It was a throwaway line.

Specifically she said, “My infinite energy is to help people say more awesome stuff.”

She used that term—infinite energy—only once in 2 hours and 26 minutes.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since I heard her say it. I have so many questions.

What does it tell us if we can find our infinite energy and what does it tell us if we can’t?

If we find it, to what extent should we pursue it?

Of course we can’t spend infinite energy on something, because we don’t have that, so what does it even mean to have infinite energy?

**

While I reflect on an example of something that comes to mind when I think of my own infinite energy, I would love for you to think of your own example too, dear reader.

Steve is one of my best friends. He and I have known each other for over 20 years.

One of the things we are known for is the conversations that begin at our goodbyes.

I can’t think of the amount of times we’ve come to the end of a night together and we’re standing (almost always standing) by a car (usually mine) ready to say goodbye, then one of us says something.

That something is often totally random.

A personal favourite example was a question that was something like this:

If something crazy happened and we were all of a sudden the only two people left in this city, how would we find each other? With no phones or internet obviously.

That exact conversation lasted for well over two hours. It was insanely detailed for an incredibly fictional situation.

One of my infinite energies is for conversations like that, with Steve.

**

I’d like to use this example to share some characteristics of things we might have infinite energy for.

If you’ve found your thing, I’d love to know how these characteristics line up, and if you haven’t, perhaps these characteristics will help.

I’ve thought of three characteristics and I’ll frame them as questions.

1. Is this something you want to do? - A good clue that you’ve found your infinite energy is it’s the thing you want to do, after having done all the things you need to do. Sometimes it’s the thing that makes all the things you need to do so frustrating because you want to do this other thing so badly.

2. Is this something that feels endless (in a good way)? - By endless, what I mean is that your only real constraint is time. In my example with Steve, the topics (or sometimes singular topic) we discuss could keep going and going, but at some point we come to our senses and realize that we should probably go home.

3. Is this something that has the potential to surprise and delight you? - Those particular feelings matter a lot. They point to the discovery of something new. Imagine I created a retail store full of things you’ve never seen that have been curated just to suit you. The feeling I’m getting at is what it would be like to walk through that store.

So, what’s your infinite energy?

To him though, writing a book is easy compared to what he was doing before.

R.L. Stein had many jobs before he wrote Goosebumps. One of them was working as an Editor at Junior Scholastic Magazine, where was always working on four magazines at a time.

At any given time, he was: Proofing one magazine, editing another magazine, writing yet another magazine, and planning a different magazine. Four different magazines, all at once.

Going from all of this to writing a single book felt so much easier and faster for him.

**

If you’re doing a workout that involves lifting weights, a de-load set is one where you intentionally lift a lighter weight at the very end of your workout.

The funny thing about de-loading is that it can make things that at one point seemed very challenging to you, suddenly feel ridiculously easy.

Let me explain this using some simple numbers applied to an imaginary workout.

Suppose in this workout, I had to lift the following weights: 10lbs, 25lbs, 40lbs, 50lbs, and 60lbs. In that exact progression.

Perhaps the 10lbs and 25lbs might be easy for me at first, but when I hit that jump to 40lbs that might be tough. At least initially. Then I make it all the way to 60lbs. Suppose this is my upper end.

Now it’s time to de-load.

For my last set, I drop from 60lbs back to 40lbs. This time, that 40lbs will feel very light compared to how it felt earlier in the same workout.

De-loading is intentionally easy. It’s a way for your body to take a step down from a tall ladder versus just jumping off the ladder.

**

If we want to make progress on something we’re challenged by, one way to do it would be to try something more challenging. Even for a short time. This is how we can use de-loading to our advantage.

De-loading can also trick us. Specifically, it can trick us into lowering our guard.

Back to the exercise example, when I de-loaded to 40lbs and it felt easy, you can imagine that because it felt easy I might be tempted to over extend myself.

Even though it felt relatively light because it was a de-load, I can’t lose sight of the fact that it’s still 40lbs.

In the early 80s, he won 34 out of the 35 freestyle contests that he entered.

Despite this, Rodney does not define success by trophies.

If you read his autobiography, it’s obvious that Rodney sees skateboarding as an art with infinite possibilities.

When you see the world that way, it’s not zero-sum. It’s not about winning and losing.

Winning and losing is a finite concept.

Rodney sees skateboarding as positive-sum, where when one person pushes into the unknown and creates a new known, everybody wins.

The purpose of playing the game at all is to push into the unknowns.

**

In an interview with Andy Roddick, Andre Agassi said the following about those who make it to No.1 in the world at tennis:

He then goes on to explain that once the rest of the world has seen that, they have to adjust to it.

Viewed on an individual level, it may look like one person (The No.1 in the world) is ahead of the pack for a little while. But viewed on a collective level over time, that one person shifts the entire field of players forward.

By bringing something new to the game, they made a contribution.

**

What I love most about this concept of contribution is that it can take us out of a scarcity view of the world, and shift us into an abundant one.

In many ways contribution is the opposite of competition, yet in a somewhat poetic paradox, competition can also fuel contribution.

There’s a quote I read once that explains why being measured by contribution is a powerful way to think in a world driven by ideas:

Let’s be contributors. We’ll all be better for it.

The first iterations of it weren’t very impressive, but now, it’s mind-blowing.

If you’re a fan of 90s Rap/Hip-Hop, listen to this (p.s. I can’t promise that the link will stay active forever, from my experience these songs don’t always stick around).

I have listened to many, many hours of AI-generated music. They are all covers.

Some versions are so good that I like them slightly better than the originals.

A strange thing started happening to me once I listened past a certain number of hours.

I started to notice that the music sounded ... perfect.

Too perfect.

More specifically, it was the vocals that put me over the edge.

There were some lines from some songs that were sung in such a way that I knew only a machine can do that.

This made me realize something that I had been taking for granted in all my years of loving music.

Human vocals are imperfect, because human beings are imperfect.

I love that about us. Don’t you?

**

Lee Sedol is a South Korean former professional Go player, and is one of the main characters of the 2017 documentary, AlphaGo.

The documentary is available for free on YouTube and it is entirely worth an hour and a half of your time. I have watched it several times.

It’s about a machine versus a human in an ancient game. The machine is a computer program developed by Google DeepMind, the human is Lee Sedol, and the game is Go.

The dramatic showdown between these two takes place over five games. I am not going to spoil the outcome for you, but I am going to mention one particular point that happens in game 4 (If you want to jump to the start of game 4, it’s at 1:03:55 in the documentary).

In game 4, Lee Sedol plays a move that data scientists later calculate to be a 1 in 10,000 move. The people in the documentary literally call it a “God move.”

In that one move, you could argue that Lee Sedol, a human being, was perfect.

Again, without trying to give away too much, the aftermath of that move had people in tears. Me included.

It felt like we were crying because Lee Sedol showed us that, with all our imperfections, human beings can also be perfect.

I love that about us too. Don’t you?

They essentially perform adult glee, and their shows are simply outstanding.

I learned early on that when tickets come out for the four shows that they have over a weekend, I must buy tickets for at least two of them.

The shows usually take place on a Friday night, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, and Sunday night.

My wife and others who are part of the community have given me (and fellow fans) the advice to skip the first show, and try to get tickets for Saturday night (show three - most energy) or Sunday night (final show - most emotion).

This past season, I got tickets for Saturday afternoon and Saturday night. This meant I should have been seeing shows two and three.

Then there was a snowstorm. A big one.

This forced a schedule change and they had to move the Friday night show. This meant, I would now be seeing shows one and two, on the same day, just a few hours apart.

Show one was great... but show two was something else.

There was a level of cohesion and magic that emerged. Given that I had just seen the same show a few hours prior, with the exact same humans performing, I couldn’t even understand how show two was that much better.

The thing is, I needed to see show one in order to appreciate show two as much as I did.

**

A friend and I were talking about video games the other day.

We grew up in the 90’s, so the first system we both remember playing was a Nintendo—the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

At the time, this device felt like magic. The games we played on it were like nothing we experienced anywhere else. Despite this, we still knew it was a game because the graphics were quite cartoonish.

My friend now owns a PlayStation 5.

The graphics for games on PlayStation 5 feel just a few hairs below real life.

Sometimes when we’re together, we won’t even play a game, we’ll just observe the graphics in awe.

The thing is, we needed to play a Nintendo in order to appreciate a PlayStation 5 as much as we do.

**

When we experience the evolution of something, we appreciate it more.

Why?

I think it’s because it touches on a truth we all believe about ourselves.

We can evolve too.

The topics were a bit too abstract and the speed of the conversation was a bit too fast.

After a few minutes of listening, I gave up and decided to switch to a different episode from the same podcast.

Instantly, I understood everything that was being discussed.

If you listen to someone speak about a topic you have absolutely no clue about, then immediately follow that with listening to someone from your field, you will have the same experience I had.

The experience itself is quite mundane.

Because my experience happened in such short succession and within the same podcast (not the same episode), it got me thinking about something.

I started thinking about how easy or difficult things are to interface with, and what that ease or difficulty does.

**

Let’s talk about wayfinding signs.

If you don’t know what these are, take a look at this blog post, which has some seriously hilarious examples of poor wayfinding.

When the signage that’s specifically meant to help you navigate a place is confusing, you not only have a higher chance of becoming lost, you may also lose your desire to explore. You’re just too frustrated.

Interfacing comes down to energy.

The more energy required to understand something, the harder it is to interface with.

If something is hard to interface with, you’re less likely to explore it further than you already have.

**

When I read a book, I think my single favourite format is a hardcover book (with the dust jacket removed).

The issue is, most of the hardcover books that I read don’t fit into my pockets. I guess I could permanently switch to cargo pants if I really cared that much.

The reason I love my Kobo, is because it’s portable. It does fit into my pocket.

The easier something is to interface with—this is especially true for an idea—the more portable it becomes.

The more portable something is, the more widely it can be used. I can read my Kobo in the dark and can’t say the same for my beloved hardcover book.

**

The more deeply we interface with something, the greater the connection we form to that thing.

Let’s make that easy.

“I know people shaped by pain as well as by love, and if it was more pain than love ... watch out.”

*

Andre Agassi (8-time Men’s Singles Grand Slam Champion) has openly talked and written about hating tennis.

In an incredible interview he did with Andy Roddick, he says this:

“You can be motivated through two things in your life, fear or love, and it was fear that was driving me.”

*

What these quotes are pointing to is a state that we all find ourselves oscillating between.

My favourite phrasing of this is dark force and light force motivation.

Pain, fear, greed, envy, and their equivalents are all dark forces.

The light forces are things like love, creativity, joy, and interest.

Being driven by these forces feels different and our bodies give us clear signals about which force is driving us at any given time.

Dark forces have a tight grip. They add tension to our minds and bodies. They make us see the world through a lens of scarcity.

A light force loosens our grip. It helps us to see the abundance and to see with abundance.

*

Both of these forces can drive us far in life, but there’s one key difference between them.

I said it earlier. Dark forces add tension. Light forces remove tension.

All things being equal, if two people end up at the same place, the person driven by light forces will be lighter when they arrive.

The beauty of these forces is how they scale in shaping our decisions.

In a given day, we may be motivated by one or the other multiple times, and we also may have an overarching force guiding our entire year.

If you want a simple test to know which of the two is driving you right now, just ask yourself this question:

Are you moving toward something or away from something?

Toward is light. Away from is dark.

The concept is very simple, it starts with each player being dealt a series of cards with nouns on them. We play the kids version so these nouns are words like toothbrush, a dollar, girlfriends, rollercoasters, and hospitals.

When play begins, one player called the judge draws a “description” card. Words like smelly, valuable, shy, and energetic appear on these description cards. All players except the judge then choose one of their noun cards that they feel best matches the judge’s description card and they place that noun card (face down) in front of the judge.

Once all the players’ chosen noun cards are in, the judge reads out the various noun cards and then selects one that they feel best matches the description card. For example if the description card was valuable, and I had the noun card toothbrush, I may choose to play that card in the hopes that it gets selected by the judge. Once the judge selects their preferred noun card, that player wins the round and then a new player becomes the judge.

The crux of this game is that it all comes down to the judge’s choice. They may be fairly literal and choose the best logical match with description and noun, or they may choose the noun card that feels funniest to them (as I often like to do). As author and adman Rory Sutherland would say, this game isn’t about logic, so much as it is about psycho-logic.

***

Why did I just spend four paragraphs telling you about how a peculiar board game works?

Because I think it can teach us everything we need to know about applying for a job.

The thing about playing Apples to Apples is, sometimes when a certain description card comes up and you know a lot about the psychology of the judge, you can easily think that you have the best noun card to match. You often feel really good about throwing that noun card into the pile. You are almost certain that you will win the round.

Then you hear the other noun cards being read out loud, and you instantly know you’re going to lose.

There’s just a better noun card in the pile, and you are certain that the judge is going to choose it over your own.

Importantly, this had nothing to do with your choice. You played the best card from the ones you were dealt. Someone else just happened to have the right card for that judge in that turn.

When applying for a job, there is so much within your control except two important things:

1. The other candidates.

2. The employer’s final choice.

If you keep playing long enough, in one turn you will have the right card.

He works for magicians, and surrounds himself almost exclusively with magicians.

When Dani was very young, he got to see another legendary magician, Juan Tamariz, perform live. After the performance, Juan had a ritual of sticking around until the early hours of the morning just to perform for other magicians. From the time he was a young kid, Dani was one of those who stuck around with Juan until the early hours. To Dani, this is just what magicians did.

Now, more than 40 years later, Dani has built a house in his hometown of Estepona (Spain), exclusively for magicians to live in while they practice their craft alongside him.

Surrounding himself with magicians from a young age, was simply the water Dani swam in. He still does.

***

I’ve mentioned my recent and growing fascination with Anjan Katta before. He is the CEO of a new computing company called Daylight.

In a profile I read about him recently, he mentions that Daylight isn’t a company focused on product design, it’s focused on environment design. He wants to be a part of creating the environments that enable you to be the best version of yourself.

According to the profile, Anjan’s home has no overhead lights.

He likes to wrap himself in blankets at nighttime because they put his nervous system into a calmer place. He has a projector that casts grainy constellations of stars across his ceiling. He is designing the type of environment that he wants to imbue in his company’s products.

Environment design is the water than Anjan swims in.

***

I often find myself falling into the comparison trap. It’s awfully magnetic for some reason.

When I was growing up in Sri Lanka, I can’t recall exactly at what grade this started, but for as long as I can remember, each person in our class was ranked. Out loud.

What this meant was, a few times each year after an exam period, students in the class would be ranked according to the grades they received. There would be a single ranking order, we weren’t ranked according to each subject—at least that’s what I remember. These rankings were then read out loud to the entire class, from first to last.

I was never top of the class and I have been thinking back to that time recently for several reasons. I may write about a few of them some other time, but for the purpose of this post, I’ve realized that being compared to others was part of the water I swam in for a long time.

***

What’s your water?

I haven’t been able to get this out of my head ever since hearing it a few weeks ago.

Anjan Katta is the CEO of a new computing company called Daylight, and I just love the way he thinks about the world.

What Anjan is pointing to here, is a universal truth about the way big ideas develop.

In John Gardner’s potent book Self-Renewal, he states it this way on page 29:

How many of us can really recognize in the vast clutter of modern life the seedlings of new ideas and new ways that will shape the future? The new thing rarely comes on with a flourish of trumpets. The historic innovation looks exciting in the history books, but if one could question those who lived at the time, the typical response would be neither, “I opposed it” nor “I welcomed it,” but “I didn’t know it was happening.”

The new thing rarely comes on with a flourish of trumpets. That’s worth keeping on a Post-It.

This got me thinking about two things related to progress.

1. We need to try things that may not work.

2. We need to pay attention to the small things.

***

One thing I’ve learned about the winter after having lived in Canada for 23 years: Light snow is scarier than heavy snow.

I think this holds for rain too. When the rain is torrential, it likely won’t last long. The same goes for snow.

The light, slow, slightly pretty, and eerily quiet snow is what ends up causing a snow day. We had one of these the other day, where we went from being able to see the pavement one day, to every school in our Province being shut down the next morning.

The light snow is easy to ignore, because it’s small. It being able to cause a system-wide school closure feels uninevitable. It’s not going to arrive with a flourish of trumpets.

***

I can see an easy counter-argument to the idea of paying attention to the small things.

Our attention is scarce, so of the many small things, how do we know what to invest our attention in?

And how long do we keep investing before we give up?

Luckily, I think the answer to both of these is the same and it connects to both of the points I made earlier about progress:

Try things you’re interested in and pay attention to things you find interesting for as long as you still find them interesting.

In short: To make progress, follow your interests.

It’s uninevitable where they may lead.

Cooking of course, is the final stage of the journey. Before getting there, there’s meal planning, grocery shopping, grocery unpacking (which I despise), and then cooking.

The other night, I was cooking a chicken stir fry. Usually this meal—which I’ve prepared many times before—would take me about an hour from start to finish.

One of the steps in the prep of the chicken is to use a little baking soda to tenderize the chicken. It’s a trick I first learned from this video, and I’ve used it ever since.

On this particular night, when I was dumping out the baking soda onto the chicken, it came out in clumps. Perhaps a few too many clumps. I broke up some of the clumps with my fingers and carried on with the prep of the chicken.

If you take nothing else out of this post, just know this: Too much baking soda makes something taste like metal. Especially chicken.

When we eventually sat down to eat, all that chicken that I had meal prepped for, bought at the store, unpacked, and then spent an hour prepping, tasted like a plate of hot garbage. Hot metallic garbage.

***

A sunk cost is something you’ve spent that can’t be recovered.

In the most basic sense, you can think of a sunk cost as monetary, like the cost of the chicken in my story. But of course, sunk costs are not just monetary.

Our attention for example, is a perpetual sunk cost—which is why I’m so grateful that you choose to spend some of it here.

Effort is another one.

One of my favourite views on sunk costs, comes from Seth Godin. In a blog post from 2021, he writes the following:

“Ignore sunk costs” is the critical lesson of useful decision making.

The thing you earned, that you depend on, that was hard to do–it’s a gift from your former self. Just because you have a law degree, a travel agency or the ability to do calligraphy in Cyrillic doesn’t mean that your future self is obligated to accept that gift.

A sunk cost is a gift from your former self to your future self, and your future self can choose whether or not to accept that gift. I just love that.

So in my chicken story, what exactly was the gift that I was giving my future self?

***

Interestingly, I thought a lot about this in the moment when it happened.

I think the answer can be found in my behaviour immediately after realizing that the chicken tasted like metallic garbage.

I was frustrated. Internally and externally. Externally, my behaviour looked like throwing the chicken in the garbage as quickly as possible and then cooking some fried eggs to make up for it.

Internally, I was so angry with myself. I was in no way kind to myself. My sole focus was to fix my “mistake,” though a better word for how I was feeling at the time would be “failure.”

Do you see now what the gift was?

It was an opportunity to practice self-compassion.

But I wasn’t ready to accept it.

***

In the time since my metallic chicken moment, I have come to be grateful to my former self for providing that gift, even though I wasn’t ready to accept it.

Self-compassion is something each one of us can use lots more of.

I was inspired to reflect on this moment with gratitude to my former self, by this hauntingly beautiful post by Henrik Karlsson: The Third Chair. It is fully worth spending your attention on it.

Your future self will thank you.

The competition had a regular round, a semi-final round, and a final round. Each round involved giving the same presentation of your team’s proposed solution to the business case problem.

Our team had made it into the semi-final round.

In case you can’t recall what doing a school project was like, we had each divided up parts of the presentation and took turns awkwardly transitioning to each other for our respective parts. The line, “Now I’m going to pass it off to ...” was essentially tattooed on our inner forearms as we gestured to the person we were “passing off” to.

My portion of the presentation involved walking the judges through a proposed organizational chart. As you might imagine, this took up an entire slide.

During our several practice runs and one live presentation leading up to the semi-final, each time I was passed off to, the organizational chart slide displayed perfectly.

During the semi-final, for some unexplainable reason, the slide was blank.

***

Challenge is an excellent revealer.

In Timothy Gallwey’s classic The Inner Game of Tennis, he discusses the surfer waiting for the big wave (Top of Page 120):

The surfer waits for the big wave because they value the challenge it presents. They value the obstacles the wave puts between them and their goal of riding the wave to the beach. Why? Because it’s those very obstacles, the size and churning power of the wave, which draw from the surfer their greatest effort.

In episode 2 of The End of an Era documentary about Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Taylor talks about what her dancers evoke in her (At 26:36):

“It also is interesting to be in a position where, like, you know, this is a team of experts and there’s something about that that keeps me on my game and focused and locked in. It’s one of the elements of, like, where that kind of pressure is a privilege, because they’re not messin’ up, so it better not be me.”

Challenge might be one of the greatest self-awareness tools in existence.

Most of us aren’t surfing big waves or practicing choreography for a history-making tour every day, and yet, we each experience moments of challenge every day.

On our big days, these challenges are obvious. It’s on our smaller days, when the challenges are less obvious, that we have to pay particular attention. It’s easy to let the challenging moments slip by on these days.

By giving effort to the small challenges, we build up the stamina to face the bigger ones.

***

Leading up to the semi-final we had practiced our presentation several times. We did it as a team, and I had done it on my own. Those were all small challenges.

Then the slide came up blank. This was the big challenge.

I suddenly knew two things in this moment: 1. I could recite the slide from memory because I had made it and studied it so many times. 2. The judges had no idea what the slide looked like and to describe it using only words and no visuals would do it no justice at all.

Somehow, I remembered that before we started the semi-final, each judge was handed a copy of the written report that we had to produce in conjunction with the presentation. I also remembered that at the back of our written report, in a specific appendix, was the organizational chart in all its visual glory.

So when the slide came up blank, without skipping too many beats I asked the judges to simply turn to the back of our report and look at the chart while I walked them through it.

I had no idea that I remembered any of this, nor did I know that I had memorized the chart. That’s the beauty of big challenges.

They are excellent revealers.

1.

A lightly edited excerpt from Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland (Specifically, Page 29):

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side would be graded on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pounds gets an A, forty a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A. Come grading time a curious fact emerged: the works of the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

2.

Seth Godin on episode #343 of the Tim Ferriss Show, shares this:

“I’ve done 7,400 blog posts, and I’ve done four perfect ones. So you just got to keep making the work with generosity, because then your lizard brain will give up on censoring you because it’ll realize that you’re not going to give up. And at that point, it’ll just say, well, we might as well make it better.”

3.

Jackson Dahl—my favourite podcaster at the moment—just interviewed Brie Wolfson, who talks about getting a finger feel for excellence on something. When asked how we develop this finger feel—in other words how do we become excellent at a thing—she says, “Probably the most reliable input if you want to get that finger feel thing is just time on the thing. It’s like so unsatisfying in some ways because we wanna like shortcut and I think that’s the whole point of it, you cannot shortcut this thing.”

***

Repetitions help us get better and repetitions take time.

You can get reps of anything, but I’ve found it’s easier to get reps of something that’s tangible, controllable, and doesn’t involve other people. Reading, writing, playing an instrument, shooting a ball into a hoop, lifting a heavy object ... that kind of thing.

So how do we become better at intangible things, that aren’t in our control, and involve other people? In other words, most things. Things like being kinder to our kids, having difficult conversations, or being vulnerable as leaders?

I have two ideas.

The first involves treating even the small instances of things as opportunities to put in reps.

These reps won’t feel like much. It’s like asking you to treat lifting your water bottle with the same level of intent as lifting a heavy weight in the gym.

When dealing with intangibles though—like opportunities to be kind—this approach is much closer to what reality presents us with. Intangible things don’t come in uniform sizes. They also don’t come with any level of consistency. Holding the door for a stranger and saying loving words to your child after they’ve just raged at you for 20 minutes, are different sizes of kindness with unpredictable timing.

If we only practice with the big sizes whenever they show up, we’re missing out on a whole lot of hidden reps.

The second idea involves finding themes.

Suppose you wanted to get better at having difficult conversations. The first step would be to identify the key ingredients you need to have a difficult conversation. Let’s take courage as an example. Finding themes would involve us turning courage into its own theme and looking for other instances to practice that theme.

Ideally those other instances are tangible, controllable, and don’t involve other people. They can also be very simple, like ordering something off a menu that you would usually avoid.

The path to better work start with reps.

Find the hidden ones.

It was called Work in the Dark.

To honour the launch of Base Patterns, I’d like to revisit this post.

Thank you, dear reader, for being here.

***

“If you don’t work when you don’t wanna work, you’re not gonna be able to work, when you do wanna work. End of story.” - Twyla Tharp on the Huberman Lab (Exact quote at 1:05:31).

There’s an interesting truth about certain kinds of work.

Most of you reading this sentence have done this kind of work.

It’s work that is mostly invisible to everyone else, except you.

It’s the work you do that allows you to show up in front of others and be impressive—if you’ve worked hard enough.

Let’s call it, the work in the dark. This is the real work.

When we get inspired by someone else’s work, what we’re seeing is not their work, it’s the outcome. The byproduct of their real work. One of my favourite podcasters, Jackson Dahl, sometimes calls it the exhaust.

***

I know absolutely nothing about the NFL.

From what I’ve been able to put together, if a team had to play every single game they could possibly play in order to win the Super Bowl, it would amount to 21 games.

Each game lasts 60 minutes.

Simple math tells me that’s a total of 1,260 minutes (21 x 60).

The average 9-to-5 working week has 2,400 minutes (40 hours).

So, for a single team, a dream NFL season in terms of playing time, lasts for a little less than three working days.

What are NFL players doing for the other 362 days in their year?

Working. In the dark.

***

One of my favourite podcasts is Acquired with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal.

It’s long form (most episodes are 3-4 hours) and incredibly detailed.

They just celebrated 10 years of hosting, and in their 10-year anniversary episode they detailed some pieces of their process for making the show (Starting at 1:10:06).

Most of the real work that Ben and David do, is research and editing. Each episode takes a month or sometimes more to create.

No listener gets to see or hear that.

The content that I and many others have the pleasure of hearing is just the exhaust.

***

Work in the dark is the real work.

It’s the work you have to love and it’s the work you are most likely to hate.

Work in the dark can’t be rushed. Like the nature of anything that compounds, it needs time.

It’s the most honest form of work because not only do you know whether you’ve really done it, but when it comes time for you to show up in the light, others will know it too.

I’ll leave you with what I think work in the dark feels like:

“...a quiet, deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done to create the best future results and then simply taking those steps, one after the other, turn by turn of the flywheel.” - Jim Collins, Good to Great (pg. 169)

The one-sentence summary is this:

Things are harder to build than they are to break, so we have to work hard to make sure they’re built right.

I focused most of the post on preventing something from breaking.

The thing is, things break.

So in this post, I’d like to talk about how we build things up again.

***

A few years ago, one of my best friends (Steve) and I had a great rhythm of playing squash on Saturdays in the winter.

Our typical season would start off with both of us complaining about how out of shape we were, and after a few weeks, we would still be complaining.

Eventually, our shape would kick in and our games would get very, very competitive.

One particular time, I was reaching for a ball that was diagonally behind me—think four o’clock on a clock face—and I felt a sharp and very intense pain in my lower back.

I fell over from the pain and lay there hurting.

We had always joked that this was inevitable. That one of us would eventually break and need to be carted out by the other, or in the best case scenario, it would happen to both of us simultaneously and we’d be roommates in the local hospital.

Steve came over, we did a few basic checks like wiggling my toes, and he helped me up.

We were able to do some laps around the court, and then I was able to gingerly take my shoes off, put my winter boots on, get into my car, and eventually get home.

For the next three straight days, even brushing my teeth hurt—you don’t realize how much stretching your neck does in the motion of brushing your teeth.

I had been building up to our squash season all year, doing some training to prepare—though in fairness, you can never be prepared for that kind of cardio—and then, in a single step, everything changed.

***

There’s a really unfortunate trap that we have fallen into as humans in the modern age.

The immediate gratification trap.

When an app or a website on your phone last took more than a few seconds to load, what did you actually do?

Did you wait? That would be ludicrous.

I’m guessing you either:

1. Gave up on the search/caring about the thing you were looking for;

2. Made some judgements about the brand/app/whatever you were looking for;

3. Questioned whether the wifi was working; or

4. Threw your phone across the room.

If waiting were a disease, I’d be curious to know how many people suffer from it annually.

I’d also be curious to know how much money major companies like Amazon are pouring into curing this disease each year.

***

When something that was building up over time suddenly breaks, the first dose of reality we’re hit with is simple and extremely frustrating:

Time is the most powerful force of repair, and the least in our control.

So, how do we deal with time?

I remember when I started recovering from my back injury, I would gauge my progress by how easy it was for me to roll over and get out of bed each morning.

When I was able, I would combine this with how painful a 15-minute walk around the block felt each day.

As the days turned into weeks, both of these things got easier.

Three weeks after falling down on the court in pain, I was back on it. It was slow at first, tentative for sure, and a week or two after that, it was good again.

When things break, they take time to build.

We can’t make time move faster, we can only mark its passage.

Most of the outside was made of glass. This was a material choice.

It was winter time, so darkness had set in early, and where this particular Starbucks was located, there wasn’t much else around it.

Since it was open when I drove by, all the light from the inside shone through the glass to the outside.

It looked like a lighthouse. A literal beacon of comfort.

The material choice evoked a feeling.

***

Pick up any book, crack it open, and you’ll notice a few things.

The font type, the font size, the space between the lines, and the width of the margins.

These are all material choices.

Compare how you feel looking at a book that has small font, densely packed, with tight margins, to a book that is the opposite.

Each evoke different feelings.

***

I own several colours of the exact same t-shirt.

Yet this past season, when I had to facilitate a particular kind of workshop at work, I found myself wanting to wear just one colour.

Similarly, I own several colours of the exact same workout clothes.

Yet whenever I’m doing a rowing test (once every six weeks), I choose to wear the same combination of colours.

Colours are material choices. They evoke feelings.

***

Material choices are all around us.

What we choose, often dictates how we feel.

That means if you want to feel different, choose different.

Her idea can be summarized in a single question: Right now, do you feel your work is a job, a career, or a calling?

I want to talk about what each of these feels like based on my own experiences, in the hopes that it might help you answer the question—if your answer doesn’t feel obvious already.

A Job

This felt very contained.

It was a box I opened when I got to work and a box I closed when I left.

It did what it needed to for a while.

At one point in my life—after graduating from university—it felt like something I had to do, and so I did.

There were moments of all the emotions that I would come to experience in the latter two categories, but I would say the overwhelming emotion I felt here can be best described as, “meh.”

A Career

This is where my notion of containment started to change a little.

The box didn’t stay closed after I left work. In fact, I would be reading, writing, and in general thinking about things that I could put back in the box the next day.

I distinctly remember feeling a sense of, “Oh this is what I do now.”

This is when I first started to experience the desire to climb some kind of ladder.

This was when I could start calling what I was doing, my craft.

Shifting from something I had to do, to something I got to do.

A Calling

Here, the box doesn’t even exist anymore. I’m finding ways to make connections to work all the time, everywhere.

Strangely, the desire to climb a ladder vanished too. In fact, if anything, there’s a desire to slide back down the ladder. I’ve written before about the idea of growing down—this is the best description of what growth feels like here.

A new feeling in this orientation is also how I think about time. In a job, I would think in days and weeks. In a career, months and a few years. Now, I’m thinking in decades.

It’s not something I have to do, or get to do, it’s something I want to do. For a long time.

It’s more than a craft now, it’s closer to an identity.

***

Where are you?

This year, she did another amazing thing. She turned some of her artwork into notebooks and they are now being sold at a pop-up holiday shop.

A week ago, she had an appointment to drop off her products at the pop-up shop, and initially she thought that she would have to set up her display as well, but it turned out that the folks running the store were going to do that.

When she visited the shop after everything was set up, I asked her what she thought of her display.

She said it looked great, but it was a little lower down—meaning, not at eye level.

We agreed that this wasn’t a big deal because this pop-up shop attracts a certain kind of buyer: A forager.

***

I don’t know much about product placement in a grocery store, but I do know one thing: It takes a combination of money and popularity (these are linked) to be placed at eye level on a shelf.

Think of your own behaviour in a grocery store.

Specifically when you’re in one of the middle aisles.

Are you bending down a lot?

If not, it’s likely that you’re buying many of the products that are placed at or close to eye level.

You’re not necessarily foraging.

This behaviour perpetuates a cycle: The more we buy at eye level, the more money those companies make, the more popular they become, and the more eye level space they own.

***

Of course, the idea of something being at eye level doesn’t just exist in a grocery store.

Any “most popular” list works the same way: The top movies/shows on your favourite streaming platform, podcast/song charts, and of course books as well.

I buy things at eye level all the time. I am sure we all do. It’s requires far less mental processing because there’s an implied level of trust that we can take advantage of.

I am not trying to mount a case against buying things at eye level.

Instead, I’m curious, what do you forage for?

The act of foraging is what would lead you to stumble upon my wife’s beautiful notebooks.

It’s what would lead you to discover the not-yet-discovered.

There’s lots more out there, just bend down and have a look.

Prepping fresh kale isn’t the most fun thing to do, but it’s easy enough and you always end up getting a lot more leaves off the stalk than you think you will.

Buying fresh kale was quite cheap.

A few feet away from the fresh kale, were some bags of prepped kale. Someone else had already done the pulling of the leaves off the stalks, and even the washing of those leaves.

The price of these bags were twice as much as the fresh kale.

***

The prepped bags of kale are a shortcut.

In this case, the price of the shortcut is obvious. The value is also obvious. I’m not buying prepped kale, I’m actually buying time—the time saved from needing to prep it myself.

Besides the extra money for the prepped bag, what isn’t necessarily obvious, is the hidden cost of taking this shortcut.

Shortcuts always have hidden costs.

The reason they’re hidden is because these costs are often intangible.

What do you miss by reading a summary of the book vs. the book itself?

What do you miss by watching the highlight of a game vs. the game itself?

What do you miss by rushing your kids to bed vs. taking it slow with them?

***

The hard way is slow, riddled with frustration, and intangibly more rewarding.

The next time you’re faced with the option of taking a shortcut, just ask:

What will this really cost?

I would guess that many of you reading this would point upward.

There are many things that grow in that direction.

Children, trees, the concept of age in general, etc.

Some of you, may point outward. Thinking of growth as something that can expand.

The number of books on your shelf, a balloon, lanes on a highway, etc.

I want to talk about a different direction of growth that I’ve been thinking about lately.

Growing downward.

***

If you’ve ever done a lower-body strength exercise, then you may have felt what I’m about to say.

Imagine doing a squat while carrying some kind of weight.

When you get to the point in that movement where you need to generate force—after you’ve actually lowered your body down into the squatting position—you have two mental options.

Option 1 is the obvious option—generate force by pushing the weight back up using your legs.

Option 2 is the less obvious option—generate force by pushing the ground away from you, also using your legs.

Do you see how they are different?

If I had to draw an arrow depicting where you would be focusing your energy in terms of generating force, in option 1 it would start at the floor and point upward, and in option 2 it would start at the floor and point downward.

If you’ve never done this before, which would you guess feels more powerful?

I can tell you from experience, that option 2—generating force by pushing the floor away from you—feels far more powerful than option 1. It’s not even close.

To actually feel what I am talking about, take a break from reading this sentence and try a basic squat.

Now, try the same thing, except this time try to visualize your feet being screwed into the ground while also having blocks of concrete extending from your heels deep into the earth.

I know that sounds super strange, but you’ll have to trust me. You need to feel as deeply rooted into the ground as possible, in order to feel the difference.

Regardless of whether you tried this or not, to actually get better at generating this kind of force, you have to learn to grow downward.

You have to get better at visualizing your feet being deeply rooted into the ground, so that you can feel more connected to the ground as you explode away from it.

***

When I take this out of the realm of exercise, it directly translates to the idea of depth.

Growing by deepening our knowledge of a given thing.

Growing by deepening our ability of a fundamental skill.

There’s a quote from Bruce Lee that I absolutely love. The gender-neutral version is this, “I fear not the person who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the person who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

If exercise has taught me anything, it’s that depth is powerful. Literally.

If you’re in a season in life where growth is on your mind, consider pointing it downward and seeing what happens.