If you usually read me for go to market and positioning, this one’s a left turn. No frameworks, no playbook, none of the work stuff. These are the principles I actually run my life on.
I turned 35 expecting to feel like someone who finally had it figured out. I didn’t. What I had instead was a notebook full of half finished thoughts, a stack of books with the corners turned down, and a long history of learning things the slow way. For years I’d saved anything I read, heard, or saw that stuck, and in time it became this.
They’re my consolations (to borrow a word from Alain de Botton). When I’m lost or just need some inspiration, reading back through them helps me recalibrate my compass.
Most of them came from getting something wrong, then listening to enough smarter people to get it less wrong. Even so, I’d tell anyone to walk their own path first, because nothing teaches you like your own experience. Ask me again in ten years and I hope a good chunk of this has changed. That would mean I’m still figuring things out.
But for now, this is where I’ve landed, and I’d stand behind all of it.
1. Action is the antidote to anxiety
When we feel anxious, the most natural response is avoidance. Stay away, feel safe. But avoidance doesn’t reduce anxiety. It feeds it. Dr. Julie Smith puts it clearly. Avoidance doesn’t only maintain anxiety, it makes it worse over time.
The Stoics (which I’ll be mentioning a lot) knew this intuitively. Seneca warned that if the future keeps us in suspense, it’s because our present is empty. The fix is always the same. Do the thing. Send the message. Start the project. Make the call. The fear shrinks the moment you move toward it.
2. You get 4,000 weeks if you’re lucky, stop waiting
Oliver Burkeman did the math in “Four Thousand Weeks”. If you live to 80, that’s roughly 4,000 weeks. That’s it. Write that number down and tell me you still have time to waste on things that don’t matter.
Seneca said it two thousand years ago. “While we are postponing, life speeds by.” The problem isn’t that life is short. The problem is that we act as if it’s long. We postpone the things we care about and fill our days with urgencies that feel important but aren’t. The person you want to become is waiting on the other side of the thing you keep putting off.
3. Notice the people who bring out your favorite version of yourself
Montaigne wrote beautifully about friendship. He believed we choose our friends for more than their company. We choose them because they accept us for who we believe we are. That acceptance creates space. Space to be honest, to be ambitious, to be flawed without performing.
Pay attention to how you feel around different people. Some relationships drain you. Others make you funnier, kinder, sharper, more generous. Those people are rare. When you find them, hold on.
4. You teach people how to treat you by what you tolerate
This one took me years to learn. Every time you accept behavior that crosses your line, you update the rules of the relationship. You train the other person that the line doesn’t exist.
Epictetus would say this is entirely within your control. You can’t control how others act, but you can control what you accept. The boundary isn’t selfish. It’s the most honest form of communication you have.
5. Growth happens when you do things you feel unqualified to do
Nietzsche had an uncomfortable truth about this. He wrote that between the initial failure and the eventual success, between who we aspire to be and who we are today, there’s a gap filled with pain, anxiety, envy, and humiliation. We suffer because we can’t spontaneously control the ingredients for our own growth.
That gap is where the work happens. Feeling unqualified isn’t a sign you’re in the wrong place. It’s a sign you’re in exactly the right place. Comfort is a nice place to visit, but nothing grows there.
6. “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek”
Joseph Campbell said this, and it might be the most compressed piece of wisdom I’ve ever encountered. Before every meaningful thing I’ve done, there was a stretch where I was terrified to start.
The fear doesn’t go away. You just learn to move alongside it. Seneca again. “The one who fears suffering already suffers from fear.”
The cave is the conversation you’re avoiding, the career change you keep postponing, the truth you’re afraid to speak. The treasure is on the other side.
7. If you don’t schedule your priorities, someone else will
Whatever you don’t claim, someone else claims for you. Meetings expand into the space you left open. Other people’s urgencies become your afternoon. Nobody sets out to hijack your week, they just fill the gaps you didn’t.
Stephen Covey distinguished between the urgent and the important. Urgent things demand attention now. Important things build the life you want later. The urgent wins by default unless you put the important in the calendar first and then defend it. Block it before the week starts, or the week decides for you.
8. The most dangerous addiction is the approval of other people
Naval Ravikant said something that stuck: “Don’t take yourself too seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.” There’s freedom in that. The moment you stop performing for an audience, you start making decisions that actually fit your life.
Marcus Aurelius kept reminding himself. “Hold firm to the moral principles you’ve set for yourself, and pay no attention to what others say about you, for that is no longer your concern.” Two thousand years later, the advice hasn’t aged.
9. Burnout happens when you treat rest as a reward rather than a right
We’ve built a culture where rest feels like something you have to earn. Finish the sprint, then rest. Hit the target, then take a break. But rest isn’t a reward for productivity. It’s the condition that makes productivity possible.
Nietzsche observed that we throw ourselves into work more intensely than necessary, because for us it’s even more necessary not to have time to stop and think. “Haste is universal, because everyone is running from themselves.” If you need to burn out to justify resting, the system is broken, not you.
10. You’ll never regret investing in your health, learning, or relationships
Naval said it simply: “A calm mind, a healthy body, and a house full of love. These things can’t be bought. They must be earned.“
I’ve never looked back on a workout, a book, or an honest conversation and thought “I wish I hadn’t done that.” I can’t say the same about doomscrolling, people pleasing, or grinding on work that didn’t matter. The investments that compound are always the same three.
11. Normalize not having an opinion on things you aren’t informed on
This is harder than it sounds. Social media rewards hot takes. Conversations reward confidence.
Silence feels like ignorance.
But Epictetus had a rule worth adopting: “If you see someone who bathes quickly, don’t say ‘they bathe badly,’ say ‘they bathe quickly.’ Before you know the reasoning behind someone’s actions, how can you know those actions are wrong?”
The discipline of withholding judgment until you actually understand something is one of the most underrated forms of intelligence.
12. The only person who’s going to magically show up to save you is you
Epictetus asked a question that still cuts: “What teacher are you still waiting for before you start correcting yourself? You’re no longer a child but a mature person. If you continue to be negligent, always postponing, life will pass you by without your noticing.”
Nobody is coming. Not a mentor, not a partner, not a promotion. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you start building.
13. Your habits are the silent architects of your life
James Clear wrote: “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”
Aristotle put it more simply: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.“
Your life is not shaped by the big decisions you make once a year. It’s shaped by the small decisions you make every day without thinking.
14. Discipline is choosing what you want most over what you want now
The Diderot Effect illustrates this perfectly. You buy one nice thing, and suddenly everything else feels inadequate. One purchase triggers a spiral of consumption. The same pattern applies to time, attention, and energy. Short term comfort always seems reasonable in the moment. But it compounds into long term mediocrity.
The Stoics called this the practice of choosing the harder right over the easier wrong. Not because suffering is noble, but because the person you want to become lives on the other side of discomfort.
15. The people who matter won’t leave you for having boundaries
Boundaries feel risky because we’re afraid people will leave. Some will. And that’s the point. The people who leave when you set a boundary were only staying because the boundary didn’t exist.
The people who stay, who respect the line, who love you without needing you to shrink, those are your people. As Montaigne would say, true friendship doesn’t require you to diminish yourself. It requires the opposite.
16. Your worth isn’t tied to your productivity
This is one I have to keep relearning. There’s a voice that says if you’re not producing, you’re not valuable. That voice is lying.
Marcus Aurelius wrote that a calm mind, free from passions, is the strongest fortress a person can retreat to. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop producing. Sit with yourself. Write in your journal. Do nothing useful for an hour. Your value doesn’t fluctuate with your output.
17. Reach out to people just because they crossed your mind
Epicurus believed that the most important thing for a happy life is the acquisition of friends. Not achievements, not possessions, not status. Friends.
But friendships require maintenance. Not grand gestures, just small, consistent ones. A message that says “was thinking about you” takes ten seconds and can mean everything to someone who needed to hear it that day. Don’t wait for a reason. The thought is the reason.
18. Not every provocation deserves a response
Someone says something designed to get a rise out of you. A comment lands wrong. An email arrives with an edge on it. The instinct is to answer straight away, and the instinct is usually wrong.
Marcus Aurelius asked himself constantly. “Is this necessary?” Most of the time the answer is no. Not every argument needs your input. Not every provocation deserves a response. The bait can sit there uneaten. The ability to pause, notice the pull, and choose not to react is a form of power most people never build.
19. Action creates motivation, not the other way around
We wait to feel motivated before we start. But that’s backwards. Motivation is a byproduct of action, not a prerequisite for it. The Latin phrase “solvitur ambulando” captures it. It is solved by walking. You don’t think your way to clarity. You move your way there.
This changes what you do on a bad day. You don’t wait for the feeling and then act. You act badly, briefly, and the feeling turns up somewhere in the middle. Every creative person I admire has said some version of this. The work comes first, the feeling follows.
20. You can do almost anything, but not everything
This is the hardest tradeoff in a life full of options. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to a hundred others. And the more capable you are, the more painful the narrowing feels.
James Clear put it well. “Eliminate. Focus. Close yourself to the world and ask, ‘What can I create today?'” The constraint isn’t a limitation. It’s the thing that makes depth possible. You can go wide and stay shallow, or go narrow and build something that matters.
21. Your calendar reveals your real priorities
Not the priorities you talk about. Not the priorities on your vision board. The ones in your calendar. Where your hours go is where your life goes.
If you say family matters but your evenings are filled with work, you’ve made your choice. If you say learning matters but you haven’t read a book in months, you’ve made your choice. This isn’t about guilt, it’s about accuracy. The calendar is the most honest mirror you have. Look at it and ask if this is the life you’re choosing.
22. You’ll never feel ready because ready isn’t a feeling, it’s a decision
Paul Graham wrote that finding work you love is difficult, and most people fail. But if you have the destination in sight, you’re more likely to arrive at it. You don’t wait to feel ready to start walking. You start walking and readiness catches up.
Waiting for readiness is just procrastination dressed up as prudence. The person who waits to feel ready never starts. The person who starts before they’re ready learns faster than everyone else.
23. Confidence is built every time you keep a promise to yourself
Not the confidence that comes from compliments or achievements. The deeper kind. The kind that comes from saying “I’ll wake up at 6” and doing it. From saying “I’ll write every day” and doing it. From saying “I’ll have that hard conversation” and doing it.
James Clear wrote that doing something every day turns desired behavior into default behavior. When willpower fails, routine takes over. Confidence isn’t a feeling you cultivate. It’s a track record you build, one kept promise at a time.
24. It’s not the destination or the road there, it’s the people
Epicurus withdrew from public life. His principle, “lathe biōsas” (live hidden), meant staying close to home, avoiding complex desires, and spending time with close friends. Of all the means to ensure happiness, he said, “by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.”
I’ve chased goals, hit them, and felt empty. I’ve failed at things and felt fine because the people around me made it fine. The moments I remember most aren’t achievements. They’re dinners, conversations, late nights with people I love. The people are the point.
25. Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it
The sunk cost fallacy is everywhere. Relationships that should have ended years ago, careers built on momentum instead of meaning, projects that stopped making sense three months in.
Montaigne had a maxim that applies directly: “Don’t try to control everything.” Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is let go of something you invested in. The time is already spent. The only question that matters is this. Does it still serve who I’m becoming?
26. You become what you consume, so guard your inputs
James Clear wrote this. “The edge is in the inputs. The person who consumes from better sources gets better thoughts. The person who asks better questions gets better answers.” The same applies to food, media, and relationships.
Naval recommended reading science, mathematics, and philosophy for an hour a day. He claimed it would put you at the top of human achievement within seven years. I don’t know about the timeline, but the principle is right. Your mind is built from what you feed it. High quality inputs produce high quality thinking. Low quality inputs produce noise.
27. Drop the word “should”, it’s usually guilt or someone else’s script talking
Naval said this and it hit hard. “Whenever the word ‘should’ appears in your mind, it’s driven by guilt or by a social construct. Doing something because you ‘should’ basically means you don’t want to do it. It will only make you miserable.”
Start noticing how often “should” shows up in your thinking. I should be further along. I should want this. I should feel grateful. Most of the time, “should” is someone else’s expectations wearing your voice. Replace it with “I want to” or “I choose to,” and watch how many things fall off the list.
28. You don’t have to outsmart people, just out position them
Shane Parrish from Farnam Street wrote something I come back to often. “Anyone looks like a genius when they’re in a good position, and even the smartest person looks like an idiot when they’re in a bad one.”
Positioning applies well beyond business. It’s a life concept. The person with low leverage and cash in the bank has options. The person with high leverage and no buffer is trapped, no matter how smart they are. Time is the friend of someone properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned.
29. Happiness is what’s left when you stop believing something’s missing
Naval again. “Happiness is really a default state. Happiness is what remains when you remove the idea that something is missing from your life.”
This reframed everything for me. I spent years chasing happiness like it was a destination. But it’s not something you arrive at. It’s something you return to when you stop running. The wanting is the problem, not the having. Epicurus understood this. Peace comes from needing less, not from acquiring more.
30. Intensity makes a good story. Consistency makes the results
Farnam Street put this perfectly, and it captures the tension of your twenties. You want intensity. You want the dramatic transformation, the overnight success, the big break.
But the people who actually build something meaningful are the boring ones. The ones who show up every day. The ones who lay one brick, then another, then another. James Clear calls it the compound effect of habits. The Stoics called it the daily practice of virtue. The label doesn’t matter. The consistency does.
31. Silence is where the strong rest, you don’t owe everyone your noise
“Silence is the rest of people who are strong and feel secure in themselves.” That line from “Ego Is the Enemy” changed how I think about quiet. Somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that staying quiet meant I had nothing to add. It’s usually the opposite. The pressure to weigh in, to have a take on every passing thing, comes from insecurity, not strength.
Epictetus had a rule I keep close. “Be silent for the most part, or say only what is necessary, and in few words.” You don’t owe everyone a running commentary. Most of the noise you’d add wouldn’t have helped you or anyone else. And quiet isn’t only restraint. It’s where you get your energy back.
32. Thank the pain and let it forge you, suffering is a teacher
Nobody signs up for the hard stretches. But looking back, every version of me I actually respect was built in one. The losses, the failures, the seasons where nothing worked taught me things comfort never could.
Seneca wrote that “difficulties strengthen the mind, as labour does the body.” Pain isn’t only something to rush through or numb. Handled right, it’s information, and sometimes it’s the only teacher that gets through. You don’t have to be grateful for it while it’s happening. You just have to let it do its work.
33. You’re disturbed not by what happens, but by your judgment of it
This is the single idea that’s saved me the most grief. The event is rarely the problem. The story I wrap around it is.
Epictetus said it plainly two thousand years ago. “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them.” Someone cuts you off, a plan collapses, a message goes unanswered. The thing itself stays neutral until you decide what it means. Change the judgment and the feeling changes with it. That space between what happens and how you respond is where most of your freedom lives.
34. Luck is preparation meeting sweat, the more you prepare the luckier you get
I used to think the people catching the breaks were just lucky. Some were. But most had quietly put in the reps for years, so when the moment showed up, they were ready to grab it.
Seneca is often quoted as saying “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” You can’t manufacture the opening. You can make sure you’re ready for it when it comes. The work you do when nobody’s watching is what makes you look lucky when they finally are.
35. Control today, make it 1% better, and let the gains compound
You can’t control the next decade. You can control the next 24 hours. That’s the whole game.
James Clear built “Atomic Habits” on a simple piece of math. Get 1% better every day for a year and you end up close to 37 times better. The daily improvement feels invisible. The compounding isn’t. Don’t try to overhaul your whole life today. Just leave it a little better than you found it, then do that again tomorrow.
If any of these resonated, let’s connect. Always happy to keep the conversation going.
