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.
So much of this work is about access to our soul, which is our true and authentic self. We reach it mostly through the heart, which I discuss at length here, but the mind can get us there too. I like to think of the mind as a radio. It's always picking something up, and with practice we have some say over which station it lands on. On its own our mind defaults to predict and protect, and from that station we can't hear much of who we really are. So we train 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
Mindset and the gift to be found in our struggles. “The Obstacle is the Way”
Learning to trust
Overcoming addiction
Content Menu
Fear and Anxiety
Fear is effectively pre-installed in our “software.” Humans evolved over millions of years, and one of the reasons we are still here is that our brains became really good at anticipating danger. 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 we are so much safer today. So that same fear which was essential on the savanna often works against us in modern life. It’s not very often we need to worry about a wild animal ready to attack us. In modern times, we might worry about a final exam or a financial worry, but our brain and body often treat these like real danger.
So many of us (myself included) spend significant energy suffering over things that have not happened 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. //If we are not aware of what’s going on, the worry can become almost like a rehearsal. We play the scary scene forward, feel the fear , and create the suffering before anything has actually happened. But the body does not know the difference between what is real and what we imagined. Our nervous system shifts into threat response, which makes means stress hormones flood our system, our heart rate increases, and our muscles tighten. And this is all in reaction to something that exists only in our mind. So we unwittingly 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 can effectively 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.
Hawkin’s core idea is that most of us don’t know how to effectively deal with our emotions. We might suppress them, express them in distorted ways, or avoid them. Hawkins teaches that instead of fighting or resisting emotions, we can allow them in, 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 made a lot of sense to me. The first is that feelings drive thoughts. A single suppressed emotion can generate thousands of thoughts over time (aka “stinking thinking”), but when we process and release the emotion, we can often stop the obsessive thinking and rumination. The second is that resistance is like glue. Ironically it’s the resistance that keeps emotions stuck. When we allow emotions to flow without any judgment, they begin to lose their power. I think the third point is maybe the most profound that is that you are not your feelings. The real you is the witness of your thoughts and feelings. Michael Singer writes about this at length in a great book called Untethered Soul that I highly recommend, when he writes that 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. He defines love as unconditional, non-attached presence. I like to refer to this as divine love, and I will write about it in the Soul section.
Hawkins also introduces his Map of Consciousness, which I found so interesting. The map charts emotions on a scale of vibrational energy. He makes an interesting case that everything in the universe has a frequency, including our emotional states. These vibrational states can either be expansive or contractive. 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 workhere.
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 this30-second video that helps put negative emotions into perspective.
Authenticity
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” Joseph Campbell.
On the introductory page of the website 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 wasn’t a topic I spent time on until I was in my early 50s. I spent most of my life focused on performance and productivity. I started out as a wrestling coach and a lower school Spanish teacher, then spent thirty years becoming something else. 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 I am here to remind you that you are the only you that has ever existed (unless of course you are an identical twin). Out of the ~8 billion people currently on earth, you are a completely unique genetic expression. And according to the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), approximately 117 billion Homo sapiens have been born since our species emerged roughly 200,000 years ago. Again, out of all those humans, no one has ever been exactly like you. And that’s just your biology. I believe we are each infused with a completely unique spiritual essence. We are each this beautifully complex mix of biology, personality, and soul.
But it’s hard to be authentic. As you will learn in the recommended reading, we evolved in tribal societies, and it was dangerous to disturb the group. For most of human history, being accepted by your tribe was an important part of survival and reproduction. The tribe meant food, protection, and mating, and none of it was easy to come by. Your standing in the group really mattered, so displeasing the people above you or getting a reputation as difficult or useless was genuinely dangerous. If it got bad enough you might be kicked out of the tribe, and that could mean death. We are still running that same software, but the threat now is probably no more than a raised eyebrow or an unreturned text. If we aren’t aware of this dynamic it’s easy to read these signs as real danger.
In fact, creating this website felt dangerous to me at first. My higher self knows it’s the right thing to do. I’m constantly inspired to write down my thoughts, and it’s my primary creative outlet, but my small, loud, perfectionist self will sometimes say, “who do you think you are?” or “what will your investors think?” I am the Chief Investment Officer of an investment management business in Fort Worth, TX, and there is risk I could turn an investor off. Just check out this section where I write about how much evidence there is proving reincarnation and the existence of the soul. That’s pretty provocative. My son even once said, “Dad, this is pretty out there.”
But my “give a shit” meter is in check, and I am making solid strides in caring less about what other people think, which feels good. I feel like my personality and my soul are aligned when I do this work.
A word before we go further. This isn't a quick read, and the things I'm about to recommend aren't quick either. There's a long article, a 30 minute video, and a written exercise that took me a few weeks to complete. It’s find if you're skimming, but if you actually want to know who you are, it takes time, and I don't know a shortcut.
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.
Urban's central image is the Social Survival Mammoth, the prehistoric part of us that evolved to track other people's judgments obsessively. It craves approval, fears rejection, and hijacks our decisions to keep us safe in the eyes of the tribe. Feeding it are what he calls the Puppet Masters, the specific people whose opinions actually run our lives. It could be your parents, your spouse, your boss, or the “high-status” people in your circle. Most of us have never named them, which is exactly why they have so much power.
But then you also have the opposite of the Mammoth, and he refers to it as your Authentic Voice (AV). I prefer to call it the soul or the higher self, but the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that this part of you knows what you value and what brings you joy, and it usually knows the next right step. As Urban puts it, “Your AV knows how you feel deep down, and it knows which people, subjects, and activities you truly enjoy and which you don't.”
Taming the Mammoth means sitting with some important and potentially uncomfortable 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? 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 an earnest attempt at letting go of the constant need for approval and moving into a new level of daily awareness.
Urban's questions help you see where you've been performing rather than being your authentic self. But I like to add a shorter set of questions in the moment when I'm deciding what action to take. Does this challenge or stretch me? I believe I'm here to grow and learn, so the harder option can sometimes be the right move. But the real test is the next three. Is it kind? Is it giving? Am I sharing something that adds value to someone else? I ask those because being yourself can go wrong, and I’ve seen it in action. If we aren’t careful authenticity can turn into too much self-importance, which can start to look a lot like narcissism.
Now What?
I spend significant amounts of time with Gen Zers who are in their early 20s. Many are uncertain what career path to take. I’ve had a fulfilling and rewarding business career so often they want my opinion and guidance. I tell them all that being true to ourselves is how we make big decisions. This section is dedicated to this group of wonderful young friends I have.
So for those trying to decide on your first career moves, I love to pair the Mammoth article with this 30 minute video titled How to Live Your Life at Full Power by Graham Weaver. Graham is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and an accomplished entrepreneur. He discusses some of the items mentioned in the Mammoth piece, but he goes further by giving advice on how to live with less fear. He also discusses specific strategies like writing down your fears (they have less power when they get out of your head), a 9 Lives exercise in which 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.
I also highly recommend the following exercise that a friend introduced to me a couple of years ago, and it changed the trajectory of my life. Here is a helpful PDF that you can use. It’s called the Guiding Purpose System or “GPS.” And here is a wonderful quote to get your juices flowing. “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Howard Thurman
You start the GPS by writing down your gifts. These are the things you do well naturally with little effort. Here are some questions to contemplate when working on this part. What activities do you excel at? Of those, what are the things you find easy, almost effortless? What have other people suggested you are most gifted at? Ask close friends and family for their opinion as they might be aware of gifts you can’t see.
Next, you write down your passions. These are things that put you in flow and energize you. Here are some questions you can answer. What things do you absolutely love to do? What activities put you into flow and make you lose track of time? What activities energize you?
Now create a list of the most meaningful contributions you want to make. What acts of helping or service are most personally rewarding for you? What are the specific ways that you can make a difference that are deeply meaningful to you? What kind of contribution brings you the greatest satisfaction?
As you go through the lists you start to see overlap. For example, where gifts and passions overlap are things that you are great at plus the things you love to do. As you keep going you will see things you love to do that are also fulfilling. At the end of the exercise hopefully you can start to see an intersection of your gifts, passions, and contributions, and you may begin to receive some clarity of what you are meant to do.
I spent a few weeks on this exercise, and the message was clear. I love to teach and coach, and I’m good at it. I enjoy motivating and supporting people, especially younger people. Interestingly, that was my first career. In my early 20s I was a wrestling coach and a Spanish teacher. This is all before I began my business and investing career, which is a fun story that I may tell later.
I am also often approached by my friends’ children wanting career advice. I’m at the age where a lot of my friends’ kids are about to graduate college. I used to think of these meetings and calls as an imposition. But now I realize that this is a chance to tap into my love of coaching and teaching so I try to make myself available immediately when these opportunities present themselves. I estimate that I have over 20 young people that I talk to on a regular basis, and I never think to myself that I am too busy to talk with them.
This new realization didn’t mean I had to quit my investing job. I love what I do, but it did mean it was time to be more deliberate about how I share myself and spend my time. So here is what I did after this realization. I started this website, I became much more active in my company’s college internship program, I started a Thriving program at my company, and my son and I organized a group of his friends who are in their 20s and are serious about health, wellness, and thriving in all areas of their lives. We meet monthly to discuss these topics along with business. The point here is that being authentic doesn’t necessarily mean you have to completely blow up your life.
The result has been one of the most rewarding times of my life. I feel aligned and in flow. I feel like I’m in the right place, at the right time, with the right people, and it’s beautiful. And now I have all these new friends, many of them much younger than me, so I have been surrounding myself with youthful energy. Like Joseph Campbell said, “When you follow your bliss…doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors and where there wouldn’t be a door for anyone else.” And it feels so true to me. More young people have started to appear in my life. It’s like some loving force is conspiring in my favor to make this part of my life more fulfilling.
I understand that if you are young, you may not have a lot of career options, but keep your gifts, passions, and contributions top of mind. There is no downside knowing yourself better. It’s also okay not have it figured out yet and to just experiment. And while some of you may have a very specific career plan, make sure to look for the open doors. I’ve spent so much time exhausting myself knocking down doors when there was an open door right in front of me. I’ve come to believe that life is constantly working in my favor, even when it doesn’t seem like it. I write about that in detail here.
I think one of the most interesting things about authenticity is how contagious and attractive it can be to others. I think it’s because it gives others permission to be themselves. Start paying attention to people who are really good at being authentic. You might find you want to be with them. I also think the courage authenticity requires is attractive. Dolly Parton died recently so it seems appropriate to mention her because she embodied this as well as anyone. She loved to say, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” I am not sure anyone was more popular than Dolly with so many different demographics. In fact, I looked this up, and in a recent national survey she was the only public figure out of dozens to be viewed favorably by a majority of Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Not the most popular. The only one.
And to all of my friends, please know I'm here for you. There's nothing I'd rather do than remind you of something you already know underneath everything, which is how unlikely and special you are. Remember, out of roughly 117 billion people who have ever drawn breath, there has never been another one of you and there won't be another. I don't think that's an accident. I believe you're carrying something unique that has never been here before, and that you're meant to share with the world.
So maybe relax a little and realize this. You already are what you're looking for. You already are where you're trying to get to. And you already are the thing you think you need to become. So just be yourself.
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.