The Forge

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.

Does Everything Happen for a Reason? Yes and No.

Do you think everything happens for a reason?

I used to hate this question. Mostly because I hated the answer people gave me — that soft, well-meaning “everything happens for a reason” they’d offer up like it explained anything. It doesn’t. Not on its own.

So here’s my actual answer, the one that took me a while to land on: yes and no. And the “no” part matters just as much as the “yes.”

The “Yes” Part

Romans 8:28 says it plainly: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.”

Read that closely. It doesn’t say all things are good. It says all things work together for good. That’s a completely different claim, and it’s the one that actually holds up under pressure.

This is a promise about direction, not a description of every individual event. God isn’t out here labeling car accidents and layoffs and diagnoses as “good.” He’s saying something bigger: that He can take the full mess of a life — the wins, the wreckage, all of it — and weave it toward something that matters. Toward good. Toward purpose.

That’s the “yes.” Not everything is happening for a reason in the moment. But everything can be used toward one, over time, in the hands of someone who’s actually able to do that.

The “No” Part

Here’s where I push back on the version of this idea that gets thrown around too easily.

Not everything that happens is good. Full stop. Evil is real. Suffering is real. Some things happen because people make cruel choices, or because the world is broken, or because bad luck is just bad luck. Pretending otherwise — trying to force a silver lining onto every single bad thing that happens — isn’t faith. It’s avoidance dressed up as faith.

A friend losing a parent too young isn’t “for a reason.” A kid growing up in an abusive home isn’t part of some hidden lesson plan. Calling those things “good” or “meant to be” doesn’t honor God — it kind of insults the pain. Romans 8:28 was never meant to flatten grief like that.

Holding Both at Once

So this is where I’ve landed: I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. I believe everything can be worked into one.

That’s a subtle shift, but it changes everything about how you carry hard seasons. You stop trying to reverse-engineer meaning out of every bad thing the moment it happens — which, honestly, is exhausting and usually dishonest. Instead, you trust that the mess isn’t wasted. That it’s raw material. That the same God who didn’t cause the wound can still do something real with it.

I think that’s a sturdier place to stand than “everything happens for a reason.” It doesn’t ask you to lie about what hurt. It just asks you to trust the One doing the weaving.

That’s the whole tension, really — and I’ve stopped trying to resolve it into something simpler than it is.

Why My Apartment Looks Almost Empty (On Purpose)

What’s your home decoration style?

People walk into my place and their first reaction is usually the same: “Wait, did you just move in?”

Nope. I’ve lived here a while. This is just how I like it.

Less Stuff, More Room to Think

I didn’t set out to become a minimalist. It happened more like a slow realization — every time I cleared something off a shelf or took a picture frame down, the room felt easier to be in. Less to look at. Less to clean. Less pulling at my attention when I’m trying to relax or focus.

So the style stuck. Now it’s not really a “style” at all, it’s just a rule I default to: if it’s not doing something for me — function, meaning, or beauty — it doesn’t stay.

What Actually Makes the Cut

A few plants. That’s non-negotiable. There’s something about greenery that a blank wall just can’t replace — it makes a room feel alive without adding visual noise. I keep them simple too: a snake plant here, a pothos there, nothing that needs a manual.

A handful of photos, chosen carefully. Not a gallery wall, not a shelf full of frames — just one or two images that actually mean something. If I have to think hard about why something’s on my wall, it’s probably not important enough to be there.

Clean surfaces. Counters, tables, shelves — I want them mostly bare. Not because I’m precious about mess, but because open space does something for my head that clutter never will.

The Test I Use

Before anything new comes into the apartment, I ask one question: would I miss this if it were gone?

If the honest answer is “not really,” it doesn’t come home with me. It’s a simple filter, but it’s kept my place — and honestly, my mind — a lot quieter than it used to be.

It’s Not About Having Nothing

I want to be clear: this isn’t some extreme, empty-room aesthetic. I still have furniture I love, a couch I actually sit on, books I actually read. The goal was never nothing — it was only what matters.

Turns out, when you cut the excess, what’s left just hits different. The plant in the corner gets noticed. The one photo on the wall actually means something every time you look at it. Nothing’s competing for your attention, so everything gets to matter.

That’s the whole philosophy, really. Keep what earns its place. Let the rest go.

I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know (And I’ve Made Peace With That)

Are you a lifelong learner?

Ask me if I’m a lifelong learner and I won’t hesitate. Yes. Obviously. Next question.

But here’s what actually convinced me, and it wasn’t a book or a podcast or some tidy realization I had on a run. It was noticing how often I’m wrong about things I was sure I understood. Credit card rewards, investing, how AI actually fits into a workflow instead of just sounding impressive in a LinkedIn post — I’ve had to unlearn half of what I thought I knew about all three. Not because I was careless. Because the ground kept moving.

That’s the part people skip when they talk about “lifelong learning.” They make it sound like a personality trait, something you either have or don’t. I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s a response to a fact most people would rather not sit with: you don’t know what you don’t know, and you never will completely. The moment you think you’ve arrived is usually the moment you stop paying attention.

Curiosity isn’t the finish line, it’s the fuel

I’d rather be hungry than certain. Certainty feels good for about a week, right up until reality hands you a bill for it. I’ve watched people optimize a card stack once and never touch it again, meanwhile the entire points landscape shifted under them. I’ve watched people build a financial plan in their twenties and defend it into their forties like it’s scripture. The world doesn’t grade on effort from ten years ago. It grades on what you’re doing right now with what you currently understand.

So the question isn’t “have I learned enough.” It’s “what am I still missing.” That second question keeps you sharp. The first one makes you comfortable, and comfortable is where good decisions go to die.

Wisdom over information

There’s a difference between collecting facts and actually getting wiser, and it trips people up constantly. You can know every APR formula and every reward multiplier and still make a dumb financial decision because you skipped the part where you ask why you’re making it. Information tells you what’s possible. Wisdom tells you what’s worth doing. I want both, but if I had to pick the one I chase harder, it’s wisdom. Facts get outdated. Judgment compounds.

That’s honestly the whole premise behind everything I build here. Not “here’s a hack,” but “here’s how to think about this so you can spot the next ten hacks yourself.” Teach the fishing rod, not the fish. It’s slower content to make. It’s also the only kind that still works when the landscape changes, and the landscape always changes.

What this actually looks like day to day

Being a lifelong learner isn’t a vibe, it’s a set of habits, and mine are pretty unglamorous. I ask people who know more than me dumb questions and don’t perform confidence I don’t have. I read stuff that contradicts what I already believe, on purpose, because agreeing with everything I read means I’m not actually learning anything. I treat every mistake as data instead of evidence that I’m bad at this. And I stay suspicious of my own certainty, especially the kind that shows up fast and feels good.

None of that is exciting. It’s just consistent. And consistency, applied over years instead of weeks, is the actual difference between someone who talks about growth and someone who’s quietly become a different, sharper person than they were three years ago.

The real test

Here’s how I’d actually check if someone’s a lifelong learner, versus someone who just likes the label: what did you change your mind about in the last six months? Not a small preference. Something real — a belief about money, a strategy you were sure was right, an opinion about how something works. If nothing comes to mind, that’s worth sitting with. Not as a failure, just as information.

I don’t know what I don’t know. I’m never going to fully close that gap, and honestly, I don’t want to. The gap is the whole reason any of this stays interesting.

What’d you change your mind about recently?

The App That’s Eating My Screen Time (And Why I Refuse to Delete It)

What app eats up most of your screen time — and do you even feel bad about it?

My phone sent me the weekly screen time report Sunday night, the one with the little pie chart that’s supposed to make you feel bad about yourself. I braced for the usual verdict: Instagram, probably, or some doom-scroll spiral I don’t even remember starting.

It wasn’t Instagram. It was Claude.

Hours of it. Not “checked it a few times” hours — real, sustained, this-is-clearly-a-habit hours. And my first instinct was the same one you’d have: that can’t be good, right? The average American adult is already burning something like 4-5 hours a day on their phone and another couple hours on top of that across other screens. Most of that time is TikTok, YouTube, group chats, the algorithm doing what it’s built to do. Screen time is the thing every wellness article tells you to cut.

So I sat with it for a minute before I decided how to feel about my own number.

What I’m actually doing in there

Here’s the thing that report doesn’t show you: not all screen time is the same kind of time. Watching a feed and building something are not the same activity, even though they light up the same little icon on the same chart.

When I opened up what I’d actually been doing, it wasn’t scrolling. It was drafting. It was the SEO post I’m writing right now. It was three rounds of edits on a LinkedIn newsletter that started too polished and needed roughing up until it sounded like me again. It was a Skool resource I built in an afternoon that would’ve taken me a week of staring at a blank doc otherwise. It was brainstorming session after brainstorming session where I was thinking out loud and getting pushback, not just typing into a void.

It was also the unglamorous stuff. Tightening up a cover letter so it didn’t say “leveraged synergies” anywhere near it. Working through an Excel formula for the new QC role instead of googling it and losing twenty minutes to bad tutorials. Talking through a decision I was overthinking until I could see it clearly enough to just make it.

None of that is content consumption. All of it is output.

The question underneath “is it worth it”

The real question isn’t “how many hours.” It’s “what did those hours buy me that I wouldn’t have otherwise.” That’s the only math that matters, and it’s the same math I use on every credit card or investment decision — return relative to cost, not the sticker price in isolation.

Run that math on my week and it’s not close. A blog post that used to eat three hours of a Saturday now takes 45 minutes, which means I actually have a Saturday again. A job application I’d have rushed through at 11pm out of sheer fatigue instead gets the attention it needs, because the drafting and revising didn’t have to eat the whole evening. That’s not time I lost to a screen. That’s time I got back to spend on training, or on the people in my life, or honestly on nothing at all, which is its own kind of win.

Compare that to the other version of high screen time — the one where you look up and can’t account for two hours, and nothing in your life is different for having spent them. That’s the version that should actually worry you. Mine isn’t that. Mine has receipts: published posts, sent applications, decisions made instead of deferred.

The distinction that actually matters

If your screen time report is dominated by an app that’s making decisions for you — what to watch next, what to feel triggered by next, what to compare yourself to next — that’s worth examining. If it’s dominated by a tool that’s helping you make decisions and produce things you’re proud of, that’s a completely different category, even if the hour count looks the same.

I’m not saying tally up hours and everything’s fine as long as the app has a good reason. I’m saying the clock isn’t the metric. The output is. Two hours of scrolling and two hours of building a business look identical on a pie chart and mean nothing alike in real life.

One thing worth doing this week

Pull up your own screen time report. Don’t just glance at the ranking — pick your top app and ask one honest question: did this make me something, or did it just take something from me? You don’t need to audit every app on the list. Just the one at the top. That answer alone will tell you whether your biggest habit is a leak or an investment.

Mine’s an investment. I checked the math, and I’m keeping the habit.

If I Could Erase One Trend From History, It’s This One

If you could erase one trend from history, what would it be?

Somebody asked me that question at a dinner last month. “If you could erase one trend from history, what would it be?”

People usually go for the easy answers. Fast fashion. Reality TV. Whatever meme is annoying them that week. I sat with it for a second, and the answer that came up wasn’t clever or contrarian. It was simple, and it’s been bothering me ever since.

I’d erase the trade we made — mostly without noticing — when we swapped unstructured outdoor time and undistracted family time for screens.

Not technology itself. I’m not writing this from a cabin with no wifi. I run an entire brand on the internet. The trade I’m talking about is narrower and sneakier than “technology bad.” It’s the slow, decade-long shift where free play outside stopped being the default childhood experience, and where a family sitting in the same room stopped meaning they were actually with each other.

The Trend Nobody Voted For

Here’s what’s strange about this one: nobody sat down and decided it. No one announced “we’re now going to spend 60% less time outside than kids did in the 1980s.” It just happened, one convenience at a time. A tablet in the back seat. A phone at the dinner table “just to check something.” A Saturday that used to mean bikes and dirt and boredom now means four people in four rooms staring at four different screens, together in the same house and nowhere near each other.

The research backs up what most of us already feel in our gut. Kids today spend dramatically less time in unstructured outdoor play than previous generations, and screen time has filled almost all of that gap. Family meals have gotten shorter, and even when they happen, they’re increasingly co-located rather than connected — bodies in the same room, attention somewhere else entirely.

That’s the part that gets me. It’s not that we lost outdoor time or family time in one dramatic swoop. We lost it in fifteen-minute increments, thousands of times, until one day the baseline had moved completely and nobody remembered voting on it.

Why This Trend Costs More Than It Looks Like

I think about trends the way I think about money: the real cost isn’t the sticker price, it’s the opportunity cost. What did we actually give up?

Unstructured outdoor play isn’t just exercise. It’s where kids learn risk assessment, negotiation, boredom tolerance, and creativity, because there’s no algorithm deciding what happens next — they have to decide. That’s a skill you can’t download. You either build it through reps, or you don’t build it at all.

And undistracted family time isn’t just “nice to have.” It’s the actual mechanism through which kids learn they’re worth someone’s full attention. Not their scheduled attention. Not their leftover attention. Their full attention. A parent glancing up from a phone every few minutes doesn’t send the same signal as a parent who’s just there.

I look at this the same way I look at financial freedom, honestly. Money isn’t the point — it’s what money buys you back: time, choice, presence. This trend quietly stole the very thing that money was supposed to buy people in the first place. We got more convenience and more connectivity, and in exchange we handed over the resource that convenience was supposed to protect.

This Isn’t a Nostalgia Post

I want to be clear about something. This isn’t me pretending the 1980s were some golden age and phones ruined everything. That’s lazy, and it’s not useful to anybody.

The honest version is this: technology isn’t the villain. Passive, default, unexamined technology use is the villain. There’s a real difference between a family that uses screens intentionally — a movie night, a video call with grandparents, a kid learning to code — and a family where screens are just the water everyone’s swimming in without ever asking if they want to be wet.

The trend I’d erase isn’t “screens exist.” It’s “screens became the default and nobody made a decision about it.”

The Fix Isn’t Complicated. It’s Just Uncomfortable.

Here’s where this connects to everything I write about at The Forge. Financial freedom, time freedom, attention freedom — they’re all the same muscle. They all come down to one question: are you making decisions on purpose, or are you letting the path of least resistance make them for you?

You don’t need a digital detox retreat to fix this. You need friction. Put the phone in another room during dinner. Make “go outside” the boring, unremarkable default instead of the special occasion. Ask yourself, honestly, whether the last hour of scrolling was a choice or a habit wearing a choice’s clothes.

That’s it. That’s the whole intervention. It’s not glamorous, and it won’t trend on social media, which is a little ironic given the subject.

The Real Question

If you could erase one trend from history, what would it be? I’d bet if you sit with that question longer than ten seconds, you’ll land somewhere close to what I did — not on something dramatic, but on something quiet that’s been costing you for years without ever asking permission.

The good news is you don’t need to erase it from history. You just need to stop letting it run on autopilot in your own house, starting with the next hour you have available.

What’s yours?

The One Piece of Old Tech I Actually Miss

Which outdated technology do you miss the most, and why?

Everybody’s got a nostalgia answer ready to go. Flip phones. CD binders in the backseat. Dial-up internet, if you’re feeling especially masochistic. Mine’s a film camera.

Not because it took better pictures. My iPhone’s camera destroys anything my old point-and-shoot could do, technically speaking. Sharper, faster, works in the dark, edits itself half the time. There’s no rational argument for going back.

But rational isn’t really the point.

You Only Got 24 Shots

Here’s the thing people forget about film: you had a roll of 24, maybe 36 if you splurged. That was it. No deleting the bad ones and trying again. No burst mode to spray-and-pray your way into one usable frame.

So you thought before you clicked. You framed the shot, checked the light, maybe stepped left or right to fix the background — all before you pressed the button, not after. Every photo cost something, even if it was just a few cents worth of film and development. That scarcity forced a kind of attention that’s basically extinct now.

I take probably 40 photos of my dinner plate before I text one to somebody. Film me would’ve thought that was insane. And honestly? Film me would’ve been right.

The Waiting Was the Feature

You dropped the roll off at the drugstore and then you just… waited. A day, sometimes a week. You forgot half of what you’d shot by the time the envelope came back.

That gap did something modern photography can’t replicate: it turned pictures into a small surprise instead of an instant transaction. You’d flip through the stack and half-remember, half-rediscover a birthday party or a road trip. There was a little dopamine hit built into the delay itself — not because the picture was good, but because you’d genuinely forgotten it existed.

Now the photo shows up on screen before you’ve even lowered the camera. Convenient, sure. But it collapsed the whole experience into a single flat moment. No anticipation, no rediscovery. Just confirmation.

Bad Photos Were Allowed to Exist

This is the one that actually gets me. Film photos were full of mistakes — thumbs in frame, red-eye, blurry motion, weird light leaks — and nobody deleted them. They went in the album anyway, next to the good ones, because deleting them would’ve meant wasting the print you already paid for.

So the mediocre photos survived. And looking back at them now, the blurry, poorly lit, slightly-off ones are often the most honest record of what a moment actually felt like. Digital gave us the delete button, and somewhere along the way we started using it on our own memories, not just our bad shots.

What This Actually Says

I don’t think this is really about cameras. It’s about what happens when you remove friction from something that used to require patience. Film forced selectivity, delay, and imperfection into the process — and it turns out those weren’t bugs. They were doing something for us.

Digital didn’t just make photography better. It made it frictionless, which is a different thing entirely, and not always a trade worth making without noticing what you gave up.

I’m not buying a film camera. I’m not precious enough about it to shoot 24 frames on faith and mail them off to a lab. But I’ve started deleting fewer photos. I’ve started waiting a day before I post one instead of firing it off the second it’s taken. Small stuff. But it’s the same instinct — put a little friction back in, on purpose, because it was never really the technology I missed. It was what the technology made me do.

The Hard Years and What Got Me Through

What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years” — and what got you through it?

There were two chapters, not one. But they rhyme close enough that I’ve started thinking of them as a single story with an intermission.

The first one was high school, where a specific group of people made it their business to make me feel small. Nothing dramatic enough to write a movie about — just the steady, daily kind of cruelty that doesn’t leave marks but rearranges something in you anyway. The second came later, in a relationship I’d put two and a half years into. Long enough to stop hedging. Long enough to build a future around someone. And then I found out I’d been cheated on.

Different rooms, different ages, same lesson. I guess I needed it twice.

Here’s what that lesson actually was, stripped of the poetry: people can turn on you, or leave you, without warning, no matter how much you gave them. There’s no early detection system for it. You don’t get a heads-up. You just find out, and then you have to keep living in the same body you had five minutes before you knew.

I wish I could tell you there was a breakthrough moment. A therapist’s line that cracked something open, a verse that hit different at 2 a.m., a decision I made on a specific Tuesday that changed the trajectory. That’s the version that makes a better story, and it’s the version most people write when they’re telling you how they got through something. But it’s not what happened to me.

What got me through, honestly, was mostly time. Time, and hope that the future had something better waiting than what I was currently standing in. That’s a less satisfying answer than “I found God” or “I did the inner work,” and I’m not going to dress it up as more than it was. I didn’t fix anything in real time. I just kept going, one ordinary day after another, until enough of them stacked up that the weight was different. Not gone. Different.

The hope part matters more than people give it credit for. It wasn’t faith yet — not in the structural, load-bearing sense I’d describe it now. It was closer to a stubborn refusal to believe this was the whole story. A sense that eighteen-year-old me, or twenty-six-year-old me, wasn’t the final draft. That’s a smaller thing than faith, but it’s not nothing. Some days it was the only thing doing any work at all.

If you’re waiting for me to say faith carried me through those years, it didn’t. Not then. My faith didn’t get stronger from being bullied, and it didn’t get stronger in the middle of getting cheated on. It got stronger after — once I was already standing on the other side of it, looking back at the shape of what I’d survived and recognizing something in it that I couldn’t have named in the moment. The strengthening was retrospective. It showed up as gratitude for things I hadn’t understood as gifts while I was living them.

I think that’s true for more people than admit it. We want the story where faith is the rescue vehicle, arriving mid-crisis to pull you out. Sometimes that happens. For me, it was more like faith was the thing waiting on the other side of the hard years, and I only recognized it once I’d walked far enough to turn around.

If you’re in your own version of this right now — the version where someone’s hurting you and you can’t see the exit, or the aftermath where trust feels like a language you used to speak fluently and now can’t remember — I don’t have a shortcut for you. I don’t think there is one. What I have is this: you don’t need the whole story figured out today. You don’t need the lesson to be clear yet, or the faith to feel solid yet, or the forgiveness to be real yet. You just need enough hope to get through the day in front of you, and then the one after that. The meaning tends to show up later than you want it to, but it does show up.

That’s not a hustle-your-way-out message. Some seasons aren’t solved. They’re just survived, one ordinary day at a time, until you’re far enough out to see what they gave you.

If this one landed for you, I write about the stuff underneath the money and career strategy too — not just the tactics, but what actually holds a person together while they’re building. Come find me on Threads, or grab the newsletter. Link’s in the bio.

Are We Shaped More by Our Experiences or by Who We Are?

Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are?

Here’s my answer, and I’ll give it to you before the caveats: experiences don’t shape you. Your response to them does. And that response is the one thing that was always, stubbornly, yours.

I know that sounds like a dodge. Nature vs. nurture has been argued for a century by people smarter than me, and I’m not going to settle it in a blog post. But I think the framing itself is the trap. It sets up experiences and identity as two forces fighting over you, when really identity is the thing doing the interpreting. Same event, different person, completely different outcome. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the mechanism.

The Stress Fracture Taught Me Nothing. I Taught Me Something.

I’ve dealt with tibial stress fractures for years. When I started training for a marathon, that history wasn’t a footnote — it was the entire design constraint. Eighteen miles was my ceiling, not because my cardio couldn’t handle more, but because bone and connective tissue don’t care how motivated you are. They adapt on their own schedule.

Here’s the thing: the injury history is an experience. A real one, with real physical limits. But it didn’t make me cautious, or conservative, or patient. I made myself those things, using the injury as the material. Someone else with the same fracture history could just as easily have gotten reckless, chased the mileage anyway, and broken down again. The experience was identical. The output wasn’t.

Psychologists have a name for this, sort of. Julian Rotter called it locus of control — whether you believe outcomes come from your own actions or from outside forces. People with a strong internal locus don’t get fewer bad breaks. They just process bad breaks differently, and that difference compounds over a lifetime into something that looks a lot like “who they are.”

Turnarounds Don’t Happen to Companies. They Happen to People Inside Companies.

I ran a branch that was down 17% when I took it over. Eighteen months later it was up 5%. Nothing about the market changed in that window. The building was the same. The customer base was largely the same. What changed was a set of decisions made daily by people who’d decided the numbers weren’t a verdict on them.

I bring this up because it’s tempting to credit “the experience” of running a struggling branch for whatever growth happened in me. But plenty of people run struggling branches and come out the other side more bitter, not more capable. The experience was the raw material. It wasn’t the sculptor.

This matters for anyone building something right now — a business, a job search, a body, a marriage. You will get the same raw material as everyone else eventually: a layoff, an injury, a rejection, a slow month. The instinct is to ask “why is this happening to me.” The better question, the one that actually changes anything, is “who am I going to be inside this.”

Where Faith Fits, If You’re Wondering

I’m a Christian, and I don’t think this is a coincidence that the language of scripture leans so heavily on identity before it leans on circumstance. Paul writes from prison the same way he writes from freedom. Job doesn’t get his losses explained to him — he gets reminded of who God is, and that’s positioned as sufficient. The pattern isn’t “endure hardship and you’ll become someone.” It’s “know who you are, and hardship becomes something you move through instead of something that defines you.”

That’s not a passive stance. It’s the opposite of passive. It’s the difference between waiting for your circumstances to improve before you decide who you are, and deciding who you are so your circumstances have somewhere to land.

So What Actually Shapes You?

Not the event. The interpretation, repeated enough times that it hardens into a default. Every time something happens and you narrate it a certain way — “this is proof I don’t have what it takes” or “this is data, keep moving” — you’re not describing your identity, you’re building it. The tenth time you tell yourself that story, it’s not a coping mechanism anymore. It’s just true about you.

This is why two people can go through the same divorce, the same bankruptcy, the same diagnosis, and come out unrecognizable from each other five years later. It’s not that one had it “worse.” It’s that identity was doing the heavy lifting the whole time, quietly deciding what the experience was allowed to mean.

If you’re in the middle of something hard right now, the honest move isn’t to wait until it resolves before you figure out who you are. It’s to decide that now, on purpose, while the outcome is still unwritten. That decision is the one variable in the whole equation you actually control.

If you want more of this kind of thinking applied to money, career, and building something that outlasts a job title, that’s what I write about every week. Come find me on Threads or grab the newsletter — link’s in the bio.