I’ll be honest with you, I almost didn’t get these prompts out on time.

Last week I launched Westly, the brand I’ve been trying to build for ten years. It’s live, people can buy things, and that’s never been true before… and I’m still adjusting to the fact that it’s true now, actually.

But launching something new while running something existing has forced me into a reckoning I’ve been avoiding for a while, which is that I can’t do everything. I can’t give my full attention to two things at once and expect either of them to be exceptional. I love writing and I love building, but they both want all of me, and I’ve been spread so thin lately that neither has been getting what it fully deserves.

So April, for me, has become a month of pruning. Looking hard at where my attention is actually going versus where I want it to go. Cutting commitments that felt important but aren’t actually essential. Protecting the things that matter by starving the things that don’t.

That’s the spirit behind this month’s prompts. Not productivity advice or optimization hacks, but honest questions about attention as a finite resource. Where is yours going? What’s it costing you? What needs to be cut so the important stuff has room to breathe?

I wrote these prompts partly for you, but also partly for myself. I need them more than ever right now, and I thought maybe you might need them too.

April — 5 weeks of daily prompts:

Week 1: The audit — where is your attention actually going?

Week 2: The cost — what is your current allocation costing you?

Week 3: The pruning — what needs to be cut, starved, or released?

Week 4: The protection — what deserves your attention, and how do you guard it?

Week 5: The redirection — now that you’ve cleared space, where does your attention go?

30 prompts for April. One for each day, or whenever you need to get honest about what you’re feeding with your focus… and what might be quietly starving because of it.

Prompts for whatever season of life you’re currently in:

September, October, November, December, January, February & March

Unsure how to begin? Try building a journaling foundation

♡

Want to go a step deeper than reflection? Try Conscious Creation

Before you can change where your attention goes, you have to see where it’s actually going.

We think we know where our attention goes, but we’re usually wrong. We remember the focused hours, not the fragmented ones. We count the deep work, not the scrolling that happened in between. We tell ourselves stories about our priorities that don’t match the data of our days.

This week is about getting honest. Not judgmental, just accurate. Where is your attention actually going? Not where you intend it to go or where you wish it went., but where does it actually land, hour after hour, day after day? The answers might be uncomfortable, but you can’t redirect something you haven’t first located.

1. If you tracked your attention like a budget, where did most of it go last week? Be specific.

2. What do you reach for first when you have an unstructured moment? What does that tell you?

3. What’s consuming more of your mental bandwidth than it deserves right now?

4. Where do you lose time without meaning to? What pulls you in and doesn’t let go?

5. What are you thinking about when you’re not thinking about anything in particular? What’s the background hum?

6. Who or what gets the best of your attention versus the scraps?

7. If someone followed you for a day and only watched where your attention went, what would they conclude matters most to you?

Every yes to one thing is a no to something else. What’s being neglected while you’re busy elsewhere?

Attention isn’t unlimited. When it goes somewhere, it’s not going somewhere else. That’s just simple math…. but most of us don’t do the math. We say yes to things without fully registering what we’re saying no to. We give our attention to the loudest demand without asking whether it’s the most important one.

This week is about tracing the cost. What’s being starved while something else gets fed? What have you been neglecting, avoiding, or putting off because your attention was absorbed elsewhere? And is that tradeoff one you’d actually choose if you saw it clearly?

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So I want to be clear about something before I explain why I’m trying again: this isn’t another empty announcement. As of yesterday, the site is live. People can actually buy things. That has never been true before, and the reason it’s true now isn’t that I finally found the courage I was missing or got my head right or decided to stop being afraid. It’s that the specific bottlenecks that killed every previous attempt have genuinely collapsed, and I’ve spent enough failed attempts learning exactly where those bottlenecks were to recognize when they’re gone. And believe me when I say… they’re gone.

For most of modern history, starting a brand required a long chain of capabilities to line up at once. You needed a storefront, payment infrastructure, suppliers, logistics, photography, and reach, and if any single link in that chain broke, the whole thing broke. The advice to “just start” always sounded simple coming from people who were already on the other side of it. In practice, there were gates everywhere, and most of them were expensive and slow. But that world has been quietly dismantling itself for years.

Shopify now exists. That sounds almost too obvious to be worth saying, but the implications are enormous. A single person with a point of view can now have a functioning storefront with payment processing and product pages in an hour. Then sourcing got democratized. Platforms like Faire and FashionGo let an independent operator with a business license access wholesale vendors across the world that would have been completely opaque a decade ago. Access that once required relationships, industry connections, and serious capital now largely requires logging in. And when access widens like that, curation becomes the differentiator, which happens to be the exact game I’ve always wanted to play.

I want to be honest about where I’ve gotten stuck before, though, because it wasn’t always infrastructure standing in the way. The last time I tried to build this, I went further than most people even know. I didn’t just want to curate wholesale product, I wanted to manufacture my own. I went to LA, worked directly with a manufacturer, designed pieces, had prototypes made, and for a while it felt genuinely close. And then reality arrived in the form of minimum order quantities. To produce even a handful of styles at the required scale was going to cost nearly $100,000, and that was just for the privilege of learning whether I’d gotten the product right. I didn’t have that kind of cash to commit before a single customer had even weighed in, so the whole thing came to a stop. What’s different now isn’t just that costs are lower, it’s that the path itself has changed. I can test before I commit, and I can build a real feedback loop before making irreversible bets, and that changes the calculus entirely.

But the bottleneck that actually killed me every time wasn’t the store or the sourcing. It was actually the image. When you sell on the internet, you’re selling an image before you’re selling a product. You’re selling the feeling of ownership, the version of yourself you might become, the emotional weight a garment carries before anyone’s touched it. I’ve known how high that bar is for a long time, and not just theoretically. I’ve been in something close to half a million photographs. I spent years as a content creator with a significant audience, was the face of a brand for almost a year, and at various points was also the one directing the shoots, booking the models, and doing the photography myself. That combination taught me more about building a brand than almost anything else could have, because I had to understand every layer of the production at once. I learned how a product gets styled, what a story costs to build around it, where imagery breaks down and why, and what it actually takes to make someone feel something about a piece of clothing they’re seeing on a screen.

I also came away knowing exactly how unsustainable that process is for a single operator trying to build something from scratch. To take a garment from a poly bag and turn it into something that reads as desire rather than inventory requires the right model, location, styling, light, pose, crop, and retouching, done consistently, at a standard that clears the bar of the internet. Every time I tried to build a brand before, that’s where I ran out of runway. And it wasn’t because I didn’t know what I wanted it to look like, because I definitely knew. It was because producing it at that level cost more than I could justify before I had any revenue to justify it with.

So here’s the thing I didn’t expect to ever say: I can’t take photos better than AI can now generate them, and I can’t model photos better than AI can generate them either. That’s a hard pill to swallow when you know exactly how much craft goes into the human version of this work. But the shift has happened, and the implications go beyond just cost savings. What collapses isn’t just the budget, it’s the entire cycle time. Someone with taste can now move at the speed of taste. I can go from product to imagery to storefront to live test without waiting on ten other people and a four-week (minimum!) production window.

I know that’s not a neutral thing to say right now, but I’d rather be honest about the tools I’m using than perform ambivalence I don’t actually feel. I understand why people are uneasy about it. But I’m not. (If you want the longer version of why, I wrote that last week.)

This changes who gets to participate in this industry in a fundamental way.

It also changes what the real constraint becomes, because when the mechanical barriers lower, the remaining ones get more human. Taste. Curation. Judgment. The ability to know what should exist before the data fully proves it. I’ve thought a lot about why so many stores feel flat and generic right now, and I think it comes down to authorship, or the absence of it. Most brands aren’t really authored anymore, they’re just assembled by disconnected teams, each doing their job reasonably well, but collectively sanding off the point of view in the process. The merchant is in one room, the creative team is in another, the analyst is in another, and by the time a product has passed through enough hands, whatever made it interesting has usually been optimized away. What modern infrastructure and AI tools unlock is a world where a single curator can maintain a coherent point of view across more of the stack, where taste can move at the speed of feedback, and where the loop between what I see in my head and what a customer can actually buy is genuinely short. I think brands built that way are going to be better, not just faster. And as such, I believe this is the future of ecommerce.

When people weigh the cost of starting a business, they usually think about downsides like money, time, or the embarrassment if it doesn’t work. Those costs are real. I know because I’ve paid them, more than once. But the cost of not starting has a different shape now. When the tools improve this quickly, waiting isn’t neutral. You forfeit learning, customer signal, and the compounding that comes from being in the arena while the landscape is still shifting. I’ve already forfeited that three times, and I know exactly what it costs.

What genuinely excites me now isn’t just that I finally got across the line. It’s that the same conditions that made this possible for me are available to anyone right now. Every person who’s ever had a clear point of view but couldn’t afford the infrastructure to express it commercially is sitting in front of a different set of doors than they were five years ago. I’m curious what happens to culture, markets, and aesthetics, when more of those people finally get in. I think it’s going to be interesting, and I think we’re going to end up with more beauty, more specificity, and more businesses that actually say something because they were built by one person who actually meant it.

Westly is my version of that bet. A store that exists in the same tension I’ve always lived in—one foot in coastal California and one foot in the desert, which is literally what the logo represents.

I hope you’ll stop by and see what we’re building at shopwestly.com.

And as a thank you for being part of the BAD GIRL MEDIA community, you can use code BGM20 for 20% off your first order.

See you out Westly.

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“There is nothing new under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes, roughly 3,000 years ago.

Even the anxiety about originality isn’t original. People have been wrestling with the what counts as a new idea, or whether genuine creative invention is even possible, or whether we’re all just recombining what came before us, for literally millennia. The fact that one of the oldest texts in existence already had a definitive take on it should tell you something about how long humans have been torturing themselves over this.

And yet here we are, still acting like originality is the highest creative virtue. Still performing novelty we don’t feel. Still quietly assuming we’re not the kind of people who have genuinely new ideas. It’s the wrong frame, and it’s always been the wrong frame, and once you drop it, something more interesting opens up.

We treat originality like it’s a thing you either have or you don’t. Like it’s some innate creative spark that certain people are born with and others aren’t. Which means most people spend their intellectual lives either performing originality they don’t feel, or quietly assuming they’re not built for it. Both are a waste of time, and both come from starting with the wrong question. “How do I think something nobody has thought before” has never been how interesting thinking actually works. Orienting yourself around it produces a particular kind of hollow, contrarian cleverness that gets mistaken for depth but isn’t.

The more useful question is what kind of mental architecture produces connections worth making, and that’s a question with a real answer.

Leonardo da Vinci is the obvious example, but he’s obvious for a reason. He wasn't operating from some mystical creative genius, he just refused to keep his domains separate. Art, anatomy, engineering, and physics weren’t different subjects to him, they were different angles on the same questions. So when he looked at a problem he had doorways where everyone else had walls. A biologist who’s also deeply versed in mechanical engineering sees solutions the pure engineer misses because his specific combination of influences generates collisions that wouldn’t otherwise happen. The insight was always there in theory, he’s just the one positioned to see it.

Mental scaffolding has been on my mind lately…

When you zoom out far enough, the whole thing becomes almost absurd to worry about. There are eight billion people alive right now, and no two of them are processing the world through the same lens. Same culture, same era, same Netflix algorithm, and still, no two people are having identical experiences of it, drawing identical conclusions from it, or making identical connections inside it. Of course there are going to be similarities between our ideas and our art and our work. That’s just what happens when you’re all living inside the same culture at the same time, swimming in the same references. But similarities aren’t sameness, and the fact that your conclusions rhyme with someone else’s doesn’t mean you arrived there the same way or that the view from where you’re standing is identical to theirs. Eight billion people, eight billion unrepeatable constellations. The overlap is inevitable, but the duplication is impossible.

This is what actually produces the thinking we retroactively call original. Not a spark, or a special kind of mind, but a specific and unrepeatable constellation of influences that nobody else has assembled in quite that configuration. Which means the whole originality conversation has been asking the wrong thing all along, because the constellation is already unique to you. The question is whether you’ve built it deliberately enough, and whether you’ve kept the pathways between the rooms alive.

That requires two things that pull against each other.

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Welcome to the Cambrian Explosion.

Let me say upfront that this essay is really going to piss some people off. It always does when I don’t perform the correct amount of hand-wringing about AI. Apparently having a non-hysterical take on generative tools means you hate artists, you’re a scab, you don’t care about creativity, etc etc etc. I’ve heard all of it. I find it exhausting and historically illiterate, and I’m going to explain exactly why.

And we’ll be skipping the “is AI art really art” debate because that conversation has been running in circles for three years without producing a single useful insight. Whether a machine-generated frame has a soul is a philosophy seminar question. What matters for this essay is what happens economically and culturally when the cost of turning an idea into a finished visual product drops by 90 percent.

Every major creative tool in history has had its doomers. When the printing press arrived, scribes warned that mass-produced text would destroy the sacred craft of writing. When photography emerged, painters declared that mechanical image-making was soulless theft. When the Impressionists dragged their easels outside and painted in open air, the academy treated it like a moral failure. When the digital camera democratized photography, professionals predicted the death of the craft. When YouTube arrived, the industry said it would never produce anything worth watching. (Tell that to Mr Beast.) They were all embarrassingly, obviously, historically wrong, and the people making the same argument about AI right now are going to look exactly the same in ten to twenty years. Certain they were protecting something, and totally blind to the fact that they were just afraid.

I’ve used AI tools constantly, for almost everything, for over three years now, which means I’m watching this acceleration from the inside rather than theorizing about it from a comfortable distance. And what I can tell you is that this isn’t stoppable. There’s no version of events where the cost of turning an imagination into a finished visual product doesn’t keep collapsing. There’s no timeline where the gatekeepers get their moat back. The only question worth asking is where this is actually heading, and that’s what this essay is about.

First, the concession.

AI is taking jobs in Hollywood, not eventually, but right now. Entry-level VFX work, storyboarding, rotoscoping, background generation, you name it, are getting automated and the people who held those roles are feeling it. The British Film Institute flagged it in 2025. The World Economic Forum projected that technology would displace 92 million roles globally by 2030, while creating around 69 million new ones, which is a massive reshuffling rather than a simple loss. But the pain is real and it deserves acknowledgment rather than being waved away. So, acknowledged.

But to understand why what’s coming actually matters, you first have to understand what’s broken about the system it’s disrupting, because the argument isn’t just that AI is arriving, it’s that the thing it’s replacing was already failing us. And nowhere is that failure more obvious than on your couch at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night, scrolling through an endless grid of content and feeling absolutely nothing.

The problem isn’t that there’s nothing to watch.

The complaint you hear constantly, that there’s nothing good on, is technically insane. You have access to more filmed content than any human in history. Multiple streaming services are actively competing to bury you in options, and yet you scroll for forty minutes and rewatch Friends for the ninth time. This isn’t an abundance problem, it’s a quality signal problem, and it has a very specific cause.

When a single season of television costs $150 million to produce, the studio can’t afford for it to be strange. It can’t afford to alienate international markets, challenge demographic assumptions, or follow a vision that doesn’t test well with focus groups in Ohio. The financial architecture of legacy entertainment requires broad appeal as a survival mechanism, and the result is content that’s technically competent, visually expensive, and emotionally inert. It was designed by committee to offend no one and, consequently, to move no one.

The current machine organizations (the Netflixes, the Warners, the Paramounts) have spent decades optimizing the human out of the creative process. To mitigate risk at that budget level, they rely on proven IP, recycled tropes, and algorithmic projections of what kept viewers engaged for the first ten minutes of a similar show last year. A brilliant, idiosyncratic script gets purchased, handed to a room of executives, focus-grouped into submission, and sanded down until all of its interesting edges are gone. The final product is polished, loud, and completely hollow.

This is the architecture of the slop, and the slop isn’t just the six-fingered AI cats on your social feed. It’s the $200 million blockbuster that feels like it was written by a committee of accountants in a windowless room in Burbank. It’s the prestige drama that hits every expected beat so precisely that you forget it the moment the credits roll. When a project costs a quarter billion dollars to produce and another hundred million to market, it can’t afford to have an edge. It has to be palatable to everyone from Peoria to Phuket, and in the legacy system, “mass appeal” has always been a polite term for the lowest common denominator.

To be clear, humans have always made slop. Bad art is not a new invention. Shakespeare’s contemporaries were cranking out forgettable plays by the dozen, and for every Monet there were a thousand painters nobody remembers. The slop has always been there. What the modern studio system managed to achieve, somehow, is making the expensive stuff the most mediocre of all.

The deeply counterintuitive truth here is that AI is actually the solution to this problem, not the cause of it. By collapsing the cost of production, we’re finally decoupling vision from capital. When a screenwriter can generate a high-fidelity series from their bedroom without needing a $50 million permission slip, they no longer have to care about the masses. They can care about the story.

Enter: The Cambrian explosion.

Around 540 million years ago, complex life on Earth went from sparse to explosively diverse in a relatively short window. New body plans, new defense mechanisms, entirely new strategies for existing, all appearing seemingly out of nowhere. Biologists call it the Cambrian explosion, and it was the most generative moment in the history of life on this planet.

We’re standing at the beginning of something equivalent in content.

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Yesterday, Marc Andreessen sat down with David Senra on the Founders podcast, and there was a segment I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. I listened to it two more times this morning. His goal, he said, is zero introspection. As little as possible. Because dwelling on the past gets you stuck there, and the best founders he knows don’t spend time examining themselves, they just go build things. High neuroticism and deep self-reflection, in his telling, are essentially the same trap, which is that both keep you looking inward when you should be looking out.

I write about self-examination for a living. I’ve built two frameworks, Conscious Creation and The Daily 5, specifically around the idea that systematic self-knowledge is how you build a life that actually works. So when someone with Andreessen’s credibility says introspection is the enemy of impact, I can’t just nod along. But I also can’t dismiss it entirely, because some of what he’s saying is true.

He’s right that the specific behavior he’s describing—open-ended rumination that gets called personal growth—is a real problem. The founder who goes to a retreat, does the inner work, takes shrooms, finds their center, and then quietly opts out of building anything. The person who journals for years and never changes because the journaling has become the destination rather than the process. The endless processing of feelings with no output requirement, no feedback loop, no accountability to what you actually do with what you learn. That pattern is real, and he’s identified something worth naming.

Where he loses me is when he traces all of this back to Freud and Vienna in the 1910s and 20s, framing the entire examined life as a manufactured modern construct. That’s just historically wrong. Socrates was interrogating his own beliefs and motivations four hundred years before Christ. The Stoics like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca built entire philosophical systems around directed self-examination as the foundation of effective action. Augustine wrote the Confessions in the fourth century, which is essentially a book-length act of introspection. Buddhist traditions going back thousands of years center on observing your own mind.

The examined life is not a Viennese export and Freud didn’t invent self-reflection, he just medicalized one version of it. Conflating his specific therapeutic model with introspection as a whole is a category error, and it lets Andreessen dismiss the entire practice by attacking its weakest expression.

The neuroticism claim deserves the same scrutiny, too. He observes that the best founders often have close to zero neuroticism, and then slides that into an argument against introspection, as if the two are equivalent, but they’re not. Neuroticism is a personality trait. It’s a measure of emotional reactivity and how easily you’re destabilized by external events. Introspection is a practice of directed self-examination. These things are not the same, and they don’t necessarily travel together.

The Stoics were obsessed with introspection specifically because it produced less neuroticism, not more. The whole project of examining your own mind was to become less reactive, more stable, better at distinguishing what you can and can’t control. If anything, their argument would be that the path to zero neuroticism runs through rigorous self-knowledge, not around it.

There’s also an obvious survivorship bias baked into Marc’s framing. We hear about the founders who had low neuroticism, didn’t examine themselves much, and built empires. We don’t hear about the ones who had no self-awareness, couldn’t recognize their blind spots, kept repeating the same destructive patterns in their companies and relationships, and eventually flamed out. That sample doesn’t make it into the narrative. Andreessen is drawing conclusions from a very specific slice of successful people and treating it as a general prescription, which is exactly the kind of reasoning that sounds compelling and falls apart under a minute of scrutiny.

What I think he actually means, and where his instinct is pointing at something real, is that introspection without structure produces avoidance. Sitting with your feelings indefinitely, with no output requirement and no feedback mechanism, is just rumination. It can feel like work, but it isn’t work. The hour you spend journaling in circles about the same insecurity you’ve had for ten years, without ever asking what you’re going to do differently, is not self-examination. It’s procrastination. And that specific behavior deserves the criticism he’s giving it.

But the solution isn’t to abandon introspection. The solution is to make it systematic. This is the premise behind both Conscious Creation and The Daily 5. Neither of them is about sitting with your feelings. Conscious Creation is a behavioral tracking system where you’re watching what you actually do, not what you think you do, and you’re building evidence about what’s working and what isn’t. The Daily 5 is structured daily reflection with specific output requirements and, optionally, AI-assisted pattern recognition across your entries over time. Both frameworks treat self-knowledge as something you collect data about rather than something you access through intuition alone. The output of introspection, done this way, isn’t a feeling. It’s information you can actually act on.

This, I’d argue, is what high-performing founders actually do—even the ones who claim they don’t introspect. When they review what went wrong in a deal, that’s introspection. When they decide their values are non-negotiable on a specific issue, that required knowing their values, which required some self-knowledge. When they recognize they made the same mistake twice and change course, they engaged in a feedback loop about their own behavior. They just don’t call it introspection, because the word has been colonized by the therapy-speak Andreessen is rightly frustrated with. But the practice is still there.

The real split isn’t between people who examine themselves and people who don’t. It’s between people who examine themselves with structure and purpose versus people who examine themselves with neither. One produces data and forward motion. The other produces more questions and a very full journal.

Andreessen is optimizing his argument for a specific failure mode, which is the archetype of the founder who loses their edge to enlightenment. That’s worth cautioning against. But “zero introspection” as a general prescription is imprecise at best and actively misleading at worst, because it throws out one of the most consistently documented sources of high performance alongside the behavior that’s actually the problem.

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations—a private, never-intended-for-publication journal of self-examination—while running an empire, fighting wars, and managing succession crises. He was one of the most effective leaders in recorded history and one of the most introspective people we have detailed record of. The argument that self-examination cost him his impact doesn’t hold up against the evidence.

The examined life isn’t the problem. Unstructured self-examination with no output requirement, no feedback loop, and no accountability to action is the problem. Once you fix that, introspection doesn’t slow you down. It’s the thing that keeps you from making the same expensive mistake three years in a row.

—S

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It doesn't matter how famous or rich or successful you are, it will find you at some point. You make something, you put it out, and the response is mostly good. People engage, share it, tell you it hit something real for them… and then two people say something awful. Maybe it's a comment that misses the point so completely you wonder if they even read the same thing you wrote, or a quote-tweet that strips your words of all context and presents them to an audience primed to be outraged, or a DM from someone who decided your existence is a personal affront. Whatever it is, without fail, no matter how many good responses you got, those two shitty comments are the ones you're still thinking about at midnight.

I’ve watched this happen to people I respect and I’ve watched it happen to me across every platform I’ve ever used, which at this point is most of them. A Substack essay that gets two dismissive comments out of two hundred thoughtful ones. An Instagram post that finds its way to a corner of the internet that hates you specifically. A shitpost on X that someone decides to take completely literally and then screenshots for an audience that’s already decided who you are. A podcast clip that gets clipped at exactly the wrong moment, stripped of thirty minutes of context, and dropped into a timeline full of people who’ve never heard of you and now have very strong feelings about you. A product launch where someone who has never shipped a damn thing in their life shows up to explain in detail why it won’t work.

I’ve been in all of these situations, some of them in the same week. And the thing I’ve had to learn, slowly and sometimes badly, is that none of it is actually about your work.

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"He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

A few years ago I published something that scared the shit out of me. I’d been sitting with the idea for a long time, but for the most part, I’d kept it to myself. Until one day, I felt so enraged by the fact that saying something was giving me this level of anxiety. It’s just my thoughts! Why should I feel like I can’t say what I think out loud?! So I posted it, publicly, and then I went to sleep.

By morning I understood, in a way I hadn’t before, exactly what it costs to say something true in the wrong room. I lost friendships over it. Not acquaintances, but real ones, people I’d known for years, people who’d seen me through actual things. They didn’t argue with me or ask what I meant or where the idea came from or whether I’d considered the counterargument. They just quietly recategorized me, and that was that. One opinion, one data point, and suddenly they knew everything they needed to know about who I was. Who I’d been all along. Everything else they knew about me was simply irrelevant.

I want to be honest about how that felt, because I think we tend to describe these experiences in the abstract to avoid admitting how genuinely disorienting they are.

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I know people who are genuinely gifted at small talk. One of my best friends can walk into any room, read it in thirty seconds, and be mid-conversation with a stranger before I’ve even figured out which corner I’d like to stand in. It’s a real skill, and I mean that without a single ounce of sarcasm. I’ve watched people do this and have been quietly in awe of it my entire adult life.

But for the rest of us, small talk is a special kind of purgatory. It’s not that we’re antisocial or bad at conversation, it’s that the ritual of talking at length about nothing, of cycling through the same six questions like we’re all reading from the same script, feels like a colossal waste of the one resource we can’t get back. There’s a heavy kind of exhaustion that comes from saying nothing for two hours. I would rather sit in silence than perform the weather conversation one more time, and yes, I’m aware that makes me difficult to seat at dinner parties.

But to me, small talk isn’t connection. It’s the social lubricant that keeps us from having to say anything real while we figure out if the other person is safe enough to say something real to. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But somewhere along the way we stopped treating it as a warm-up and started treating it as the whole show. The weather, the weekend, what do you do, oh, how long have you lived here?? The same six questions on rotation until someone checks their phone and we all agree to stop pretending.

I miss actual conversation. I miss sitting across from someone and leaving two hours later knowing how they actually think, what’s shaped them, what they want and haven’t said yet. I miss the version of talking to people where you walked away changed by it in some small way. And I don’t think I’m alone in this, because everywhere I look people are saying they’re lonely while also spending enormous energy avoiding the exact thing that would fix it.

Part of what’s made this worse, I think, is the political climate we’ve all been marinating in for the last decade. We’ve been trained, very deliberately, to treat disagreement as a form of aggression. To see someone who holds a different view not as a person worth understanding but as a threat to be managed or a problem to be corrected. Platforms have built entire systems around this logic, curating what you see and don’t see, flattening the discourse until everyone in your feed agrees with you and you start to think that’s what the world looks like.

Bluesky recently made a post about how they’ve been “working hard” to make their platform “less toxic,” which in practice means less of the speech they find uncomfortable. I’m not naive about how these decisions get made, and I’m not interested in debating specific platforms here, but I do think it’s a symptom of something real. We’ve built an entire media infrastructure around the idea that being challenged is harm, and we’re shocked that people have stopped knowing how to be challenged.

What this has done to actual conversation is devastating. Changing your mind used to be called thinking, but now it’s called flip-flopping. It’s social suicide in certain circles to admit you were wrong about something, because it opens the door to everyone who disagreed with you marching back in to say they knew it all along. One of my favorite quotes—often attributed to John Maynard Keynes, the economist whose ideas basically rewrote how governments think about money—is apparently one he never actually said. But whoever did say it nailed something important: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

The willingness to update is the whole point of having a mind, but we’ve made it costly in a way it’s never been before, and people have responded by becoming more rigid, more defensive, and much less interesting to talk to.

*Taps sign*

This is also (I want to be very clear here) not a problem that belongs to any one side of the political spectrum. I’ve watched people on the left refuse to engage with any data that complicates their preferred narrative and I’ve watched people on the right do the exact same thing with equal conviction. The issue isn’t ideology, it’s the fact that for a lot of people their opinions have become load-bearing parts of their identity, which means examining them feels like structural damage. The moment someone disagrees with you stops being interesting and starts being a personal attack.

This Conversation Menu isn’t really a cure for any of that, but it is an alternative to participating in it. I organized these questioins by what they actually reveal about a person, like how they handle being wrong, whether there’s a gap between what they perform and what they actually believe, how they think, what they want, how they see other people, and what they’ve survived. They’re not designed to make people uncomfortable for fun, they’re designed to make it easy to have the kind of conversation that most of us are quietly starving for.

Quick note before you dive in: some questions will get you honest answers and some will get you a person’s preferred narrative about themselves. For example, almost everyone, when asked how they respond to disagreement, will say they try to understand the other perspective, because that’s who they want to be, not necessarily who they are. I’ve kept some of those questions in because even a person describing the version of themselves they wish they were tells you something. But the sharper questions are always the behavioral ones, the ones that require a specific story, or naming something that actually happened, because those are much harder to fabricate on the spot, and that’s usually where the real conversation starts.

One more thing: real curiosity is economical. The best questions are short. You ask the stripped-down version and let the silence do the work, because a long, over-specified question tells the other person exactly what kind of answer you’re looking for, and then that’s what you’ll get.

What’s inside → 6 categories of questions:

How they handle being wrong

What they actually believe vs. what they perform

How they think

What they want

How they see other people

What they’ve survived

Plus a bonus set of my personal favorites

50 questions total, each with a short note on what the answers reveal

Use this however it works for you. First dates, long drives, dinner parties, whatever. These aren’t meant to be ran through in one sitting. Just pick one or two from wherever the conversation naturally wants to go, ask it like you mean it, and then actually listen to the answer. I think we might be pleasantly surprised by other people if we give them the opportunity to do so.

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Karl Popper’s entire philosophy of science was built on a single uncomfortable premise. He believed what separates genuine knowledge from dogma isn’t how strongly you believe something, it’s whether you’re willing to have it proven wrong. He called it falsifiability, and the idea was radical enough that it reorganized how we think about what science even is. A theory that can’t be disproven isn’t knowledge, it’s faith. And a mind that can’t update isn’t thinking, it’s performing.

See also:

The willingness to be wrong is one of the most underrated measures of a person we have. Most people treat their opinions like personal property, which means any challenge to the idea registers as a challenge to them. The people worth knowing have figured out that changing your position is a sign of engagement, not weakness. These questions find out which kind of person is sitting across from you.

1. What’s the last thing you actually changed your mind about?

2. What do you think you’re probably wrong about right now?

3. What's the most expensive opinion you've ever had? (Expensive meaning it cost you a relationship, money, time, reputation, etc)

4. When someone disagrees with you, what happens in your body?

5. Have you ever gone looking for something that might prove you wrong? What did you find?

6. What's a belief you've been quietly walking back for years but haven't said out loud yet?

7. Who’s someone you love disagreeing with? What makes it not terrible?

8. What’s something everyone around you accepts that you think is wrong?

What these questions reveal: intellectual honesty and ego flexibility. Specificity is the tell. If they can name the actual belief and what cracked it, that tells you almost everything. “I’ve grown a lot” tells you nothing. Grown how? In what areas? What was your starting point?

Hannah Arendt wrote extensively about the difference between public and private life, arguing that a healthy society depends on keeping the two from collapsing completely into each other. When they do collapse entirely, when everything you believe privately is identical to what you’re willing to say publicly, it’s not integrity, it’s actually conformity. The most interesting people have a private life of the mind that doesn’t always match their public one, not because they’re dishonest, but because they’re actually thinking, and thinking doesn’t always produce socially acceptable conclusions on the first pass.

Most people have adopted the positions of their social environment because it’s the path of least resistance. The cross-ideological questions live here, and they produce the most genuinely enjoyable conversations because they don’t belong to any tribe. These are the questions that can make dinner tables across party lines actually interesting again.

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I’ve had time on my mind a lot lately. Not in the abstract way, but in the very specific, pressing, slightly uncomfortable way that happens when several things converge at once and you can’t look away from any of them.

I’ve been experiencing that low-grade type of burnout lately, where you’re doing all the things and still somehow feel like you’re not doing enough. The kind of burnout that turns inward and becomes self-criticism before you even realize that’s what’s happening. It has a way of making time feel accusatory. I keep catching myself doing this mental audit of the day, tallying what got done against some invisible standard I never consciously set, and the math never comes out right. I don't know who decided I should be doing more than I'm doing, and I haven't figured out how to ask her to leave.

Spring is arriving, which means Summer is near, which means I turn another year older soon. The days are getting longer and there’s something about the seasonal shift that always makes me ponder this stuff whether I want to or not. I’m sitting at my desk right now, and when I look to my right I can see my backyard, and the pomegranate trees that looked completely dead for the last three months—bare and skeletal, but they are fully green and bushy again and it feels like it happened almost overnight. The hummingbirds are back, too. There’s something about watching that cycle happen right outside my window, again, that makes time feel very real and very fast simultaneously. It’s like the vertigo of watching the world move at a pace that has nothing to do with my schedule or my feelings about it.

My dog is getting older. I had to take her to the vet yesterday because she’s been having some joint issues. We did X-rays, got new medications, the whole thing. We’re actually the same age if you’re going by dog years, which is a strange thing to sit with. She’s been through so much with me… so many versions of my life. Different houses in various cities, we’ve traveled all around the country together. She’s been here for every bad idea and every better one, the business and the end of the business and whatever this thing is I'm building now. She was there for all of it. She's at my feet right now, asleep, the way she always is. I love listening to her little snores while her body does that twitch thing like she’s running in her dreams. Watching her move a little more carefully lately makes the finite shape of things very legible in a way I usually manage to avoid thinking about. It puts a kind of pressure on time that I don’t have a clean way to describe. I can just feel it.

And then there are the tattoos. Ugh, God, the tattoos. I started the removal process this month—on all of them, more than I'd like to say here. There's something particular about lying under that laser that invites a unique kind of reckoning with past selves. Who she was, what she thought she was doing, the absolute confidence it takes to make a permanent decision about a body you don't fully know yet. She wasn't wrong exactly, but she had no idea who was coming after her, and she didn't bother to ask. Now I'm the one dealing with it, which feels both unfair and completely fair, which is maybe the most honest thing I can say about the relationship between who we were and who we are. The fact that this process takes so much time to undo is another story. I won’t be tattoo-free for about 2 years, it’s costing me a small fortune, and it’s insanely painful. It feels like both a punishment and a reward. Like, the audacity of who I was at 18 or 24, using my under-developed pre-frontal cortex to make decisions I couldn’t understand the implications of! At least hindsight is 20/20? Sigh…

Anyway, all of this together has put me in quite a mood. If you’ve been reading with me for a while, you know I love Notion and have a database for just about everything, and that’s exactly what I reached for last night—my favorite quotes on time. I’ve been adding to it slowly, over the course of several years, and I like to return to them when I’m feeling the way I’m feeling now because they remind me that time happens to everyone, and that none of us are immune to what it brings. The human condition doesn’t make exceptions. Nobody gets a longer lease on the present moment, nobody gets to pause the trees or keep the dog young or undo the decisions of their past selves without some cost. And there’s real comfort in finding that someone else already said the things you can’t quite articulate yourself. Remembering that we’re not alone in these feelings… that we’re actually in really great company.

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Here are 17 quotes that have done the most work on me personally when I’m in this place. They’re not meant to be motivational. They’re not telling you to optimize your mornings or make the most of every minute. They’re just honest about what time actually is, how it actually moves, and how human it is to spend your whole life in the middle of it without fully understanding it.

I hope you’ll read them slowly. The ones that make you uncomfortable are probably the ones doing the most work.

“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.”

— The Garden of Forking Paths, Jorge Luis Borges

I came back to this one recently during a week where I felt like I wasn’t making any decisions. I was just letting things roll forward, days passing in a kind of forward drift, nothing chosen, nothing refused.

Borges wrote it as a story about a labyrinth, but what it actually describes is something much quieter and more mundane… the way not choosing is also a choice, just one you didn’t consciously make. Every fork taken by default is still a fork. The life that happens to you and the life you build diverge along the same timeline, in the same increments. You just don’t feel the second one moving.

This piece below was actually inspired by this quote:

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

This one I’ve had memorized for years. It’s the most honest description I know of how a life actually feels from the inside—not like a straight line going somewhere, but like phases that each have their own job. The year I quit weed was almost entirely a questioning year. I wasn’t building much, I was simply surviving and regulating and trying to figure out who I was without the thing I’d been using to manage myself for a decade. It felt like stagnation, but looking back, it was the year that made everything after it possible. Not every year is for answering. Some years are just for asking, and being in one doesn’t mean you’re falling behind. It means the work is likely happening somewhere you just can't see yet.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

Henri Bergson

What I find useful about Bergson isn’t the quote itself, it’s the argument underneath it. He spent his career fighting the idea that time is something you can measure and divide and manage like a length of rope. Real lived time, he argued, is continuous and qualitative, and cutting it into units changes what it is. The quote itself is the part I keep losing and finding again: that maturity isn’t a destination, it’s a process of ongoing self-creation, and that process doesn’t complete. You don’t arrive. You just keep authoring yourself forward, which is either exhausting or liberating depending on the day.

I think about this when I catch myself trying to engineer my way through a period that’s fundamentally about becoming, reaching for the tracking system when what’s actually needed is to just stay inside the process. Complexity theory makes the same argument from a different angle, that sufficiently complex systems can’t be optimized from the outside, only allowed to develop. The scheduled version of time has real limits, and some things only happen in the continuous version.

A piece that was loosely inspired by this quote:

“If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.”

— The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil

I build a lot of systems for looking at what’s actually true. I looove data, audits, documentation, entire infrastructures, etc. And I think that’s right. But Musil is pointing at the thing that pure empiricism misses, which is the present moment always contains more than what currently exists in it. The possibility sense is what lets you perceive what could be true without requiring evidence that it already is. I need both. The data tells me what the machine has been doing. The possibility sense is what tells me what to build next.

When I’m feeling burnt out like I have been these past few weeks, I try my best to lean into the possibility sense. Follow my curiosities, lean into the childlike wonder, seek out beauty and awe, because I’ve spent enough time in pure data mode to know what happens when the possibility sense goes quiet… you get very efficient at optimizing something you’ve stopped questioning.

“Every cigarette I smoked was accompanied by a solemn vow never to smoke again. I smoked my last cigarette hundreds of times.”

— Zeno’s Conscience, Italo Svevo

This is one of my all-time favorites, and almost embarrassingly specific to my own experience. I’ve had so many last times before the actual last time. What Svevo nailed is that the ritual of resolution—the vow, the ceremony of the final one, the emotional experience of deciding—can become its own satisfaction, completely detached from any actual change. I recognized this pattern in myself so clearly it was uncomfortable to read the first time I encountered it. What finally worked wasn’t stronger resolve, it was removing the conditions that made the choice available in the first place, and then documenting everything so I couldn’t quietly revise what had actually happened.

I built the entire Conscious Creation framework around this:

“Time moves in spirals, not in straight lines. We believe we have left something behind and find ourselves encountering it again, closer or further from the center, but always the same thing.”

Joseph Roth (paraphrased from his essays on time and memory)

The spiral model of time is more accurate than the linear one and I think most people intuitively know this but don’t have language for it. You don’t move away from things so much as orbit them at different distances. The same core questions keep appearing across different years, different relationships, different contexts. I keep encountering the same few in my own life: how much to show, how much to protect, what I’m building and whether it matters, who I am when nobody’s defining me. I used to think returning to the same territory meant I hadn’t moved or was evidence of being stuck, but now I think it means I’m getting closer to the center of something worth actually understanding.

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Unpopular opinion, but “be yourself” is the most overrated, cop-out advice in existence.

It sounds wise or liberating, plastered on Instagram graphics and graduation speeches and self-help books. Just be yourself! The right people will love you for who you are! Authenticity is magnetic!

But what if yourself isn’t that great? What if your authentic self is anxious, reactive, undisciplined, and kind of a mess? What if “being yourself” means defaulting to your worst impulses, your laziest habits, and your most unexamined patterns? What if the self you’re supposed to “be” is precisely the thing standing between you and the life you actually want?

“Be yourself” assumes the self is a finished product worth presenting, but for a lot of people, it’s not. It’s a rough draft that needs serious editing.

I spent most of my twenties “being myself,” and myself was a complete disaster.

Myself drank too much and stayed up too late and couldn’t stick to a routine. Myself was reactive in conversations, saying whatever came to mind without filtering for whether it was useful or kind. Myself had big ideas but no follow-through, plenty of opinions but no discipline, and lots of potential but nothing to show for it.

If I had kept “being myself,” I’d still be that person. Probably worse, actually, because we know habits compound. The version of me that exists now—the one who built a business, who writes regularly, who has her shit mostly together—is not the authentic self I started with. She’s a constructed self. A self I deliberately built because the original wasn’t working.

And I’m not embarrassed by that; I’m proud of it. The construction was the whole point—it is the whole point. I’ll forever be constructing and re-constructing.

There’s a strange moral weight we’ve attached to authenticity, as if being unfiltered and unedited is inherently virtuous.

“I’m just being real.” “This is just who I am.” “I can’t help it, it’s my personality.” These phrases get deployed as shields against any expectation of growth or change. You’re not allowed to ask someone to be different, because that would be asking them to be inauthentic, and inauthenticity is the cardinal sin of our era.

But this framing is insane when you actually think about it. Should the person with anger issues just keep exploding because that’s their authentic response? Should the chronic interrupter keep interrupting because that’s just who they are? Should the person who’s “brutally honest” keep brutalizing people with their honesty because filtering would be fake?

At some point, “being yourself” becomes an excuse for not improving. It’s a way of locking in your current flaws as permanent features and demanding that everyone else accommodate them. “This is just who I am” really means “I’ve decided not to change, and you have to accept it.”

No. I don’t have to accept it, and neither do you. People can change. People should change.

Reminder:

There’s a quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” People love repeating it as if it’s profound, but whether Wilde actually said it or not, the irony is rich. Wilde was one of the most deliberately constructed personalities in literary history. The wit, the aesthetic, the public persona, none of that was his unfiltered authentic self emerging naturally. It was a performance, refined over years, designed to create a specific effect.

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Momentum sounds like a productivity word, but it’s not. It’s a physics word. Objects in motion stay in motion. Objects at rest stay at rest. The hardest part isn’t moving fast, it’s moving at all. (And then sustaining that movement when the resistance shows up… and the resistance always shows up.)

Most people have things in their life that are stuck because, for many of us, stuckness is the default. Starting requires force, and continuing requires friction management, and most of us are navigating both while also trying to live our lives, pay our bills, and stay sane.

This month isn’t about pushing harder or optimizing your way into motion, it’s about getting honest about what’s actually moving, what’s stalled, what’s stuck because it’s hard, and what’s stuck because part of you doesn’t actually want it to move. Those are different problems with different solutions.

I don’t know about you, but for me, there’s something about March that invites movement. Winter is finally losing its grip, the days are getting longer, the thing that felt impossible to start in the dark of January might feel more possible now. It’s like something inside of us starts to thaw.

By now, we’ve been at the year long enough to see some initial patterns. Maybe the thing you started in January didn’t stick or has started to dissolve. Or the desire you named in February hasn’t come any closer to being real. Or you haven’t started the project you swore was definitely happening this quarter. Or you’re still doing the thing you were finally going to stop doing.

I’m not telling you to judge or punish yourself. But honestly assessing what’s in motion, what’s stalled, and what needs intervention, is sometimes the kick in the ass we need to get back on track. And I’ll speak for myself when I say: I desperately need that kick because something about the last 2-3 weeks has completely derailed me.

So, 31 prompts for March. One for each day, or whenever you need to figure out what’s actually moving in your life, or what’s just sitting there, waiting. As always, take what serves you, leave what doesn’t, and write as honestly as you can. x

March — 5 weeks of daily prompts:

Week 1: Taking inventory—what’s actually in motion right now?

Week 2: Resistance—what’s stalled, and why?

Week 3: The push—what would it take to get moving again?

Week 4: Sustaining—how to keep going when the initial energy fades

Week 5: Direction—making sure you’re moving toward something that matters

Before you can build momentum, you need to know what’s already moving (and what isn’t).

We’re bad at seeing our own velocity. Sometimes we feel stuck when we’re actually making progress, just slowly. Sometimes we feel productive when we’re actually just busy, moving fast in circles, not toward anything.

This week is about getting honest about what’s actually in motion in your life and what’s been sitting untouched despite your good intentions.

1. What in your life has real momentum right now? Where are things actually moving?

2. What have you been “working on” that hasn’t actually progressed in weeks?

3. What did you start this year that’s still going? What quietly died?

4. Where are you confusing activity with progress?

5. What area of your life feels the most stuck right now? What would getting unstuck look like?

6. What’s one thing that’s moving slower than you’d like? What’s the actual bottleneck?

7. If someone looked at your actions (not your intentions) over the past month, what would they say you’re building toward?

Stuckness isn’t random. Something’s in the way, and it’s usually not what you think.

When something stalls, we tend to blame the obvious things: no time, no money, no energy, no support. But those are often just the surface. Underneath, there’s usually something else like fear, ambivalence, unclear priorities, or a story we’re telling ourselves about why we can’t. Resistance is information. This week is about reading it.

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Nietzsche had a very specific idea of what mediocrity was, and it wasn’t what most people think. It wasn’t about being average, or lacking talent, or missing some opportunity that would have magically changed everything. Mediocrity, in his framework, was the failure to become. The slow, almost imperceptible process of settling into a version of yourself that was never really yours to begin with, and then defending that settled version like it’s something sacred. Mediocrity isn’t where you end up when you try and fail, it’s where you end up when you stop trying to become anything at all and convince yourself the stopping was a choice.

What makes his diagnosis so uncomfortable is that he wasn’t pointing at people who lack ability. He was pointing at people who have it and will never use it, because the mechanisms keeping them mediocre are disguised as virtues, or comfort, or as identity itself.

He named those mechanisms back in the 1880s, and I’m sorry to say it like this, but, they go so hard.

Here are seven of my personal favorites.

1. Ressentiment: Building an identity out of what you oppose

Nietzsche borrowed this word from French deliberately. Not to be confused with resentment, which is an emotion that flares and fades. Ressentiment is an architecture. It’s what happens when someone who feels powerless takes that feeling and constructs an entire worldview around it.

The person living in ressentiment doesn’t just dislike what they can’t have, they redefine it as bad. The promotion they didn’t get is proof that the system is rigged. The relationship that didn’t want them is evidence that intimacy is a trap. The success they can’t replicate is confirmation that anyone who wins must be cheating. (Sound familiar?)

This is everywhere now. Entire online identities built not around what someone is creating but around what they’re against. The person whose whole personality is hating a political party, or the ex who’s been “healing” for three years but whose every post is still about the relationship, or the person who can’t name a single thing they want but can inventory everything they resent in breathtaking detail.

Ressentiment keeps you mediocre because it replaces the hard work of creation with the easy work of opposition. You never have to build anything. You just point at what other people built and explain why it doesn’t count.

2. Herd Morality: A value system that makes mediocrity a moral good

This one is doing more work in the modern world than almost anything else Nietzsche identified, and it’s routinely misunderstood as a simple critique of conformity. But herd morality isn’t just “going along with the group,” it’s a complete value system, one that elevates equality, safety, and sameness as the highest moral goods, and treats distinction, excellence, and individual greatness as threats to be neutralized.

The herd doesn’t just prefer the average; it moralizes the average. Standing out becomes arrogance, ambition becomes selfishness, excellence becomes a form of violence against those who didn’t achieve it. The person who pushes ahead isn’t admired but resented, because their existence is an implicit accusation against everyone who stayed put.

This is the quiet engine behind a lot of contemporary moral language. When “equity” slides from meaning fairness into meaning enforced sameness of outcome, that’s herd morality. When a culture treats the desire to be exceptional as inherently suspicious, as if wanting to be great is an insult to everyone who doesn’t, that’s herd morality. When institutions flatten standards so that no one has to confront the discomfort of being outperformed, that’s the herd protecting itself from the thing it fears most: the individual who doesn’t need it.

Nietzsche’s point wasn’t that community is bad. It was that a community whose highest value is no one should stand above anyone else will produce people who can’t stand on their own at all.

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Hey friends,

The guided portion of Conscious Creation is wrapping up this week, but I hope you’ll continue to track on your own. To help you along your continued journey, I built an interactive prompt library that contains every prompt from the entire program, including new prompts from this week, that you can revisit any time you want to run or rerun your data moving forward. For future reference, you can find the prompt library (and all other subscriber tools) by visiting tools.badgirlmedia.com. I also added it as a link on the homepage. (Passwords are at the bottom of this post.)

When I designed Conscious Creation back in the fall, I mapped out twelve weeks of guided content: essays, frameworks, AI prompts, weekly reflections, etc. I chose twelve weeks because that’s how long I believed it takes for tracking data to become genuinely useful, for the patterns to get undeniable, and for the habit of paying attention to your own life to actually stick.

And I still believe that twelve weeks of data is better than eight. The patterns get sharper and the self-knowledge gets deeper with every additional week of data behind you.

But by the time I finished writing Week 7 (and had real user feedback to reference against my initial syllabus) I realized the remaining four weeks of planned content were repackaging ideas you already have. The frameworks were built, the AI prompts were delivered, the crucial concepts like systems thinking, keystone habits, feedback loops, and failure points have already been shared. What was left in my outline was essentially the same material we’ve already covered: “energy and the cascade effect” (which is just systems thinking applied to your body), “input curation” (systems thinking applied to consumption), “identity vs behavior” (which the entire program has been teaching implicitly since Week 1).

I could have written those weeks and they would have been just fine, but this program is built on a very specific premise—that you follow the evidence instead of the plan when the evidence tells you the plan is wrong—and it would be pretty hypocritical to ignore that premise just because my original plan said twelve weeks.

There is still lots of work to be done, but the rest is application, and you now have everything you need to continue on your own. The remaining weeks are about you using the tools you already have as your dataset continues to grow.

As such, this week’s post is built differently from the others. It’s less essay and more reference material. I want this to be the thing you can come back to in a month, or a quarter, or six months, when you want to re-run your analysis or you’ve noticed yourself drifting and need to figure out where your system is breaking down.

Quick note before we get into the final post: So far, I’ve built the prompt library, but I’m currently working on an interactive toolkit that will cover the entire Conscious Creation program. This will be as useful for newbies as it will for people continuing along on their current journey. It will include the full prompt library with additional prompts, help with creating and/or editing your tracker, finding your tracker archetype, understanding and creating graphs and other visuals from your dataset, weekly/monthly/quarterly review assessments, and more. You’ll also be able to build a personal dashboard that will track your insights along the way. I hope to have it done in the next couple of weeks, and I’ll update you when it’s ready.

Here’s a sneak peek of the dashboard:

One last check-in.

Before we shift from guided to self-directed, I want to offer you a few things to reflect on.

How has your relationship with the tracker changed since Week 1? Most people start out treating it like a chore and end up treating it like a mirror. If you’re still filling it in every day, something has shifted in how you relate to your own data, even if you can’t articulate what that shift is yet.

Is the system you built in Week 6 still running? If it is, that’s a meaningful accomplishment. Most behavioral changes don’t survive two weeks, so give yourself some credit for that. If it broke, look at why, and look at whether the Week 7 systems analysis told you it was aimed at the wrong target. You can adjust this as many times as you need to.

And the big one: do you trust the data more than your memory now? Because if the answer is yes, the program did what it was supposed to do. Everything else is just technique.

So, what changes now?

The guided essays stop after this one, but the tracking doesn’t have to. I've been tracking for 90 days, and plan on continuing mine as well. I’ll be running experiments and integrating my data into my life in other ways. Plus, I am a huge data nerd so I can’t wait until the end of the year when I can look at an overview of everything. (How stupidly exciting!)

You now have a set prompts, frameworks, and an understanding of how your specific system runs, and these will work on any amount of data. The more data you feed them, the better they work. Eight weeks is enough to see the patterns, but twelve weeks makes them undeniable. At six months they’ll become predictive, and a year makes them transformative.

But the thing about any structured program is that the default outcome is that you will gradually start to drift. This drift is predictable though, which means you can plan for it. You don’t need to track everything forever and you don’t need me writing essays to keep you honest. But you do need a minimum viable system that catches the drift before it compounds, and you need to set it up now, while the habits are still warm, not three months from now when you’ve already slid back to your defaults.

What I’m giving you below is everything you need to keep going on your own: an inventory of what you learned, a reassessment of where you are now, archetype-specific guidance for what to focus on next, the complete prompt library from the entire program, and a sustainable rhythm for checking in with your data going forward. (Plus the interactive dashboard builder that’s coming soon!)

This is your toolkit. I hope you’ll continue to use it :)

First, write it down before you forget it.

Before anything else, I want you to document what this program actually taught you. Not in vague terms like “I learned a lot about myself,” but in specific findings, written down, so you can reference them in a month when the details start to blur.

Fill this out now, while it’s fresh. This becomes the reference document you check against during your monthly and quarterly reviews.

(These will all be available to fill out on the interactive dashboard, as well. If you answer these now, you can simply transfer them over when the tool goes live.)

KEYSTONE DISCOVERIES:

What one or two habits, when maintained, create positive effects across multiple areas of your life?

1. [Specific keystone habit from your tracking data] Evidence: [How you know this matters — what correlations you observed]

2. [Specific keystone habit from your tracking data] Evidence: [How you know this matters — what correlations you observed]

Keystone example from my personal data:

FAILURE POINT DISCOVERIES:

What breakdowns create the widest negative cascades?

1. [Specific failure point from your tracking data] Evidence: [What happens across other domains when this fails]

2. [Specific failure point from your tracking data] Evidence: [What happens across other domains when this fails]

CORRELATION DISCOVERIES:

What reliably predicts what in your system?

1. When [X happens], [Y] consistently follows

2. When [X happens], [Y] consistently follows

3. When [X happens], [Y] consistently follows

PATTERN DISCOVERIES:

What patterns about yourself did tracking reveal that you genuinely didn’t know before?

1. [Specific pattern about your energy, behavior, output, etc.]

2. [Specific pattern about your energy, behavior, output, etc.]

3. [Specific pattern about your energy, behavior, output, etc.]

CONFRONTATION DISCOVERIES:

Where did your data contradict the story you were telling yourself?

• I thought I was [identity claim] but my behavior showed I’m actually [behavioral reality]

• To close this gap, I need to consistently demonstrate [specific behaviors]

These are your core insights. Everything else was useful for pattern recognition but doesn’t need to be remembered in detail. This list is what you’re protecting going forward.

Reassess your archetype.

In Week 5, I introduced five archetypes based on what your data looked like at that point: Pattern Finder, System Validator, Discoverer, External Reactor, and Confronter. You used that archetype to guide what kind of system you built in Week 6.

Eight weeks in, it’s worth reassessing, because your archetype may have shifted.

Note: If you’re in the prompt library, you can sort “by archetype” and the reassessment is located at the top, and all archetype-specific prompts are under it:

If you were an External Reactor in Week 5 because outside forces were dominating your data, but you’ve since built a minimum viable routine that holds even on chaotic days, you might now be a Pattern Finder with enough stability to start seeing real correlations.

If you were a Discoverer who found one key insight and built around it, and that system has been running for two weeks, you might now be a System Validator, someone whose data is consistent enough that the next move is experimentation rather than pattern-hunting.

If your Week 7 systems analysis revealed a gap between what you believed and what your data actually showed, you might have picked up Confronter as an additional layer, regardless of what your primary archetype was.

Here’s the thing I want to make explicit: you can be more than one, and you will shift over time. A System Validator for your physical health and a Pattern Finder for your creative output. A Discoverer in one domain and a Confronter in another. Your data is multidimensional and your archetype will be too.

Every time you come back to this material (monthly, quarterly, whenever) re-run the archetype assessment. Ask yourself: is my data consistent or variable right now? Can my tracked behaviors explain the variance? Am I seeing multiple patterns or one key insight? Does my data match my self-image? The answers will change as your system evolves, and the guidance you follow should change with them.

Where to focus next, by archetype.

If you’re currently a Pattern Finder:

You see how things connect. Your Week 7 analysis probably revealed multiple feedback loops and correlations. The risk for you now is analysis paralysis, seeing so many connections that you don’t know which one to act on.

Your focus for the next month: pick the ONE upstream lever with the highest downstream impact and protect it obsessively. Don’t try to optimize five things. Optimize the one thing that your data says moves the most other things, and let the downstream effects take care of themselves. Re-run the Keystone Finder prompt monthly to check whether your highest-leverage behavior has changed.

Your ongoing prompts: Keystone Finder, Loop Mapper, Upstream/Downstream Audit.

If you’re currently a System Validator:

Your systems work and your data is consistent. Your risk is complacency, staying comfortable in a stable routine without testing whether a better version exists.

Your focus for the next month: design one controlled experiment. Change one variable for two weeks and track what happens. You have the stable baseline that makes experimentation meaningful, which is an advantage most people don’t have. Use it. If the experiment improves things, integrate the change. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost nothing because your baseline is solid.

Your ongoing prompts: Before/After System Check (run it after each experiment), Full System Map (quarterly, to see if your stable system has any hidden weaknesses).

If you’re currently a Discoverer:

You found the thing and you built around it. Now your job is to decide whether that one finding is still the most important lever, or whether the system you built around it has revealed a new insight that matters more.

Your focus for the next month: re-run the full analysis suite from Week 7 with your updated data. Your system change may have shifted the dynamics enough that a different behavior is now the keystone, or a different failure point has emerged. Discoverers who don’t reassess tend to keep optimizing around their original finding long after the system has evolved past it.

Your ongoing prompts: Keystone Finder (monthly), Failure Point Detector (monthly), the full suite (quarterly).

If you’re currently an External Reactor:

Outside forces still drive a lot of your data, and that’s fine. The question isn’t whether external disruption exists because it always will. The question is whether your minimum viable routine is holding even on your hardest days.

Your focus for the next month: refine your floor. What’s the absolute minimum set of behaviors you maintain even when everything else falls apart? Track your adherence to that floor specifically. If you’re hitting it 80% of the time, start raising it slightly. If you’re below 60%, the floor is too high and you need to lower it until it’s actually sustainable under real-world stress.

Your ongoing prompts: Failure Point Detector (to identify what breaks first under pressure), Before/After System Check (to measure whether your floor-holding days produce meaningfully better outcomes than your floor-breaking days).

If Confronter applies to you right now:

Your data showed a gap between your self-image and your behavior. The constraint you built was designed to close that gap. The question now is whether it’s working.

Your focus for the next month: measure the gap again. Run the same comparison you ran in Week 5 or 7 and see if the numbers have moved. If the gap is closing, keep the constraint and give it more time. If the gap is the same or wider, the constraint isn’t addressing the real issue and you need to redesign it, probably by looking upstream of the behavior you targeted.

Your ongoing prompts: the Confronter-specific prompt from Week 6 (re-run monthly), Upstream/Downstream Audit (to check whether you’re targeting the right level).

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Last week, after I published “How to build a week that doesn’t drain you,” I received some interesting questions about the actual planning process behind my weeks. While I haven’t had a chance to do a deep dive into my ‘philosophy of planning’ yet, I realized there is actually something I can share immediately, which is my Sunday meeting ritual. The 30 minute sit-down I have with myself before each new week. If you’re trying to be more strategic with your time and energy, and prioritize what you’re executing on, maybe this will be helpful for you too.

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You would never run a company where nobody checked the calendar until Monday morning. Imagine the CEO showing up and getting blindsided by three meetings he didn’t prepare for, spending the day putting out fires he could’ve prevented, and then wondering why nothing strategic ever gets done. You’d call that company mismanaged. You’d say the leadership was asleep at the wheel.

And yet that is exactly how most people run their lives.

Sunday night arrives and the dread kicks in because an unknown blur of obligations and half-remembered commitments bears down on you like weather you didn’t check the forecast for. So you cope and you scroll and you “relax” in a way that’s actually just avoidance. And then Monday hits and you’re already behind, because behind is where you started.

A lot of people approach this as if it’s a discipline problem, but I’m of the belief that it’s actually just a simple architecture problem. You don’t have a meeting with yourself, so you never get ahead of the week. Instead, you just get dragged through it.

I started having these Sunday meetings with myself about a year ago, and so far, it’s the closest I’ve come to solving my own architecture problem. It takes about thirty minutes, but the more you do it, the faster you’ll get. It works whether you have a boss or you are your own boss, whether you use a color-coded calendar or a crumbled up receipt, or whether your week is predictable or barely held together with string. What it requires is honesty, a pen or your Notes app (or wherever you keep your notes), and the willingness to look at your life like it’s something you’re in charge of.

Because, I don’t know if you know this, but you are in charge of your life :)

Everyone plans. Almost nobody examines.

There’s a version of Sunday planning that already exists in the productivity canon, and it’s mostly useless. Buy a planner, write down your goals, time-block your calendar, and color-code it if you’re feeling ambitious. These systems have one thing in common, which is, they assume everything currently on your plate belongs there, and the only problem is that it isn’t organized well enough.

In my experience, that assumption is almost always wrong.

Most of what fills your week wasn’t chosen, it’s just accumulated over time. The recurring meeting that stopped being useful six months ago but nobody’s had the balls to cancel, or the obligation you agreed to when you were trying to be agreeable, or that errand you keep doing manually because you never spent twenty minutes finding a better solution, or the social commitment you dread but maintain because you’ve never actually asked yourself why you said yes in the first place.

Your calendar (or your mental to-do list, or whatever passes for your system) is an archaeological record of decisions made by previous versions of you under different circumstances. You keep honoring them like contracts you can’t renegotiate… except you absolutely can.

Most planning systems skip the part where you decide whether things should exist on your plate at all. That’s the part this meeting is for. Before you optimize the schedule, you audit the system that produced it.

Personally, I tend to accumulate tasks and other aspirations quickly, which is why the examination aspect is more important than the planning piece, and is exactly why this works so well for me as part of my overall weekly system. You might resonate with this too. I write something ambitious down and then it carries over week after week after week, without ever getting done. I hang on to it so long it starts to become sentimental. This meeting has become the place where I am ruthless with the decisions of my previous selves, and cancel or delete the things she thought I “should” do.

Here’s an example of what you’ll be building in your own Sunday meeting:

Why Sunday. Why 30 minutes. Why every single week.

Sunday works because it sits in the gap between weeks, close enough to the week ahead that you can be specific, but far enough from it that you’re not already in reaction mode. Monday morning is too late because you’re already being acted upon, and Friday afternoon is too early and too contaminated by the week you just survived. Sunday gives you the distance to think clearly and the proximity to act precisely.

Thirty minutes is the constraint, and the constraint is a feature. A protocol that takes an hour won’t survive contact with real life, but thirty minutes is short enough to be non-negotiable and long enough to be genuinely useful. Set a timer for each phase and let it create urgency. Urgency prevents the meeting from becoming an open-ended rumination session where you journal about your feelings and end up scheduling nothing.

The consistency is what makes it work. This has to be a ritual, not just another intention. Same time, same place, same structure, every week. Unanchored intentions have a half-life of about three days, but a ritual with a fixed container becomes load-bearing. It holds weight because it has a shape. You don’t decide every Tuesday whether to go to your standing meeting at work, you just go. This is the same principle applied to your own life, which deserves at least the same structural respect you give your employer.

Before you sit down: what to bring

The setup is part of the ritual. What you need depends on what your week looks like.

One rule regardless of which column you’re in: phone in another room or on Do Not Disturb. Not face-down on the desk. Another room. You’re not managing your attention in this meeting, you’re designing your week. They’re different cognitive modes and the phone collapses them.

A quick note before we get into the protocol: this meeting is the governance layer on top of whatever structure you already have. If you’ve been using the Energy-First Week Builder, Phase 4 is where that work pays off because you already know which hours belong to which kind of work, and you’re slotting your priorities into the right containers. If you haven’t done the energy audit yet, a slow Sunday is actually a great time. You only need to do it once to get data that changes every week after.

BUILD YOUR ENERGY-FIRST WEEK

The Protocol: 30 minutes, five phases

Set a timer for each phase. When it goes off, move on.

5 minutes.

This phase is operational, not emotional. You’re not processing your feelings about the week, you’re simply closing open loops so they don’t follow you into the next one.

Three questions, answered fast.

1. What did I complete that I intended to complete?

This is for calibration. You need an accurate read on how much you actually get done in a week so you can plan the next one realistically. Most people overestimate their weekly capacity by about 40%, which is why most Sunday plans fail by Wednesday.

9-5 example: “I finished the client proposal, made the dentist appointment, and got to the gym twice out of three planned times.”

Freelance example: “I published the Tuesday essay, sent two pitch emails, and finalized the brand partnership brief. Didn’t touch the course outline.”

2. What didn’t get done, and why?

This is the more important question. “Didn’t get done” has a reason, and the reason matters. Was it genuinely deprioritized because something more important took its place? Did it drift because nothing forced it forward? Or did you just not want to do it?

If something has appeared on this list three weeks in a row, it needs a decision right now: commit to it with a specific plan, or kill it. Perpetual deferral is its own answer… you don’t actually intend to do it, you just haven’t admitted that yet.

3. What surprised me?

Surprises reveal planning gaps. If your week was full of things you didn’t see coming, that’s structural. Either your environment is genuinely unpredictable (rare) or you’re not scanning far enough ahead (common). Recurring surprises in the same category are a pattern, not bad luck.

5 minutes.

Pull up whatever holds your week, whether that’s your calendar, your notes app, your task list, or the list you just wrote in the no-calendar version. Look at everything on the board without starting to schedule yet. The question is, what’s actually here?

Get it all visible. Most people carry their week as a vague cloud of anxiety rather than a concrete map, but when you see it written out, it is almost always more manageable than it felt when it was floating around unexamined.

Then ask: what shouldn’t be here?

For each item, run it through four buckets:

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This isn’t a judgment. I want to say that upfront because this topic tends to make people defensive and defensiveness kills the conversation before it even starts.

But I can’t help but notice something, and I think more people are noticing it than are willing to say it out loud.

Everyone I know is on something.

If you start actually inventorying the people in your life, you’ll see it gets strange fast. There’s the friend on Adderall who can’t work without it anymore because she started taking it in college and her baseline concentration is just shot now. There’s the colleague on Lexapro who says it saved her life but also hasn’t cried in two years and isn’t sure how she feels about that. The guy who needs a few drinks to be social. The girl who needs an edible to fall asleep… or relax… or take the edge off.

Then there’s the Xanax for flying, the beta blockers for presentations, the Ambien, the modafinil, the microdosed mushrooms, the Wellbutrin added specifically to offset the sexual side effects of the other antidepressant.

And underneath all of it, so normalized we forget to even count it: caffeine in the morning and alcohol at night… every day… like bookends of modern consciousness.

I’m not listing these to shame anyone, I’m listing them because when you write it out, the load the average functional adult is carrying (mind you, I’m not talking about addicts or people in crisis, just regular people with jobs and kids and social lives) is genuinely unlike anything that came before. And frankly I don’t think most of them need to be on any of it.

Before you roll your eyes too hard or scream at me through your screen, you should know, I say this as someone who used to be on nine medications at once.

I actually wrote about my journey quitting everything and finding my true baseline here:

Anxiety, blood pressure, depression, sleep, focus, pain, nausea. I told myself I was handling my problems responsibly. Identify the issue and treat it with the appropriate intervention. That’s what being a functioning adult looks like!

Except, what I couldn’t see because I was too far inside it was that most of those medications were treating problems I was creating for myself.

I was nauseous every morning because I was drinking most nights, but rather than stop drinking, I took a pill for the nausea.

I was thirty pounds overweight and never moved my body, but rather than dealing with that, I took a pill for the joint pain.

I was on two anxiety medications for nearly a decade, and a significant chunk of that anxiety was downstream of the drinking, the weight, the inflammation, and the fact that my body was in constant low-grade revolt. I thought I had a chemical imbalance, but I actually just had a poor lifestyle.

I couldn’t see any of it. Or more honestly, I probably could see it, but I refused to acknowledge it (extreme levels of cope, if you will.) Every symptom had its own treatment, the treatments had side effects that became new symptoms, and eventually I was managing an ecosystem so complex that I genuinely didn’t know what I felt versus what the drugs were making me feel.

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Conscious Creation is a guided behavior tracking program. Every week, you get an essay that teaches you how to read your data differently, how to see correlations, identify systems, and recognize patterns you couldn’t see while living them. Plus prompts that help you use the data strategically, and frameworks for making course corrections based on what your data reveals about you.

The story behind the program, and how it works:

If you’re just joining us —

The program is self-paced. The weeks build on each other, but you can start anytime and move through at your own speed. Start with Week 1 where you’ll build your tracker and figure out what to track.

START TRACKING TODAY

You’ve probably heard some version of the advice that says you should only change one thing at a time. Don’t overhaul your whole life, pick one habit, start small, focus.

It’s good advice, and I give it myself too, but there’s a second part to that advice that almost nobody talks about, and it’s the part that actually matters. When you change one thing and hold it long enough, other things start to change on their own. Because your life isn’t a collection of separate projects, it’s one system, and when you move one piece, the rest of the system has to adjust.

I’ll give you an example from one of our Conscious Creation participants. He decided his one system change was going to be leaving for work ten minutes earlier on office days. That’s it... ten minutes. He wasn’t trying to redesign his entire morning, or fix his stress, or improve his fitness routine, or become a different person. He simply moved his morning departure time.

Here’s what it changed, in his own words:

So, to leave ten minutes earlier, he started prepping the night before (picking out his clothes, packing his kid’s lunch) , which wasn’t part of his original plan. It just became necessary once the departure time moved. And because his mornings weren’t rushed anymore, he stopped arriving to work already stressed, he stopped spending the first hour of his day recovering from the chaos of getting out the door, his commute became calmer because he had a buffer for traffic, and ultimately, his mental energy at work improved because he wasn’t starting the day depleted.

But then something else happened that he definitely didn’t plan. Since he’s using AI to help him read his tracked data, it suggested that he start keeping resistance bands in his car. He’d been wanting to add an extra workout day but couldn’t figure out how to do it without cutting into family time, sleep, or the occasional long work day. Once the rest of his routine settled into this slightly calmer groove, a solution appeared, and now he’s getting a workout in on days when the gym isn’t realistic, because the resistance bands are just there in his car, ready when he needs them.

One decision, just ten minutes, and it touched his evenings, his mornings, his stress, his commute, his energy at work, and his fitness. He pulled one thread and the whole fabric shifted.

And that’s exactly what this week of Conscious Creation is all about. Finding your highest-leverage thread, and pulling.

What happened with that ten-minute change wasn’t random, and it isn’t just a nice anecdote about morning routines. It’s an example of something called systems thinking, and it’s one of the most useful mental models that most people have never been formally introduced to. (And if you’ve been reading with me for a while, you likely know by now, it’s my personal favorite and I yap about it constantly—and I’ve been dying to get to this week so I can finally work it into Conscious Creation!)

Systems thinking is a discipline that’s been around since the mid-20th century, and it shows up everywhere from engineering to urban planning to organizational management to ecology. The core idea is deceptively simple: most outcomes aren’t produced by a single cause, they’re produced by a web of interacting factors that influence each other, and you can’t understand the outcome—or change it—by looking at any one factor in isolation.

The classic example is traffic. A traffic jam isn’t caused by one bad driver, it’s the product of road design, traffic volume, speed differentials at merge points, signal timing, and the way humans react to brake lights three cars ahead. You could scream at every individual driver to “just drive better” and it wouldn’t change anything, because the problem isn’t any single driver’s behavior. It’s how the system is structured. The fix isn’t behavioral, it’s structural: widen the merge lane, adjust the signal timing, add a roundabout. Change the structure and the traffic resolves itself without anyone needing to become a better driver.

Businesses work the same way. A company with declining sales can fire every salesperson and hire new ones, but if the real issue is that the product is overpriced relative to what competitors are offering, or that the marketing is attracting the wrong audience, or that customer support is so bad that word of mouth is killing them, then the new salespeople will fail just like the old ones did. The CEO who only looks at the sales team is treating a symptom. The CEO who maps how product, pricing, marketing, support, and reputation all interact with each other and finds the actual bottleneck, is taking advantage of systems thinking.

The reason this matters for how you think about your own life is that most people approach personal change the way a bad CEO approaches declining sales. They identify the thing they don’t like (I’m not going to the gym enough, I’m not creating enough, I can’t focus, I eat like garbage in the evenings, whatever) and they attack it directly. More discipline, more willpower, more guilt when it doesn’t work. And when it doesn’t work, they assume the problem is them. They assume they’re not trying hard enough or they’re not disciplined enough, or worse, something is wrong with their character.

But the problem is rarely the individual behavior. The gym isn’t happening because you’re sleeping poorly, which means you’re exhausted by afternoon, which means you don’t have the energy for a workout, which means you scroll instead, which means you feel bad about yourself, which means you stay up late ruminating, which means you sleep poorly again. In that scenario, “just go to the gym” is the equivalent of screaming at drivers in a traffic jam. The intervention is aimed at the wrong level. The leverage point is the sleep, or the evening routine, or the stress that’s causing the rumination. It’s something upstream that, if you fixed it, would make the gym attendance resolve on its own.

That’s systems thinking applied to your life. And now, six-plus weeks of tracking data means you actually have the information to do it, instead of just guessing at what’s connected to what.

Here’s an example from my own data (I’ll explain in more detail below):

In this post:

Quick check-in

Why your system evaluation is only half the picture

What “seeing the system” actually means (and why it matters more than any single habit)

Keystone habits: the behaviors that move everything

Failure points: where one breakdown takes the whole day down

Feedback loops: the cycles that either compound your progress or keep you stuck

AI prompts for mapping your specific system

What to track this week + end of week reflection

Need to revisit previous weeks?

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6

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BUILD YOUR ENERGY-FIRST WEEK

Every couple of weeks, someone in my comments or my DMs says some version of “There’s no way you actually write all of this yourself” or “I don’t believe one person can publish this much” or my personal favorite “You must have a team.”

But I don’t have a team. I have a desk, an espresso machine, and about ten hours a day that I’ve deliberately chosen to spend building something instead of consuming something. That’s it, that’s the whole mystery.

I’m not saying this to brag about being a workaholic and I don’t think there’s something inherently virtuous about working as much as I do. I’m saying it because the disbelief always reveals something more interesting than the question itself. When someone tells me they “can’t believe” I produce as much as I do, what they’re really telling me is that they’ve never sat down and done the math on where their own hours actually go. Because… the math is not complicated. The average American spends several hours a day watching television and several more hours on their phone doing things that don’t meaningfully improve their lives. That’s a meaningful chunk of hours, every single day, that aren’t going anywhere in particular.

I rarely watch Netflix, I’m not on TikTok, I don’t doomscroll before bed. I’m not morally superior for any of this, I’ve simply made a decision about what I want to spend my finite hours on, and I’ve built boundaries around that decision so I don’t have to remake it every night when I’m tired and the couch looks inviting. The output isn’t a mystery, It’s a consequence of my allocation.

But the thing I wish I knew sooner was, choosing to spend the hours is only half the equation. The other half, the half that most productivity advice completely ignores, is when you spend them and on what. Because I can sit at my desk for ten hours and produce something genuinely good, or I can sit at my desk for ten hours and produce garbage, and the difference between those two outcomes has almost nothing to do with effort or discipline. It has to do with whether I matched the right work to the right window of energy.

I’m about as anti-woo-woo as it gets, but before you write me off, hear me out.

Realizing my energetic windows could align (or not) with my work is what led me to build a system I think of as energy-first scheduling, and it draws from a few people smarter than me. Daniel Pink wrote an entire book called When about the science of timing, and one of his core findings is that our cognitive abilities don’t stay constant throughout the day, instead, they follow predictable patterns based on chronotype, with most people hitting an analytical peak in the morning, a trough in the early afternoon, and a rebound in the late afternoon that’s actually better for creative and insight work. Cal Newport has written extensively about the concept of deep work and how protecting uninterrupted blocks of concentration is more valuable than any amount of shallow busyness.

Those two frameworks, paired with tracking my own energy patterns through what I call energy mapping in The Daily 5, gave me real data about when my specific brain is ready to create vs needs a break.

The synthesis of all of that looks something like this: instead of building your week around your obligations and hoping you’ll have energy left over for the things that matter, you build your week around your energy patterns and fit the obligations into the gaps. It sounds like a small inversion, but it’s changed everything about how I work.

The fundamental error most people make.

First off, I’m not the same person at 9am that I am at 3pm. Not in terms of willpower, not in terms of creativity, not in terms of patience, not in terms of my ability to make good decisions. And neither are you.

This shouldn’t be controversial. Pink’s research on timing shows that cognitive function follows a daily arc that’s as predictable as the tides. Decision fatigue is real and measurable, creative thinking tends to peak at different times than analytical thinking, most people’s self-control is highest in the morning and lowest in the evening. None of this is news to anyone who has read the research.

And yet we build our weeks as if we’re machines running at constant RPM from wake to collapse. We schedule the important presentation at 4pm because that’s when the conference room was available. We save the creative work for “later” because the morning got eaten by emails. We make major life decisions at 10pm because that’s when we finally have a quiet moment, even though our decision-making capacity has been degraded by fourteen hours of micro-choices and social performance.

Most of us are perpetually scheduling the wrong tasks for the wrong versions of Ourselves.

So, how do you break this cycle?

The principle is simple: map your energy patterns, categorize your work by what kind of energy it requires, and then match them. The hard part isn’t the concept, it’s the tracking, the honesty, and the willingness to protect the structure once you’ve built it.

Step 1: The energy audit (one week of paying attention)

Before you redesign anything, you need data. Not guesses, or vibes, or what you think your energy patterns are based on some article about chronotypes you read three years ago. Actual data from your actual life.

For one week, set a recurring alarm for every two hours during your waking day. When it goes off, rate three things on a scale of 1 to 5:

Focus: how easily can you concentrate right now? Could you read something dense, or would you struggle to follow a recipe?

Creative energy: do you feel like you could generate new ideas, write, brainstorm, problem-solve? Or does everything feel flat and derivative?

Social bandwidth: do you have the patience and warmth for other humans right now, or would even a simple phone call feel like an assault?

Write it down somewhere. A notes app, a scrap of paper, whatever. Don’t overthink the format. What matters is that you’re capturing a snapshot of your capacity at regular intervals throughout a normal week.

By Friday you’ll have a map, and I promise it will contain at least one surprise, because when I did this, I discovered that my creative peak wasn’t first thing in the morning like I’d always assumed. It was between 9am and 1pm, after I’d been awake for a few hours and had some coffee and movement. My mornings before 9 were actually better for administrative work and clearing inboxes, the stuff that requires attention but not invention. And my social bandwidth basically fell off a cliff after 5pm.

Pink calls this the peak-trough-rebound cycle, and while the specifics vary by chronotype (early birds peak earlier, night owls peak later), the pattern itself is remarkably consistent. The point isn’t to match my pattern though, it’s to discover yours.

Step 2: The task taxonomy

Once you have your energy map, categorize the work you actually do in a given week. Not by urgency or importance (the Eisenhower matrix has been beaten to death) but by what kind of energy each task demands.

I use four categories:

Creation work: writing, designing, strategizing, building. Anything that requires you to generate something that didn’t exist before. This is the most energy-expensive type of work and it needs your best hours or it will be mediocre. This is what Newport calls “deep work,” and his central argument is right. The ability to perform this kind of concentrated cognitive effort is both increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. Protect it accordingly.

Processing work: email, admin, scheduling, data entry, returning calls, paying bills, ordering supplies. This requires attention but not originality. You can do this when your brain is at 60% and it’ll be fine.

Connection work: meetings, one-on-ones, phone calls, collaborations, difficult conversations. This draws from your social bandwidth, which is a separate reservoir from your cognitive bandwidth. Some people have more of this than others; neither is better, but you need to know your limit.

Recovery work: exercise, cooking, walking, reading, anything that replenishes rather than depletes. I’m calling it “work” deliberately, because if you don’t schedule it, it won’t happen, and then everything else suffers. This isn’t optional maintenance, it’s actually load-bearing infrastructure.

Go through your typical week and tag everything. You’ll probably notice that most people front-load their days with connection work (meetings all morning) and then try to do creation work in the wreckage of the afternoon, which is exactly backwards for most human brains.

Step 3: The match

Take your energy map from Step 1 and your task taxonomy from Step 2 and match them.

Your highest-focus, highest-creativity hours get creation work. Non-negotiable. This is the most important thing you do and it gets the best version of you.

Your moderate-focus hours get processing work. You don’t need to be brilliant to answer email, you just need to be functional and attentive.

Your highest social-bandwidth windows get connection work. Schedule meetings and calls here, and protect the rest of the day from them.

Your lowest-energy periods get recovery work. Stop pretending you’re going to do deep thinking at 3pm on a Tuesday. Go for a walk. Let your brain defragment.

When I restructured my week this way, two things happened almost immediately. My creative output got better because I was working at the right time. An hour of writing at 11am produced more usable material than three hours at 4pm ever had. And I stopped feeling guilty about the low-energy periods, because they had a job now. They aren’t wasted time, they’re recovery time, and recovery is on the schedule because it’s supposed to be there.

Before I get into the rest of the system, I actually built a tool for this.

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to make these frameworks more than just essays you read and nod along to. Reading about energy mapping is useful, but actually doing it is different. So I built an interactive tool that walks you through this entire process step by step. You rate your energy by the hour, categorize your tasks, and it generates a personalized weekly schedule based on your actual patterns.

This is the first tool in what’s becoming an interactive library for paid subscribers. The essays give you the thinking, and the tools help you use it. I’ll be building more of these based on the same principle every time: take the framework, make it functional, put it in your hands.

Here’s what the energy-first-week-builder looks like:

First, you’ll rate your energy for each day in 2-hour blocks.

Based on your energy ratings, the tool will create a heat map of your energy patterns.

From there, you’ll enter in your daily tasks, and categorize them using a simple drop-down menu.

Based on your energy patterns and your categorized entries, the tool will create a daily schedule for you that prioritizes your day and matches your tasks to the appropriate energy level.

Below the paywall:

Steps 4 through 7, which includes the complete weekly design template I use (broken down day by day), the rules that protect the structure from falling apart, the Tuesday check-in protocol, the Friday pre-mortem, and what to do when your whole plan breaks. Plus the password to access the energy-first-week-builder above.

Step 4: The weekly design template

Here’s the actual structure I use.

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Earlier this week while I was out running errands, I saw the same woman at three different places. Once at the coffee shop, once at Target, and again at the Post Office. Except it wasn’t the same woman, it was three different women who looked so similar I had to double-take each time. Same overfilled lips, same contoured cheekbones, same brow lift pulling everything slightly upward, same long blonde hair extensions falling in identical waves. Same face, same hair, different bodies, walking around like they’d all been produced at the same factory.

The Instagram face is no longer an online phenomenon. It has escaped the internet and colonized actual physical reality. It’s at brunch, it’s at the nail salon, it’s at Target. There’s a specific woman now (and you know exactly who I’m talking about) and she’s everywhere, multiplying, a copy of a copy of a copy of something that was already artificial to begin with.

And the thing that gets me, beyond the sameness, is the sheer amount of maintenance this look requires. The filler touch-ups every six to twelve months. the Botox every three to four months, the hair extensions that need moving up as your real hair grows, the lash extensions every two to three weeks, the nails, the brows, the facials. We’re talking about a part-time job’s worth of appointments just to maintain a face, and somehow millions of women have decided this is a reasonable way to spend their time and money—not to look like themselves, but to look like each other.

I’m not saying these women look bad… some of them look great, in a very specific way. But they look great in the exact same way, which starts to feel less like beauty and more like a uniform.

People have been talking about “Instagram face” for years now—the specific combination of features that filters enhance and fillers create. It’s been analyzed and criticized and memed to death, but knowing the phenomenon exists doesn’t make it less strange to actually see, over and over again, women who’ve voluntarily made themselves look more like each other and less like themselves.

There’s a video going viral right now that captures this better than anything I could describe.

A young woman who is genuinely, objectively beautiful, sits down for a “glam” makeover. In the before, she’s striking in the way that actually stops you in your tracks when you see someone who looks like her. Clear skin, natural brows, a face that looks like it belongs to a very specific person. The kind of face you’d remember. Then the transformation happens. Contour, highlight, overlined lips, lashes, the whole protocol. And when the reveal comes, millions of people had the same gut reaction… she looks… worse. Not ugly… just less? Less distinctive, less alive, less her. She went from looking like someone to looking like everyone.

The comments are full of people trying to articulate what they hate about it, and most of them land somewhere around “she looked better before” without being able to explain why. But there is a why, and it’s not just aesthetic preference. It’s actually neurological.

Your brain has a dedicated region for processing faces—the fusiform face area—and it doesn’t evaluate features the way a makeup artist does, which is one at a time. It reads the whole gestalt. It sees the relationship between every feature simultaneously. The subtle asymmetries, the micro-proportions, the way light falls on bone structure that hasn’t been optically restructured with bronzer. Your brain processes a natural face holistically, as a unified identity, and it does this with remarkable speed and emotional fluency. You see a face and you feel something about that person before you’ve consciously registered a single feature.

Heavy contouring and filler disrupt this process at a fundamental level. When you reshape the apparent bone structure with shadow and highlight, you’re feeding the fusiform face area contradictory information—the geometry says one thing, the texture says another, and the micro-movements of actual muscle and skin underneath don’t match the sculpted surface. Your brain flags the discrepancy even when your conscious mind can’t name it. The result is that uncanny flicker of something’s off that people experience when they meet someone whose face has been heavily modified. You’re attracted to the features in isolation. The lips are full, the cheekbones are sharp, the skin is smooth, but the face as a whole doesn’t cohere, and some part of you registers that as untrustworthy, or at least unreadable.

There’s a reason for this. Humans evolved to extract enormous amounts of social information from faces. Trustworthiness, emotional state, health, age, intention—we read all of this in fractions of a second, and we do it through micro-expressions, subtle asymmetries, and the natural play of muscle under skin. Symmetry is attractive, but only up to a point. Perfectly symmetrical faces, when generated in studies, are rated as less attractive and less trustworthy than faces with natural slight asymmetries. We’re not wired to find perfection beautiful. We’re wired to find humanness beautiful, and humanness is, by definition, a little bit irregular.

This is what the glam transformation destroyed. The before face had all its irregularities intact. The slight unevenness that makes a face legible, the natural shadows that let your brain build a three-dimensional model of an actual person. The after face had been flattened into a two-dimensional template. Every contour was placed according to a formula rather than following the actual architecture underneath. The result was a face optimized for a photograph but degraded for the far more complex task of being perceived by another human being in real life.

At some point, unfortunately, we stop reading these types of faces as a person and start reading them as products.

I know what that perceptual disruption feels like, because I’ve experienced it from the inside… not as a viewer, but as the face.

About five years ago, I experimented with lip filler. I’ve always had an uneven top lip where one side was slightly more plump than the other, and I thought it made my face look asymmetrical (hello insecurity that practically no one else noticed!) So I went to get it evened out. I had justified this to myself as “I’m just balancing it out.”

Well, the woman messed up. She put more filler in the side that was already bigger. I should have just accepted my fate and stopped the whole process right there.

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It’s almost Valentine’s Day, which means my feeds are flooded with two types of content: couples posting aggressively happy photos, and single people posting about how they’re healing from narcissistic abuse.

I don’t want to minimize actual narcissistic abuse, which is real and devastating, but I’ve noticed something over the past few years and I can’t pretend I haven’t. The number of people who claim to have dated a narcissist has grown exponentially, while the clinical prevalence of Narcissistic Personality Disorder has remained constant at around 1-2% of the population. Which means either narcissists are extremely busy, dating thousands of people each, or something else is going on.

What’s going on is that “narcissist” stopped being a diagnosis and became an insult. It’s the new “asshole,” but medicalized, so it sounds more legitimate and makes you sound like a victim rather than just someone who dated a jerk.

Spend ten minutes on TikTok or Instagram and you’ll encounter an endless stream of content about narcissistic red flags, narcissistic manipulation tactics, and how to heal from narcissistic relationships. There are accounts with millions of followers dedicated entirely to this topic. The comments are full of people having revelations: “Oh my god, this is my ex exactly.” “This explains everything.” “I finally have a word for what happened to me.”

The word is doing a lot of work. Too much work, if we’re being completely honest.

Here’s what narcissism actually means clinically:

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning in early adulthood. It’s characterized by things like an exaggerated sense of self-importance, preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, belief that one is special and unique, a sense of entitlement, interpersonally exploitative behavior, and arrogance.

Here’s what narcissism has come to mean colloquially: anyone who hurt you, disappointed you, prioritized themselves, or failed to meet your needs in a relationship.

These are not the same thing. Not even close.

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The diagnostic creep happened gradually, then all at once.

It started with genuine awareness-raising when people who had actually experienced relationships with personality-disordered individuals started sharing their stories, and those stories resonated. The patterns were recognizable—love bombing, devaluation, discard, hoovering1. For people who’d lived through this cycle, having language for it was genuinely healing. Finally, someone was describing what had happened to them.

But then the language escaped containment and the specific patterns of actual narcissistic abuse got diluted into general relationship disappointment. “Love bombing” started meaning anyone who was enthusiastic early in a relationship (aka dating). “Gaslighting” started meaning any disagreement about what happened. “Narcissist” started meaning anyone who wasn’t sufficiently attentive, who had their own needs, or who eventually left.

The terminology spread because it’s useful. Not clinically useful, but emotionally useful. Calling your ex a narcissist does several things at once: it explains why the relationship failed (their pathology, not your incompatibility), it positions you as a victim rather than a participant, and it makes the breakup feel meaningful rather than just sad. You didn’t just get dumped, you escaped abuse. You’re a survivor.

I do understand the appeal. Breakups are painful, and the pain wants a story. “We weren’t right for each other” is unsatisfying. “He was emotionally unavailable” is closer but still feels incomplete. “He’s a narcissist who love-bombed me and then devalued me as part of a predictable abuse cycle” is a narrative. It not only has a shape, it also has a villain. It explains everything and exonerates you completely.

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Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Never judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Only God can judge me.

We are buried in these. An entire culture of proverbs designed to stop you from reading what’s right in front of you. The message is consistent and relentless: that drawing conclusions about someone quickly is shallow, reductive, and unfair. That the decent thing to do is suspend judgment, give people time, wait for the “real” person to emerge from behind whatever they’re showing you.

This might be one of the most costly things polite society has agreed to pretend.

I’m not saying first impressions are perfect. Of course they’re not. But the insistence that they’re worthless trains people to ignore pattern recognition that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for a reason, and replaces it with a politeness norm that benefits the people most invested in not being read accurately.

A geologist can read a cliff face and tell you what happened sixty million years ago. The striation, the color, the angle of the grain… none of it is decorative. It’s compressed time. Every layer is a record of what happened to the rock. What pressures it endured, what temperatures it survived, what was deposited on it and what was stripped away. The surface isn’t hiding the history. The surface is the history.

People work the same way, if you’re willing to read them.

Most of us aren’t because we’ve been shamed out of it. The modern instinct is to insist that first impressions are shallow, and that real character only reveals itself over time and intimacy and long exposure. This is partially true and mostly self-serving, because what it actually protects is not other people’s complexity, but our own reluctance to act on what we’ve already seen.

The word character comes from the Greek kharaktēr—an engraved mark, a stamp pressed into metal or wax. Not a quality someone has, but an impression something makes. The word assumed that identity is legible on the surface, that who you are is not locked away in some inner vault but cut into you, visibly, by the accumulated force of how you’ve lived.

The Romans gave us persona, from the masks worn onstage in theater. A persona wasn’t a deception, it was a functional truth. The face you present is the face that acts in the world. The ancients didn’t agonize over whether the mask concealed the “real” person underneath. The mask was the person, at least the person that anyone else had to deal with.

Somewhere between these two etymologies, modernity made a strange move. It decided that surfaces are unreliable and interiors are sacred and that the “real” person is hidden underneath, accessible only through sustained closeness. That reading someone quickly is a failure of generosity rather than a function of intelligence.

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