Curiosity Chronicle

Last Wednesday, I flew to Panama to deliver two keynotes. I was excited for the trip. I’d been once before as a kid and remembered the beautiful country.

I completed the first talk on Thursday evening and the second on Friday morning. I left feeling energized and headed back to the hotel to take a few calls before heading to the airport.
At 12:56pm local time, I was on the top floor of my hotel when I started to feel a light rumbling sensation in my chair.

But then, chaos. The floor started to shake. The entire building started to sway. Things started falling off the counters and onto the floor.

I would shortly find out that a 7.7 magnitude earthquake was underway. Over the next 30 hours as I tried to find my way home, there were 161 aftershocks, including several 6.0+ magnitude tremors.

In this piece, I share my stream-of-consciousness perspectives from going through a massive earthquake.
How everything got smaller. How I was reminded that shared struggle builds bonds. Why awareness is so very perishable.
And why bad luck may not be so bad...

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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.

Confession: I’ve never been someone who was a natural in social settings.
As something of an introvert, I struggled to build new adult relationships. I often felt others weren’t responding to my social signals. In most cases, I just assumed they didn’t like me and moved on.
But it turns out I was actually falling victim to a damning collision of two psychological phenomena:
Signal Amplification Bias: Our fear of rejection in social situations tempers our ability to convey social signals, and blinds our ability to recognize that tempering effect.
The Liking Gap: We assume others like us less than they actually do.
In effect, you send less than you think, and you hear less than they send.
Two people who like each other leave an interaction convinced the other one doesn’t.
In this piece, I share a simple solution that has completely transformed my experience with adult friendships:
Like people out loud...
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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.

When I was 13 years old, a single story changed the course of my life.
But to understand it, I need to take you back in time to a strange experiment from decades ago.
Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga was studying patients who had their corpus callosum surgically severed. His experiments led him to hypothesize that the left hemisphere has a specialized system he called The Interpreter, whose responsibility is to find clear cause and effect.
Its job is simple: To take scattered, seemingly random data and facts about the world in front of you and stitch them into a coherent story that feels true.
The problem is that we’d rather have a story that’s wrong than no story at all.
For me, The Interpreter began telling a story when I was young: I wasn’t very smart. My sister was the smart one. I had to be something else.
And then, confirmation bias kicked in. The story determined what “counted” as evidence. Eventually, the story itself constrained my world.
In this piece, I talk about the stories we tell ourselves and the empowering truth that allowed me to confront my own:
You wrote the stories. Which means you can rewrite them.
The most important story in life is the one you tell yourself.
Make sure it’s true.
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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.

Confession: I'm a routine guy.

I thrive on structure. I think of routines as a way to ensure execution against the daily action that contributes to long-term, compounding progress.

But there's a dark side to routines that nobody talks about.

When your routines become too rigid and complicated, they become a source of stress rather than strength. The routines meant to serve you can start to own you.

This is where my 90-10 Rule comes in:

90% disciplined compliance.
10% open flexibility.

90% of the time, I'm locked in with my structure, but 10% of the time, I give myself the space to let life happen freely.

In this piece, I talk about the Paradox of Routine: The best routine is the one you can break.
The 10% is what enables the 90% to be so effective.

Your routine should serve your life, not own it.

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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 the 3rd century BCE, King Pyrrhus was preparing for an aggressive military campaign in Italy when a trusted advisor named Cineas asked him a simple question:
After conquering Italy, what would they do next? Then Sicily. Then Libya and Carthage. And then?
King Pyrrhus replied, "Then we will live a life of ease. Drink all day and have pleasant conversation with our friends."
Cineas paused and spoke: "But what's stopping us from doing that today?"
The story is one of the oldest documented cases of the Arrival Fallacy: the false assumption that reaching some achievement or goal will create durable feelings of satisfaction and contentment in our lives.
But life is rarely so black and white. Ambition isn't the mortal enemy. And presence isn't the perfect hero.
In this piece, I wrote about choosing the middle path. Rejecting the or and embracing the and.
Remember: You can conquer your Carthage if you want to. Just don't make the wine wait for it.
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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.