Curiosity Chronicle

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:
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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.

I'm often asked for advice from people just starting out in life.
When I respond, I imagine I'm speaking to my 22-year-old self. Young. Energetic. Highly ambitious. But with little direction. Feeling lost.
There are a handful of things I find myself consistently repeating in these responses, so I thought it would be worthwhile to collect them into a single piece.
But to be clear, in writing (and re-reading it), it's obvious to me that this advice applies to all of us. At any age. On any life path.
So, strap in and buckle up.
Here's my brutally honest advice to my 22-year-old self...
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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 an apocryphal story, legendary painter Pablo Picasso was walking through the market when a woman approached him and asked for a drawing.
Picasso quickly drew a small, but beautiful piece of art and handed it back to her.
"That'll be one million dollars," he smiled.
"But Mr. Picasso, it only took you thirty seconds!"
"On the contrary," he replied. "It took me thirty years to draw that masterpiece in thirty seconds."
This story is a perfect example of a modern crisis I'm starting to see in the AI era.
It's called the Locksmith Paradox: We have a tendency to undervalue something because of the low visible input required to create it, despite the output being exactly what we requested.
In this piece, I talk about the science behind this phenomenon, why it penalizes efficiency and rewards general incompetence, and how to fight back as individuals, leaders, and organizations...
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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.