The Forge

The Book I Never Finished (And Can’t Stop Thinking About)

What’s a book you never finished but still think about?

I never finished Anna Karenina. Got maybe two-thirds through, put it down during a busy stretch, and somehow never picked it back up. That was a while ago now. And it’s still one of the books I think about the most.

That’s the weird thing about certain stories — they don’t need an ending to leave a mark. Sometimes the unfinished middle is exactly where the lesson lives.

Two people, two very different decision systems

Here’s what actually stuck with me. The book runs two parallel lives side by side. Anna, who blows up her entire world chasing a feeling, and Levin, this awkward, overthinking landowner who’s out in the countryside wrestling with doubt, work, and what a good life even looks like.

Tolstoy never really lets you forget these two are supposed to be in conversation with each other. Anna moves on pure want. Every choice she makes is reactive — driven by whatever she’s feeling in that exact moment, with no real framework underneath it. It reads exciting at first. Thrilling, even. But you can feel the runway getting shorter with every chapter. She’s not making decisions anymore. She’s just responding to whatever fear or desire is loudest that day.

Levin is the opposite, and honestly kind of insufferable about it. He second-guesses everything. He quits things, restarts things, has a full identity crisis about farming of all things. But underneath the mess, he’s actually building something — a set of values he keeps testing against real life. He’s slow. He’s not thrilling to watch. But he’s constructing an actual decision system instead of just running on impulse.

I think that contrast is the whole book, honestly. Not “love vs. duty.” That’s the surface read. The real question underneath it is: are you making decisions from a place of groundedness, or are you making decisions from whatever you’re afraid of or hungry for right now?

Why this keeps following me around

I work in decision systems for a living now, in a sense — that’s basically the whole premise behind The Forge. Credit, investing, travel, income — none of that actually works without a framework underneath it. And I think about Anna constantly when I see someone (myself included, some days) making a financial decision purely out of fear. Panic-selling. Impulse-buying the thing that’ll make the discomfort go away for an hour. Taking a job or a partner or a plan because the alternative — sitting with uncertainty — feels unbearable.

None of that is stupidity. Anna isn’t stupid in the book. She’s smart, funny, self-aware even. That’s what makes it land. Smart people make fear-based decisions all the time and dress them up as passion, as boldness, as finally choosing themselves. Sometimes that’s exactly what it is. And sometimes it’s just fear wearing a nicer outfit.

Levin’s path is less romantic and a lot more useful. He builds. He fails. He adjusts. He keeps checking his choices against something more durable than a feeling in the moment. That’s not a thrilling story to tell at a dinner party. But it’s the one that actually holds up.

Why I never went back to finish it

I think — and I’ve thought about this more than a reasonable person should think about an unfinished 900-page Russian novel — that I already knew where Anna’s story was headed. Everyone does. It’s baked into the cultural water supply at this point. And some part of me didn’t want to spend more time watching someone spiral without a framework when I was actively trying to build one for myself.

Levin’s story doesn’t really “end” so much as it settles into something quieter. Less dramatic. More honest. Maybe that’s why I keep circling back to this book instead of just rereading it — I didn’t need the ending. I needed the contrast. And I got that a long time before page 800.

If you’ve read the whole thing, no spoilers. I’ve made my peace with not knowing exactly how it lands. Some books you finish. Some books you just carry around with you, half-read, doing their work anyway.

The Day They Signed Away Everything

If you could go back and witness any historical event, which one would you pick?

If you handed me one ticket — any moment in history, front row, no consequences — I wouldn’t pick a battle or a coronation or the moon landing. I’d pick a hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776. And I’d watch a handful of men walk up to a table, one at a time, and ruin their own lives on purpose.

That’s what the signing of the Declaration was, if you scrape the marble off it.

We’ve turned it into a ceremony in our heads. Powdered wigs, a grand document, that painting where everyone looks calm and important. But here’s a detail most people never learned: most of the fifty-six signatures didn’t happen on July 4th at all. The bulk of them went down on August 2nd, after the thing had been copied onto parchment. So by the time a man actually dipped his pen, the adrenaline of the vote was long gone. He’d had weeks to think about it. He knew precisely what he was doing.

He was signing a confession.

To the most powerful empire on earth, this wasn’t a Declaration. It was a list — neatly organized, helpfully legible — of people to hang. John Hancock didn’t sign that big because he was showing off. He signed it big so King George wouldn’t need his spectacles to find the name.

The part nobody quotes

Everybody knows the opening. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Beautiful. But the line I’d want to watch land on their faces is the last one:

“We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Read that again slowly, because the middle word is the one we skip. Our Fortunes.

A lot of the men in that room were rich. Merchants, planters, lawyers with real estate and ships and businesses. In pure dollar terms, they had the most to lose of almost anyone in the colonies. And plenty of them did lose it. Homes burned. Estates seized. Some died broke, some died in prison, some spent the rest of their lives paying for a signature that took four seconds to write.

They knew the odds when they walked up to the table. That’s the thing I can’t get over.

The safe choice was the expensive one

Here’s what I’d really be studying in that room, and it’s the reason this event matters to anyone trying to build something.

Staying loyal to the crown was the safe financial move. Keep your head down, keep your property, keep your business humming. On a spreadsheet, loyalty won. Rebellion was the reckless line item — the one your accountant and your mother and every reasonable voice in your life would beg you to cross out.

But “safe” was a lie, and they knew it. The status quo was quietly bleeding them dry — taxes they had no say in, a future being decided for them, a slow surrender dressed up as stability. Loyalty wasn’t protecting their fortunes. It was just letting the loss happen at a pace comfortable enough to ignore.

So they made a different kind of decision. Not a fear-based one — “protect what I have” — but a faith-based one. “Risk what I have for something I can’t yet see.” Those are two completely different operating systems, and most of us run the first one our whole lives without noticing.

The fearful decision is easy to spot: it’s always the one that keeps everything exactly where it is. The faithful one usually looks insane on paper right up until it’s the only thing that ever mattered.

Your table is smaller. The math is the same.

You’re probably not committing treason this week. Good. But the mechanics of the moment don’t change with the scale.

Somewhere in your life there’s a “safe” choice that’s quietly costing you. The stable-looking job that’s slowly deadening the part of you that used to make things. The business idea you keep researching instead of launching, because researching feels productive and launching feels like standing up in that room. The rate you don’t raise, the pitch you don’t send, the calling you keep calling a hobby.

The status quo always presents itself as the responsible option. It’s very good at that. It hands you a spreadsheet where standing still is the smart play, and it never once mentions what the standing still is costing you, because that number doesn’t fit in a cell.

Those fifty-six men had the same spreadsheet in front of them. They signed anyway.

What I’d actually be looking for

If I got my one ticket, I wouldn’t be there for the pageantry. I’d be watching their hands. Their faces. I want to know if they looked afraid.

And my honest guess is that they did. I don’t think courage means the fear went away. I think it means Hancock’s hand was probably a little unsteady and he signed enormous anyway. I think that’s the whole lesson, actually — that you can be genuinely scared, fully aware of the price, doing the math and not liking the answer, and still walk up to the table.

That’s the moment I’d want to witness. Not because they were fearless. Because they weren’t, and they did it anyway.

So here’s the only question worth taking from that room into this week: What’s the safe-looking choice in your life that’s actually the expensive one?

Find it. Then go sign your name too big to miss.

Nostrana

Which is the best restaurant in your city?

Every city has a restaurant people argue about. Portland’s isn’t much of an argument. If you ask around long enough, you’ll hear the same name more than any other: Nostrana.

It sits on a corner in Buckman, on Southeast Morrison, in a building that used to be an auto shop — you can still feel that bones-of-a-warehouse quality in the space. High ceilings, big windows, a room that manages to feel both loud and warm at the same time, which is a harder trick than it sounds. Cathy Whims opened it back in 2005, and twenty years later it’s still the place people mean when they say “Italian” in this city, not because it’s flashy, but because it’s never stopped being good.

What it actually is

Nostrana is a wood-fired pizza and seasonal Italian kitchen, and both halves of that matter. The pizzas come out of a wood oven with the kind of char and chew that make you understand why people get precious about crust. But it’d be a mistake to think of it as a pizza place with pasta on the side. The menu moves with the season — what the farmers have is what shows up on the plate — and it’s built out of real technique, not trend-chasing. Whims has been a six-time James Beard Award finalist, which tells you the kitchen isn’t coasting.

Then there’s the drink program. Nostrana’s been called Portland’s capital of the Negroni, and once you’ve had one there you get why. It’s not gimmicky. It’s just consistently, quietly excellent — the kind of cocktail list that makes you trust the rest of the menu before you’ve even ordered.

Why it’s the one

Every city has restaurants that are good for an occasion — the place you go for anniversaries, the place you go to impress somebody. Nostrana isn’t that. It’s good enough for the big occasion and unpretentious enough for a random Tuesday, and that combination is rarer than it should be. You don’t have to earn your way into deserving a table there. You just show up hungry.

There’s also something to be said for a restaurant that’s been excellent for two decades in a city where restaurants open and close like weather. Nostrana didn’t get famous and then coast. It’s still run by the person who opened it, still sourcing seriously, still changing the menu with the seasons instead of laminating one and calling it done. That kind of consistency is its own quiet flex.

The part that’s mine to fill in

[This is where you drop in the actual memory — the dish you always order, who you go with, the specific night it became “your” restaurant instead of just a good one. That’s what turns a review into a story.]

If you’re ever in Portland and you only have one dinner to spend well, spend it here. Get a pizza. Get whatever pasta they’re running that week. Order the Negroni. Let the room do what it does.

No One Is Coming

What’s a moment when you realized you were officially an adult?

There’s a moment everyone remembers differently but recognizes instantly. Mine happened staring at a bank balance that didn’t have enough zeros in it to cover what was about to come out.

I did the math three times. Not because I didn’t trust the first two, but because I kept hoping the third one would be different. It wasn’t. And somewhere in that third recalculation, a much bigger number than my account balance clicked into place: I was actually, completely, on my own here.

Not in a dramatic, cinematic way. No one was going to swoop in. No parent was going to quietly cover it “just this once.” No emergency fund I’d forgotten about. No line of credit with my name already on it. Just me, the number, and the bill.

That’s the moment I became an adult. Not the birthday. Not the diploma. Not the apartment lease with my name on it. This.

The myth we grow up on

Nobody tells you this directly, but you absorb it anyway: somewhere, someone is keeping the ledger balanced on your behalf. Parents. The system. Luck. Some vague sense that things work out for people who are basically trying.

Then one day the ledger doesn’t balance, and you find out that belief was never true. It just hadn’t been tested yet.

That gap — between “someone’s got this” and “no one’s got this but me” — is where fear lives. It’s genuinely disorienting to feel it for the first time. Your stomach does something specific. Your brain starts running worst-case scenarios at a speed that feels almost violent. And underneath all of it is a question you’ve never had to answer before: what happens if I can’t fix this?

What actually happens next

Here’s the part nobody tells you either. You fix it. Maybe not elegantly. Maybe by picking up a shift you didn’t want, or having a conversation you’d been avoiding, or eating cheaper for a month than you’d like to admit to anyone. But you move, because the alternative — staying frozen in front of the number — doesn’t make the number smaller.

And something happens in that moving that doesn’t happen any other way. You stop being a person things happen to and start being a person who handles things. That’s not a mindset shift you can talk yourself into ahead of time. It only gets installed by going through it.

I’ve talked to a lot of people about their version of this moment. The exact circumstances are never the same — a car repair, a missed paycheck, a number that used to feel small suddenly feeling enormous. But the shape of it is identical every time. Terror, then a decision, then the quiet discovery that you were more capable than the fear let on.

The part worth remembering

If you’re in that moment right now — staring at your own version of the number — here’s what I’d want you to know. The fear you’re feeling isn’t a sign that something’s wrong with you. It’s just the sound of a belief breaking, the one that said someone else was responsible for this. That belief was always going to break eventually. Better now, with a bill, than later, with something bigger.

And once it breaks, it doesn’t grow back. That’s the trade. You lose the comfort of thinking someone’s got a safety net under you. You gain the fact that you can catch yourself. Most days, that’s a better deal than it sounds like in the moment.

No one was coming to save me that day. Turns out I didn’t need saving. I needed to move.

[Note: drop in your real number, the actual bill, the age you were — the specifics are what’ll make this land. Right now it’s the shape of the story; you fill in the truth of it.]

The One Message I’d Send My Past Self

If you had a time machine and could send just one message to your past self, what would it say?

Someone asked me a question recently that I couldn’t shake: if you had a time machine and could send one message to your past self, what would it say?

I expected to reach for something dramatic. Buy the stock. Don’t take that job. Call her back. But the answer that surfaced was quieter than that, and it’s been sitting with me for days.

Stop researching. Start choosing.

Not because research is bad. Research is how you avoid dumb mistakes, and I’m not anti-preparation. But there’s a point where research stops being preparation and starts being a hiding place. You know the point I mean. It’s the fifth podcast episode on the same topic. The spreadsheet you keep adding columns to instead of sending. The “I just need to figure out a few more things” that’s been true for three months.

Here’s what I didn’t understand back then: more information doesn’t make a decision safer. It just delays the moment you find out if you were right. And if some part of you is scared of that moment, you will happily mistake research for progress forever.

The tell

If you’re someone who loves options — new ideas, new angles, new possibilities always more interesting than the one you already picked — you probably know this pattern. Collecting information feels like momentum. It isn’t. Real momentum closes doors. It commits you to one path and lets the others go quiet. And if closing doors feels like a small death to you, you will unconsciously keep every door open as long as you possibly can, dressed up as diligence.

The way to catch yourself: listen for “I need to figure out.” That phrase almost never means what it says. It usually means “I’m not ready to be seen trying and possibly failing.” It’s a socially acceptable way to stand still while feeling like you’re moving.

Fear-based versus faith-based

Here’s the distinction that actually changed how I make decisions, and it’s simpler than it sounds.

A fear-based decision is organized around avoiding a bad outcome. It asks: what if I’m wrong, what if I lose the money, what if I look foolish. It optimizes for not losing.

A faith-based decision is organized around moving toward something. It asks: what’s the next honest step toward the thing I actually want, and can I trust myself to adjust once I’m in motion. It optimizes for learning.

Both feel like “being careful” from the inside. That’s what makes them hard to tell apart in the moment. But fear-based decisions keep you gathering information forever, because no amount of information ever fully removes risk. Faith-based decisions accept that you’ll course-correct from action — you just can’t course-correct from nothing. There’s no data in stillness.

You don’t need certainty to move. You need a next step small enough to take and a willingness to adjust once you see what happens. That’s it. That’s the whole engine.

The message, in full

So if I could send one line back, it wouldn’t be about the stock or the job or the girl. It would be this:

You have enough information. The thing you’re calling “figuring it out” is actually fear wearing a lab coat. Pick the next small honest step and take it today. You’ll learn more from one real action than from another month of research.

I think most of us are carrying around a version of this. Some plan we’ve refined past the point of usefulness. Some list we keep updating instead of starting. Some conversation we’re “still thinking about how to approach.”

So here’s the question worth sitting with, if you want to borrow the time machine for a second: what’s the current version of “I need to figure out” that you’re running? And what would it look like to stop researching it and just start?

One Text From My Future Self

If your future self could send you one sentence, what do you hope it would say?

If your future self could send you exactly one text — no context, no explanation, just one line — what would stop you mid-scroll?

I’ve been sitting with that question for a few weeks now. And I keep landing on a mashup of two ideas that don’t sound related at first:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Don’t value things. Value experiences.

One’s about how you treat people. The other’s about how you treat your own life. Different sentences, different situations — a disagreement with a coworker versus a decision about whether to buy the thing or book the trip. But the more I sit with them, the more they look like the same instruction wearing two different outfits.

The same move, twice

Both of these are pointing you toward the same thing: put your weight down on what actually compounds, and stop putting it down on what depreciates the second you drive it off the lot.

The Golden Rule isn’t really about manners. It’s a redirect — stop running the math from your own convenience and start running it from the other person’s dignity. Treat their time like it matters as much as yours. Treat their needs like they’re as real as yours.

“Value experiences over things” is the same redirect, aimed inward. Stop running your decisions off what looks good in a photo or feels good for a week, and start running them off what you’ll actually remember at 70. A thing sits in a closet and slowly loses value. An experience — a trip with your kid, a hard conversation that repaired something, a year you trained for a race you weren’t sure you could finish — it keeps paying you back. It shows up in who you become.

Same instruction. Two directions. Invest in what compounds — people and moments — instead of what depreciates — stuff and shortcuts.

Where this gets practical

I talk a lot on here about optimization — the right card for the spend, the points that turn into a flight, the tax-advantaged account, the side income stream. All of that still matters. I’m not walking any of it back.

But optimization without a target is just motion. It feels productive. It isn’t the same thing as progress.

If the target is “acquire more stuff,” you can optimize yourself into a bigger garage and a smaller life — more efficient spending on things that were never going to pay you back in the first place. Same dollar, same card, same 2x points — just aimed at the wrong thing.

If the target is people and experiences, those exact same tools build something that doesn’t lose value the day you get it. The points that book the flight to see your parents while they can still travel. The dinner with the friend who’s actually going through something. The gear that gets you to the starting line of the thing you said you’d never do.

The tools don’t change. The target does. And the target is the whole game.

The honest question

Here’s the one worth sitting with, not just reading past: if you looked at your last thirty days of spending — money and time both — what would it say you actually value? Not what you’d tell someone at a dinner party. What the receipts say.

I’ve run that audit on myself more than once and didn’t love the answer every time. That’s kind of the point of doing it.

The one sentence

So if my future self only got one line through — no context, no room to argue with it — I think it’d be this:

Spend your life on people and moments, not stuff, because that’s the only investment that actually pays out forever.

Everything else on this page — the credit strategy, the travel hacks, the income streams — is just the vehicle. That sentence is the destination.

Molly Doesn’t Need to Prove Anything

Share a photo of your pet and tell us one thing that makes them uniquely them.

My dog Molly is a golden retriever/Maremma mix, and she might be the most mellow creature I’ve ever met. Not lazy — mellow. There’s a difference. She’s got energy when it counts. But her default setting is calm, and I’ve come to think that’s actually the most interesting thing about her.

Here’s the tell: when you feed her, she takes the food so gently it’s almost eerie. Her head barely moves. No snapping, no grabbing, no lunging for the treat like it might disappear. Just this soft, unhurried acceptance — like she already knows it’s hers and there’s no reason to rush.

I’ve had dogs before who treat every meal like it’s being contested. Molly’s never operated that way. She trusts that the food’s coming, so she doesn’t need to fight for it. And honestly, watching her do that over and over has quietly rewired something in how I think about wanting things.

Most of us — me included — grab. We rush the ask, force the close, snap at opportunities like they’re the last one that’s ever going to show up. Scarcity does that to you. It makes you graceless. Molly’s the opposite of that. She moves through the world like there’s enough. Enough food, enough attention, enough time on the couch. So she never has to be anything other than exactly as gentle as she wants to be.

I don’t think she’s calculated this. I think she’s just a mellow dog. But I’ve started noticing it on purpose now, especially on days when I catch myself rushing something out of fear instead of clarity. There’s a version of taking what’s yours that doesn’t require elbows out. Molly demonstrates it daily, mouth barely touching your fingers, tail going the whole time.

She’s not a guard dog. She’s not particularly driven. She will not be winning any agility trials. What she’s got instead is this settled, unbothered way of being — and in a world that rewards hustle and grab, that’s turned out to be the trait I respect most in her.

The Man Who Passed Me at Mile 14 (And What He Said Before He Disappeared)

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Mile fourteen is where the wheels usually come off for me. Not because of my lungs — my lungs are fine. It’s my shins. Old stress fracture territory. Every long run past the two-hour mark, some part of my brain starts running a different race: the one where I convince myself to stop before something breaks.

I was deep in that argument with myself on a Saturday long run a few weeks back, legs heavy, watch mocking me, when an older guy in a faded Boston Marathon shirt pulled up next to me. Had to be seventy. Moved like he’d been doing this since before I was born.

“You’re arguing with yourself,” he said. Not a question.

“Something like that.”

He laughed, easy, like he’d had this exact conversation a hundred times. Said his name was Dennis. Said this was his fifty-third marathon training block. Fifty-third. I did the math in my head and it didn’t make sense — the guy should’ve been retired from his knees alone.

I asked him the obvious question. Why keep doing this to your body at seventy?

And he said something I haven’t been able to shake since.

“Because nobody on their deathbed asks to see their stuff again. They ask about the trip to Alaska. The race they finished. The person they became doing it.” He tapped his own chest. “You can’t put a finish line in a box in your closet. That’s why I keep chasing them.”

Then, quieter, like it was the real point and the first part was just the setup: “And don’t you dare quit on yourself out here. God didn’t bring you fourteen miles to watch you stop trusting your own legs at fifteen.”

He picked up his pace and was gone. I never got his last name. I never saw him again. I finished the run anyway — slower than I wanted, but I finished it.

Why That Line Rewired How I Think About Money

I’ve spent years now writing about credit optimization and travel hacking and building toward financial freedom, and if you strip away all the mechanics — the points, the annual fees, the spreadsheets — what’s actually underneath it is Dennis’s sentence. Things end up in boxes. Experiences end up in you.

That’s not a rejection of money. Money’s a tool, and a good one. But somewhere along the way it’s easy to start optimizing for the wrong scoreboard — more stuff, nicer stuff, stuff that photographs well — instead of the scoreboard that actually matters at the end of a life. The whole reason I care about points and cash flow and building income that doesn’t chain me to a desk isn’t so I can buy more things. It’s so I can buy more Alaska. More finish lines. More mornings where I’m not trading my one life for someone else’s calendar.

Every dollar is a vote for what kind of story you’re building. Dennis just said it plainer than I ever have.

Why It Rewired How I Think About Myself

Here’s the part that hit harder, honestly. The second half of what he said.

I’m building a QC framework from scratch at work right now — no inherited process, no manual to follow, just me deciding what “good” even means for defects nobody’s ever formally defined before. Most days that feels less like a job and more like running blind. I’m also somewhere in the middle of a job search that’s tested how long I can keep showing up to outreach that doesn’t get answered, and building a brand that started as a following and is still becoming something more.

None of that is a straight line. All of it is mile fourteen, over and over.

And the temptation in every single one of those rooms is the same temptation I felt on that run — to quietly negotiate myself down. Lower the ambition. Play it safer. Stop trusting that the thing I started has a finish line at all.

What Dennis actually gave me wasn’t running advice. It was a decision I get to make on repeat: that God isn’t the one who loses confidence in me at mile fourteen. I am. And I don’t have to.

Faith, for me, was never about certainty that the outcome works out exactly how I’ve pictured it. It’s the thing that lets me keep moving when I can’t see the finish line yet — trusting that showing up with what I’ve got is enough, because I’m not actually running it alone.

The Only Advice Worth Keeping

I never got Dennis’s last name, and I’ve made my peace with never finding him again. Some advice isn’t supposed to come with a follow-up conversation. It’s supposed to land once, hard enough that you carry it the rest of the way yourself.

So here’s what I’m building my life around these days: spend on the things that end up in your story, not your closet. And when your legs — or your career, or your bank account, or your faith — start telling you to stop trusting yourself, remember that’s usually right around mile fourteen. Not the end. Just the part where it gets real.

Keep going anyway.

Faith Is Taking the First Step

What’s a quote that perfectly describes your outlook on life?

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

I’ve probably read a hundred quotes about faith. Most of them slide right off me. This one didn’t, and it took me a while to figure out why.

It’s not because it’s comforting. It’s because it’s an accusation.

I am a person who wants the staircase. All of it. I want to see the landing, the turns, the exit sign at the top before I’ll commit to the first step. Give me an ENFP brain wired for possibility and an Enneagram 7’s allergy to being stuck, and you get someone who can generate options faster than he can act on any of them. Strategy feels like progress. It isn’t. It’s just a more comfortable place to stand than the first step.

Here’s where I catch myself doing it: a hiring manager I should message directly instead of tweaking my resume for the ninth time. A newsletter idea sitting in drafts because I haven’t “figured out” the full content calendar around it. A defect standard at work that I want fully built and airtight before I show anyone a rough draft. Every one of those is me asking for the staircase when I’ve only been asked to take a step.

And that’s the part people miss about faith. It’s not a feeling. It’s not optimism. It’s not “everything happens for a reason” said with a shrug. It’s closer to what Hebrews calls it — being sure of what you hope for, certain of what you can’t see. That’s not passive. That’s a decision to move before the evidence is in, because you trust something about who’s holding the rest of the staircase even though you can’t see it.

I think about this every time I’m out on a long training run. You don’t run a marathon by seeing mile 22 from mile 1. You can’t. Your body wouldn’t let you carry that much information anyway — it would talk you out of starting. You run the mile you’re on. That’s it. That’s the whole strategy some days.

Same thing is true of the quality system I’m building from scratch right now with no inherited process to lean on. I don’t get to see the finished, validated, everyone-trusts-it version on day one. I get to define one measurable defect criteria today. Ship that. Let it be imperfect. Take the next step once I’m standing on it.

The staircase, it turns out, has a habit of appearing exactly one step at a time — but only for the people who are already climbing. It doesn’t reveal itself to the people still standing at the bottom drawing blueprints.

So here’s the question I’m asking myself, and I’d put it to you too: what’s the step you’re not taking because you can’t see the whole staircase yet? Not the five-year plan. Not the perfect version. The next physical, doable, uncomfortable step.

Take it anyway. That’s the whole faith part.

11 Places I Can’t Rank (But Can’t Stop Thinking About)

What are your top 10 travel destinations?

I sat down to write “my top 10 travel destinations” and got exactly as far as you’d expect: eleven places, zero willingness to cut one. So here’s the honest version. Not ranked. Not a listicle promising you “hidden gems.” Just the places that rearranged something in me, in no particular order, because pretending I can rank them would be a lie and this isn’t that kind of blog.

Thailand

Thailand is the place that taught me heat has a texture. Not just hot — thick, wet, alive. Street food carts running at 11pm with lines longer than any restaurant back home, motorbikes threading through gaps that shouldn’t exist, temples that go from roadside-ordinary to jaw-dropping in the space of a doorway. It’s a country that rewards slowing down. The itinerary you planned matters less than the conversation you have with the guy running the noodle stall.

Japan

Japan is precision as a form of hospitality. Everything — the trains, the way a shopkeeper wraps a purchase, the silence on a subway platform — feels considered. It’s the most orderly chaos-adjacent place I’ve been: Shibuya crossing dumping thousands of people into each other with zero collisions, then five minutes later you’re in a shrine garden and you can hear a single leaf hit the ground. Japan doesn’t ask you to keep up. It asks you to pay attention.

Vietnam

Vietnam moves at the speed of a scooter horn. Hanoi’s Old Quarter is sensory overload in the best way — coffee that tastes like it’s daring you to finish it, plastic stools on sidewalks, motorbikes carrying entire families or entire furniture sets. Then you get out to Ha Long Bay or the countryside and the volume drops to almost nothing. The contrast is the whole point. Vietnam doesn’t smooth itself out for visitors, and that’s exactly why it sticks.

London

London is a city that argues with itself constantly and somehow stays coherent. Roman ruins under glass office lobbies, a thousand-year-old church next to a curry house, the Tube swallowing and spitting out more humanity per square foot than almost anywhere on earth. It’s not a city that dazzles you in one shot. It’s a city that keeps handing you one more layer every time you think you’ve seen it.

Barcelona

Barcelona is a city that refused to finish its own architecture on purpose. Gaudí’s buildings look like they’re still growing, like the stone hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet. Add in a beach you can walk to from the Gothic Quarter, tapas culture that treats a meal as a three-hour social event rather than a transaction, and a rhythm of life that doesn’t apologize for the siesta. It’s a city built for people who think efficiency is overrated.

Ghent, Belgium

Ghent is the one people don’t expect on this list, and that’s exactly why it’s here. Skip Bruges — Ghent has the same canals and medieval skyline without the tour-bus density. Cobblestone streets, a castle you can actually walk through without a velvet rope in sight, and beer culture that treats a pour like a craft, not a commodity. It’s the quiet cousin to the cities everyone photographs, and it’s better for it.

Prague

Prague at golden hour looks like it was designed by someone who’d never heard of restraint — spires, red rooftops, a castle looming over the whole thing like it’s still keeping watch. Walk across the Charles Bridge before the crowds show up, before the street performers set up, and it’s just you and centuries of stone. Prague is proof that a city can survive war, occupation, and reinvention and still come out looking like a fairy tale that means it.

New York City

New York doesn’t care if you love it. That’s the whole trick — it just keeps moving, and you either match the pace or you get out of the way. Steam rising off manhole covers, a bodega on every corner that somehow has exactly what you need at 2am, skylines that look fake until you’re standing under them. It’s loud and expensive and rude and I’d go back tomorrow. Some cities you visit. New York, you survive and then miss.

Milford Sound, New Zealand

Milford Sound is the closest I’ve come to feeling small in a good way. Cliffs dropping straight into black water, waterfalls that appear out of nowhere after rain, fjords carved by ice that had nowhere else to be for ten thousand years. There’s no skyline here, no crowd to navigate — just scale. The kind of scale that makes your problems back home feel appropriately sized for about the length of the boat ride.

Chongqing, China

Chongqing is a city built like it lost a bet with gravity — apartment towers stacked on cliffs, a metro line that runs straight through the middle of a residential building, streets that are actually staircases because flat ground is a rumor here. It’s the most disorienting skyline I’ve stood in front of, in the best way. Add in hot pot so spicy it recalibrates your relationship with pain, and Chongqing earns its spot as the place I still can’t fully explain to people.

Edinburgh, Scotland

Edinburgh is a city that looks like it was carved rather than built — a castle sitting on top of an extinct volcano, closes and wynds that duck between buildings like the city’s keeping secrets, fog that rolls in like it’s been hired for atmosphere. Walk the Royal Mile at night when the crowds thin out and it stops feeling like a tourist stop and starts feeling like the setting of every ghost story you were ever half-convinced was true.

Eleven places, zero ranking, and I’m not sorry about it. What ties them together isn’t the food or the skyline or the photos — it’s that each one made me feel like a beginner again for a few days. That’s the whole reason I keep going back for more, and it’s a big part of why I’ve spent so much time figuring out how to make the travel itself cost less than people assume. More on that soon.