Curiosity Chronicle

There's a quote that I've had printed out in my office for the last decade:
"It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe."
For years, I credited the line to legendary boxer Muhammad Ali. But it turns out, that attribution is wrong. The first known reference to the adage appears in an unsigned filler in a 1916 insurance industry trade publication.

Fortunately, you don't need a famous name attached to the words for their lesson to ring true.

The mountain is the big, obvious obstacle that stands before you. It's easy to see. And thus, easy to blame for your lack of progress.
But what if the mountain is no more than a clever distraction?
The pebble is the small, silent saboteur that holds you back. The fixed mindset. The bad habit. The self-limiting story. The friction in your environment.
It's nothing, until it's something.
On Friday, I wrote about the Pebble Paradox: When the pebble is just bad enough to hurt, but not bad enough to fix. So, it persists.
What's the small thing you've been ignoring that's keeping you from the life you're trying to live?
Identify it. Then remove it.
You can't conquer the mountain until you remove the pebble.
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This episode brought to you by:
DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. 
Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial Advisor. Track your spending, investments, and net worth—all in one place.
Innerbody Labs - A Higher Standard. After reviewing thousands of health products, we built formulas we wished existed.
Lemon - The Al agent that turns your voice instructions into finished tasks.

Last week, my business partner and I held our quarterly "Think Week" retreat.
The plan for this retreat was straightforward:
• 2 days
• Limited connectivity, no meetings
• Unstructured schedule
• Question prompts as catalysts to zoom out
• Focus on deep conversations, journaling, thinking, and reflecting on business ventures, relationships, health, and life.
I always leave these retreats with new perspectives and insights. And, in the interest of openness, and because I think many of them are broadly applicable, I try to share them here with all of you.
So, in this piece, I share 5 things I've been thinking about:
P.S. For those who are interested, you can find a full guide I created for conducting your own Think Week (or easier Think Day) here.
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This episode brought to you by:
DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. 
Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial Advisor. Track your spending, investments, and net worth—all in one place.
Innerbody Labs - A Higher Standard. After reviewing thousands of health products, we built formulas we wished existed.
Lemon - The Al agent that turns your voice instructions into finished tasks.

This is one of my strongest held beliefs:

Preparation beats planning.

Planning is based on the expectation of order. Preparation is based on the expectation of chaos.

And as I recently found out, there's real science to support it.

In 1994, researchers gathered 30 collegiate baseball players for an experiment. One group practiced hitting pitches in a fixed order. Another received pitches in a completely randomized order.

During practice, the fixed-order group looked better. But in a real game-like session, the random group performed significantly better.

I call this the Random Cage Effect.

In this piece, I talk about how I've applied this lesson to my own life and why preparing for chaos leads to better real-world outcomes...

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This episode brought to you by:
DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. 
Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial Advisor. Track your spending, investments, and net worth—all in one place.
Innerbody Labs - A Higher Standard. After reviewing thousands of health products, we built formulas we wished existed.
Lemon - The Al agent that turns your voice instructions into finished tasks.

A few days ago, I made a terrible mistake.
I woke up, grabbed my phone, and started scrolling X while making my coffee.
In the span of about two minutes, my brain got hit with doomsday predictions, geopolitical tensions, horrific news, and warnings about AI destroying jobs.
Before I had even taken my first sip of coffee, I was in fight-or-flight mode.
It's easy to feel that we're living in the most uncertain time in history. But the uncertainty itself is ancient. Its grip on our lives is new.
You are plugged into a 24/7 uncertainty machine. An IV drip straight into your veins.
The truth is you can't stop the machine. So the goal isn't to avoid or eliminate uncertainty, as much as to outlast it.
In this piece, I talk about the single mantra I keep coming back to:
When in doubt, zoom out.
Everything in life benefits from perspective. The struggle feels smaller. The growth feels bigger.
Because the days are noisy, but the months, years, and decades are not.
When in doubt, zoom out.
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This episode brought to you by:
DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. 
Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial Advisor. Track your spending, investments, and net worth—all in one place.
Innerbody Labs - A Higher Standard. After reviewing thousands of health products, we built formulas we wished existed.
Lemon - The Al agent that turns your voice instructions into finished tasks.

In 2021, I left my traditional career track in finance to go all in on writing and creative work.
I assumed that more time inputs would mean more, and better, outputs.
I was wrong.
The writing, once a highlight of my day, had taken on the feel of a job. The passion had become work.
As it turns out, there's real science that helps explain why. It's called the Overjustification Effect: When an expected external incentive decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to engage in an activity they already enjoy.
In this piece, I wrote about how I learned to protect the things I love from the weight of expectations and why I think you need to become a beginner again.
It's a small rebellion in a world that wants you to do everything with some purpose in mind.
You don't have to get good at every single thing you do. You don't need to attach metrics to every pursuit. Not everything has to become something.
Some things can just be.
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This episode brought to you by:
DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. 
Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial Advisor. Track your spending, investments, and net worth—all in one place.
Innerbody Labs - A Higher Standard. After reviewing thousands of health products, we built formulas we wished existed.
Lemon - The Al agent that turns your voice instructions into finished tasks.