Curiosity Chronicle

I first met Tim Cook in 2014.

I was just starting my career in finance and had signed up for a local gym that opened at 5:00am. I started arriving at 4:45am so I could get to the office by 6:30.

Each morning, there was a small handful of others who would congregate outside the doors at that time. Tim happened to be one of the people in that group.

For the first six months, I talked to him almost every day and had exactly zero idea who he was.

As our friendship grew and I came to consider him a mentor, I realized something deeper was going on. A few years later, he was still there. Doing the exact same thing. Every single day.

He became the best example I've seen of an old Zen saying:

What do you do before enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water. What do you do after enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water.

In this piece, I talk about the lesson I learned from seeing it up close: The outcomes may change. The titles may change. The scale may change. But the work doesn't...

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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 convinced that the market for telling people what they want to hear is much larger than the market for telling people what they need to hear.

That one fact explains a lot of what you see in the world.

But my goal has always been to be real. Even if it's unpopular. Because everything I write is something I hope my son reads someday, and I owe him the truth.

Today, that truth is a few things nobody told you about success.

It may not be what you want to hear. But it's definitely what you need to hear...

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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.

Imagine two different people on the same mid-January day.
One lives in California. He walks outside in shorts and a t-shirt. The warm sun beams down on his face. He puts on his sunglasses, unlocks his car, and turns the AC on full blast.
One lives in New York. He walks outside in a heavy jacket. He grimaces as the cold wind hits his uncovered face. He opens the trunk of his car, takes out a brush, and starts cleaning the snow and ice off his windshield.
Which one do you assume is happier?
You just picked one in your mind. And I probably would have picked the same. Right up until I lived both.
Yes, the truth is, the two people are both me, just one year apart.
And our assumptions about their relative happiness reveal an important cognitive trap everyone needs to understand.
It's called the focusing illusion.
A cognitive bias where people overemphasize the importance of a specific, visible factor when estimating the overall happiness of an individual or group.
In this piece, I explored why what you can see is almost never what matters, and shared a simple question I like to call my Tuesday Test...
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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 weeks ago, I came across a podcast clip of Conan O'Brien talking about why he doesn't pay to fly private. He likes going through the airport, chatting with people at TSA, and "being in the world with other people that are traveling."

It got me thinking about the obsessive pursuit of convenience and the hidden debt it creates in your life.

Money has the ability to reduce the simple stresses, burdens, and inconveniences of adult life. But there's a certain level of inconvenience that's an important part of the human experience.

When you seek convenience, you get a benefit now in the form of ease, but it creates a corresponding liability in the form of reality separation.

In this piece, I talk about the hidden debt of convenience, how to pay it down by embracing friction, and why friction is what makes your life feel real...
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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 1628, Sweden's mightiest warship sank less than a mile into its maiden voyage -- not because of an enemy attack, but because a king couldn't stop adding to it. I call it the Vasa Effect: the addition of individual positives can eventually create a catastrophic negative.
In this week's piece, I break down why our bias for addition is holding us back and how creative subtraction might be the fastest way to improve.
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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.