, your social life is busy, or you have kids, it’s easy to wake up and move from one thing to the next until late at night. By the time you get into bed, you’re so tired that you watch TV for ten minutes and fall asleep.

That’s a full day, but there was no real recovery in it.

So put recovery into the day. Take a short walk between work blocks, sit alone for 10 minutes before the evening starts, journal before you turn on the TV, or schedule the sauna a few times a week.

Daily recovery helps you return to go time with real energy instead of forcing yourself through another day.

How do you keep perspective when you feel inconsistent?

The first thing is to stop judging your progress by how productive you feel today.

Feelings change quickly. Results become clear over a longer period.

Here are a few practical ways to do that.

1. Check the evidence before you criticize yourself. Look at the last month, quarter, or year. Are you moving toward your goals? Are your skills, health, relationships, or business improving? My friend felt inconsistent, but his numbers told a different story. Your feelings don’t always give you an accurate picture of your progress.

2. Set a minimum for slower days. You don’t need to quit working because your energy is lower. Pick the one or two things that keep your life moving and do those. This could be one focused work block, some exercise, or taking care of an important responsibility. Then let that be enough for the day.

3. Plan your life in waves. When you know a busy period is coming, make room for it. And when that period ends, give yourself a quieter stretch. You can use time blocking for your week, but you can also think in terms of months and seasons.

The conversation with my friend was really about perspective. His results were improving, while his mind kept telling him he was behind.

And I think many ambitious people live with that same feeling.

They keep pushing because slowing down feels like losing ground. But when you zoom out, you often realize that you’re doing better than you think.

Isn’t that weird? Your mind just keeps you busy.

The truth is that you don’t need to feel productive every day to make progress.

Sometimes the quiet period is exactly what makes the next go period possible.

Most of what people do all day falls into one of two boxes.

Box one is money: Your income, savings, the next promotion, or the bigger client.

Box two is pleasure and status: How you look, who likes you, where you ate, what you posted, or who saw it.

There’s nothing wrong with those things. Money matters. And pleasure makes life enjoyable. But if those are the only two scoreboards you use, your sense of self-worth will always depend on something outside of you.

Marcus Aurelius reminded himself of this:

“Find joy in simplicity, self-respect, and indifference to what lies between virtue and vice.”

Finding joy in simplicity makes sense. And we all know what he meant by not getting worked up about things that are neither good nor bad.

But find joy in self-respect is the part I keep thinking about.

What makes you respect yourself?

In my experience, it’s the way you live. It’s the things you do every day that strengthen your character. Most of them look ordinary. And nobody will congratulate you for them.

But when you look in the mirror, you know.

Here are nine things I take pride in. Whether they make me look successful is irrelevant. They help me respect the person I see.

1. Move your body every day

I take pride in moving my body every day. It doesn’t always have to be a hard workout.

It can be a long walk, a gym session, or a ten-minute run. My rule is simple: I do something every day unless I’m sick.

And when I do get sick, I recover. Then I start again as soon as I feel better. That first workout after being out for a few days always feels good because I’m back to being myself.

Daily exercise gives you more than physical benefits. Every time you do it, you prove that you can keep a promise to yourself.

2. Give people your full attention

When I’m talking to someone, I want to be there.

That means making eye contact, listening, putting my phone away, and not checking a notification in the middle of a conversation.

And this applies everywhere. At work, with a friend, with your spouse, or while you’re playing with your kid. When you’re doing something with another person, be engaged.

People can feel when your mind is somewhere else. They can also feel when you’re truly present. I take pride in giving people that feeling.

3. Keep feeding your curiosity

Never stop learning.

Read a book because you’re curious. Learn about history, business, psychology, philosophy, technology, or something that has no connection to your career at all.

I like following my curiosity wherever it goes. It keeps my life interesting. And I think it keeps you young too. You continue looking at the world with the same curiosity you had as a child.

The moment you decide you already know enough, life becomes smaller. There’s always something else to understand.

4. Live with discipline

This is a big one for me because discipline shows up in every area of your life.

Your diet, work, health, habits, and the way you use your personal time all show whether you do what you said you would do.

You don’t need to be perfect. Nobody is. But when you keep making excuses, you slowly lose trust in yourself.

And when you’re disciplined, you can look in the mirror and see someone who follows through. That’s one of the strongest forms of self-respect.

5. Be a person of your word

My word is my bond.

If I say I’ll do something, I do it. If I say I’ll be somewhere, I show up. And if circumstances change, I communicate instead of disappearing.

Keeping your word sounds basic. But a lot of people say things they don’t mean. They agree because it’s easier in the moment and then find an excuse later.

Over time, keeping your word builds a good reputation. More importantly, you know that people can count on you.

Subscribe now

6. Don’t let people walk over you

My default is to be nice. I like being respectful and treating people well.

But when someone tries to take advantage of me, screw me, or cross one of my values, I become very serious. I’m a pit bull and I show my teeth.

I take pride in that. I know who I am, what I stand for, and where my lines are. And I don’t let people walk over those lines.

You don’t need to look for conflict. Most situations are better when everyone stays calm and reasonable. But being nice doesn’t require you to accept bad behavior.

7. Show up for the people you love

Your character shows when being there is inconvenient.

Maybe a friend is struggling and keeps talking about the same problem, a family member needs your time when you’re tired, or your spouse needs you to listen while your mind is still at work.

You don’t always need to solve anything. Often, you only need to be there, listen, and make the other person feel that they’re not alone.

People remember who showed up during the difficult periods of their lives. I want to be that person.

8. Keep going when things get hard

I don’t quit simply because something becomes difficult.

Every worthwhile path has periods when the work is boring, uncertain, or painful. If you leave every time that happens, you’ll never stay with anything long enough to become good at it.

Of course, sometimes stopping is the right decision. I’ve done that too. But I don’t make that decision only because a moment feels hard.

Stay long enough to understand whether the path is wrong or the work has simply entered a difficult phase.

9. Take the risks that feel right

I’ve moved abroad, started businesses, and ended relationships and jobs. I’ve started things because they felt right, and I’ve ended them because that felt like the right thing to do.

Those decisions came with uncertainty. But when I look back, they’re also the decisions I’m most proud of.

When you take a thoughtful risk, you act because you know what you want to do, even though nobody can guarantee the outcome.

Not every risk will work out. But at least you gave yourself the chance to find out.

When you look back, what will make you proud?

I think this is the most important scorecard of your life.

When you look back, are you proud of the things you did?

Are you happy with the decisions you made?

Or do you see a long list of things you wanted to do but kept postponing because you were afraid?

I think our biggest regrets usually come from the things we were too afraid to do: the conversation we avoided, the risk we never took, or the life we kept putting off.

And if you keep doing things that strengthen your character, it all adds up. You become someone who is engaged, curious, disciplined, reliable, strong, and willing to act.

Marcus Aurelius was right. You find joy in self-respect because you earn it through the way you live.

Do that long enough, and it adds up to a life you don’t regret.

Fear of investing is not always irrational.

I bought my first stocks in 2007. I still remember how nervous I felt when I placed the order. Then the financial crisis arrived and I lost around 60% of the money I had invested.

So when someone says, “Just start investing,” I understand why that advice doesn’t feel very helpful.

Investing is scary.

Prices move every day, the future is uncertain, and you can lose money. You should respect that.

But fear can also keep you waiting forever. You tell yourself you’ll start when you have more money, when the market looks safer, or when you finally understand everything.

That moment never comes. The goal is not to eliminate fear. The goal is to understand what the fear is telling you and build a system that prevents emotion from making your decisions.

Sometimes fear is a useful warning. Maybe you’re investing money you might need soon. Maybe you’re buying something you don’t understand. Or maybe the position is simply too large.

Those are problems you can address.

But normal uncertainty can never be fixed. No amount of research will tell you exactly what the market will do next year. At some point, you need to accept that uncertainty is part of building wealth.

In the rest of this guide, I’ll show you how to separate cash from investment money, choose a strategy you can stick with, and start without taking more risk than you can handle.

I also talk about my own approach in the accompanying video. If you haven’t upgraded yet, become a paid member to unlock the full guide, the video, and the complete Wise & Wealthy Academy archive.

Read more

When it comes to work, I’m not always that productive.

I have times when time seems to stop and I’m fully fully focused, completing one thing after the other.

During these times, it’s also easy for me to write. The words just magically flow out of my fingers on the keyboard and show up on the screen. Everything is effortless.

But I also experience times when everything is flipped.

I’m slow, all over the place, and the worst thing… writing feels like a struggle. I have to squeeze out the words. And I don’t experience much joy because of the resistance.

These phases of work are normal. We all experience them.

The question is: How do you deal with long stretches when your work is taking a toll on you?

Because if you don’t watch it you burn out.

Burned-out people push hard for months or years and then hit a wall so hard they can’t get back up.

I’ve done this too.

Let me share with you how to avoid burning out.

The week my body made the decision for me

A few years into writing seriously, I was putting in long days. Write for hours, then switch to course work, then back to writing.

The output was good, and I had a lot of momentum. So I kept pushing.

Then one morning I woke up with a headache that didn’t leave for four days. I was tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix. My brain felt like a wet towel.

I sat down to write and produced almost nothing. I’d look at a sentence and not know how to finish it. I tried to outline and the ideas wouldn’t come.

I was still “working,” in the sense that I was at my desk. But the real work was gone.

I took the rest of that week off. It took another week before I felt like myself again.

Two weeks of lost output because I didn’t take a day off when I needed one. That’s the math nobody tells you about.

The point beyond which quality drops

Paul Graham has this popular essay called How to Work Hard. Most people quote the parts about effort and ambition. This has stayed with me:

“You can’t solve this problem by simply working every waking hour, because in many kinds of work there’s a point beyond which the quality of the result will start to decline.”

He says his personal limit for deep writing or programming is five hours a day.

Beyond that, quality drops. And if you think grinding past your limit is admirable, he says to get that idea out of your head.

You’re just showing off to yourself.

That’s so true. I’d spent years thinking more hours meant more output. It doesn’t. It means worse output, followed by a crash.

Work is sprinting, not a marathon

Here’s the mental model most people carry: Work is a marathon. You pace yourself. You stay consistent. You keep going.

That model is wrong in one specific way.

Deep, focused work is not a marathon. It’s a series of sprints. And sprints require recovery. A sprinter who runs flat out for 200 meters doesn’t immediately run another 200. They recover first. Their muscles rebuild. Then they sprint again.

Knowledge work is the same.

Your brain is not a machine that produces the same output every hour. It’s a biological system with limits. Push it past those limits and it produces worse work.

Push it past that and it stops producing at all.

Seneca understood this about the mind long before anyone ran a study on it. He said this 2000 years ago:

“Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after a rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmland, as uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers.”

The rest is not wasted time. The rest is what makes the next session possible.

Subscribe now

10 lessons on longevity

You might read this and think, “maybe I should work less.” But that’s not really what I’m saying.

The idea is that, if you want to avoid burn-out, work in a way that doesn’t require you to quit in two years.

Here are some practical things to keep in mind.

1. Know your daily limit. Track what happens to the quality of your work after three hours of deep focus. After four. After five. You’ll find a point where it drops. That’s your limit. Work up to it. Stop before you cross it every single day.

2. Protect sleep like a deadline. Sleep is not optional recovery. It’s the primary recovery. One bad night is manageable. A pattern of five-hour nights for weeks is how you end up with headaches that don’t leave and output that doesn’t come.

3. Move your body every day. When your brain is spent, physical movement restores something that sitting at a desk cannot. Walking, lifting, swimming — anything. This is not advice about health. It’s advice about output. Movement is recovery for knowledge workers.

4. Take one full day off per week. Not a day where you half-work. A day where the laptop stays closed. One day off per week is how you show up fully for six. Skip it for a month and you’ll feel the deficit.

5. Stay hydrated and eat real food. Dehydration kills focus faster than almost anything else. Before you diagnose yourself as uninspired or blocked, drink two glasses of water and eat something real. A surprising amount of mental fog is just a body that hasn’t been maintained.

6. Balance deep work with lighter work. Not every hour needs to be your hardest. Schedule your most demanding work for when you’re sharpest — usually the first few hours. Save lighter tasks for when the energy dips. Meaningful productivity is not about maximum effort every hour. It’s about the right effort at the right time.

7. Take strategic breaks inside the workday. A ten-minute walk. Eyes closed for a few minutes. A break from the screen. These are not distractions. They’re part of the work cycle. The brain needs micro-recovery even within a single session.

8. Watch for the early warning signs. The first sign you’re crossing your limit is usually subtle. Slower thinking. Less patience. The feeling that everything is slightly harder than it should be. When you notice that, stop. Don’t push through it. The push-through instinct is what turns a recoverable dip into a multi-week crash.

9. Take vacations before you need them. Most people take a break only after they’ve already burned out. That’s like drinking water only after you’re dehydrated. Schedule proper breaks proactively, before the crash.

10. Balance long-term and short-term goals. The projects with a deadline next week and the projects that matter in five years need different energy and different attention. If all your capacity goes to urgent work, the important work never happens. Schedule both deliberately. Don’t let one consume the other.

The goal is decades, not weeks

The people who do good work for a long time are not the ones who grind until they break and then restart. They’re the ones who figured out how to work hard without that cycle.

They treat their capacity as something to maintain, not consume.

That mindset shift changes everything.

You stop treating it as guilt and start treating it as fuel. You stop admiring people who sleep four hours and start noticing they disappear every few years. You stop measuring yourself in hours and start measuring yourself in output over decades.

Don’t waste years recovering from months you didn’t have to break yourself in.

Work hard. Protect the capacity. And above all, keep going!

I get it. That’s how most of us started using AI, and then we just kept going. But you can’t properly search a chat box or easily find something you worked on three weeks ago.

You have to remember where everything is, while the AI itself forgets your work the second you close the tab.

We’re using brand-new technology in an old-fashioned way.

I learned this the hard way. A while back, one of my main tools added a 5-hour usage limit, the same cap Claude already had. I had to scramble, move everything over, and rebuild my entire workflow from scratch.

That doesn’t happen to me anymore. I stopped looking for the “right” model (there isn’t one) and built a system that doesn’t depend on any single one.

In this episode, I show you that system: Where your work should live, how to connect it to every model at the same time, and how to switch between models without rebuilding your setup.

Then I look at the latest flip in the “software is dead” story. Software stocks went up more than 50% in six weeks.

I look at why that happened and compare the story with the actual numbers on jobs, layoffs, and openings.

I talk about all of that, and more, in today’s episode.

Enjoy!

-Darius

P.S. I also edited this episode with AI for the first time. My video editor now connects directly to Claude and ChatGPT, and I used Claude to cut this one.

I gave it one prompt and then one more to fine-tune the edit. This normally takes me 30 to 40 minutes. This time, it was done in a few minutes.

Read more

It’s easy to turn something you enjoy into a scoreboard.

A lot of people start writing because they love to read and share their ideas. And then they start focusing on views. They start thinking, “What should I do to earn more money?”

That’s how many writers end up as podcasters or YouTubers. And after a while, they find themselves burnt out because they didn’t sign up for becoming a glorified views-chaser.

Many of us fall for this trap.

• You start a business because you want freedom. Then revenue becomes the only measure of a good month.

• You exercise because you like feeling strong. Then every workout becomes a judgment of your body.

The activity stays the same. Your relationship with it changes.

The philosopher Alan Watts spent much of his career explaining Eastern philosophy to Western audiences. One of his most useful ideas was that life is closer to play than to a journey with one final destination.

“This is the real secret of life: to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”

Watts wasn’t telling people to stop caring. He was showing us how easily seriousness turns into strain.

Winning can ruin a good game

A game needs rules, effort, and uncertainty. Without those things, there is nothing to play.

The trouble starts when winning becomes the only acceptable outcome. You stop enjoying the work, noticing what you’re learning, or appreciating the people around you. Everything becomes a means to the next result.

I recognize this pattern in my work too.

There is always another task, another target, and another idea to complete. If I’m not careful, I start telling myself that I can relax when everything is finished.

But everything is never finished.

You just keep going. And that’s okay. What’s the point of retiring and sitting on a beach, waiting until you die? There’s no fun and meaning in that. Everyone knows that.

It’s important to keep reminding yourself there’s no future moment of relief.

Subscribe now

A game can have real stakes

Saying that life is a game can sound dismissive. Think of the serious things in life.

A breakup can be devastating. Parenting comes with serious responsibility. A business problem can affect employees and families.

Calling life a game does not erase consequences, of course.

It changes your mindset toward them.

You still prepare, work, protect people, and deal with what goes wrong. But you remember that your current role is not your entire identity, one loss is not the end of your life, and no score can tell you what you are worth.

Detachment is not indifference, though.

An athlete can care deeply about the match without believing that a loss makes life meaningless. A writer can want an article to succeed without allowing the numbers to decide whether the work was worthwhile. A parent can take responsibility without trying to control every outcome.

Play gives you enough distance to respond instead of merely react.

Stop living for the final chord

Watts often used music to explain this idea:

“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, which had a serious purpose at the end. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing and to dance while the music was being played.”

A song is not successful because it reaches the final note quickly. If that were the goal, the best song would be one loud chord.

The music matters because of what happens between the beginning and the end.

Life is the same.

You need goals because they give the game direction. But accomplishing the goal is not the purpose.

If you spend ten years resenting the work required to reach a milestone, the milestone cannot return those years to you.

The question is not only, “Am I making progress?” It is also, “Do I want to live this way while I make progress?”

Play hard without clenching

Here’s how I apply this idea:

• Name the game. Are you playing for money, status, approval, mastery, service, or curiosity? A game becomes dangerous when you don’t know which one you’re in.

• Choose your rules deliberately. Many rules are inherited. You don’t have to pursue the largest company, the highest income, or the most visible life.

• Care about the process. Results matter, but they arrive irregularly. The process is where you spend your days.

• Keep your identity larger than the score. You can lose money, miss a goal, or publish something that fails without becoming a failure.

• Know when to stop playing. Some games no longer fit your values. Leaving them is not always quitting. Sometimes it is good judgment.

I’ve written before about why you shouldn’t take life too seriously.

I believe that we should work hard without turning every outcome into a personal crisis.

You can care deeply and still hold the result lightly.

That’s the balance Watts was pointing toward.

Be fully engaged in the work, the relationship, the conversation, or the challenge in front of you. Play well.

Try to win.

Just remember that winning was never the only reason to play.

Recently, one of the younger employees at our family business asked me for career advice.

He had just graduated in business administration and asked, “What did you do after university?”

I told him I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time. But looking back, I’m glad I made the decisions I made. In my case, I made them out of necessity.

This was in 2010 and 2011, when the economy was still dealing with the aftermath of the financial crisis. Nearly all of my peers wanted a traineeship or a job at a large company. And I mean all of them.

But traineeships were scarce, and many companies had stopped hiring. Only a handful of people I knew got the positions they wanted. The rest took whatever was available, often in government or administrative work.

I took a different gamble and started a business with my dad.

I had studied business administration and imagined working in finance or at a large multinational. Instead, I barely got paid and spent much of my time doing tedious work in a cold warehouse, surrounded by industrial machines, dirt, and people who were much older than me.

It wasn’t the career I had pictured.

But we couldn’t afford to hire people. So I learned bookkeeping, built a website, did sales, managed customer relationships, handled procurement and shipping, and learned about tax rules.

I also took on real responsibility. When I made a mistake, nobody quietly fixed it for me. We dealt with the consequences ourselves.

After three years, I had experience across almost every part of a business. I used it to get a good job at Gartner, the IT research firm, in 2014.

During my recent conversation with our employee, we looked up a few of my former classmates on LinkedIn. More than a decade later, some were still doing pretty much the same work.

What is the experience paradox?

You can’t get a good job because you don’t have experience. But you can’t get experience because nobody will give you the job.

So when you’re starting or switching your career, your main goal is not maximizing your salary. You want to maximize your experience:

• Skills you can use in more than one job or industry

• Responsibility that forces you to grow

• Relationships with people you can learn from

• Proof that you can create results

This often means accepting lower pay, longer hours, or worse work-life balance for a few years. You shouldn’t live that way forever. But sacrificing some comfort early can change the rest of your career.

Many people do the opposite. They take the comfortable job and coast while things are going well. Then their work becomes unbearable, the industry changes, or their role becomes redundant.

Only then do they start learning new skills, contacting old connections, or building something on the side. By that point, the new thing needs to work immediately. And useful skills, reputations, relationships, and income streams rarely appear on demand.

That’s what I mean by building when you don’t have to.

You build skills while your job is stable. You create proof while you have an income. You maintain relationships before you need help. And you test new directions before you’re desperate for one of them to work.

The best career decisions often look inefficient in the short term. But they can give you something much more valuable later: Options.

In the rest of this guide, I’ll show you how to build those options without turning every evening into another full-time job.

If you haven’t upgraded yet, become a paid member to unlock the full guide and the complete Wise & Wealthy Academy archive.

Read more