I’m convinced that AI will not destroy our need for personal connection, humanity, stories, and expression.

The reason I’m so convinced of that is because of one word.

Culture.

When people talk about AI, they underestimate the power of culture.

As in common values and thinking. The slow, invisible force that decides what actually sticks in our lives and what doesn’t.

Here’s what most people miss. When something new arrives, it has to pass through culture before it changes anything. And culture moves slowly.

How things actually become normal

Think about how any new thing spreads. Early adopters run with it first. But it’s not mainstream yet. And as long as it’s not mainstream, we don’t know its real cultural effect.

This is what researchers call the diffusion of innovations. New ideas move from a small group of experimenters to the general population along a predictable S-curve.

Slow start, steep climb, then a plateau once something is fully absorbed into everyday life.

Take the five-day work week. We treat it like it’s always existed. It hasn’t. Henry Ford announced the plan in 1922 and implemented it in 1926.

Before that, working six days for sixty hours was normal. It took decades to go from a radical idea to something we now consider untouchable.

Social media did the same. It started as a way to connect with people you actually knew. Then it slowly reshaped how we talk, date, argue, shop, and see ourselves. Nobody decided this. It seeped into culture over years.

Or look at alcohol. For a long time, going out and drinking was how young people bonded. Now coffee shops and gyms are booming.

Sober is becoming normal. A whole fitness culture has exploded, creating new brands and a wave of multimillionaires selling supplements, clothes, and a healthier way to live.

None of these shifts happened overnight. Slowly, then all at once.

AI is going through this right now

We’ve had AI in our hands for about four years. The culture around it is just starting to take shape.

This kind of shift takes five to ten years before there’s a settled public opinion. We’re in the messy middle.

What I’m seeing is a lot of resistance. People push back hard on the idea that AI can replace human beings. And I understand why. The word itself, artificial intelligence, makes people uneasy.

AI knows everything that has ever been recorded. But it’s backward-looking, not forward-looking.

It remixes what already exists. It’s the perfect DJ. The perfect remixer. But it doesn’t create new genres. It doesn’t invent new forms of art.

That distinction matters more than people realize.

What I’ve learned from using AI intensively

In recent weeks I’ve been automating work that used to require a three-person team.

Scheduling, repurposing, proofreading, references, visuals, headlines. Most of the production work is now handled.

The only thing I actually do is write the article.

But here’s the key. The content you’re reading is still me. These are my ideas, my thinking, my experience. AI helps make it presentable. That part can be automated. The thinking cannot.

I see the same thing in my family business, a traditional company that sells industrial laundry equipment. We’re automating:

• Invoicing and bookkeeping

• Parts of the sales process

• Note-taking and follow-ups

All the annoying parts of work. The parts nobody actually wanted to do.

AI is getting good at taking over the work we never wanted in the first place. That’s what everybody wanted all along.

The economy is shifting from need to want

When everyone has access to the same tools, competence stops being special. It becomes the baseline. If everyone can write a clean email, design a graphic, or ship a product with AI, those things no longer set you apart.

So what’s left?

You.

Your name. Your reputation. Your taste. Your perspective. The reason someone chooses you over everything else that’s out there.

It’s no longer a matter of whether we can replace someone. We can.

The real question is: Do we want to replace a person?

That’s what a personal brand answers. It’s not about being famous. It’s about being wanted.

When you have a strong personal brand, people don’t just need the work done. They want you to be the one who does it.

In a world where anyone can do anything, being wanted is the only real security left.

Build your brand. Share your thinking. Put your name on your work. Let people see the real human behind it.

Because the tools are now available to everyone. You are the only thing that can’t be copied.

Build your own brand in one weekend

If you don’t have a personal brand yet, or you started one that’s been sitting half-finished, consider joining my course, Launch in 48.

It’s my cohort-based course where you build and launch your brand in one weekend.

This year’s cohort comes with 14 video lessons, a live workshop on July 1, and free access to Darius 2, my AI assistant trained on all my private frameworks.

The cohort runs once a year. Registration closes June 30.

If you have any questions, let me know!

-Darius

I’ve been writing online since 2015.

I never had a huge viral moment. No post that broke the internet. No overnight explosion.

I still built a large audience.

I’m telling you this because most people carry the wrong model in their head. They think an audience gets built in one big moment. One viral video. One post that takes off. One lucky break that changes everything.

So they wait for it. They publish something, watch it get fourteen likes, and decide they failed. Then they quit.

I almost did the same thing.

My first years were quiet

Like everybody else who starts writing online, I started with 0 followers and subscribers.

I published an article every week anyway. Some weeks the numbers were close to zero.

I’d watch other writers post something that exploded and pull tens of thousands of views in a day. I had nothing close to that.

I’ll be honest. I wanted the viral hit. I studied the posts that blew up and tried to reverse-engineer them. It never worked. The harder I chased the spike, the worse my writing got, because I was writing for an algorithm instead of a person.

So I stopped chasing it. I made one decision instead.

I’d publish every single week, no matter what. Good week or bad week. Big numbers or single digits.

That decision is the whole story. There’s no secret beyond it.

Virality is a spike. An audience is a slope.

Here’s what most people miss.

A viral post is a spike. It shoots up, then it falls back down just as fast. Most of those readers never return. They saw one thing and moved on. A spike feels amazing and changes almost nothing.

An audience is different. An audience is a slope. You build it one reader at a time, slowly, by showing up as the same person over and over.

Psychologists even have a name for why this works. It’s called the mere-exposure effect.

The more often someone runs into something, the more they trust it and like it. You don’t earn trust with one brilliant post. You earn it by being there again and again, until a stranger turns into a regular reader.

That’s why consistency beats virality. A viral hit gets you seen once. Consistency gets you remembered.

Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who was born a slave and later taught a generation of Romans, understood this two thousand years ago. He said:

An audience is a great thing. It doesn’t get created suddenly. You build it one week at a time.

How to build an audience without going viral

If you’re starting from zero, here’s exactly what I’d do.

1. Pick one publishing schedule and never miss it. Weekly is enough. The schedule matters more than the size of each piece. Your readers need to know you’ll show up. Reliability is the product.

2. Write for one person, not the algorithm. Picture a single real reader with a real problem. Write to help that one person. Posts built to go viral feel hollow. Posts built to help someone get shared, because they actually helped.

3. Go where your readers already are. Don’t sit in your corner of the internet waiting to be found. Publish where the audience already gathers. Building your own audience from scratch takes years. Borrowing an existing one is faster.

4. Get better in public. My early articles were not that great. I improved because I kept shipping and kept studying how to write articles people actually want to read. You don’t get better in private and then launch. You get better by publishing.

5. Measure in years, not days. A single post tells you almost nothing. Judge your progress over twelve months, not twelve hours. The daily numbers are noise. The yearly trend is the signal.

The boring truth

People always want the audience-building hack. There isn’t one.

I built an audience of 100,000+ by writing one article a week and refusing to quit when it was slow. That’s it. That’s the entire method.

It’s boring. It’s also the only thing that reliably works.

You don’t need to go viral. You need to go again. And then again. And then again.

Start this week. Then publish the next one anyway.

The hardest week is the first one

Everything I described above only starts working once your platform actually exists. A page with your name on it, a way to collect emails, and your first piece published. That first week is the one most people never finish.

That’s why I built Launch in 48.

The course gives you a simple framework to get everything live in one focused weekend: your brand, your page, your freebie, your welcome email.

I just updated it with new lessons on growing your brand and making your first income, plus Darius 2, an AI trained on my private content that you can ask anything while you build.

The course is open until June 30. We kick off with a live workshop on July 1.

Join Launch in 48 here.

I’ll be honest. When I started this experiment, I expected it to fail.

I’ve tested a lot of AI tools over the past three years.

And every time someone claims you can “clone yourself with AI,” the result is the same. A chatbot that talks like a LinkedIn post.

Nothing like the actual person.

So my expectations were low.

But last month, I tried something different. Kajabi, the platform where I host all my course, just introduced a new feature where you can train an AI assistant on your own private data.

So I used my course materials. My frameworks. My lesson transcripts. Notes and answers I’ve written over ten years of teaching people how to build online businesses.

Stuff that ChatGPT and Claude have never seen. Because it’s not on the public internet.

Then I started asking it questions, expecting general advice. But it actually sounds like me. It doesn’t give generic advice. I asked Darius 2 and ChatGPT the same question. Here’s the result, side by side:

That’s my framework, my reasoning, my voice. It even pushes back the way I would.

I kept testing it. Harder questions. Specific situations. Edge cases from real students.

At some point I stopped testing whether it sounded like me and started using it as an actual assistant.

And that’s when the bigger insight hit me.

Generic AI advice is worth almost nothing now

Everyone has access to AI. You, me, your boss, your competitors, every 19-year-old with a laptop.

Which means that when you and a million other people ask ChatGPT the same question, you all get the same answer. There’s no edge in an answer anyone can pull up in four seconds.

And it’s getting worse. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge found that when AI models train on AI-generated content, the output degrades fast.

They call it model collapse. Feed the machine its own output, and everything drifts toward the same gray average.

That’s where generic content is headed. More sameness, faster.

So ask the better question: What does AI not have?

Your experience. Your judgment. Your taste. Your way of thinking. The years of mistakes behind every strong opinion you hold.

Your private knowledge. That’s the edge.

The biggest opportunity right now

Here’s the part most people miss.

My AI clone doesn’t sound like me because the technology is magic. It sounds like me because I spent a decade building a body of work to train it on.

Hundreds of articles. Premium courses. Frameworks with names. Answers to thousands of student questions.

If I had trained it on nothing, I would have gotten nothing back.

First the substance. Then the presentation.

AI is the best presentation tool ever invented. It formats, polishes, repurposes, and scales. What it can’t do is generate the substance.

That part is you.

This is why I keep saying your personal brand is your most valuable asset right now. AI is flooding the internet with content that all sounds the same.

The people who stand out are the ones with a recognizable voice and a body of work that’s actually theirs.

When you have that, AI stops being a threat and becomes leverage. You can train it on your knowledge. Scale yourself. Serve more people without working more hours.

But it only works if you’ve built something worth cloning first.

This is why I’m reopening Launch in 48

Launch in 48 is my course on building your personal brand from scratch in one weekend. It only opens once a year, and today is that day.

This year’s version is the biggest update since I created it. The course went from 8 to 14 lessons.

The six new lessons cover what happens after you launch: Turning your story into an advantage, using AI without sounding like AI, growing on Substack, creating your first offer, and building your monetization ladder.

And there’s one more thing.

The AI assistant I described above? I call it Darius 2. It’s trained on the complete course, my frameworks, and material I’ve never published.

Every student gets free access inside the course. Whenever you’re stuck, you ask, and you get an answer based on my actual thinking instead of generic AI advice.

We kick off with a live workshop on July 1 at 12 pm EST, on the business model behind monetizing a personal brand. There’s a replay if you can’t make it live.

Registration closes June 30. After that, the doors stay shut until next year.

Join Launch in 48 here: members.dariusforoux.com/launch-in-48

If you have any questions, just reply.

-Darius

Last week I was walking through town with my wife and our son in the stroller. We ran into a former high school classmate. We were both pleasantly surprised to see each other after so many years.

He looked at my wife and said: “He was always the cool guy in school.”

I laughed because it reminded me how much I cared about how I looked and what people thought of me back then.

For a sixteen-year-old, that’s probably normal. But at some point, you’ve got to stop living like that.

The thing is, most people don’t actually stop. They just trade one obsession for another.

From cool-obsessed to money-obsessed

When I was at university, a friend of my father, a very successful businessman, asked me what I wanted to do after graduation.

“Work at a bank,” I said, “and eventually become CEO.”

I wasn’t joking. I was always obsessed with finance and had been reading about CEO compensation at major banks. The numbers were insane, and I thought: That’s the goal!

I had no idea what that actually required. Decades of grinding. Office politics, luck, compromise.

I just saw the number and decided that was what success looked like. Looking back, I find that pretty embarrassing. But that’s where my head was.

So I did everything I thought would make me rich. I started a business with my dad.

When that didn’t generate the money I wanted, I tried the corporate route. I moved to London. I worked hard. I chased the career.

And I was miserable.

Why do we narrow in on money like that?

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, spent a lot of time thinking about why people lose their sense of purpose.

In his book The Will to Meaning, he described exactly what happens when money takes over:

“Once the will to money takes over, the pursuit of meaning is replaced by the pursuit of means. Money, instead of remaining a means, becomes an end. It ceases to serve a purpose.”

That’s it. That’s the trap. Money was always supposed to be a tool. But at some point, most people flip it.

The tool becomes the goal.

Frankl also noticed something about the kind of person this creates. He wrote:

“To those people who are anxious to have money as though it were an end in itself, “time is money.” They exhibit a need for speed.

To them, driving a fast car becomes an end in itself. This is a defense mechanism, an attempt to escape the confrontation with an existential vacuum.”

They rush through everything. Not because they need to, but because slowing down means confronting an emptiness they’ve been running from.

I recognized myself in that description.

It takes real work to become a person with depth. And I say that as someone who had to do that work myself. I wasn’t a reader. I didn’t journal. I didn’t reflect. I was, to be honest, a bit of a meathead.

In high school I wanted to be cool. At university I wanted to be rich. I was chasing external things my entire life without ever asking why.

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Becoming aware of my money obsession

When the corporate career fell apart and I moved back in with my parents, I hit a wall. I didn’t know what to do. So I turned to books.

Not self-help books, but real philosophy. Books that challenge your ideas and not necessarily tell you what to do.

The Stoics. Schopenhauer. Viktor Frankl. Will Durant. Then Eastern philosophy. Krishnamurti. Anthony de Mello.

Bhante Gunaratana’s Mindfulness in Plain English, written by a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk who has been meditating since he was twelve years old.

I read everything I could get my hands on, and something shifted in me. I became aware. That’s the only word for it.

I woke up to what I had been doing, and why, and where it was leading.

I gave up chasing money.

I started writing without any expectations, just because I loved ideas and wanted to think more clearly.

That decision changed the entire direction of my life.

What I actually learned

The Stoics didn’t tell me to want money less. They told me to look at where my wanting came from. And once you look at that honestly, the obsession loses its grip.

It stops feeling like ambition and starts feeling like fear wearing a suit.

One of the most profound and deepest ideas I’ve read comes from Epictetus. The following quote is from A Manual for Living:

Let me break that down, because there’s a lot in it.

1. Open your eyes: Most of us go through life following others without questioning it. We absorb the values of the culture around us and call them our own.

2. See things for what they really are: Look underneath the surface. What actually drives people. What they want underneath what they say they want. What you find, if you look honestly, is that a lot of what we chase is performance. We want to look successful more than we want to be successful.

3. Thereby sparing yourself the pain of false attachments and avoidable devastation: Once you see human nature clearly, you stop attaching yourself to things that can’t give you what you’re actually looking for. And you avoid a lot of pain that was completely avoidable.

What’s the biggest false attachment? That money will make you happy.

It won’t. Not on its own. Not above a certain point. And definitely not if it becomes the only thing you care about.

Money is not the enemy

I want to be clear about something. Wealth and money are not the same thing, and I’m not saying either one doesn’t matter.

Money buys freedom, options, and security. Pretending otherwise is just another way to lie to yourself.

What changed for me is the relationship.

Seneca, one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome, described it better than anyone I’ve read. He wrote:

Seneca was honest. He preferred wealth, because who doesn’t? Anyone who claims otherwise is lying.

We'd rather have a lot of money than not at all. But Seneca keeps it outside the part of him that actually matters.

The money lives in the house. Not in the heart.

That’s the whole shift.

You don’t have to hate money to stop being controlled by it. You just have to put it in the right room.

I don’t care about appearances anymore. What I care about now is depth, good work, and the people in my life.

And the money?

It follows. Not always immediately, and also not always in the way you expected. But it follows.

Philosophy didn’t make me poorer. It made me free. And that turned out to be worth more than any number I ever chased.

It’s now 11 years since I seriously started applying Stoicism and Eastern Philosophy to deal with overthinking.

You see, the reason I got obsessed with philosophy is because I had a NEED for it. I’ve always been an overthinker.

Eckhart Tolle, the author of The Power of Now, wrote about a story in one of his books. It goes something like this:

A guy is walking down the street and he sees an acquaintance walking on the other side. He waives at him but the other person ignores him.

The guy starts thinking, “Why did he ignore me? Did I say something bad to him last time? Maybe he has a problem with me? Should I text him? No.”

And he goes on and on like that until he sees him again a few weeks later. Turns out the other guy was in such a hurry that he didn’t even see him. All that thinking was just a waste of energy.

To be honest, I’m not sure if Tolle wrote all of that but I remember reading a story like that once and thinking, “How does this guy know something so personal about me?”

Because I’m that guy. I had an experience like that.

At some point I knew I had to get a handle on my thoughts. And it all starts with realizing that you are not your thoughts:

The Voice You Mistake for Yourself

There is a voice in your head.

It comments on everything. Your work, your face in the mirror, the way that last conversation went, the thing you said five years ago that you still remember. It compares you to other people. It tells you what kind of person you are.

Most people treat that voice as the truth. They hear it say “I’m bad at this” and conclude, “I’m bad at this.”

They hear it say “they don’t like me” and conclude, “they don’t like me.” Then they spend their days making decisions based on the verdicts of a narrator that is wrong most of the time.

The voice is not you.

It is a stream of thoughts. Some of them are useful. Most are recycled. A large percentage are wrong.

A 2010 Harvard study tracked the mental wandering of 2,250 people in real time and found that the human mind drifts away from what it is doing about 47% of the time.

And it doesn’t drift to happy places. It drifts to old arguments, future worries, social comparison, and self-criticism.

Half of your waking life is spent listening to a narrator that wasn’t asked for an opinion.

Why Thoughts Are Not Facts

Read more

They ask it questions. They rewrite emails. They summarize articles.

That’s useful.

But it’s not the real opportunity anymore.

The real opportunity is using AI agents to run recurring work for you.

I recorded a practical workshop for Academy members where I show you my full AI agent setup. This is the system I use to automate the annoying work in my business, from content planning to visuals to project management.

You’ll see how I use agents to:

• Write polished article drafts from my sloppy drafts

• Repurpose articles into Medium headlines, Substack notes, and Academy posts

• Create blog visuals in my own style

• Check finance exports for missed or unbooked transactions

• Build reusable AI skills so Claude and ChatGPT understand how I work

• Connect AI to apps like Notion

This is a practical screen-share. And it’s built around one simple idea:

If you do the same task every week, why not automate it?

That way you have more time and energy to focus on important work.

Check out the workshop!

If you’re not a member yet, consider upgrading to a paid membership.

You’ll also get access to the full archive of members-only content, plus new lessons, podcasts, and articles every week.

All the best!

-Darius

P.S. There’s a written version of this workshop below.

Read more

Before my son was born, so many people around me shared stuff like:

• “Say goodbye to sleep.”

• “Forget about your mornings.”

• “You’ll never have time for yourself again.”

I nodded along. What else do you say? They’d been through it, I thought.

But here’s what nobody told me.

Having a child didn’t take time away from me.

It showed me how badly I was already wasting it.

The warnings were right about the wrong thing

Yes, my time got cut. I no longer control my own schedule the way I used to. My son sets the rhythm now. My wife and I adapt around him, support each other, and find pockets of time wherever they appear.

And that’s when something strange happened.

I started getting more done.

You might expect something like, “I started waking up at 5 AM got important work done!”

But that’s not me. I don’t believe in forcing yourself to do something out of character.

I’m not a morning person.

I simply let go of all my expectations and routines.

My goal is to adapt and seize whatever time window opens up. If I see an opportunity to do work for 30 minutes, I go for it HARD!

Before, I had more time and less pressure to use it wisely. I’d start work, drift, come back, sort of focus, sort of not. Hours would pass and I’d have maybe one real hour of output buried inside them.

Now? I sit down and I work. Because I don’t know how long the window is.

That’s it. That’s the whole system.

The poet and philosopher Goethe saw this clearly. Constraints don’t hold you back. They force you to rise to them. As he wrote:

Responsibility is the most underrated productivity tool

We’ve been sold the idea that the key to getting more done is having more time, better tools, or the right morning routine.

Read enough productivity content and you’d think the secret is a specific type of notebook and waking up before the sun.

It’s not.

The real lever is stakes.

When something depends on you, you show up differently. You focus differently. You make decisions faster and stop fussing over things that don’t matter.

The Stoics understood this long before productivity culture made it a buzzword.

Seneca spent his life writing about time, and his conclusion was blunt: Most people don’t lose time because they have too little of it. They lose it because they don’t feel its weight:

A child makes the weight real.

We’ve all heard of memento mori, the reminder that life is finite.

Most people know it intellectually. A new baby makes you feel it. When you’re holding something that small and fragile, you understand that we all started like that.

And especially once you start edging closer to 40, you start seeing the effects of aging.

“I’m getting older,” is something you start saying. But do you truly feel it? Do you use it to maximize what you get out of life?

If you do, the trivial things that used to eat your hours suddenly look exactly like what they are… trivial.

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What actually changed

1. I found a new way to work.

In the first weeks after birth, I figured out a system that’s been working well. I put my son in a baby carrier on my chest, walk slowly around, and when he falls asleep, I move to my treadmill desk. Walking at the slowest pace, one eye on him, the other eye on writing.

That’s how I got most of my articles done in March and April.

Now he’s a bit older; he sleeps better, so I’m not doing the treadmill technique anymore.

When I’m at my desk without him, I know exactly what I’m doing before I sit down. Write new articles. Post the weekly Academy training for my paid Substack. Answer emails. Work on a new course.

I’ve simplified my work drastically. Just a short list of things that matter, and I do them.

2. Workouts got shorter and more consistent.

I used to do longer sessions, less frequently. Now I aim for every day, which realistically lands at four or five times a week.

Twenty to thirty minutes. Push, pull, or legs, three exercises, done. Short enough that there’s no excuse to skip. Frequent enough that the habit sticks.

I actually feel better than I did with longer sessions I kept postponing.

3. Some things shifted back.

I’m reading less than I want to. Right now most of my reading is about the stock market, the companies I invest in, and geopolitical developments. Books have taken a back seat. I want to fix that. I just haven’t found the right system yet with the new schedule.

My wife and I used to watch a show or movie every evening. Now it’s no longer every night.

We’ll get that back slowly. Same with time together as a couple. A strong relationship is good for us and good for him.

Nothing is gone. It’s just reorganized.

4. Social time looks different, not smaller.

Family visits us almost daily. I see my best friend every week. I talk to other friends on the phone. I take my son out in the stroller and we walk.

The low-value stuff, the obligatory hangouts where you don’t really connect and wonder why you went, that’s what disappeared. Not because I decided to cut it.

Just because there’s no room for it and I don’t miss it.

The real takeaway: Don’t be afraid to change your life

I’ve had stretches like this before.

When I started my writing career. When I moved to Spain. When I came back to the Netherlands.

Big events that disrupted everything and forced a reset. Each time, I came out more focused, more clear on what mattered, more productive than before.

The pattern is obvious in retrospect.

Big life changes make you better.

New responsibilities. A new environment. A different routine.

Things that force you to stop running on autopilot and actually decide how you want to live.

The things we’re most afraid of are usually the ones that push us furthest.

I’ll be honest. I was afraid of all of it. Especially having a child. The loss of freedom, the pressure, the unknown. Every single warning people gave me tapped into a real fear I had.

But every move like that brings you higher. It pushes you to become a more complete version of yourself.

If you’re sitting on something you’re afraid of, a commitment, a change, a responsibility you keep postponing, consider that the fear might be pointing at exactly the thing you need.

Seneca said it best:

You don't need more time. You need higher stakes.

Let me ask you something.

Have you ever bought a stock or an asset because you saw someone talk about it online?

I bet the answer is yes. Because I’ve done it. Almost everyone I know has done it.

Here’s the follow-up question: Do you still own it?

Probably not.

A few years ago I got caught up in the meme stock craze. GameStop. BlackBerry. Nokia. Everyone was talking about them. The energy was electric. People were making life-changing money in days. I got in on that too.

You know how that ended.

More recently, I bought Hims and Hers stock. A lot of people were talking about it, the numbers looked decent on the surface, and I thought, why not take a stab at it?

Years ago I read that the great Stanley Druckenmiller often buys a stock that looks interesting and then researches it after his purchase, not before it. So he avoids analysis paralysis.

If he doesn’t like it or the stock moves against him, he sells. I’ve been doing that too occasionally with my trades. I like that strategy because it increases the stakes. But it’s risky.

Pretty soon after I bought , I realized it wasn’t my kind of company at all.

No strong competitive advantage. Not a business I actually understood or believed in. But by the time I figured that out, I was already down.

That’s the comparison trap. And it’s one of the biggest threats to your long-term investing success.

I talk about how I handle it in this video:

Why It Happens to Everyone

The comparison trap isn’t a sign of stupidity. It’s a sign of being human.

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You sit down somewhere quiet. Maybe in a coffee shop. Maybe on your couch after a long day. And out of nowhere, a thought hits you.

Why am I not more successful?

Maybe you thought you’d have kids by now. Or a business that prints money. Or a name people actually recognize. Maybe you thought you’d own a house. And that you’d have it all figured out.

But none of that has happened.

So you start comparing.

• This guy was a millionaire by 30.

• She had a bestseller by 26.

• He became a CEO at 40.

• She retired at 48.

So what?

They are not you. But it still stings, right?

“Why not me?”

I’ve been there more times than I can count. And every time, I noticed the same thing. The comparison never came from inside me. It came from looking outside.

That’s the trap most of us walk into. We’ve gotten more materialistic and more externally focused every year. It’s not new. We’ve been doing this for a long time. But it’s getting worse.

You might think it matters what your friends think of you. Or that strangers look at you and think, “Wow, that’s a successful person.”

But here’s the truth. Those people will not be there for you in ten or twenty years.

They care about themselves.

That’s just normal human behavior.

So why are you organizing your life around their applause?

Impact was never about size

Here’s what most people get wrong. We think impact only counts when it’s big and public.

But that’s not how impact works.

Think about the people who shaped you most. A parent, teacher, or friend who said the right thing at the right time.

None of them were famous. None of them had an audience. They mattered because they were close to you, not because they were known to everyone.

That’s the rule. Impact moves through proximity, not popularity.

I think about this with my own life now. I have a young son. He doesn’t know how many people read my articles, and he won’t care. To him, I’m not a writer with an audience.

I’m just his dad. That relationship will shape him more than anything I ever publish. And almost none of it will happen in public.

Psychologists have spent decades studying what they call mattering, the basic human need to feel significant to other people. Their work keeps landing on the same point.

Feeling like you matter has almost nothing to do with fame or status. It comes down to whether you make a real difference to the people actually in your life.

The most famous Stoic understood this long before the research existed. Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman empire. He could have had any monument, any legacy, any amount of glory he wanted.

Instead, in his private journal, he reminded himself of the opposite:

Think about who said that. Not a struggling writer with twelve views. The most powerful man alive. He looked at fame, the thing everyone chases, and called it empty.

Because he knew your life doesn’t turn meaningful the moment the world claps.

It’s meaningful when you do good work and treat people well, whether anyone is watching or not.

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You can’t force your life into a particular shape

Most of our unhappiness comes from believing no one cares. You wake up, work, come home, watch TV, sleep. You forget what your real job is. To be useful to the people in front of you.

But instead of doing the work in front of us, we try to force outcomes.

A higher income, better job title, or house in the right neighborhood.

We act like we’re some kind of magician who can wave a wand and make life arrive on schedule.

You’re not. I’m not either. Nobody is.

Sometimes it takes a while to get where you want to be. That doesn’t mean the journey is wasted.

Because we’re obsessed with outcomes, we measure life in milestones. But life isn’t only about outcomes. It’s about whether the work you’re doing today is work you’d respect.

William James said it best.

That’s the whole game.

How to measure your life correctly

So how do you put down the famous-or-failure ruler? Here’s what worked for me.

1. Name your real audience. List the people your life genuinely touches. Family. Close friends. The people you work with. The handful of readers, clients, or customers you actually serve. That short list is your real audience. The faceless crowd you imagine watching and judging you doesn’t exist.

2. Measure contribution, not attention. At the end of the day, don’t ask who noticed you. Ask one question instead. Did I help anyone today, even in a small way? A good conversation counts. Honest work counts. Showing up for someone counts.

3. Do the work nobody claps for. The boring, invisible work is usually the work that matters most. Raising a kid well. Doing your job properly. Being the friend who picks up the phone. Nobody hands you applause for it, but your work matters more than anything you do for show.

4. Get off the comparison feed. Social media is a machine for making your real life feel small next to other people’s highlights. When the scrolling starts whispering that you don’t matter, that’s not insight. That’s the machine working. Use it less.

Your life already counts

Your life doesn’t need an audience to count. It never did.

The point was never to be seen. The point is to be useful to the people in front of you, and to do work you’d respect even if nobody ever knew your name.

Do that, and your life matters. Quietly, but completely.

You don’t need the world to agree.

When I graduated, I applied for about a dozen jobs.

I got invited to eight interviews. And rejected eight times. Always the same line. “It’s not you, it’s us. You’re great, but we’re looking for something else.”

Eight times.

So I gave up on applications and started a business instead. Three years later, I wanted experience at a major corporation. But this time I did it differently. I didn’t touch a single job board. I went to my network and got recommended.

Two interviews. Both at major companies. Two great offers.

That taught me something I’ve never forgotten. Job postings are mostly BS, especially for more important jobs. When I later worked at Gartner, most new hires I met came through a recommendation, not an application.

Here’s the data that backs it up:

• 85% of jobs are filled through networking

• 80% are never posted publicly at all

• Referred candidates are four times more likely to get hired than someone who applies cold

The formal application process is mostly a backup system. The real opportunities move through reputation and relationships.

They go to the people who are already known, already trusted, already top of mind when something good comes up.

If nobody knows who you are, you don’t exist in that flow.

Doesn’t matter how good your work is.

This post is about fixing that. Not through self-promotion or personal branding gimmicks. Through building something real that makes you genuinely hard to ignore.

I talk about what that looks like in practice in this video:

The Invisible Professional Problem

Here’s something most talented professionals don’t know about themselves.

They have a visibility problem.

Not a skills problem. Not a performance problem. A visibility problem.

70% of employers research candidates on social media before making a hiring decision. 57% have rejected a candidate based on what they found.

This works both ways. A strong, credible online presence doesn’t just prevent rejection. It actively creates opportunity.

When someone Googles your name, what do they find?

If the answer is nothing, or an outdated LinkedIn profile from three years ago, that’s not helping you.

In a world where everyone is searchable, being invisible reads as being unserious.

Being Good Is Not Enough

This is the uncomfortable truth at the center of this post.

Being excellent at your work is necessary. But it’s not sufficient.

Research published in the Academy of Management Journal found that reputation has two distinct dimensions:

• Quality: How good you actually are.

• Prominence: How well-known you are to the right people.

Both matter. But prominence contributed more to outcomes than quality alone.

Read more

My wife told me a story recently that I couldn’t get out of my head.

Her close friend works as a waitress at a restaurant. Hard worker, nice person. One evening she made a mistake at a table of seven people. She served six dishes and one had to wait a little longer.

One of those seven people went home and wrote a one-star review and named her specifically.

The boss saw it, and she was told she was no longer allowed to work as a waitress. Her salary was cut. She was moved to the kitchen.

A single negative review destroyed someone’s livelihood.

I know this isn’t rare. But it still makes me angry every time I hear it.

My own experience with it

My books have over 30,000 reviews on Amazon. If you scroll through the one-star reviews and read what some people write, you will find some harsh stuff.

If I read a book I don’t like, I put it down and move on. In fact, most folks are like that.

But some people have this urge to let others know that they didn’t like something. And they can be very nasty.

I’ve also dealt with it in my courses. People who bought a course and then opened a dispute with their credit card company without ever contacting me first, flagging the purchase as fraud.

This is a daily reality for anyone who offers a product, service, or puts their work into the world.

Whether you’re a small operator or interacting with thousands of customers daily, you have to deal with negative situations.

It’s simply a part of the game.

There are a lot of miserable people out there

If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, a store, or any customer-facing role, you already know this.

My uncle has worked in the hospitality industry for nearly twenty years. The stories I heard from him are genuinely unbelievable.

Some people walk in looking for a reason to complain and cause drama.

Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher who spent a lifetime studying human nature, warned us many years ago not to pay attention to these types of people. He wrote:

Paying too much attention to what miserable people think of you is giving them an honor they haven’t earned.

Most negative criticism doesn’t come from people who want to help you improve.

It comes from people who are frustrated with their own lives and have found a safe outlet.

The anonymity of the internet makes it even easier. The review culture makes it acceptable.

If you have ever dealt with that type of negativity, don’t take it personally. It was never really about you.

What the Stoics said

Marcus Aurelius dealt with critics, enemies, and people who tried to undermine him his entire reign. His response was consistent: Focus on what you can control, and ignore the rest.

He wrote in his private journal:

The Stoic framework is practical here. Criticism is an outside event. You can’t control what others think or say about you.

You can’t control what your boss does with it. You can’t control whether a spiteful person decides to spend their evening trying to damage you.

What you can control is your response.

And more importantly, your identity.

Who you are is not determined by what a stranger on the internet says about you.

If you’re someone with proper values and have good intentions, you don’t have anything to fear. Just do what you’re doing and ignore the hate.

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Don’t give them the power to define you

Schopenhauer made a distinction that I find very useful. He separated what a person is from what others think of them.

He argued that a person’s real existence is in themselves, not in other people’s opinions.

Schopenhauer put it this way:

Your health. Your relationships. Your work. Your character. These things are real. A one-star review is not.

The problem is that our minds don’t naturally make this distinction. A bad review or criticism at work feels like an attack on who we are, not just on what we did.

This is where the Stoic practice of separating events from judgments becomes essential.

The review or criticism is an event. Your interpretation of it is a judgment. And you control the judgment.

What to actually do

Accept that some people will always be negative. This is not cynicism. It’s just reality. You can’t please everyone and you shouldn’t try.

The person who tries to make everyone happy ends up pleasing nobody, including themselves.

Do your best work and let it stand. The waitress who made a mistake is still a good person doing a hard job.

The one-star review doesn’t change that. Her colleagues know it. Her regular customers know it. The review says more about the person who wrote it than about her.

No matter what happens, don’t respond in anger.

Responding to hate with your own hate just adds fuel. Most of the time, silence is the most powerful answer.

And finally, remember what Schopenhauer said about intellect and criticism:

The people who leave the most vicious criticism are almost always the ones least qualified to give it.

They lack the capacity to understand what they’re criticizing. That’s not an excuse to dismiss all feedback.

Genuine, constructive criticism from people who know what they’re talking about is very valuable.

That’s one of the most important ways to improve yourself… by listening to the feedback of people who want the best for you.

But hateful, anonymous attacks from strangers are not feedback. They’re noise.

Ignore them at all cost.

Update: Right before scheduling this article, I heard that the person I mentioned in it is back to waiting tables. That makes a huge difference financially, in tips alone. I was happy to hear that. A good example of staying the course and focusing on doing the right thing.

Think about the last time you said yes to something you didn’t want to do.

How did you feel afterwards?

My guess is not so great.

That happened to me all the time before.

A meeting that had nothing to do with your work. A favor that ate your entire afternoon. A commitment you agreed to because saying no felt awkward in the moment.

I would say yes to these types of things, and then immediately got angry with myself.

“Why can’t I just say NO!”

Most people say yes constantly. At work. In their personal lives. To requests that have nothing to do with what they actually want to get done.

And then they spend the rest of the day slightly resentful, slightly distracted, wondering why they can’t make progress on anything that actually matters.

Every yes is a no to something else. Your time is finite.

When you give it to one thing, you take it from another. Most people never think about it this way because saying yes feels easy and saying no feels uncomfortable.

So they keep saying yes. And keep filling their days with other people’s priorities.

Warren Buffett has a line on this:

I talk more about this in the video below.

Why Most “Say No” Advice Gets It Wrong

Here’s where I disagree with most of what’s written on this topic.

The typical advice goes like this: Guard your time ruthlessly, you don’t owe anyone an explanation, just say no to everything.

That might be true. But if you take it literally, you risk becoming someone nobody wants to work with.

We’re social beings. The people asking things of you are usually your colleagues, clients, and friends.

The people you see every day. Shutting them down without explanation doesn’t protect your time. It damages the relationships that make your work possible.

There’s a better way.

You really don’t have to be ruthless about saying no. Simply be honest.

Saying no is about knowing what you’re working on, committing to it, and communicating that clearly when something else comes up.

For example, it would be strange for me to stop replying to reader comments. That’s part of my work. Some things deserve a yes even when they’re inconvenient.

I also don’t subscribe to the whole idea of, “Calculate your hourly rate and say no to everything that doesn’t make money.”

Let’s say one author claims their hourly rate is 1000 bucks because that’s how much they make with their books and articles. Okay, great. But that doesn’t mean you should only be writing.

If you just keep on writing and don’t do anything else, you run out of material at some point.

Here’s what people who optimize everything around money miss. The things that look like distractions are often where your best work comes from.

The conversation that has nothing to do with your current project gives you the idea for the next one.

The book that isn’t “useful” shows up in your writing six months later. The walk where you weren’t being productive is where you solved the problem you’d been stuck on for a week.

If you say no to everything that doesn’t directly advance your career, you slowly starve the work you’re trying to protect. Input matters as much as output. You can’t just produce. You have to refill the well.

So the goal isn’t to say no to everything that you don’t like or that advances your career.

Life is not that transactional. However, that doesn’t mean you should go around saying yes to everything because you fear that you will let people down.

Find a balance. If you really can’t do something, just say no.

But how do you know when you can or can’t?

Enter:

The Priority-First Framework

Here’s a framework you can use in your career. I share more on personal situations later.

Read more

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche had been on my reading list for years. I finally got to it recently.

While I didn’t really like the book, there was one chapter that really got to me, called “Of Voluntary Death.”

This is the idea:

Live so fully and intentionally that when death comes, it feels like a completion rather than an interruption.

I love that.

Think about it. Most of us don’t live that way.

We drift, we delay, we stay on a trajectory that we know is not the right one.

And then one day it’s over…

This is why we fear death.

Nietzsche wrote:

A person who never truly lived, who drifted, obeyed, delayed, copied others, and never became themselves, cannot really “die at the right time” either.

Why?

Because for Nietzsche, the “right time” is not about age. It is about ripeness.

He admired the idea of a person who lives with such intensity, purpose, and self-command that even death becomes part of their life, not just something that happens to them.

The courage to live on your own terms

A person should live so fully that, when death comes, it feels like a completed arc.

If you never had the courage to live your own life, make your own values, take action, and become who you are, then your death will also be passive.

It will just be a biological shutdown. Not the end of a life well-lived.

Now here comes the question: What does a life well-lived look like?

Here’s how Nietzsche looked at it:

Surrounded by men filled with hope. That image has stayed with me. He’s describing someone whose life inspired others to be better.

Someone who, at the end, is surrounded not by grief alone but by people who are motivated to continue what that person started.

That’s legacy. Not fame. Not money. Not a building with your name on it.

Just people who were made better by knowing you.

Your kids. Your friends. Your colleagues. The person you mentored ten years ago.

The reader who changed their life because of something you wrote. Anyone who crossed your path and left the encounter slightly different.

I think you can only accomplish that by truly living your life on your own terms.

But most people live timidly, afraid of what others think of them, not taking any risks, and never growing.

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We must grow, otherwise we die

Then Nietzsche gets harder:

He’s talking about that creeping sense that you’re not living the way you know you should.

That you’re wasting time. That you’re holding back. That there’s a version of yourself you’re not becoming.

That’s the poison-worm. Not circumstances. Not bad luck. The gap between who you are and who you know you could be.

Most people live with that gap their entire lives and never close it. They stay on the branch not because they can’t fly but because they’re afraid.

Nietzsche says that, “It is cowardice that keeps him fastened to his branch.”

We all know what it feels like to hold on to our branch. We want to go out there in the world and do something, but we can’t.

We stay put.

But that’s like an early death. We must grow, otherwise we die. We must keep moving.

Having a son recently made this concrete for me in a way it never was before.

What I do, he will see. What I value, he will absorb.

There are still so many areas in my life that I want to improve.

How I treat people, how I handle difficulty, how I show up when things are hard…all of that becomes input for who he becomes.

How to live this way practically

Nietzsche closes the chapter with this:

I love how he describes it as a sunset glow. Not an explosion or something grand.

Just a warmth that lingers after you’re gone.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Do your work well, not for recognition but because it represents you.

• Be honest with the people around you, even when it costs you something.

• Show up for the people who need you, especially when it’s inconvenient.

• Build things that last longer than the moment.

• Treat the people closest to you as the most important audience, because they are.

None of this is grand. All of it compounds.

The question isn’t whether you’ll be remembered. You will be, by someone, in some way.

The question is what they’ll remember.

Do you want to accomplish any one of the goals below?

• Start a business.

• Get in better shape.

• Make money with stocks.

• Build an audience online.

• Write a book.

• Become financially independent.

Most people who want to accomplish something like this start by asking themselves: How do I do this?

Let’s say you want to build an audience.

You go to AI or Google and write: “How to build an audience.”

Then you go looking for the steps. The framework. The success story you can model.

After all, this is what the internet and every self-help book focus on.

Tony Robbins built an empire on the idea that “success leaves clues.” Just find someone who did it, copy what they did, and you’ll get the same result.

• “Here are the 5 steps to building a successful YouTube channel.”

• “Here’s how I grew my newsletter to 10,000 subscribers on Substack.”

• “Here’s the morning routine of a billionaire.”

The problem is that this works for simple, well-defined goals.

Training for a marathon? Sure. Follow the plan. The steps are clear and the outcome is predictable.

But anything creative, anything career-related, anything involving money or building something original?

Mimicking others doesn’t get you there. Because those outcomes depend on context, timing, personality, and judgment that can’t be copied from someone else’s playbook.

There’s a better question to ask first.

Not “how do I succeed?” but “what would guarantee failure?”

Find those things. Then make sure you never do them.

That’s inversion. And it’s one of the most underused thinking tools available.

Where It Comes From

The idea comes from a 19th-century German mathematician, Carl Jacobi. He discovered that some of the hardest problems in mathematics became easy when you approached them backward.

His rule: “Invert, always invert.”

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner at Berkshire Hathaway, picked this up and applied it to everything. Business, investing, life.

This is what Munger said about his own success:

Not trying to be brilliant, but instead just trying not to be stupid.

That’s inversion in practice. You don’t need to know exactly how to win. You need to know clearly how to lose, and then avoid those paths.

Why It Works Better Than Forward Thinking

Forward thinking is optimistic by nature. You imagine the outcome you want and build a plan to get there. That’s fine.

But optimism creates blind spots. You underestimate obstacles. You overestimate your ability to execute. You see what you want to see.

Inversion forces pessimism as a tool. Not as a lifestyle, but as a check. It asks:

What could go wrong? What’s most likely to blow this up? What am I not seeing because I want this to work?

Munger again:

That line sounds a bit morbid. But it’s one of the most practical thinking frameworks you’ll ever use.

Know the failure modes. Avoid them. Let the good outcome happen as a result.

Read more

For as long as I can remember, I wanted passive income.

Money that came in without being tied to my time or energy. Income I didn’t have to show up for. The kind of financial life where you don’t have to worry.

I think this is a universal desire for anyone who didn’t grow up rich. You see what financial stress does to a family and you make a silent promise to yourself: I’m never going to live like that.

So I built toward it for my entire adult life.

Here’s what I didn’t expect when I got there.

I still worry.

The dream doesn’t deliver what you think it will

Here’s the truth. No matter how much money you make, life will never be easy.

The anxiety doesn’t disappear just because money is coming in.

The only thing that happens is that your worry shifts. It finds new things to attach to.

Gordon Livingston, a psychiatrist, wrote a book called And Never Stop Dancing in which he put this concept into words better than I could. He wrote:

That’s the thing about passive income as a goal. It’s really a wish for simplicity. For the complexity and anxiety to go away.

But they don’t. Because they were never caused by a lack of money. They’re just part of being alive.

The harder question

Livingston has another line in the book that I keep coming back to:

That last part is the one that hit me.

Let’s say you get full relief from the burden of striving. What relevance do we retain?

What else is out there?

If you stop striving, you stop living. That’s not a metaphor. It’s literally what happens. You lose your sense of purpose.

Your reason to get up in the morning. The feeling that you’re moving somewhere.

You see this with parents who have grown kids. All of a sudden, there’s a huge void. The child who relied on you for everything no longer needs your 24/7 care.

You get all this free time. But how to spend it?

A friend of mine often said, “When our kids are old, my wife and I are going to travel the world.”

But you can’t do that eternally. You get used to everything, even to the wonders of the world.

There’s just no ideal answer to all our problems.

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What I focus on instead

Passive income was always supposed to be the destination for me.

“Oh man, once I have money coming in every month, I can just enjoy my life!”

The problem is that we don’t question our own ideas enough. Enjoy what? Sure, I love reading books, working out, traveling, watching movies, eating great food, and spending time with family.

If I spend all my time on entertainment, I don’t get much satisfaction out of it at some point. It becomes the standard.

What makes life so good? It’s resting after working hard. It’s going on a vacation after spending a long time at home.

Variety. That’s the key.

I’m not saying don’t build passive income. I’m glad I did. Financial security is real and it matters.

But it’s the wrong goal to organize your life around. Because the day you achieve it, you’ll realize it solved a practical problem but not the deeper one.

The deeper goal is to keep challenging yourself every single day.

It doesn’t have to be some grand pursuit of mastery. Just a small daily habit of doing the thing that’s slightly uncomfortable.

Yesterday I mowed the grass and trimmed the edges of the garden. I’m not a garden person. I don’t enjoy that kind of work.

The grass had been long for a while and every time I looked at it, I didn’t like it. So I went out and mowed it.

It took a couple of hours. It looked great when I was done. And I felt genuinely good afterward.

That’s the secret to living a happy life.

Write when you don’t feel like it. Work out when it’s easier to skip. Do your taxes instead of postponing again. Go outside when you’d rather stay in.

Not because any of these things are important in themselves. But because the habit of doing hard things keeps you sharp.

It keeps you relevant to yourself. It keeps the anxiety at bay better than any amount of passive income ever could.

The actual goal

Financial freedom is a practical achievement. It gives you options. It removes certain kinds of stress. I’m genuinely grateful for it.

See passive income and money as a foundation. What you build on that foundation is the real question.

And the answer, as far as I can tell, is to keep challenging yourself. Keep striving. Keep doing the thing that’s slightly harder than what you did yesterday.

Livingston’s question stays with me: What relevance do we retain?

The answer is the same whether you’re broke or financially free. You retain relevance by staying in the game. By contributing. By growing.

Passive income buys you time. Challenging yourself is how you use it.

Most investors know how to buy. Almost nobody knows when to sell.

That gap is where months of gains disappear in a matter of days.

I learned this the hard way. Early in my investing career, I watched a position double. Then keep going. I held because it was still moving.

Then it turned. Then I told myself it would come back. By the time I sold, most of the profit was gone.

That cycle repeated enough times that I realized the problem wasn’t my stock picking. It was that I had a system for getting in and no system for getting out.

In this short video I recorded, I walk through how I think about taking profit:

The Problem With “Let Your Winners Run”

The most repeated piece of investing advice is to cut your losers and let your winners run.

It’s true. But it’s incomplete.

If you let your winners run indefinitely, eventually they stop running. Every trend ends. Every bull market turns. Every stock that went up 300% gives back a significant portion before most people sell.

The investor who held a stock from $160 to $450 and then watched it fall to $220 didn’t let a winner run. They let a winner become a smaller winner, or worse, watched years of gains evaporate.

Jesse Livermore, one of the greatest traders who ever lived, understood this better than anyone. He made and lost multiple fortunes on Wall Street, and his most important lesson wasn’t about when to buy. It was about when to sell.

His rule: As long as a stock is acting right and the market is right, don’t be in a hurry to take profits.

But the moment the trend shows signs of exhaustion, you exit. You don’t wait for confirmation that it’s over. By the time it’s confirmed, you’ve given back too much.

The market never rings a bell at the top.

The system for knowing when to sell is what separates investors who keep their gains from those who give them back.

I cover the full framework below.

Read more

Here’s something I’ve noticed about my own behavior. And I don’t necessarily like it.

When I’m in a meeting or a conversation, I drift the moment things go on too long without something interesting. My mind wanders. My hand moves toward my phone. And I catch myself thinking: wait, what did they just say?

Have you felt this too?

I think it’s because of how we’ve been conditioned. Everything we consume has been optimized to hold our attention. TV shows, movies, social media, websites; all of it engineered for dopamine hits. Short, sharp, immediately rewarding.

No wonder we reach for our phones the second something gets slow or unclear.

The research backs this up. Two decades ago, the average time someone stayed focused on a single task was around two and a half minutes. Today that number has dropped to 47 seconds.

47 seconds.

That’s what you’re working with.

I recently wrote an article about how to express yourself clearly, and a reader left a comment asking for more depth on one specific part; how to keep people engaged in the middle of a story.

That was a good observation because getting attention is one problem. Keeping it is a completely different one.

The myth that got it wrong

Before we go further, let’s kill a number you’ve probably heard.

The 8-second attention span. Shorter than a goldfish. You’ve seen it quoted everywhere.

It’s fabricated. A 2015 Microsoft report cited a data source that didn’t exist. No peer-reviewed research supports it.

The goldfish comparison was invented too. And yet it spread because it felt true and made a good headline.

The real number, 47 seconds, comes from Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine who spent twenty years tracking attention using actual computer logging software.

But here’s the important nuance.

Those 47 seconds measure screen behavior.

How long do people stay on a digital task before switching? In a face-to-face conversation, you have more time than that. People can’t click away from you. They’re physically present.

The problem is their mind can still leave. And it does. Fast.

The real issue: New conditioning

This isn’t about intelligence or rudeness. It’s about rewired reflexes.

We’ve spent years training ourselves on content that never lets us get bored.

Netflix starts the next episode before you’ve decided if you want to watch it. Instagram refreshes the moment you reach the bottom.

TikTok serves a new video before you’ve finished the last one.

The result is a reflex.

The moment something feels slow, unclear, or pointless, the hand moves. It’s not a conscious decision. Your brain has been trained to expect stimulation at a certain pace, and when that pace drops, it goes looking elsewhere.

You’re not competing with the person in front of you. You’re competing with everything in their pocket.

That changes what it means to manage your attention.

What this means for you

If you want to be heard, you have to earn attention fast and then keep earning it.

In that article on expressing yourself, I introduced a simple framework: setup, buildup, payoff. Most people understand the setup and the payoff instinctively. The buildup is where they lose the room.

Here’s how the timing works in practice:

1. Setup: As short as possible. Set the scene. One or two sentences for a quick conversation, maybe a bit longer for a complex story. The rule is simple: give the minimum context needed to make the buildup land. Nothing more. The moment you add details that aren’t necessary, you’re spending attention you haven’t earned yet.

2. Buildup: Starts immediately. This is where tension needs to appear. Before 47 seconds are up, the listener must feel something unresolved. A question. A problem not yet solved. A decision is still hanging. If they don’t feel it by then, you’ve lost them.

3. Payoff: Earned, not rushed. Once the tension is built, deliver the point. Now it actually lands.

The setup is easy. The payoff is obvious. The buildup is the skill.

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The buildup: What it is and how to do it

Tension.

That’s it. Not drama.

Just something unresolved that keeps the listener from leaving.

You’re controlling the pace at which they get the answer. The moment they feel like they already know where this is going, their attention is gone.

Here’s what it looks like in practice.

Example 1: Personal conversation

Without buildup: “I had a difficult conversation with my boss last week. It went fine in the end.”

Done. Nothing to hold onto. The listener nods and moves on.

With buildup: “I had a difficult conversation with my boss last week. I’d been putting it off for two months. Every time I thought about bringing it up, I convinced myself it could wait one more week. Then something happened that made waiting impossible.”

Same story. The listener is now leaning in. What happened? What did you say? How did it go?

You haven’t added new information. You’ve just left something unresolved. That’s the whole trick.

Example 2: Work setting

Without buildup: “We tried a new approach with the client, and it worked.”

With buildup: “We tried something with this client, I was genuinely not sure would work. We’d already failed twice with the standard approach. The team wasn’t convinced. We were out of options.”

Same ending. Completely different level of engagement. The buildup makes the payoff feel earned.

What kills the buildup:

• Giving away the ending too early. “So this is actually a funny story,” or “it all worked out fine.” The moment you signal the outcome, tension is gone. Let them wonder.

• Adding irrelevant details. If a detail doesn’t raise the stakes or deepen the uncertainty, cut it. Every unnecessary sentence burns attention you don’t have.

• Going too slow. The tension needs to be felt before 47 seconds runs out. If you’re still warming up at 45 seconds, you’ve already lost them.

A simple way to practice:

Before you tell any story, ask yourself one question: what is the moment of maximum uncertainty?

Find it. Build toward it. That’s your buildup.

• In a meeting, name the problem before you give the solution

• In a conversation: hold the punchline one beat longer than feels comfortable

• In a presentation, open with what’s at stake before explaining what you did

The listener doesn’t need more information. They need a reason to stay.

The good news

Most people are terrible at this. They ramble. They bury the point. They over-explain. They assume the listener will stay out of politeness.

That means the bar to stand out is low.

If you open strong, create tension early, and get to your point without unnecessary detours, you will be the person in the room people actually listen to.

Not because you’re a gifted speaker. But because you respected their attention enough to earn it.

In a world of 47-second attention spans, that’s a rare thing.

And rare things get noticed.

When I quit my corporate job to become a writer, it felt like I was starting from scratch.

I had spent years in client-facing roles at an IT research firm, building relationships, learning how large organizations think, and developing skills I didn’t fully appreciate at the time.

And then I walked away from all of it to write on the internet. To most people around me, that looked like throwing everything away.

But here’s what I realized later: I wasn’t starting over. I was building on everything I had learned. I just couldn’t see it clearly at the time.

The skills I developed in my family’s industrial laundry business got me the Gartner job. The training methodology I experienced at Gartner, which has one of the best corporate training academies in the world, became the foundation for how I structure my own courses today.

Every step was built on the last, even when I wasn’t consciously aware of it.

That’s how careers actually work. Not like a ladder you climb and abandon. More like a compounding investment where every experience adds to the base.

I talk more about that in this video:

A Career is Not Like a Relationship

Most people look at their career like a romantic relationship.

You’ve put years into it. You’ve given it your energy, your time, your identity. So when you think about leaving, it feels like a breakup. Like you’re walking away from everything and starting completely fresh.

But that’s not how it works. A relationship ends when you leave.

Your skills, your judgment, your network, your reputation; none of those have an end.

They come with you.

Every client conversation, every project, every difficult colleague, every training program you sat through. All of it is still in you. You don’t leave it behind. You carry it forward.

This thinking also creates the sunk cost trap. You’ve invested so much time in this company, this industry, this career path, that leaving feels like admitting it was wasted.

So you stay.

Not because you want to, but because walking away from what you’ve already put in feels unbearable.

The time is already spent. It’s gone regardless of whether you stay or go. The only question worth asking is: what’s the best move from here?

Your Career Compounds

Here’s the better frame.

Every skill you develop, every industry you work in, every relationship you build adds to your base. When you pivot, you’re not abandoning that base. You’re redirecting it.

The person who spent ten years in corporate finance and moves into consulting doesn’t start from zero. They bring a decade of financial judgment, stakeholder management, and organizational knowledge that someone starting fresh simply doesn’t have.

The sales professional who starts building an audience online is doing exactly what they’ve always done, just to a different kind of customer.

More than 58% of professionals globally have switched industries at least once in the past three years. Most of them didn’t start over. They translated.

The key word is translate. Not abandon, not restart. Take what you have and find the new context where it’s valuable.

And true starting over is almost impossible anyway. If I decided tomorrow to become a professional musician, that would be starting over. The gap is too wide. But most career pivots don’t look like that.

They look like a marketer moving into brand consulting, an engineer moving into product management, a teacher moving into corporate training. These are redirections, not restarts. What changes is the context, not the foundation.

How to Actually Pivot

Find the overlap first.

Before you do anything else, identify where your existing skills meet what the new direction needs. You don’t need a perfect match. You need enough overlap to get in the door.

When Gartner came up for me, I wasn’t a textbook fit. But I had client-facing experience and had closed high-value contracts in my family business. I led with that in the interview process. And they appreciated it enough to offer me the job after four rounds of interviews.

Look at the skills you’ve built across your entire career, not just your most recent role.

Communication, judgment, leadership, relationship-building, project delivery. These transfer everywhere.

Most people underestimate how much they already have because they’re looking at job titles instead of actual skills.

Stage it if the gap is wide.

If the distance between where you are and where you want to go feels too large, find the intermediate step. What role gets you 60% of the way there? Start there.

Pivot again in 18 months from a stronger position. Staged pivots have a much higher success rate than single large leaps.

Think of it like investing. You don’t go from cash to an aggressive portfolio overnight. You build toward it. Career pivots work the same way.

Build proof before you leave.

In 2026, hiring managers care less about your previous title and more about what you can do right now. Start building evidence in the new direction before you make the full move.

Write about it, take small projects, get a short credential, connect with people already in that field.

By the time you make the full transition, you’ll have proof instead of just intentions.

Be opportunistic.

You don’t always get to choose your exact destination in advance. Sometimes the right pivot is the one that appears in front of you, not the one you planned.

Stay directional, not rigid. Know what skills you want to use and what kind of work you want to do. But stay open to the specific opportunities that appear.

Some of the best career moves come from having the self-awareness to see how your existing skills make you a strong fit for something you didn’t anticipate.

The Pivot Story

One thing almost nobody prepares for is how to talk about the pivot.

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It’s called The AI Brief.

The reason I started this podcast is simple. I got tired of all the hype content around AI.

Every piece of it is optimized to get your attention, not to inform you. Shocked faces, all-caps headlines, “this changes everything” every two weeks.

It’s designed to make you anxious and keep you scrolling, not help you think clearly.

The AI Brief is the opposite.

A monthly podcast where I look at the most important AI developments and explain what actually matters for your work, your career, your business, and your wealth.

The goal is to help you stay sharp and adaptable without getting caught up in panic or distraction.

What episode 1 covers

• How the AI race shifted in the last 12 months (and why “ChatGPT vs Claude” is the wrong frame)

• Why OpenAI just shut down its video platform Sora, and what it tells you about the AI boom

• GPT-5.5 and OpenAI’s quiet pivot away from flashy demos

• Why agents are still early (and what they actually do well right now)

• Why Meta just cut 8,000 jobs while spending $135 billion on AI

• What all of this means for your career, your business, and your money

The first 10 minutes of the episode are available for everyone.

The full episode, slide deck, show notes, and key takeaways are for Academy members.

If you’re already an Academy member, keep scrolling. The full notes are below.

If you’re not yet, this is a good moment to join us.

The AI Brief is now part of the Wise & Wealthy Academy, alongside the weekly posts, the $1M Ideas course, and a digital copy of Handbook for Modern Life.

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I recently shared an article on the basics of building wealth. A list of fundamentals to come back to when you’re starting out or when you feel stuck.

This is the companion piece. Because as Aristotle said:

And you can’t truly know yourself if you’re always chasing external things. Wealth without wisdom is just a string of digits in a bank account.

This list is about the other side of the equation.

Wisdom is harder to define than wealth. But you know it when you see it in someone.

They’re calm when others panic. They ask better questions. They don’t chase things that don’t matter. They know who they are.

That’s what this list is about. Not philosophy for its own sake. The practical habits and shifts that actually make you wiser over time.

1. Read old books, not just new ones

New books tell you what’s trending. Old books tell you what’s true. The ideas that have survived for hundreds of years are those tested by reality over and over again. Seneca, Schopenhauer, Aristotle, Epictetus, Montaigne. These people lived in harder times than you and figured things out. Start there.

2. Walk more than you think you need to

Not for better fitness, but for better thinking. Your best ideas don’t come at your desk. They come when you’re moving and not trying. I do some of my clearest thinking on a long walk with no phone, no podcast, nothing. Just moving and letting the mind work.

3. Write your thoughts down every day

Just a blank page and a pen to start the day. Write what’s on your mind. You’ll be surprised by what comes out when you force yourself to put thoughts into words. Writing is thinking. The clarity you’re looking for is often one page away.

4. Learn to sit in silence

Most people never actually hear themselves think. They fill every gap with noise. Music while working. Podcasts while walking. TV while eating. The mind never gets a chance to settle.

The people who know themselves best have learned to sit with nothing. Try it. It’s uncomfortable at first. That discomfort is exactly the point.

5. Turn off notifications permanently

This is not a productivity tip. The goal is not to boost your focus (while that’s a welcome side effect). The goal is to protect your sanity.

Every notification is someone else’s agenda breaking into yours. Wisdom requires uninterrupted thought. You can’t build it in two-minute fragments between pings.

I’ve turned off notifications for all apps and group chats. Just calls and messages, so I don’t miss anything important.

6. Fix the story you tell about yourself

Your labels are not facts.

“I’m undisciplined, unlucky, not smart enough, too old, too late.”

None of that is fixed. It’s a frame, a story you tell yourself. And frames can be changed. I wrote a full article on this recently. The short version: most of your problems are linguistic, not real. Change the words and the problem often changes with it.

7. Don’t take things for granted

It’s easy to complain about your situation.

• I’m too young, and no one takes me seriously.

• Work is too busy.

• Taking care of a baby is exhausting.

Someday you’d give anything for three minutes of exactly that. Wisdom is seeing the value before it’s gone, not after.

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8. Express yourself or fall apart

When you hold back who you are, something suffers. Therapy works because people finally say what they’re actually thinking.

You don’t need a therapist to do that, though. Maybe you just need a journal, an honest conversation, or just the courage to say what you mean. Blocked expression is one of the most underrated causes of feeling stuck and unhappy.

Let it out and then move on.

9. Protect your curiosity like your life depends on it

School, boring jobs, and uninspiring people are all very good at killing it. Wisdom starts with staying curious. Ask questions. Go down rabbit holes. Follow your interest even when it seems useless.

The most interesting people I’ve met never stopped being curious. Most adults stopped somewhere in their twenties and never noticed.

10. Go off the radar regularly

24 to 48 hours without social media, news, or any type of other content consumption (except books and movies). Just immerse yourself in an activity.

Hard to explain what happens when you do this. Your mind starts working again. Ideas come back. You remember what you actually think, separate from what the internet has been telling you to think.

Over the last few years, my wife and I have gone on several long road trips by car. Entire days spent driving. It’s like you live in an alternative universe. You remember every moment of the day. What you talked about, what you ate, what you saw.

When you get back to your routine, you feel refreshed.

11. Embrace spontaneity

Your best memories didn’t come from plans. They came from impulse. The random trip, the unexpected conversation, the night that turned into something you still talk about years later. Wisdom knows when to let go of control.

Not everything needs to be optimized!

12. Minimize everything

The wisest people I know own less, do less, and think about fewer things. Not because they’re lazy.

Because they figured out what actually matters and cut the rest. Complexity is usually a sign that something hasn’t been thought through properly.

Simplicity is a sign of mastery.

13. Replace consumption with real conversation

Next time you go for a walk or get in the car, call someone you care about instead of putting a podcast on. You’ll learn more and feel better.

Connection is not a luxury. It’s part of how wisdom gets built. Other people’s experiences, honestly shared, are one of the fastest ways to learn what you haven’t lived yet.

14. Spend time with older people

The fastest shortcut to wisdom is sitting with someone who’s already made the mistakes you’re about to make.

Most young people ignore older people. That’s one of the most expensive mistakes you can make. Find someone 20 or 30 years ahead of you and ask them what they wish they’d known.

15. Learn to sit with uncertainty

The need to have everything figured out is what keeps most people stuck. They wait for clarity before acting, for certainty before committing, for the right moment before starting.

Wisdom doesn’t come from having all the answers. It comes from getting comfortable not knowing and moving forward anyway.

There’s a reason Socrates, one of the greatest minds in history, said:

He wasn’t being modest. He was making the most important point about wisdom there is.

The moment you think you’ve figured it out, you stop learning. The wisest people I know are also the most curious, the most open, and the most willing to say “I don’t know.”

That’s humility as strength.

These habits won’t make you wise overnight. Nothing does.

But wisdom isn’t a destination. It’s a direction. And every day you practice even one of these, you’re heading the right way.