THE MIND
EMOTIONAL & PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING
Growing up I was told by Mr. Rogers (more on him later) how important feelings were. He told us that emotions mattered, and that it was okay to talk about them, but somewhere along the way I forgot his message.
I’m 54 now, and only recently have I begun to embrace the importance of emotional and psychological health. For most of my life I’ve struggled with big, difficult emotions like anger and fear. I didn’t know what to do with them, so I buried them or numbed out, especially with alcohol. And while those strategies might have offered temporary relief, they never brought lasting peace. I think society told me a big lie that there is something wrong with expressing emotions or holding space for others when they are struggling, but I don’t believe that anymore.
I’ve come to realize that emotions aren’t the enemy. They show up to tell us something important about our inner world and unmet needs. When we ignore or suppress them, we miss the message and often suffer more because of it.
In this section you will find reflections and resources on topics like:
Understanding and working with anxiety and how to Let Go.
Living with more authenticity and less fear of what others think about us
How to find your purpose
A series on mindset and the gift to be found in our struggles. “The Obstacle is the Way”
Overcoming addiction
Content Menu
Fear, Anxiety, and the stories we tell ourselves
Fear is pre-installed in our software. Human beings evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and one of the reasons we are still here is that our brains became extraordinarily good at predicting and protecting. Our ancestors had to be alert to the saber-toothed tiger rustling in the grass. That hypervigilance kept them alive and was passed down to us. But here is the problem: that same mechanism, which was essential on the savanna, often works against us in modern life. There is no tiger. There is just an email, a final exam, a financial worry, or an uncertain future, but our brain and body treat these like real danger.
The result is that some of us spend significant energy suffering over things that have not happened yet and may never happen at all. Mark Twain captured this well with his famous quote, "I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened." He also wrote this on the subject, "Worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe."
Here is what I want you to really understand about anxiety, because this took me a long time to see. When we become afraid of something in the future, we create the suffering now. The worry becomes a rehearsal. We play the scene forward, feel the fear of it, and in doing so we create the suffering before anything has actually happened. And here is what makes this so important to understand: the body does not know the difference between what is real and what is imagined. The same stress hormones flood your system. Your heart rate climbs, your muscles tighten, and your nervous system shifts into threat response, all in reaction to something that exists only in your mind. We end up paying the full physiological price of an event that will probably never occur. In a way, we are remembering a crappy future that hasn’t happened yet and probably never will, which may also unnecessarily manifest a fearful future into the present moment.
The anxious mind is almost always living in the future, and the story it tells there is almost always some version of 'I am not going to be okay.' Learning to recognize that story for what it is, a habit of the mind rather than a forecast of reality, is one of the most important skills you can develop. By the way, our mind will often tell other stories that are not true, like ‘I am not loved or wanted.’ Becoming aware of the stories we tell ourselves is an important part of our growth.
My Story
In late 2023 I ran into a wall of fear. We were transitioning from full-time living in Colorado back to Texas, and the timing could not have been more complicated. Work was demanding, we were building a new house that was already going over budget before we broke ground, and the logistics of uprooting our lives had more moving parts than I could comfortably handle. And while I was doing a good job staying physically fit and eating well, I wasn't sleeping well, and for the first time in a long time, I was miserable. My brain seemed like it was in a constant state of predicting and protecting. I was on high alert.
But it was more than just racing thoughts. My anxiety began to present as a visceral, body-based fear. My chest would tighten or my stomach would knot up. This was especially jarring because the months prior had been among the most spiritually rich and joyful of my life. Then in January 2024, I got hit with the flu and was flat on my back for days.
During that low point, I had a thought I've come to recognize as significant: maybe this misery is the gift. It reminded me of when I quit drinking. Sometimes it takes being brought to our knees to gain the motivation to change course, and the obstacle becomes the way. I was totally miserable, but I did have a glimmer of hope.
And I was motivated to feel better. I reached out to friends who had navigated anxiety. I found a somatic therapist. I became willing to try anything, and that's when I discovered Wim Hof breathing, which immediately made a difference. As I shared in the Breath Work section, it was a game changer. It gave me a sense of control over my physiology and a direct path to calming my system. I soon layered in meditation, creating a daily combination of breath work followed by stillness. Cold showers followed, then full-on cold plunges.
But the real breakthrough came through synchronicity. Within a few days, two different friends gave me the exact same advice: when fear arises, don't resist it. Let it move through you. It echoed the central practice in David Hawkins' Letting Go, a book I had read years before, which is to stop resisting and simply allow the feelings to be there without judgment and without trying to fix them.
I soon had a chance to try it out. I was at my daughter’s choir recital, and out of nowhere that familiar fear began creeping in. Instead of panicking or telling myself a story about the fear I was feeling, I leaned into the emotion. I said to the fear, "Fill my body. I welcome you." And something remarkable happened. The fear came in and then it passed without resistance. In hindsight it was somewhat miraculous.
Hawkins writes that when we allow a feeling to fully rise without resisting or suppressing it, the energy behind it naturally dissipates. That was my experience. Fear still visits, but not like before. That level of anxiety hasn't returned in over three years. I also went a long time without being sick, which makes me wonder what chronic anxiety does to the immune system.
So here is what worked for me. The breath work got me out of my head and into my body. Meditation reconnected me with my higher self, and was especially effective after the breath work. Cold therapy helped train my nervous system to stay calm under stress and flooded my body with mood-boosting chemicals like dopamine. And letting go, accepting the feeling of fear and anxiety instead of resisting it, seemed to create the deepest shift of all.
Letting Go: A Practice and a Philosophy
Letting Go is one of my favorite personal growth books, by David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. He is best known for Power vs. Force, but Letting Go goes deeper into emotional surrender. I've included a summary based on my notes from the book because it has had a lasting impact on how I process emotions, and I think it will for you too.
The core idea is simple but radical: most of us are constantly resisting our feelings. We suppress them, express them in distorted ways, or escape them altogether. Hawkins teaches that instead of fighting emotions, we can allow them to rise, feel them fully, and let them pass through us. He writes, "Letting go is like the sudden cessation of an inner pressure or the dropping of a weight. It is accompanied by a sudden feeling of relief and lightness." That is exactly what I felt that evening at the choir recital. It was like releasing pressure I didn't even know I was holding.
Several ideas from the book really landed for me. The first is that feelings drive thoughts. A single suppressed emotion can generate thousands of thoughts over time, and by releasing the emotion, the obsessive thinking often dissolves too. The second is that resistance is the glue. What keeps emotions stuck isn't the feeling itself but our resistance to it. The moment we allow emotions to flow without judgment, they begin to lose their charge. The third is perhaps the most profound: you are not your feelings. The real you is the witness of your thoughts and feelings. Think about that for a moment, because you cannot be what you observe. You are the observer. Your true nature is not fear or anger. It is the awareness behind those emotions. And finally, Hawkins writes that fear is healed by love, not romantic love, but unconditional, non-attached presence. I refer to this as unconditional divine love, and I will write about it in the Soul section.
He also frames negative emotions as survival programs, outdated stories (usually not true) we picked up to stay safe in a chaotic world. As I stated earlier, our brains are designed to predict and protect, which is helpful if we are truly in danger, but often leads us astray in modern life. Letting go helps update those stories and opens us up to more joy and higher consciousness.
One of the most helpful and interesting parts of the book is his Map of Consciousness, which charts emotions on a scale of vibrational energy. He makes the case that everything in the universe has a frequency, and that our emotional states either contract or expand our energy field accordingly. At the low end of the scale, moving from lowest to highest, are shame, guilt, fear, grief, apathy, anger, and desire. I would have thought anger and desire would rank lower, but while they are still draining there is some energetic momentum in them. Courage is the turning point, the first step into empowerment and forward momentum. That was where I found myself when I told myself I was willing to try anything to improve my anxiety. From courage, energy rises into willingness, acceptance, love, joy, and finally peace. GratiJoy is not on this list, but it must rank way up there!
Byron Katie: The Work
Hawkins teaches us to release the emotional charge behind our feelings while Byron Katie gives us a tool for questioning the thoughts that create those feelings. Together they form a nice combination practice: feel and release the emotion, then examine the story behind it.
Katie's central insight is simple. Much of the suffering that goes on inside our minds is almost always not reality. It’s a story we torture ourselves with. She developed a four-question process she calls The Work, and she describes it this way: "All war begins on paper." You write down the stressful thought, and then you put it through four questions.
The first simple question regarding the thought: is it true? In my case, my thoughts were about scarcity or some disastrous story I invented about the house we were going to build. These stories were not true, and it was pretty obvious when I began to question them.
The second question: can you absolutely know it is true? This asks for a deeper honesty, and often this can help find the subconscious programming that was installed in our software at a young age. Imagine a situation in which you are feeling unloved or rejected. This question might help you to realize that you really do have great friends and family in your life. That there are people who love you.
The third question: how do you react when you believe the negative thought? Here you begin to notice what this untruth is doing to you. This thought could be affecting your confidence or making you paranoid. Shining light on the cause and effect can be valuable.
And the fourth question can be liberating: who would you be without the thought? This can be a nice visualization exercise. Really sit down and see yourself out in the world without the negative story you have been telling yourself.
Byron Katie has some great quotes and I will leave with two of them here: “A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring.” and “Don't believe every thing you think.” You can find more on Byron Katie’s work here.
A Final Thought
The future is uncertain. Let that sink in and accept it. But the future also represents pure possibility and potential, and we have a choice as to how we perceive it. When we look at the future through the lens of fear, we see all the ways things could go wrong and create the anxious feeling we are trying to avoid. When we look at the future through the lens of possibility, we see a blank and exciting canvas.
Probably my favorite opening line from any book comes from The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck when he writes, "Life is difficult." That sentence is so simple and so true. Suffering comes for all of us, but we do have a choice. We can suffer passively, or we can suffer with purpose by using it to grow. To capture that spirit of moving from suffering into hope and growth, I created a playlist for you called "Out of the Dark." I also highly recommend this 30-second video that helps put negative emotions into perspective.
Technology And Mental Health
Fair warning: The below article is pretty dark. It’s a sobering summation of technology, social media, and how they are quietly reshaping the mental health of our young people. If you are a parent, a leader, a young adult, or simply someone who cares about the next generation, it’s worth your attention.
It was written by an amazing person and investor who runs his own research firm. He and his team publish a weekly report called What I Learned This Week that my company subscribes to. It’s expensive and geared toward professional investors. Most weeks he writes about markets and investment ideas, but occasionally he turns his analytical lens toward culture. He graciously gave me permission to share this one.
Before you read it, I would simply ask you to pause and notice your own relationship with your phone and technology in general. How often you reach for it? How it makes you feel afterward Whether it leaves you clearer or more scattered. Does it make you feel more connected or lonely?
Technology is not evil. In many ways it is extraordinary. It has expanded knowledge, medicine, communication, and opportunity in ways previous generations could not have imagined. But tools shape their users, and when a tool is algorithmically optimized for attention, awareness becomes essential, and awareness is the first step in addressing a problem. If you are interested in reducing your phone use, AppBlocker is an excellent resource that has worked very well for me and my family.
The thought experiment that follows is unsettling precisely because it feels familiar.
“I asked ChatGPT—If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation of young minds?” Chat’s answers were chilling, familiar, and true.
When writer and blogger Devokrishna Rajkhowa asked ChatGPT this question earlier this year, it started a viral trend. Suddenly, all over the internet, people were asking ChatGPT the same thing: “If you were the devil, how would you destroy the minds of today’s young generation?” Even Jonathan Haidt, the social scientist and author of The Anxious Generation, joined in the thought experiment. We quote Haidt, who called Chat’s responses “profound and unsettling,” including:
“I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.”
“I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.”
“I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”
We have written at length about the struggles of young people today (see articles). What’s so stunning about Chat’s answers is that what it proposed doing is exactly what social media has been doing to kids for the last decade (see articles). Haidt put it this way: “It seemed to be saying, if the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.”
Rajkhowa’s original question borrows from the cybersecurity concept of red-teaming—the practice of simulating real-world attacks to find and exploit an organization’s vulnerabilities before the real damage is done. What better way to understand why young people are suffering—from mental-health crises to a deeper lack of purpose—than to hack the devil himself?
Source: The Free Press
Below, we lay out ChatGPT’s 7 step plan, as told to Rajkhowa and Haidt, along with our own analysis:
1. Make them addicted to distractions:
We quote Chat:
If young people can’t focus deeply, they can’t learn, create, or love well. The subtle trap is to addict them to constant stimulation—endless scrolling, notifications, micro-bursts of dopamine. They’ll feel busy, “connected,” even informed, while in reality their capacity for sustained thought and presence erodes. They won’t know what they’ve lost.
Around 2015, just three years after Facebook bought Instagram and smartphones became ubiquitous, America’s highschoolers started reporting much more trouble paying attention and thinking. Reading for pleasure also fell off a cliff. (see WILTW October 16, 2025). Data across countries meanwhile reveals a growing struggle to concentrate, and a decline in verbal and numerical reasoning (see WILTW April 17, 2025). The implications are huge. Haidt writes: “When constant distractions make love and work shallower and more fragmented, it makes sense that life suddenly feels more meaningless.”
2. Glorify identity over purpose:
We quote Chat:
If you blur the sources of meaning—family, community, nation, faith, vocation—young people drift. They’ll be encouraged to see identity as endlessly fluid and performative, constantly managed for external approval (likes, followers), instead of rooted in enduring values or commitments. This makes them malleable, anxious, and dependent on external validation.
Haidt’s own research has shown that religion and tight-knit, real-world communities help protect young people’s mental health. Research by Seth Kaplan, an author and expert on fragile communities and states, shows that real-world communities help foster social trust, social capital, and social support—the bedrocks for healthy child-development. The word Haidt and his research partner, Zach Rausch, use is “rootedness.” A childhood rooted in followers and likes is hardly rooted at all. But a childhood rooted in family, faith, community, and service brings mental-health benefits that last a lifetime (see WILTW November 27, 2025).
3. Flood them with information, starve them of knowledge:
We quote Chat:
Make everything available instantly, but strip away guidance about how to weigh, sort, and interpret. Give them infinite answers without teaching how to ask good questions. In that haze, truth and falsehood feel equally slippery, so cynicism becomes natural. A generation that doubts everything believes nothing.
Herein lies the value of ancient wisdom, great books, and an education in the humanities. Compare the great works of literature and art that have endured throughout the centuries, versus the AI-generated slop, viral fury, and misinformation that storms the internet daily. What happens to us if we lose the ability to know what is meaningful, good, and true? What happens when we lose the ability to share a common reality with our neighbors and friends? These are the seeds of Gen Z’s growing nihilism (see WILTW September 25, 2025).
4. Replace real relationships with digital substitutes:
We quote Chat:
Encourage digital substitutes for friendship, love, and intimacy. People will accumulate “connections” while feeling lonelier than ever. Superficial bonds are easier to monetize and manipulate than the deep ties of family, friendship, and community. The tragedy is that they may not realize what real connection feels like.
The devil targets relationships because research shows that having close relationships is one of the best predictors of happiness. Most teens are spending five hours on social media daily—time they might otherwise be spending on real-world relationships that actually nourish their souls (see WILTW August 28, 2025). As Mark Zuckerberg explained, the average American has fewer than three friends, but wants 15. Meta’s AI companions are available to close the gap. Why should young people grapple to learn difficult skills like courting a lover, or being a friend and a spouse, when they have an endless supply of virtual companions available in customizable voices, needs, and bodies?
Role models, too, have been all but replaced by influencers. Rajkhowa writes: “Remove teachers, thinkers, parents, social workers and true leaders. Give them influencers who promote pan masala and gambling apps, who only care about likes and trends, as opposed to wisdom, honesty, and patience.”
5. Glorify convenience, consumption, and fake success:
We quote Chat:
Convince them that comfort, consumption, and self-expression are the highest goods, while restraint, sacrifice, and long-term commitment are oppressive. That way, they’ll celebrate indulgence while mocking tradition and discipline—the very things that build strength and freedom across generations.
As Haidt writes, children are “anti-fragile.” They need to do hard things over and over in order to become strong, independent adults. Smartphones hack children’s reward systems by offering constant hits of dopamine on a variable time-schedule. Everything is gamified. Victim-mentality is cool. Why dig in and pursue a long-term project when you can experience so much pleasure without ever leaving your room? “Like the denizens of 19th-century opium dens, the heavy users of these products are addicted, unfree, undisciplined, and unhappy,” Rausch writes.
6. Sow discord among generations:
We quote Chat:
Sow suspicion between parents and children, teachers and students, elders and youth. If every authority figure is portrayed as untrustworthy or obsolete, the next generation grows rootless—cut off from inherited wisdom and forced to navigate the world with only the guidance of peers and algorithms.
For as long as humans have been alive, wisdom has been passed down from one generation to the next. Technology has helped this transmission, including books, which were much more widely read by young people before they got smartphones. Now, parents and grandparents and books can’t compete against the onslaught of terabytes coming in from influencers, peers, and bots. The devil’s plan is to cut children off from the past, from the wisdom of their elders and those who came before them. Kids are then forced to make the challenging journey to adulthood with only algorithms and digital companions to guide them.
7. Make everything for sale:
We quote Chat:
If every experience—play, art, sex, spirituality, even friendship—becomes commodified, then nothing remains sacred. Young people may mistake consumption for meaning, never realizing that depth requires some things to be beyond price.
Freya India, a Gen Z writer, has written about how the endless task of managing your brand online pushes girls to turn their boyfriends into full-time cameramen and to turn a visit to Auschwitz into an opportunity for a sexy selfie. Users of social media are not just customers, they are also the products themselves. And children are the biggest prize of all because if companies can hook them young, they can profit off their attention and addiction for years.
This is the devil’s plan.
So, if we want to hack the devil’s plan—if we want to enable the next generation to develop focus and all the skills they need to become successful adults—we need to hack the phone-based childhood. As laid out by Haidt in The Anxious Generation, this means delaying kids’ access to smartphones and a fully-online life until the end of the critical period of brain development known as puberty. This means no smartphones before high school and no social media before age 16. This means enforcing phone-free schools, bell-to-bell, from Kindergarten through high school. It also means giving kids more independence and free play in the real world (see WILTWSeptember 4, 2025). To hack the devil’s plan, we must reclaim childhood in the real world.
Authenticity
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure... As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”
— Marianne Williamson
In the introduction I shared that much of the content on this site reflects lessons I wish I had learned earlier in life. One of the biggest was the importance of authenticity. The idea of being my authentic self didn’t register until I was in my early 50s. Ironically, Mr. Rogers was talking about this when I was a child, gently reminding us that we are lovable just the way we are. I spent most of my life focused on performance and productivity. I didn’t spend time pausing to ask the deeper questions: “Who am I? and Why am I here?” because I was too busy subconsciously wanting societal approval. So many of us, myself included, are bombarded with messages (these are really lies) telling us we need to be a certain way to be accepted and loved.
So how do we begin the journey back to our true selves?
One of the most insightful and entertaining starting points I’ve found on this topic is this blog post by Tim Urban:
Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think
This piece is long, hilarious, and transformational. I read it at least once a year. Urban breaks down why we’re so obsessed with other people’s opinions and how to break free.
Here are a few key takeaways:
The Mammoth Metaphor: Urban introduces the idea of the Social Survival Mammoth, which is our prehistoric ego that evolved to be hyper-attuned to the judgments of others. It craves approval and fears rejection, often hijacking our decisions to keep us “safe” in the eyes of the tribe.
The Puppet Masters: These are the people whose opinions run our lives. They may be your parents, your partner, your boss, or the high-status people in your social circle. We give them unconscious power over our choices.
Your Authentic Voice (AV): This is the wiser, truer part of you, some might call it the soul or higher self. Your AV knows what you value and what brings you joy. It doesn’t have all the answers, but it usually knows the next right step. “Your AV knows how you feel deep down... It knows which kinds of people, topics of interest, and types of activities you truly enjoy—and which you don’t.”
Taming the Mammoth: The process of reclaiming your authenticity involves deep reflection. Urban poses powerful questions:
Who in your life actually energizes you?
Do you spend money or time on things that don’t feel right?
What parts of your life carry a quiet shame or dread?
What would you do, say, or pursue if you weren’t afraid of being judged?
This is the hard and sacred work of becoming yourself. As Urban writes: “You’ve got to figure out what actually matters to you and start being proud of whoever your Authentic Voice is.”
Learning to listen to that voice has been one of the most important shifts in my life. It has meant letting go of outdated expectations and the constant need for approval. It’s an ongoing practice, but one that has lead to a true awareness of who I really am. “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” Carl Jung.
And I love to pair the Mammoth article with this 30 minute YouTube video titled How to Live Your Life at Full Power by Graham Weaver, who is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Graham discusses some of the items mentioned in the Mammoth piece, but he goes further by giving advice on how to live with less fear using strategies like writing down your fears (they have less power when they get out of your head), a 9 Lives exercise when you write down what you would do if you could live parallel lives, and how we must fully commit once we have identified our authentic path. Enjoy!
Stoicism + Spirit = Freedom
There is a version of life most of us are living without quite knowing it. I call it the 1.0 operating system. In 1.0, life happens to us. Our moods are dictated by our circumstances, and we utilize our brains primarily to predict and protect from a place of fear. Our peace depends on whether the markets cooperate and the people around us do what we want them to do. When things go wrong, we blame and look outward for the fix. Without fully realizing it, we become victims of our experience, and no amount of external success changes the underlying condition because the 1.0 operating system is always waiting for something outside itself to finally make things okay.
The 2.0 mindset is something different. In 2.0, life happens for us. We begin to see adversity not as something to survive but as something that is actively serving our growth. We stop arguing with reality and begin to flow with it. We take radical responsibility for our inner state rather than waiting for the outside world to cooperate and then the grip of circumstance slowly begins to loosen. This is not spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity. It is a fundamentally different relationship with experience, one that takes practice and an open mind.
Also, none of what follows is suggesting that we suppress our emotions or stuff our feelings. Grief, anger, fear, and sadness are real, and they deserve to be felt and processed. What the 2.0 mindset offers is not a way to avoid those emotions but a different lens through which we meet them.
The writings in this series are my attempt to map the transition from the 1.0 to 2.0 operating system, a framework I first encountered through the work of Peter Crone, a thought leader and coach that I have followed extensively.
A few notes before you begin. First, this is advanced territory. It builds on the physical and emotional foundations covered earlier in the site, and I would not recommend starting here if you are just beginning your wellbeing journey. There is a reason the Body section comes first. In my experience, and in the experience of people I have learned from, it is very difficult to operate at the 2.0 mindset if you are not taking care of your physical foundation.
Second, if you have not yet spent time in the Soul section, particularly the piece titled Evidence of the Soul, I would encourage you to visit it before diving in here. The spiritual layer of what follows, especially the idea that adversity is a curriculum designed for our growth rather than random bad luck, lands very differently once you have genuinely engaged with the evidence that we are more than just our bodies. It is not required reading, but I think it will enrich everything that comes next.
The Obstacle is the Way
I was told the ultimate prize in life was wealth and status. It took me most of my adult life to discover the truth: the ultimate prize is freedom. Not financial freedom, though that helps, but freedom from the unnecessary victimhood of circumstance. Material success can become a trap, and it did for me. The most powerful guide I found toward something better came from an unlikely place: ancient Stoic philosophy, and specifically from a book by Ryan Holiday called The Obstacle Is the Way, which is the book I have recommended more than any other.
Its premise is simple but quietly life-changing: the obstacle is not in the way, it is the way. What blocks us is not the real problem. Our perception of the problem is the problem. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."
Holiday organizes Stoic philosophy into three interconnected disciplines: Perception, Action, and Will. Together they form a practical framework for turning adversity into advantage.
Discipline One: Perception
Holiday opens with a distinction that sounds simple but is quietly revolutionary. "The phrase 'This happened and it is bad' is actually two impressions," he writes. "The first, 'This happened,' is objective. The second, 'it is bad,' is subjective." Events themselves are neutral. It is the story we tell ourselves about what they mean that often creates suffering.
He illustrates this through the story of John D. Rockefeller. As a young man, Rockefeller cultivated what he called sangfroid, an unflappable coolness under pressure. When financial panics swept markets and others spiraled into fear, Rockefeller stayed calm and clear. He didn't pretend the problems weren't real. He simply refused to add a layer of emotional catastrophe on top of them. As Holiday writes, "Nothing makes us feel this way. We choose to give in to such feelings. Or, like Rockefeller, we choose not to." Crucially, this was not a personality trait Rockefeller was born with. It was a practiced discipline.
The Stoics teach us to develop what Holiday calls the "observing eye" rather than the "perceiving eye." The observing eye sees what is actually there. The perceiving eye sees catastrophic setbacks and impossible obstacles. One is grounded in reality while the other layers a story on top of reality that multiplies suffering. Training the observing eye means learning to see things plainly and clearly before deciding how to respond.
This is not just philosophy. Psychologists call it post-traumatic growth, and the research behind it is significant. As Holiday writes, "The struggle against an obstacle inevitably propels the fighter to a new level of functioning. The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth." That which doesn't kill us really does make us stronger, not as a cliché, but as documented psychological fact.
I can say from personal experience that my years struggling with alcohol addiction, something that genuinely could have killed me, was the launch for the most significant growth of my life. I have spent a lot of time in AA meetings, and one of the most powerful things I encountered there was the “grateful alcoholic”. People who had been through absolute hell, who had lost everything and rebuilt from nothing, and who would not trade the experience for anything in the world because it led them through a profound spiritual evolution they never would have found otherwise. The obstacle, for them, was not just the way. It was the gift.
Discipline Two: Action
Once perception is clear, action follows. But Holiday is careful about what kind of action he means, because most of us default to exactly the wrong kind. We become frantic and reactive, doing more and pushing harder, convinced that if we force the outcome enough it will eventually arrive on our terms. The problem is that outcomes are rarely fully in our control. When we fixate on the destination, fear can take over, and every setback can feel like a threat rather than information.
What Holiday points toward instead is process-focused action: directed, courageous effort that does the next right thing regardless of outcome. "Action requires courage, not brashness," he writes, "creative application and not brute force." The goal is not to control the outcome but to trust that the right process, applied with consistency and patience, produces the right results over time. It is a subtle but profound shift in orientation, and no one in modern life has illustrated it more powerfully than a football coach from Alabama.
One of my favorite concepts in the book is Nick Saban's philosophy of "The Process." Saban, the legendary Alabama football coach, didn't talk about winning championships. He told his players not to think about winning the SEC Championship but to think instead about what they needed to do in each drill, on each play, and in each practice. That is the process. The task at hand and the next right action.
Holiday distills it simply: follow the process, not the prize. Think progress, not perfection. This turns action into something almost meditative, not white-knuckling toward an outcome, but doing the next right thing with full commitment regardless of what cannot be controlled. When we adopt this mindset we become highly engaged in life but detached from outcome. This mindset has transformed how I move through life.
Discipline Three: Will
This is where the book connects most directly to spirit. "If Perception and Action were the disciplines of the mind and the body," Holiday writes, "then Will is the discipline of the heart and soul." Will is what we depend on when circumstances feel unchangeable and the loss is undeniable. And here is the counterintuitive truth that Holiday explains so well, "The will has a lot more to do with surrender than with strength. True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility. The other kind of will is weakness disguised by bluster and ambition."
Holiday's great example here is Lincoln. His personal suffering, depression, grief, and political failure after failure had been so relentless that he came to believe it was somehow destined for him. "This too shall pass" was his favorite saying, and he once remarked it applied to any situation one might face. What made Lincoln great was not his cleverness or his ambition but his will: the way he resigned himself to an onerous task without giving in to hopelessness, the way he held both humor and deadly seriousness at once, and the way he used his own private turmoil to teach and serve others.
A Real-World Example
I have been mentoring a group of young adults, most of them in college and about to graduate, and one question comes up often: what do we do about AI? The job market they are entering is genuinely uncertain, and artificial intelligence is reshaping entire industries faster than anyone predicted. The fear is real and understandable.
But this is one of the clearest examples of the Obstacle Is the Way that I have seen in years. You can approach AI from the 1.0 or from the 2.0 mindset. In 1.0, AI is something happening to you. It is a threat, a reason for fear, and a force beyond your control that is going to make everything harder. In 2.0, the disruption itself becomes the opportunity. The students who lean in, who learn the tools, who figure out how to work alongside AI rather than compete against it, are going to have an enormous advantage over those who stay in fear. The obstacle, approached with the right mindset, becomes the way forward.
I am not dismissing the challenge. The job market is hard, and I take that seriously, but the Stoic question is always the same: given what I cannot control, what is the most productive use of my energy right now? Fear will not improve the job market, but curiosity, competence, and a good attitude will.
The same logic applies to whatever disruption you are facing. The specific obstacle changes, but the formula does not.
The Spiritual Layer
The Stoics gave me the structure, but I kept returning to a deeper question: why do difficult things happen in the first place? If we are merely bodies navigating chaos, adversity is just bad luck. But if we are souls here to grow while attending "earth school", adversity becomes a curriculum. That question led me to Peter Crone.
Crone is a thought leader and coach known as "The Mind Architect," who has worked with world-class athletes, executives, and high performers on freeing themselves from the unconscious, inherited beliefs that quietly run their lives. His core insight bridges Stoicism and spirit as well as anything I have encountered. One of my favorite quotes from Peter is "The Universe will present us with people and circumstances to show us where we are not free."
That quote reframed everything for me. What if the very situations and people that frustrate or trigger me are not bad luck or random noise, but gifts? Precise, perfectly timed gifts that show me exactly where I still need to practice to become a better human being. What if my difficulties are not obstacles to my growth but the very instruments of it?
I call this radical responsibility. There is no one to blame with this mindset and no external circumstance to fix before life can get better. Every difficult person and every frustrating situation becomes an invitation. If I am here to learn patience, for example, then how does anyone get better at anything? Through repetition. So it makes perfect sense that life would provide frustrating circumstances as practice. And here is something I cannot prove but have noticed recently: the more I practice and improve my patience, the less it seems I need to practice. The frustrating circumstances appear less often. I cannot say for certain why, but I have begun to flow with life rather than fight it, and that shift feels real and significant.
Of course I still occasionally get frustrated with people and circumstances, but I am infinitely more patient than I used to be, and I am very rarely in a victim mindset. I can be frustrated and simultaneously aware that this is my choice, that no one and no circumstance outside me is responsible for my inner state. I am also much quicker to catch myself now, to notice the reaction as it arises and remember that I have a choice. Viktor Frankl, who discovered freedom inside a Nazi concentration camp, described that moment as well as anyone ever has: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
Adding this spiritual dimension brings a deeper layer of trust to the Stoic path, not just the sense that I can handle what comes, but a genuine belief that what comes is serving my growth. As the meditation teacher Shinzen Young writes, "Suffering equals pain times resistance." Pain is inevitable but resistance is optional. When I argue with reality and insist this moment should be different, suffering multiplies. Byron Katie puts it plainly: "When I argue with reality, I lose, but only 100% of the time."
If You Think Your Situation Is Too Hard
You might be reading this and thinking: that is a nice philosophy, but you don't know my situation. My loss is too great and my circumstances too extreme. If that is where you are, I want you to remember a few people.
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in a South African prison for his opposition to apartheid, 18 of them in a small cell on Robben Island doing hard labor. He emerged not with bitterness but with a message of forgiveness and reconciliation that changed his country. Epictetus was born a slave in ancient Rome. He went on to become one of the most important Stoic philosophers who ever lived, teaching that while others could chain his body, no one could ever chain his mind. Viktor Frankl survived four Nazi concentration camps and wrote Man's Search for Meaning from that experience, one of the most important books of the twentieth century on finding purpose within unimaginable suffering.
These were not people with easy circumstances. They were people who discovered that the one thing no one can ever take from you is your response to what happens to you. As Holiday writes, "Our perceptions are the thing we're in complete control of. If an unjust prison sentence can be not only salvaged but transformative and beneficial, then nothing we'll encounter is likely without potential benefit." The obstacle is not just survivable. It is the way.
The Upside
I want to close with a question I recently heard Naval Ravikant ask: "If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?"
Naval's point is simple: if we are intelligent enough to build wealth, careers, and complex lives, why haven't we applied that same intelligence to the one thing that actually determines our experience of all of it? Our culture relentlessly rewards achievement and accumulation, but optimizing for those things does not reliably produce happy people. I know because I spent much of my adult life proving it.
As a professional investor I spend my days analyzing risk and reward, weighing the potential upside of an investment against its downside. That lens has become second nature to me, and when I apply it to this belief system the asymmetry is impossible to ignore. Asymmetry simply means the potential gain far outweighs the potential loss.
When I look at the 2.0 mindset through that lens, here is what I see. If I choose to see life as happening for me and adversity as a curriculum, the upside is enormous. I experience more ease, better relationships, and less exhaustion from fighting what I cannot change. I often find myself in a state of flow rather than constant resistance, and I move through life as a participant rather than a victim.
And if it turns out to be wrong? If there is no soul curriculum and adversity is just random noise with no deeper meaning? I still gain all of the upside. The practice of radical responsibility and finding the gift in difficulty improves my life regardless of whether the universe is actually conspiring for my growth. The downside of committing to this practice, as best I can calculate it, is essentially nothing. The upside is my freedom.
That asymmetry makes this the most rational bet available. Stoicism plus spirit equals freedom, and freedom is the soil where GratiJoy grows because when resistance dissolves, gratitude naturally emerges. And when gratitude deepens, it turns into joy.
Learning to Trust: Moving from Scarcity to Abundance
In the last piece we explored the 1.0 vs 2.0 mindsets and the Stoic idea that the obstacle is not in the way but is the way. As a reminder, in 1.0 life happens to us. We are victims of our circumstances, waiting for the outside world to cooperate before we can feel okay. In 2.0, life happens for us. Adversity becomes a curriculum, and we take radical responsibility for our inner state rather than looking outward for the fix. This piece is about what became possible when I began living it.
Understanding the 2.0 mindset and living it are two different things. Most of us slip back into 1.0 not because we lack the knowledge but because we are running subconscious programs so deep and so old that we do not even recognize them as programs. And I want to share one of mine.
Not many people know this, but despite a career that by most measures has been very successful, and plenty of money saved, I have spent much of my adult life gripped by a scarcity mindset. No matter how well things went financially, the fear of running out was always lurking somewhere in the background. Sometimes the fear was low grade and relatively quiet, and other times it was loud and painful. I discussed one of those times in the piece on anxiety.
But I never did the work to find out why I had these feelings. Peter Crone gave me the clearest explanation I have found. "We are dragging around our past with us," he says, "so instead of creating a future, we are remembering one." What keeps us locked in the 1.0 mindset is not laziness or weakness. It is a set of subconscious programs, what Crone calls prisons, that we picked up early in life and have been running on ever since. Things like: ‘I am not good enough.’ ‘I am not safe.’ ‘I am not loved.’ For me, one of those prisons was: ‘there will never be enough.’ I did not consciously choose that belief. I inherited it somehow, and it shaped how I perceive and experience the world.
Our subconscious programming drives much of our thinking. And thoughts generate feelings. Feelings inform actions. Actions produce results. Which means that if we want different results in our lives, the work is not primarily at the level of actions or even thoughts. It is deeper, at the level of the subconscious programming beneath the thought.
If we never go that deep, we are only working to become the best version of our limited selves. We might manage our reactions better, cope more skillfully, or achieve more, but the underlying program keeps running. Until we find and examine those lies, the ones that whisper things like ‘there will never be enough’ or ‘My value is solely based on my accomplishments,’ we will keep recreating the same patterns and the same fears, because we are not creating at all. We are remembering.
So the first step is awareness. Simply noticing the prison is a huge step toward freedom, because we cannot change what we cannot see. And once we can see it, something remarkable becomes possible.
Playing the Game
Let me set the stage for a story that changed my life.
By the fall of last year I had done two things. First, I had identified one of my primary prisons: the belief that there will never be enough. Second, I had genuinely internalized the idea from the Freedom piece that difficult circumstances are not happening to me but for me, that adversity is a curriculum designed for my growth. I had the awareness, and I had the mindset. Now it was time to put them into action.
My intention going into each day was simple: whatever comes my way, I am going to practice equanimity. Not perfection or the absence of feeling. Just the intention to remain steady, to notice the reaction as it rises, and to ask whether this situation is happening to me or for me.
This reframe changed everything. Instead of dreading the hard moments, I began to almost welcome them, because they are exactly the conditions I needed to practice. The difficult email. The frustrating conversation. The unexpected bad news. These are not interruptions to my growth. They are the curriculum.
And so I waited with intention. I was ready to play the game. Ready to pause in the space between stimulus and response rather than immediately react. This is the pause Viktor Frankl describes so powerfully: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
A Story About Letting Go
In the fall of 2025 my dad and two of my closest friends were coming to visit me in Colorado, and the morning before they arrived I got an email from my new CPA. He said it was likely that I was probably going to owe significantly more in taxes than expected for 2024, and it was a big, shocking number. I had already paid significant taxes for that year so I thought I had fully paid. In the past that kind of news would have negatively affected my entire weekend. I would have obsessed over it. The scarcity mindset and rumination would creep in with the old prison activating the familiar story that no matter how well things are going, something is going to come along and take it away.
But I caught myself. I was deep in this work at the time, and I remember thinking: this is exactly what I have been practicing for. So before spiraling, I said to myself two things. First, you do not even know if he is right. This is still an estimate. Second, you have the money to pay this if it turns out to be true. I acknowledged the situation, took what was real, set down what was not yet confirmed, and let it go.
And then something happened that I still smile about. We went skeet shooting later that day, and I shot an entire box of shells without missing once. I was completely present. That kind of presence typically wasn't available to me when negative financial news was weighing on my mind. The peace I felt was not the absence of the difficult news. It was equanimity in the middle of it. I was in flow.
About a month later, when my taxes were finalized, I did owe significantly more than expected, though not as much as my CPA had warned me to prepare for. I wrote the check with a smile on my face, and I let it go again. I felt completely at peace with it. For someone who had spent decades anxious about money regardless of how much he had, that felt pretty good.
Now things start to become really interesting. About a month later I received a check from the IRS for almost exactly the same amount I had just paid. There was no documentation and no explanation. I sat on the check for a few weeks, checked the IRS website repeatedly, found no correspondence of why they sent the check, and eventually deposited it planning to use it to pay for a big family trip. Now the story could end there and still be pretty awesome, but there is more.
Soon after and during my morning heart coherence meditation (which is designed to help with intuition), I received what felt like a clear and strong message: I need to give away the money I just received. My first instinct was practical. We had a big trip to Africa planned and this would have covered all of it and then some. But the message was clear and it did not waver. I talked to my wife about it, and we decided to add the money to an endowed scholarship we have at the University of Texas. What I love about an endowed scholarship is that the principal always stays intact so it gives and gives even after we are no longer alive. My wife and I started it in 2009, and we often receive letters from students who receive the return from the endowment.
I quietly made the donation in the final days of the year transferring some appreciated stock, and moved on. It felt right. I did not think much more about it.
Then in January, I received a call from the gift department at UT. They thanked me for the gift and then said something that blew me away. In 2025, the university had a matching program for endowed scholarship contributions. Anyone who gave that year to an endowed scholarship had their donation doubled. I was overwhelmed to hear this news. True gratijoy!
I sat with this for a while. The sequence had started with an unexpected tax bill I chose not to let bother me. I moved through equanimity, through letting go, through an act of generosity that felt like a surrender to something larger than my own plans. And I ended up somewhere I did not expect: with the universe, as best I can describe it, saying well done. This felt like true abundance.
Here is what strikes me most. The scarcity mindset that had plagued me for so much of my life had always told me to hold on, to predict and protect, and for decades I listened. This time I did the opposite. I stayed calm when the bad news arrived. I let go when the money came back. I gave it away when I was told to. And the abundance that followed was not just financial. It was the feeling of finally being free from a prison I had been living in for most of my adult life.
I cannot prove the universe orchestrated any of this, but I also cannot ignore it. I stopped arguing with reality and started flowing with it. I was in harmony with life. That flow state, which I may write about later, is difficult to describe, but one of its defining characteristics is non-resistance. When in a state of non-resistance and equanimity we move through life without fighting ‘difficult’ circumstances.
That is the game. And the more I play it, the more I start to suspect it was designed for me to win. Give it a try yourself this week. Let’s get good at this together! Really make the intention for equanimity, trust, and flow and see what happens.
As I said in the prior piece on Freedom, there is very little risk in adopting this mindset. The asymmetry is in your favor. It does not mean reading everything as a sign or not paying attention to real risks. It simply means that when we look at life as a gift, life begins to function as one. Gratitude becomes not just a practice, but a lens through which we can view everything. This fundamentally changes our vibration, which shapes our thoughts, which drives our actions, which determines our results. It is a beautiful positive feedback loop, and it starts with the decision to trust.
Looking back, I can see many moments in my life where what felt like a loss or a setback quietly became the foundation for something far better. This story is one of them. What began as unwelcome news on a Colorado morning ended with a scholarship being doubled for kids who needed it, and with me finally free from a prison I had been carrying for most of my adult life. This feels like true abundance. Not the accumulation of more, but the freedom that comes from trust.