I look back and realize something profound: I wasn’t building the business; the business was building me. It showed me things about myself that no amount of thinking or planning could’ve shown me before the work got done.

Below is what I’ve discovered so far. I share these insights, not from the mountaintop but from deep in the mud, crawling through it one day at a time, figuring things out as I go. I hope you’ll either resonate from your own experiences, or learn to better anticipate the changes you’ll undergo as you pursue your own journey. Here we go.

1. I let parts of my personality get sanded smooth to fit the corporate mold.

After 9 months of internships, 9 months of graduate work, and 15 months in a corporate role, I decided to turn away from the 9-5 without looking back. As I gained distance from my experience, a great deal of clarity came with it. I noticed parts of my individuality slowly eroding: my subtle quirks, my sense of humor, and the way I carried myself.

This scares the shit out of me because I can still see the life I almost followed instead. At its worst, I could’ve traced the conventional path, putting my head down and building someone else’s dream for ten years or more. Then one day, I’d look up and realize the edges that made me me were shaved away, and I wouldn’t remember when they left.

2. My job title was bolstering my self worth. I’m still learning to stand without one.

I was proud to call myself a Project Engineer. It worked nicely in conversation - a label that made me sound accomplished and intelligent to others. In a 4-minute conversation, I went from Project Engineer to unemployed, and I realized what the title had given me: a stronger sense of self-worth and confidence. This led me on a journey to building a sense of self-worth that transcends titles or industries.

It’s ongoing; something I’m still getting used to, but I’m beginning to find joy in helping others feel seen, supporting the people I love, and inspiring readers to design a life they don’t need an escape from.

3. I was never lazy. I was just working on projects that drained me.

For almost a year, I thought I had burnt myself out. I worked my ass off in college, and when I got into the professional world, I started to feel complacent - slowly accepting that my new life was the wrong fit.

I felt lazy because I couldn’t bring myself to deeply care about the work I was doing. At times, I wasn’t pursuing much beyond a paycheck. It was only when I started working on my own projects that I realized the fire inside me never died - it just wasn’t getting any oxygen.

4. A seed never negotiates its timeline, and neither should I.

My business started as a hobby to feed the part of me that felt creatively starved. My hobby was gardening. I planted all sorts of vegetables, and eventually started planting apple seeds - growing them into seedlings on my windowsill.

The first species of apple I planted was of the “Opal” variety. Selling these seedlings to others sparked my curiosity about business. I started a website, created some branding, and Opal was born - eventually pivoting to “Opalseed”, the creative agency it still is today.

Why do I mention this? Gardening taught me a lot about life, surprisingly. When you plant a seed in the ground, you can’t brute-force its growth, or you’ll kill it. You can’t abandon it either, or its fate will be the same. A seed takes time, patience, balance and care. Asking for growth within the arbitrary time-frame you asked for isn’t part of the plan.

For the longest time (until last week) I gave myself an ultimatum to replace my income within a 12-month timeframe. I’m 9 months in, and still building the plane as I’m flying it. I could continue kicking myself for not meeting my own fabricated expectations, or I can decide to care for my business gently, never abandon it, and let it blossom at its own pace.

5. Security was the most dangerous thing to ever happen to me.

Security feels like safety, certainty, and comfort. Our animal brains have chased this for millions of years because, for most of that time, it meant survival. But survival instincts make for poor life advice in the 21st century, where security is a product sold to you, and you accept the trade every day without noticing what you trade in return.

Security quickly turns into comfort, comfort becomes routine, and routine makes doing anything new feel intimidating... if your brain even weights that as an option in the first place.

I fell into this trap in 2025. I had a predictable job, a comfortable wage, and relaxing weekends - everything I could’ve wanted back in college - and I couldn’t understand why I felt borderline depressed half the time I was awake. I had everything I wanted and nothing I needed: challenge, novelty, risk, and adventure.

6. I will only feel ready AFTER I start, not before.

It’s an idea I hadn’t thought much about until I started my business. I had no clue what I was doing, but nobody really does when they start. The feeling of readiness, or clarity, or understanding, only comes after the project is in motion. So many people are stuck at the starting line, thinking they need to wait for the right insight or perfect circumstances before building their dream. The truth is, it’s completely flipped.

This should be considered an “unlock” rather than a problem. It means you can just take a leap and build the parachute on your way down. Wait until you’re ready and your perfect conditions may never come.

7. Rejection is not a personal slight against me. It’s just business.

As time passed, I slowly began tying my identity to Opalseed. After all, the business was tied to my interests, my schedule, my ideas, and my finances. When someone says they aren’t interested in what you’re selling, it’s easy to let that get under your skin. I’m slowly learning however, that’s completely okay if a deal falls through, or never happens in the first place. Something, it just isn’t the right fit.

To paraphrase a line from , if you were selling eggs at a marketplace and a potential buyer declined your offer, it doesn’t always mean there’s something wrong with your eggs. It might just mean this person didn’t need eggs that day.

8. The fear of being seen is the invisible hurdle to building my dreams.

At multiple points in my journey, there was a threshold I had to build up the courage to cross.

My first time posting on LinkedIn (what will my old co-workers think?), my first time posting an essay (what if my writing isn’t any good?) and posting videos of myself online (who’s even going to see this?)

I knew there was growth on the other side, but my ego was getting in the way. At this point, I’m convinced that the path to greatness is one the other side of being cringe for a while. But it’s a necessary step in the journey.

9. I’m more resilient than I imagined, but I had to fail before realizing this.

I started this project afraid of other’s opinions. Afraid of rejection. Afraid of being viewed as someone pursuing something silly. Afraid of the unknown. Over time, all these things happened to me in full force. And I realized... I was fine.

10. As it turns out, I’m not especially gifted. I’m curious, passionate, and persistent, and that is enough.

I was always told as a child that I was gifted. And at the time, they weren’t wrong. I could read by the time I turned 3. I ended up in spelling bees and Young Author ceremonies. I took advanced classes and generally saw myself as a “smart” kid.

When high school came around, I cared about my grades but was often a B student. My first ACT score was actually below the national average, and the lowest across my group of friends. Then I went to architecture school and became a straight-A student overnight.

I realized my grades had nothing to do with how “smart” I was, but how interested I was in the things I was learning about, and how persistent I was at moving forward.

I got a job in construction after school and struggled once again. In my 15 months of work, I had more bad days than good ones. In full honesty, I never thought I was very good at my job, and my layoff proved the company wasn’t exactly begging me to stick around.

Then I started my own project and felt my mind blossoming again. It has little to do with the mind of the individual and everything to do with the pursuit involved. If a fish judges its own intelligence by its ability to climb trees, it will always believe itself to be inadequate.

Let it swim and see what happens.

11. I grow 10x faster in public than I ever did in private.

When you build in public, you get constant feedback. You get novel experience. You meet new people who know things you don’t. Build in private, and you might just spend years in relative isolation before finally sharing with the world, having no idea what you could’ve learned if only you made your work visible, and made yourself easy to reach. If you’re going to build anything, build it in public.

12. My path to growth: Decide, act, learn, repeat.

My track to growth hinged on the ability to make decisions quickly and execute. I learned this first-hand: to land my very first client, I sent over a hundred cold emails and dozens of cold calls. I was pitching my design work to businesses that never knew I existed, all for a project I hadn’t even started building yet. Most of them ignored me, and a few rejected me.

Then one day, the owner of Magus Books wrote back with interest. And just like that, I had my first client and soon after, my very first dollar earned through Opalseed.

I could’ve spent weeks researching the perfect outreach strategy instead, learning everything and executing nothing. The real failure isn’t making a bad decision - it’s making no decision at all.

So I let myself be the fool. If the choice is reversible, I’ll decide fast, eat the consequences, and move forward.

There is no slower path to growth than to freeze before every decision and then wonder why you feel stuck.

13. The right business partner doesn’t lighten the load, they build a new dimension I couldn’t have found on my own.

Austin joining Opalseed as a partner was easily the best business decision I’ve made in my 9 months of working. A bad partner can tear the whole project down to the studs. A good one will share the workload. A great partner takes charge when it counts and adds something you couldn’t have built by yourself. It doesn’t just expand your breadth or depth, but adds a new dimension entirely. Plus, building something meaningful with a close friend is so much more fun than doing it all on your own.

14. To succeed, I have to decide I’ll never stop.

I used to tell myself I needed the business to make X amount of dollars within X amount of months if it was going to be a success. If I didn’t hit those metrics, the project would be a “failure” for X or Y reason. This brings the mind into a mode of stress rigidity, forcing growth rather than simply allowing the project to progress at its own pace.

The reframe is to do something you love so much that you decide you won’t stop no matter what. If I have to pick up another job to make ends meet, so be it. If a client drops us, or I lose followers, it’s nothing to stress over - because I simply know I will never stop. As long as I continue building and learning new skills, my success is inevitable. It’s just a matter of when.

15. To build a business, I had to become the type of person who could build a business.

The paradox of business building is that you need to become someone who can build a business before you can truly build it. At the same time, it’s impossible to truly know how to build a business until you actually build one. The solution is you must do both in parallel. You grow yourself in tandem with the business, and one side will struggle to grow until the other one catches up.

16. The business has built me more than I built it.

I didn’t realize how much I would grow through this entire experience. The things you learn go far beyond a marketing strategy, a website design, or a fucking sales funnel. Building a business or brand teaches you to embrace uncertainty, seek rejection, make decisions, escape your comfort zone. To dream big, hold a vision, stay consistent, and never quit.

In this way, my business has grown me more than I’ve grown it - and I’m excited to see the kind of person I’m capable of becoming as I continue this journey. I encourage everyone to pursue some type of meaningful project, not to make money or gain respect from others, but to test yourself, day after day, and uncover every ounce of the potential you otherwise would’ve left on the table.

It’s impossible to know what fruits you’ll harvest when you first plant the seed.

But maybe that’s the whole point.

-KPG

Hi.

I always write my essays on Tuesdays. I did the same thing this week.

I drafted and refined the essay on Tuesday. I polished it on Wednesday. It took me about six hours to write.

I decided to throw it in the trash.

It’s not that the essay was bad - I actually thought it was purty darn good. But something about it didn’t sit right with me. The essay didn’t capture how I really felt. It felt like a performance, scripted by someone else.

So instead, I’m going to spend an hour of my Saturday morning writing something that actually captures what I’m thinking about.

Here it goes.

I’ve built a destructive habit of tying my self-worth to the success of my business. After spending 9 months doing virtually nothing but building it, I’ve started to tie an identity to its success in a way that had become unhealthy.

Every incomplete sale started to feel like a personal slight. When I have a week of zero sales, I’d let it affect my mood for the whole weekend. A lost client could send me spiraling into dark places I never needed to visit.

I think there’s a piece of my brain that decided this was a useful tactic in achieving my goals. As if I wouldn’t have the drive to keep going unless I tied it to my own survival. Maybe this strategy, while somewhat toxic, might’ve been useful if my survival truly did depend on it. But it doesn’t.. It’s simply an illusion I wouldn’t let myself unsee.

What makes it useless is what I’m channeling these feelings into: creativity and novelty as a substrate for human connection.

Creation, at its best, comes from a state of abundance. It comes from patience, care, and allowing something to be as it currently is. Creation gets squashed when it’s churned out on an arbitrary timeframe, or becomes the purpose for meeting so-and-so metric.

We don’t criticize a seedling for not becoming a full grown oak tree within the self-made timeframe we assign it. And the seedling doesn’t beat itself up for not yet being an oak tree either.

The seedling is perfect as it is.

It would be silly to drown it with water simply because we know plants need water. It would be foolish to burn it with excess sunlight because we know it won’t thrive in darkness.

But that’s what we do to our projects all too often.

It’s what I’ve mistakenly done to my own business, and I’ve finally become conscious enough to push back.

Luckily, you all have made it easy for me to prevent that feeling from carrying into my writing. I still don’t have a formal offer on my Substack - not because there’s anything wrong with that, but because it just felt too early. I started writing at a New Year’s Resolution. To understand what I really think, and how to communicate it with others.

I love writing. The moment I view it as a chore is when I’m afraid I will begin to resent it. I never want that to happen.

On Tuesday, I wrote an interesting piece, but there was no love behind it. It was the first essay that felt like I was checking off a box. Doing for the sake of getting it done.

It had no heart. So it ended up in the trash bin.

Completing creative tasks to be done with them is a spiritually disconnected way of imagining the world, especially considering I don’t actually need to create anything. Nobody is showing up at my door with a pitchfork and torch because I didn’t break down the definitions of success and failure this week. The only pressure I’m under is the pressure I create for myself.

So I’m writing this article, directly from my brain to the page, in the span of an hour, simply because I wanted to. I already had an article, but I felt compelled to write this instead. My true thoughts , from the heart, no pressure added. No filter to distort it. No AI-revisions to pour the wet concrete of hollow buzzword language over the blossoming garden of my psyche.

For that reason, this essay is scrappy. My apologies.

This post is mine, and I wrote it simply because it was what I wanted to do.

Next week will be no different.

Thank you for being here. See you next Sunday.

-KPG

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It took four minutes to lose my only source of income.

I had spent my last fifteen months as a project engineer for a high-end construction company. The day prior, my principal emailed me while I was on the jobsite. He asked me to meet at his office at 9AM. I felt my chest sink all the way to my ass. He’d never once asked to speak with me one-on-one… at least not since the day he interviewed me. I already knew what it meant.

“I’m getting laid off. I can smell it,” I said to my direct report, sitting right next to me.

He reads the email over my shoulder. “Nah. Highly doubt it,” he replied, calm and certain. “If that were true, I’d know about it. I’d give a heads up so you knew what you were walking into.”

I wanted to believe him. I really did. But I didn’t.

…

Thursday evening turns to Friday morning. September 19th, 2025.

I show up to the office, already shaking with anxiety. I send an email to the painter I was contracting. I pull up a big spreadsheet on my second monitor to look productive as my mind stays frozen in silent panic. I check my watch.

8:55 AM.

Five more minutes.

My breath tightens. My heart pounds like my nervous system is under threat. I send another email I’ll never see the answer to.

Tick, tick, tick.

9AM. I walk down the hall to my principal’s office, a room easily half the size of my first apartment in the city. I stand in the doorway, sweaty hands clasped together like the nervous gentleman I am. He waves me in.

“Hey bud,” he says nervously. I sit and try to catch my breath without him noticing.

“We’ve got some projects stalled. Had to make some cuts. And well… we gotta lay you off. I’m so sorry.”

It was like watching a bullet launching toward my face in slow motion. It wasn’t real until it made contact.

I didn’t feel joy or sadness; it was pure confusion. Months earlier, I had my first annual review - I was so proud of it, I’d hung it on my fridge like a smug kindergartener with a new batch of artwork to show Mom. But that didn’t matter.

I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently. He shook his head. It was just the decision that had to be made. He didn’t want to lose me. The circumstances just made it necessary.

He told me to take my time packing up. I nodded and thanked him for employing me.

He was the one who found me in the first place. I was managing a small construction site in Kansas, coordinating materials and labor while I shoveled dirt and rocks from sun up to sun down. He’d handed me my golden ticket out of a small college town and brought me to Seattle.

He discovered me. He gave me the most incredible opportunity I’d ever received. And he took it back just as fast.

I leave the office. Check my watch. 9:04AM.

Four minutes. One conversation. The job I’d spent my whole life building toward - a dream job on paper - my only source of income - gone. Decided by one person, in the time it takes to brew a cup of coffee.

I’d been told my entire life this was the safe path.

Turns out it’s the riskiest path there is.

I. A New Beginning.

This was the failure I’d been afraid of all along: losing my job. I’d watched it happen half a dozen times in my short stint at the company - hard-working people cut loose because the standards were merciless. I always knew I could be next.

And for months before it happened to me, the fear had already been eating me alive. I was losing sleep. I was even losing my hair. My hearing was getting noticeably worse from incessant construction noise. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could survive at a job I clearly wasn’t cut out for.

Then my biggest fear came true.

I wasn’t making an income. I lost an identity I had built up for years. The structure of my schedule suddenly dissolved. I felt the shame of not having an answer when asked what I planned to do next. But through all of it...

I was okay.

Actually, I was more than okay. I felt a strange sense of calm. The kind that seems to arrive after you’ve braced for something for so long, and it finally hits, and you notice how you’re still standing. Still breathing.

The floor didn’t open below your feet, the sky didn’t break into pieces. For months, I rehearsed a catastrophe in my head. And when it finally came, I was left with my entire life still attached.

A bird sits on a branch not because it trusts the branch won’t break, but because it knows it can fly. I was clinging to a wispy branch I could feel cracking beneath me, terrified of the fall, never once trusting whether I had wings of my own.

The fear was never real. You built it yourself. It’s nothing more than a story, assembled out of your own insecurities, wrapped in a bow, and handed to you as fact.

Sure, my circumstances changed overnight. I was staring down a level of uncertainty I feared would happen but never fully prepared for, no idea what I actually wanted out of life, paralyzed by infinite directions things could go.

But every one of those problems lived in my own head. They were only as real as I decided they were. And it raised a question I didn’t yet have the courage to answer:

Why had I decided this was such a bad thing at all?

What if this was the best thing that ever happened to me?

II. The Truth About Failure.

The most accurate definition of failure is getting an outcome you didn’t prefer. That’s it.

Everything else - the excessive dread, the gnawing shame of feeling behind, the weight on the psyche that keeps you small - you manufactured it yourself.

“Apart from death, all failure is psychological”. -Jocko Willink

It took me a while to truly believe that. It’s the kind of line thrown around on a podcast that offers you a quick puff of empty motivation during the day and the smoke dissipates by the time you fall asleep.

It became true when I saw it in the most practical sense. When I truly thought I had faced a disaster and walked away on two feet. When I realized the only thing broken was the story I kept telling myself about what it all meant.

Death is the only outcome you can’t rebuild from or reinterpret. Everything else is merely a change in circumstance - it’s up to you to decide what it all means.

Once you absorb this, a strange truth starts to surface. The real failure wasn’t the time you took a swing and missed. It’s the swing you wanted to take but didn’t.

Each time you attempt something and fall short, you still walk away with something, even if it’s just a scar. Even a scar is a story to tell - a piece of proof that you faced something you feared and still came out alive.

And every so often, just when you think you’ll fail again, it actually works.

The only failure that gives you nothing is the one where you never decided to show up. I first the idea from J.K. Rowling, many years ago:

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.”

This is the failure that eats people alive. When they look back on their life and think about all the things they could’ve been, but weren’t. A long life, wrapped in bubble wrap and slowly decaying from the inside.

A book written without a single story included.

III. My New Prison

I left that office feeling more free than I’d ever felt since my college graduation. But subtly over time, I slowly built myself a new prison from the same bricks.

I started my own design business. Everyone on the outside saw me begin and called it courage - the laid-off construction engineer, pursuing his art, betting on himself. Under the surface, I was still building from a place of anxiety, not freedom.

I would work six days a week, sun up to sundown, for months on end - completely alone. Entire days would pass where I wouldn’t open my mouth once. I’d listen to endless rounds of podcasts so I could feel like I was part of a conversation.

Between sessions of work, I checked my metrics like it was a new nervous tic. I’d constantly chase the next quick dollar instead of strengthening the roots that would let anything of substance actually grow. I undersold myself by sending offers that arrived in a client’s inbox with a stench of desperation. I searched for motion and called it progress, just to numb my own anxiety for a few days at a time.

Underneath it all, I had unknowingly written a new definition of failure for myself:

Getting another job.

Ironically, this became my new idea of failure. Even accepting a part-time job - just to keep the floor steady as I built - felt like a tiny surrender. As if it was proof to the world that I couldn’t make it. I’d just survived losing a job and somehow taught myself that getting one was the new thing to fear. It was the same proverbial jail cell, only I’d turned it inside out.

And deep down, I knew better. I’d offered others the very same advice I refused to hear myself. I would prescribe the cold medicine that I myself couldn’t bear to swallow.

Shame, anxiety, stress, doubt - it makes you rigid. It closes the soul to new opportunities. It takes the part of you that wants to shine and covers it with perpetual clouds and smoke. Only a small amount of it is useful. Any more than that is building yourself an emotional cage.

IV. Go for it.

I can finally answer the question I couldn’t have answered nine months ago. Yes, losing my job was, in fact, one of the best things that has ever happened to me. But not in the way you might think. It was so critical for my own growth because I finally had to encounter the thing I feared most.

And I was okay.

So my advice for you, if you’re still reading, is the advice I wish I had given myself a year ago. Seriously go for it - whatever it is. Build the business, plan the move, pursue the goal you’ve been promising yourself you’d start once you feel ready.

You will never feel ready before you start. That feeling only comes once things are in motion.

What happens if it doesn’t work? To start, you tried something - that puts you ahead of nearly everyone. I started as a man whose self-worth lived in a job title that was deleted in four minutes. Now it lives in something no one can take from me. That trade can only happen if you commit.

If it doesn’t work, you at least have a story to tell. The worst thing that happens is… you’re right back where you started. No worse than if you never tried at all - except now you’ve got the scar, the story, and every reason to try again.

They told us the 9-5 was the safe path. And that safe path was taken from me in four minutes - by one person I’d barely worked with. The thing you build for yourself - the roots you grow, the wings you finally learn to use - no boss can lay you off from that.

The riskier path was the path forward all along. The path where your integrity and character are stress-tested day after day. The path that pushes you to build your dreams, not your boss’s. The path where your growth isn’t determined by old men in sharp suits.

So quit manufacturing fear that isn’t there. Stop building prisons out of bricks that were never real to begin with.

The branch is going to break either way.

You might as well find out you can fly.

-KPG

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Many of us will march all the way to our deathbed chasing a life we never really wanted. It goes beyond our career, our hobbies, or what we own. The false idols we pursue can quickly shape our lives into something that feels distorted from the inside. And we often don’t even notice.

The most misleading piece of it all… leading a life in this way is often celebrated and encouraged by the outside world. Your perception of success was largely imposed on you, whether you realize it or not. These ideas run a soft hum behind everything you think and do. You can’t always articulate them, but you can feel them dictating what to chase, what to celebrate, what to share, and what to feel ashamed of when you inevitably “miss the mark.”

We don’t manufacture this force from the inside. Our inherited dreams come as a byproduct of countless factors: the town or city we spent our childhoods in, the way our parents raised us, the algorithms that reach our phone screens, the stories we tell about ourselves. We can easily follow a dream for so long that we mistake it for our own.

Before you continue building this life of yours, it’s important to question whose life you’re really building.

I’ll offer you three claims to ponder, and you might just walk away with a new vantage point on your own.

1. You were taught what to want.

You had an idea of which jobs earned approval before you could read. That the doctors and lawyers of the world had their life sorted out. That the artists and wanderers of the world were still grappling with the never-ending task of finding themselves. A mental scoreboard began forming before you became bold enough to question its validity.

Over time, you knew what success looked like and what you could do to get it. Earn good grades, get into a good school, earn the degree, get the job. The path was a freeway complete with mile markers, road signs, and a clear route ahead- and everyone else was driving alongside you.

Pursue any career you want, as long as it’s one of these twelve. Live anywhere you want, as long as it’s a house in a quiet suburb. Spend your money however we please, as long as you max out the 401k, put a down payment on some property, and prepare for retirement.

Besides a few socially-acceptable variations, everything else is labeled as failure or fantasy.

In my own life, I always thought I knew what I wanted. Architecture and construction was the path I was headed on since a very young age. I enjoyed the pursuit, but it wasn’t until I was doing professional work in a new city when I realized it wasn’t how I wanted to spend my life. By the time I asked myself what I really wanted, the question felt almost embarrassing to think about- mostly because I didn’t know the answer.

I had inherited a definition of success like an accent. It’s so complete, so invisible that it wears you like a mask without ever showing you the mirror. And it all happened before you were ever given a say.

Most people live their lives in the approval of others. Remove the outward judgment - what our parents might think, how the world might perceive you - and you’ll find that many of us would imagine a different life entirely. A version of life that’s lived unapologetically and authentically. A life that’s not so grandiose, not so conventional, not so hurried. A life we secretly wanted for years and never mustered the courage to act on.

But when we imagine our ideal life, we also imagine the backlash.

So we keep running the script we were handed and call it ambition.

This isn’t to blame our family, our education, or our culture for our beliefs. Everyone else was taught what to want too. We’re all passing down a definition we never carefully examined, to the point that we hardly know where the chain started in the first place.

But the moment you notice it, you lose your excuse to keep playing by the rules… and you can’t get it back. You’re left with the daunting task of building your own ideas of success from scratch.

It’s even heavier than it sounds. The freeway was crowded, but at least it had signs pointing you to seemingly better places. It came pre-packaged with a map. Find your off-ramp and the first thing you’re greeted with is… the loudest silence imaginable. There’s no mile markers and no round of applause. No friends or family telling you you’re on track. And how could they?

Most people turn back at this moment and head back on the freeway. The pothole-filled gravel roads of the unconventional path are so frightening, they’d rather take the ones freshly paved by others. These paths are more comfortable, more reliable. But they aren’t yours.

2. To truly achieve success, you must decide what to want for yourself.

Achieving success on someone else’s terms is a hollow version of achievement. It’s decorated with bright paint and shiny ornament. Break it open and you find it empty at its core.

There’s so much talk about chasing success and striving for greatness. We spend far too little time defining success, and what it would even mean to achieve something so elusive. We tell each other to start running without a chance to first pick a direction. And we wonder why we feel so lost three miles deep in the wrong forest, or seven rungs up the wrong ladder.

It’s hard to choose a path and commit. You haven’t the slightest clue where the path leads from where you’re standing. The good news is, you don’t have to know the end of the path. You only need to ask the questions that rule out everything that isn’t yours.

Start by tossing out the two measuring sticks that have no endpoint: money and prestige. Money is a tool we quickly confuse for a destination. When you chase numbers for the sake of numbers, you will never have enough, while the things that would’ve satisfied you were placed on the back burner.

Prestige is worse. It relies on the approval of others, something you have little control over. Building a life around prestige is a lifelong performance staged for an audience that was never watching.

Ask yourself: “what would you do with your life if no one could know about it?”

This throws outward-societal pressures out the window. It pushes you to look inside yourself for the answer instead of asking the world to shape you to its motives. Ignore the achievements that impress strangers at dinner parties. Dismiss any goal the market values more than your own psyche does. What’s left is authentic to you, the mark only you could leave on the world.

What does an ordinary Tuesday look like?

Ignore the big launch, the shiny award, and the ribbon-cutting. Imagine a typical Tuesday in the life you want. The most monotonous, uneventful day of the week.

Who surrounds you in the morning? What are you working on in the afternoon? How do you feel when the day is over?

We design our lives around the peaks we’ll triumph over for a handful of hours and ignore the pattern of days we’ll live through for decades. Every life you choose will come with its own form of Tuesdays- the boring, repetitive work necessary to reach the big milestones you tell your friends about.

What are you willing to suffer for?

Everything worth doing comes with its own cost. Anyone can learn to enjoy their life on a good day. The deeper question is what you’ll keep doing on the days you feel miserable. The thing you’d actually suffer for points to what you value. The rest is just preference.

You won’t have clear answers to any of these right away. It might take decades. For now, you have a direction: some push or pull, a sense you’re getting warmer or colder as you keep going.

This is enough for now. The clarity you’re looking for can’t happen before you commit, only once you’re in motion. One honest step toward the life that feels like yours, and the next one will reveal itself. The ones who never take this step don’t actually avoid choosing; they let an inherited version of success make it for them. And they’ll wonder, years or decades later, why their so-called success fell flat.

3. Your life will send signs you’re on the right path.

When I talk about finding your path, I often hear the same fear: that they’ll make the wrong choice. They picture a single trailhead they must follow indefinitely no matter what. A trail that leads to a single fixed point that it will either be worthwhile or a grand waste of time.

This isn’t how it works. Instead, imagine yourself as a queen on a three-dimensional chessboard. You can move up, down, left, right, forward, back, until you find your place. The queen can make a decision, evaluate, and course-correct without ever starting over. You can take a bold leap across the board, or a single, careful step, and see how it feels. The board itself will tell you if you’re on the right track as long as you listen.

You’re not moving toward one perfect square, far-off in the distance, where success will finally greet you with open palms. The squares will shift, change color, and even disappear. Learning how to move across the board is the whole point.

First, follow your energy. Some work will fill you with energy, and some work drains it. This has little to do with actual exertion. The authentic path will continue feeding you energy when it gets hard. The inauthentic path will hand you reasons to quit, even when the days are a breeze.

Next, watch your obsession. What do you do when no one’s watching, or when no one’s asking anything of you? Where does your mind go on a slow, Sunday afternoon? Look for what keeps you curious… what you read about, what you collect, what you like to tinker with and create when there’s no real reason to.

Obsession is a truly honest signal. It can’t be faked, forced, or fabricated. It’s a motivation that seems to crawl under our skin and wear us like a jumpsuit; a drive that almost feels wrong to resist. The things you’re obsessed with are the bread crumbs toward a life the traditional path asked you to ignore.

Lastly, quit dismissing that background hum. That subtle sign you’re wearing someone else’s clothes, doing someone else’s job. The unsolicited flicker of envy when you catch someone living a life that looks more like yours than yours does. The vague sense of dread on an early Monday morning, when you’d give anything to be able to pull the covers over your head until Friday comes back around.

We’ve trained ourselves to override these feelings and stay on course. They’re the very signals we should rewire our minds to seek out. We can ignore them, but they never disappear. We only become numb to the nagging nature of the signals that fight us at every turn.

Numbness is a dangerous place to operate from. It’s how people lose years of their life before waking up and realizing they rowed themselves to the wrong shore. Correcting the course will feel like a burden at first, but it’s nothing compared to the cost of staying the same. If you feel this way on a regular basis, understand that there will never be a better time to change direction than right now.

The only dream worth inheriting.

Wherever you come from, you were taught what success looks like. What you’re supposed to want. It reveals itself differently across cultures, generations, and incomes, but the underlying idea doesn’t budge.

To live a life that’s authentically ours, we each must peel back the layers we inherited and decipher what we truly want. Only then can we actually take the steps to actually get there.

But there lies a sneaky little detail we haven’t yet discussed. The fine print we all forgot to read.

If success is a destination, it will always lie just outside your grasp.

The goalposts shift like a carrot on a stick, forever just a few inches in front of you. Buy a house in a wealthy neighborhood, and you’ll feel average in months. Become the head of your division and you’ll land in regular meetings with all the other department leaders. Hit your fitness goal and a new one will present itself. Framed this way, success is not a place we can ever arrive at. We’re satisfied with the new milestone until we feel inadequate again, pursuing the next thing once again.

Start viewing success as a direction, not an altitude.

You won’t feel successful the day you finally have a flat stomach or heavy pockets. But you can decide that success is real the moment you lace up your workout shoes and make it to the gym. You can forbid yourself from feeling accomplished until the degree is framed on the wall, or you can decide that every hour spent earning it already counts for something. In each instance, you’re nudging the odds in your favor: the odds of becoming the person you want to be. If that isn’t success, I’m not sure what is.

Whatever you pursue, make sure the desire is truly yours, then go all-in. The act of pursuing your own dream, for any moment in time, is a success in and of itself.

The only dream left to inherit is your own.

-KPG

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Throughout my adult life, I’ve often been commended on my work ethic.

This attribute has caught the attention of employers, professors, and colleagues- and has probably thrown me more opportunities than I’m aware of. Developing a solid, reliable work ethic is a meta-skill that inevitably injects more heart and purpose (and sweat) into everything I do.

But like anything else, we arrive at a point where even optimizing your own virtues only takes you so far until it subtly becomes a hindrance. If you’re the insecure overachiever type like me, you often forget that the effort was never the point- it was only the means towards building something beyond effort… something that feels greater than yourself. Something that will represent you, grow you, and maybe even outlive you.

Effort is easily measurable from the outside. You can be the person that sits in the front row of the lecture hall, completes the most volume at the gym, earns the status as the one who turns off the lights and locks the office door at the end of a long day. Your own success gets conflated with the outward perception that you’re putting in the work to make it happen.

Effort and success used to move in tandem. Now the two are decoupled- more so everyday.

Gone are the days where more effort inevitably creates better outcomes. This is nothing more than a remnant from our industrial past, where factory workers were trained to specialize in a single task, earn pay for the hours worked, and get rewarded for the outward performance of effort.

The world has changed overnight, and the principles of yesteryear are slowly proving themselves outdated. It’s important as ever to question our own programming so we can achieve a higher level of success - on our own terms - before we burn out and build resentment toward our own dreams.

The arguments I introduce below serve as trailheads to future topics to explore, internalize, and implement. I’ll expand on each of these in future posts.

1. “Hours Worked” is no longer the measuring stick.

We live in a world that pays for proven outcomes, not just effort. While hours worked is a common way to compensate employees and make a salary, it’s a poor indicator of your true output. Increasing output by working longer hours makes sense if you’re a bricklayer or a street performer, but even in those cases, there are better ways to optimize what you’re putting into the world before you start burning the candle at both ends.

Both the craftsman and the artist can optimize their value by building the skills they already use to differentiate themselves from the pack. The bricklayer can learn how to teach less-experienced builders, or learn new methods of bricklaying to take on complex projects others can’t. The street performer might play the violin, but they could learn to play new songs or instruments to become a unique act. Skill development is simply one of many forms of leverage- a bit of effort upfront will pay dividends on the backend, forever.

2. The irreplaceable generalists own the future.

It’s all-too common to make small talk with someone new and get hit with: “so what do you do?” In America, this translates to: “how do you create value for society in a way that makes you a living?”

Responding in a single word, “I’m a bricklayer, I’m a performer”, immediately puts us in a box… along with every other bricklayer or performer out there. We market ourselves as interchangeable with any other person that might say the same. Specialization was once a great attribute, but the world of the internet has made specialists easy to come by. However good you are at one thing, there’s always someone else out there who’s a little (or a lot) better. Even being in the top .01% at any activity makes you one of 800,000 people. And they each have a LinkedIn profile too.

The only way out is to become a generalist. There may be thousands of amazing teachers and thousands of great bricklayers, sure. But a great bricklayer with an acute ability to teach other bricklayers? That’s rare. Throw in even one more skill and you become one-of-a-kind.

Specialization can be hired and trained. Generalization has to be lived. Your unique value lies at the intersection of all your interests, even the ones that are seemingly unrelated… until they’re not.

The overlap isn’t just a lab concoction of unrelated skills. It’s you. A unique perspective on the world no one has, that no one can take from you.

What will you do with it?

3. To create is to be human. Creativity requires rest.

We once paid scribes to duplicate text by hand. Then, we invented the printing press. Now, we have copy-paste.

Calculators and computers used to be job titles. Now it’s a piece of software that fits in your pocket.

The repetitive tasks are slowly being outsourced to machines, as they already have been for hundreds of years, freeing up humans to do new tasks. The difference with AI is how this replacement is happening at an unprecedented rate.

One experienced person using AI can replace 10 administrators or 10 copywriters. This trend will make yet another leap as humanoids start to replace physical labor. That might sound eccentric, but this phase of automation is already underway.

It’s possible we reach a point where humans don’t NEED to do anything at all, aside from fulfilling the unique interests of other humans. If everything that can be automated IS automated, only two types of jobs will remain:

1. Positions where the human element is the differentiator that creates a unique experience (think barista, teacher, bartender, tour guide).

2. Positions where a human uses lived experience to create something new that couldn’t have been replicated by any other human (artist, author, founder, dancer, etc.)

Nearly all jobs in the future will require some level of creativity. It’ll show up in different ways, but it can’t be forced, optimized, or squeezed out on a schedule. Inspiration to create must come from elsewhere. A walk in the park, a good night’s sleep, or a refreshing conversation aren’t just the reward you earned for working hard; it’s the very input the creative mind uses as fuel.

The hustle bro treats rest as a weakness. They eliminate anything that doesn’t appear directly productive, then sit at their desk wondering why novel ideas never strike. You can’t grind your way to an idea you haven’t lived enough to create. Our best thoughts come to us when we stop chasing them.

4. Success partially depends on luck, but luck can be engineered.

You can’t always have luck on your side, but you sure as hell can expose yourself to it. The lucky ones are rarely the most talented or deserving; they’re the ones the world can actually find. The principle has been discussed ad nauseam but examples are harder to come by.

Most examples fall into three buckets: reps, visibility, and proximity.

More reps means more chances at-bat. Sending out more job applications, meeting more strangers, creating more services a client might want, these are all chances taken. Few of them will amount to anything, but the ones that do have unlimited potential. Take as many calculated shots as possible.

While putting in reps means finding others, visibility is creating avenues for others to find you. I’m at a point in my career where I’m building momentum, so I make myself pretty easy to find; I’m always searching for opportunity. My Instagram, Substack, LinkedIn, website, and email are all easy to find so I can cast a wide net for opportunities to find me back.

Proximity regards who you’re surrounded by, physically or digitally. The people you spend your time with have a huge influence over your trajectory. If you don’t want to be like them, it’s time to switch out the rooms you frequent.

Of course, your product is the multiplier for all of this. Everything else is easier when you are creating something that others find useful, entertaining, or interesting. If you’re not sure where to start, just create one thing you’re proud of, and ripple outward from there.

5. No amount of hard work fixes the wrong path.

The most important point of all. Effort without a clear direction is mostly a waste. Every hour pushing through on the wrong thing is an hour spent not building the right one. The cost is more than time and energy- it’s the alternative path you didn’t take.

You’re 2 years into a degree you’ve been second-guessing since the start. 10 years deep in a career you’ve been lukewarm about since you first interned there. 20 years into a marriage that dried out half a decade before either of you decided to call it out.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

One reason, we’ve built an identity around our path and our position in the world. Leaving it behind feels like a tiny death. The architect who can’t see themselves as anything but. The husband in a failed marriage but can’t bear the thought of becoming a single father.

But we are not what society labels us as. We are people with a messy, complicated past, and an undefined future. We can course-correct at any time, even if our detachment leaves permanent scars.

The other reason: the counterintuitive concept that effort becomes comfort. It’s actually easy to work toward the things we’ve always worked for. It gives us something to point at, and lets us hide from the bigger question: am I pointed in the direction I truly want to go? The hardest working people often bury their heads for years before looking up.

Conclusion

Working harder doesn’t always work, but if you were seeking a free pass to slack off, look elsewhere.

Hard work isn’t dead. It will always be something worth admiring, as long as the work feels meaningful enough to be something worth suffering for. The people who do succeed are still working hard, but hard work alone is no longer enough.

The path is not to simply work more, or to work less. It’s much more complex than that.

To be successful on your own terms, you need to work hard at the harder thing.

It’s harder to look up and realign your direction than it is to put your head down and keep chipping away at a path you thought you wanted. Your current path has the general script to follow, but your redirection doesn’t.

It’s harder to rest deliberately than it is to brute-force your way through. Pushing yourself is socially rewarded. Resting is viewed as laziness or wasted time, when it often sparks the inner work necessary to bring your best self to the table.

Every day, the world will reward you for how hard you appear to be working.

Your future self won’t remember or care.

Your future will only reward you for the difference you made, the life you lived, the person you became…

...and the best time to start is right now.

-KPG

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After experiencing my own version of rock bottom at 19, I began discovering, unlearning, relearning, and implementing new principles across different facets of my life.

The first ten ideas I shared can be found here, and revolve around the themes of seeing clearly, and acting boldly. Below are ten more ideas I wish I understood sooner. The final ten are about enduring well, and reckoning with time. Let’s begin.

ENDURING WELL

1. Seek out rejection. Embrace it.

Closed mouths don’t get fed. I expect you’d be willing to ask for much more from life if you weren’t so afraid of being rejected. The cost is much lower than your ego makes it seem.

Think of what you want, who might be able to give it to you, and what you’d be willing to offer for it. Send more cold emails to people you admire, people you want to work with.

Ask the cute girl or guy for their number. See if the barista will give you that day-old pastry for free. Maybe that stranger on the bus DOES want to have a conversation with you.

If you can’t expect what others will say no to, you don’t understand the limits of what you can ask for. So take a shot in the dark. And if they say no, respect it and move on. A ‘no’ doesn’t cost you anything you weren’t already missing.

2. Chasing perfection will paralyze you.

Perfection is a rare and fleeting quality to life.

Make your home sparkly clean each week and it will remain that way.. for maybe a day or two. Draft a perfect project at school or work, and you’ll be commended momentarily, just to be handed the next task. Curate your workout and diet with perfect precision before realizing everything that had to be sacrificed in order to attain it.

You want to be known as that person who has no flaws, who dances through life effortlessly without error. But behind the scenes, you’re putting in way more effort than you need to. This is an exhausting way to live, especially when you miss the mark. Following perfection has a sneaky way of building resentment toward the things you actually want out of life.

If you can learn to be okay with being slightly inadequate in some areas of your life and give yourself grace for being a finite human, life will open up for you and you can put more energy into what truly matters.

3. Always search for feedback. Be grateful for it.

The feedback we receive isn’t always what we want to hear. Harsh feedback hurts because it shines a blinding light on our imperfections. It shows us the real work we need to do to become better. Treat any feedback you receive as a gift. Never defend yourself against it, or take it personally. Lastly, always start your response with a thank you.

That final piece catches most people by surprise. Be grateful no matter what the feedback is. Honest feedback is rare in this day and age. The majority of people are increasingly hyper-sensitive to any opinion anyone might have of them. Nobody wants to be the one to burst someone’s bubble.

When someone finally does, view this as a breath of fresh air and try to see things from their perspective, even if you don’t agree with it.

4. Avoid competition. Create your own game and play it well.

In the age of the internet, we can create a career from just about anything. The problem is, so can anyone else with electricity and a WiFi connection.

If you specialize in one thing, you’re competing with the millions of other people who also specialize in the same topic or discipline, and yes, they all have a LinkedIn too. The best thing you can possibly do for yourself is building the identity of someone who’s adaptable, generalized, and can see the broader picture of any task or project.

Combining even a few skills into something new makes you an irreplaceable person, and you will be treated as such.

5. Some things never get easier. You get stronger.

I hit my own rock bottom at 19. A year later, COVID kicked the whole world in the ass, and I lost my dad to cancer just months later. Since that period of darkness, I’ve been broken up with, cussed out, humiliated countless times, went through bouts of depression, hit a negative bank balance, and got laid off from the job I moved across the country for.

None of these events actually became easier to deal with. They simply are what they are. But through these trials, you become the kind of person who’s strong enough to handle them. This is liberating when it is viewed as a privilege, as twisted as it may sound. Your setbacks and low points are the very thing that forces you to evolve into a higher version of yourself.

This means that if the same event happened to you again, you’ll be armored and calloused, ready to handle it with more strength and grace than you ever could before. Better yet, you’ll learn the rewarding feeling of helping others get through the same issues you once experienced alone.

RECKONING WITH TIME

6. Boredom makes you more creative than consumption does.

We wonder why we often have our most profound thoughts in the shower, not thinking of how it’s one of the few times we’re completely undistracted by the never-ending onslaught of life.

Many of us doomscroll, refresh the news hourly, or binge-watch the latest Netflix series and we wonder why our thoughts feel so stale and disconnected. Even reading novels or listening to educational podcasts can leave us, for lack of a better term, mentally constipated; we’re unable to sift through the abundance of information we’re bombarded with on a daily basis.

If you’re in a creative field, the quality of your time away from work is just as important as the quality of time spent working. This was a recent realization for me- the time I spend living life outside of work was something I needed to audit and recalibrate, so I could be the most rested version of myself when I get back to my desk.

7. Train your body from the inside, not the outside.

When I was in high school and early college, I always wanted to be more fit, mainly so I could look the part. I worked out over 4 hours a day during COVID, and gained a significant amount of muscle to prove it. I looked great, and my endurance felt endless, but my routine was not sustainable by any means. I still longed to build a career, a richer social life, and competence in other hobbies that didn’t result in excessive sweating.

Six years later, I’m not in the peak athletic shape I was once, but I feel amazing. I have more energy than ever, and I treat my body well about 90% of the time- I’m not perfect, but I have a healthier relationship with my body than I did 5 years ago.

I still workout and run most days, but the greater reason is so I can chase my future children around the yard and live a great life into my old age- not to impress strangers or win competitions.

I developed a much stronger self-image when I optimized my fitness for my future self, both physically and psychologically- instead of just sharpening the image I saw in the mirror.

8. You will never feel ready when you start. That feeling comes after.

It’s easy to wait for the perfect outside conditions before starting, or to wait until you have everything figured out in your head. This is nothing more than procrastination cosplaying as patience.

The only way to feel confident in whatever you’re pursuing is by simply starting. Your first step will not be perfect, and you shouldn’t expect it to be. You’ll feel like an imposter- take it as a sign you’re on the right track because you realize how much more there is to learn. It might take weeks, months, or years, but you’ll look back and realize none of it could’ve been learned from watching on the sidelines.

9. You are the oldest you’ve ever been, and the youngest you’ll ever be again.

It’s a pithy saying, but the more you think about it, the more profound it becomes.

You’ve never had as much experience and wisdom as you currently do, yet your youth is only slipping from your grasp, minute by minute. It’s not a reason to feel demoralized; instead you should feel empowered. To take matters into our own hands and do something exceptional. To make the most of the things we already have… things we can easily lose.

10. Today is the beginning of the rest of your life.

The past only matters in the fact that it got you here. Everything else exists only in our distorted perception of old memories and aging photographs.

Many people have a habit of dragging their past behind them like an anchor. They talk about the job they didn’t get, or the shitty break-up, or a regret of something they should’ve done sooner. They keep around an immature, inexperienced version of themselves as if it were a younger sibling they were taking care of.

They use their past to explain their present, as if life were a simple chain reaction of cause and effect. It’s really nothing more than a story they’ve memorized so well, it shapeshifts from a convenient narrative to a false truth.

You are not your past. The past happened to you, but it is not you. Think of it like watching rush-hour traffic while perched on a balcony. You understand you are not the traffic, it is simply happening in front of you, until it isn’t.

The future gives zero shits about your past. It’s a blank canvas, asking one question of anyone who picks up a brush: how big are you willing to dream?

Don’t let your past place a limit on what’s next.

See you next week,

-KPG

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Thank you for your time.

At 19, I hit my own version of rock bottom. These ten insights are ideas I slowly gathered on my way out. Each one serves as a guide to help me continue my path to future success.

I grouped these ideas into four main themes:

seeing clearly, acting boldly, enduring well, and reckoning with time.

The first two themes will be expanded on here; the other two will be shared next week.

SEEING CLEARLY

1. Aim to become a 7/7ths person.

By living for the weekend, we create a life that’s 5/7ths empty. We spend the week counting down to the other 2/7th… only as a means to escape the first five.

There are only two ways out of this: you must either change your relationship with the present, or you must change the present itself… and most people need both.

When I stopped waiting for Friday to arrive and started enjoying every day equally, I noticed my work getting sharper, my friendships becoming deeper, and the opportunities I used to be blind to became impossible not to notice. The funny thing is, my objective reality didn’t change. It was my perception of my own life that needed fixing.

2. Question everything, especially the things that were handed to you.

Much of what we believe was installed in us from the very beginning. It’s likely your religious beliefs aren’t much different from that of your parents, friends, or neighbors. Other value systems - political opinions, career ambitions, your preferred lifestyle, what you’re attracted to - much of it is programmed into us as a byproduct of our time and place.

This isn’t to say any of what you believe is right or wrong, but the beliefs can’t be fully yours unless you’ve examined them clearly. The unexamined defaults of our psyche can quickly become dangerous; we might be operating on a system that doesn’t have our own best interests in mind. At worst, they have the potential to ruin us. At best, they create distractions from what we truly want out of our lives.

The most dangerous part is, they’re often invisible. We don’t argue with them because we’re unaware there’s anything to argue with.

Maybe your beliefs are serving you and the world, but it’s crucial you at least question them. Question your relationships. Your career. The city you live in. Your values, your opinions, and what you do on the weekends to kill time. Question your vices and question your emotions toward them.

Question life itself.

If your life doesn’t feel authentically yours, it probably isn’t yet. This is good news: acknowledging this feeling - and being aware of it - is the first step towards making real change… and most people never even reach this step. Use it as a launchpad to elevate you to a life of your own making.

3. The things you want will continue to change. It’s important you let them.

We ask 16 year-olds to choose a career path before they’ve held a full-time job, lived alone, gone on a date, paid a bill, or seen the world. Then we act shocked when they end up choosing the wrong path.

I thought I wanted to be an architect since I knew what a job was. I didn’t realize the career wasn’t for me until I reached graduate school. It hit me one day, during our design-build studio, when I volunteered to clean the garbage behind our class’s construction site to avoid drafting floor plans on Revit: the exact thing I’d be doing for the majority of my career.

That was almost three years ago. Today, I live with my partner, who is studying to become an architect herself. She loves it. She has also said I’d be miserable working in her role. I dodged a bullet by listening to the version of me who’d outgrown the dream of the 16 year-old that picked it.

If you don’t pivot gracefully as your interests shift, you can easily end up following a path chosen by a teenager who didn’t know any better.

4. Lead with curiosity, not conclusions.

Our world feels more divided each day. It no longer feels socially acceptable for one group of people to tolerate the views of another. Beyond politics, the internet allows everyone and their dog to have an opinion on just about anything before they broadcast it to the masses.

Instead of declaring an opinion as stupid, heartless, or just plain wrong, it’s most constructive to lean in with a sense of genuine curiosity.

“Interesting- how did you come to that conclusion?” “How does this viewpoint serve you, or the world?”

This does two things at once. You take the high ground while revealing whether this person actually thought their way through the issue, or absorbed it through a glowing black rectangle.

Too often, the world is actively telling us what we should think, and thus another belief is placed in our laps, rather than being earned through lived experience. Once you see this clearly, it’s easier to avoid arguing with people who don’t truly know what they stand for.

5. Not everyone’s opinion deserves your time and attention.

The best way to avoid criticism? Say nothing, do nothing.

But this is no way to live. The moment you start building something, sharing your interests, or aim for anything beyond indifferent, you will trigger a response on both sides.

This doesn’t mean we need to ignore the masses, but instead, choose which voices carry weight. The peanut gallery of passersby who’ve never attempted the thing you’re pursuing? Their opinion is dispensable. That person you admire who has the life you dream of? That’s a perspective worth gauging. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. Choosing not to spend energy on the wrong critics can free up huge amounts of mental bandwidth for the right ones.

6. Everything has a cost.

My favorite insight from ECON 101: there’s no such thing as free lunch. Every hour you spend somewhere is an hour not spent somewhere else. Every dollar you spend on one thing is a dollar stolen from another.

Being the finite creatures we are, each commitment, big or small, suggests an equal rejection of every alternative. Every yes is invisibly tied to a thousand no’s… and we don’t get those hours back. Choose wisely.

ACTING BOLDLY

7. Seek out hard things, and seek them often.

The times I grew most were the times I chose discomfort on purpose.

At 22, I spent three months abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark, nearly 5,000 miles from the humble Kansas town I lived in at the time. I touched Danish soil with nothing but a carry-on, not knowing a single soul.

The year after, I worked in construction, performing 10-12 hours of work each day, six days a week- most of it back-breaking manual labor. I kept this routine for 9 straight months until we finished building our class project: a 2,200 square-foot, LEED-Platinum home, just blocks from our college campus.

At 24, I graduated from architecture school and moved to Seattle, not knowing a soul once again. A year later, I decided to take the leap and launch my own design business.

These moments weren’t always enjoyable while they happened, but they’re the stories I’ll tell my kids someday. None of it was easy, but all of it was worth it.

We didn’t evolve to live our lives on the couch. 99% of the time humans have existed on Earth, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers living out of small caves and temporary huts. Now, we live and work in comfy chairs in air-conditioned spaces, with food always available. This isn’t what our biology is used to.

We don’t just benefit from discomfort; we require it.

8. You should have started yesterday.

We all have that thing we’ve wanted to do for years. You already know exactly what it is for you. Either you’ll start through imperfect circumstances, or you’ll spend your life waiting for a moment that never comes.

You were hoping for a third option, but there isn’t one.

The smallest possible step often takes just ten minutes. Open that Word doc, join the club, enroll in that course, start the group chat.

You don’t have to eat a whole elephant in a day. You’re taking one bite at a time. The bite you take today makes tomorrow’s bite easier to swallow. If you have the time to read this essay, you have the time to start. No excuses.

9. Be where they are.

They say you become an average of the people you spend your time with. If you want to be different, or want your life to change, you have to spend more time around different groups of people. The only way to do this is by being in places where these different people already are.

The aspiring entrepreneur should learn where their future clients actually spend their weekends, so they can be there. The college student who wants to find friends that play volleyball or golf? He or she needs to spend more time at the beach- or on the golf course.

The world is more malleable than you think, and proximity is one of the best ways to mold it.

10. Most opportunities will lead you nowhere. It’s important you pursue them anyway.

In college, I chased dozens of opportunities, hoping it would be worthwhile down the road. I led campus tours, accredited other architecture schools, taught inner-city students, served at food banks, and cleaned trash from public parks.

Most of them were dead ends. But later I realized this was never the point.

Each experience offered me a new lens to view myself with. At this point, I’ve been a designer, a builder, an entrepreneur, a teacher, an athlete, and a writer.

I can’t be put into a box anymore, so I don’t have a rigid definition of who I’m “supposed” to be. My purpose is simply to pursue a life that is unapologetically my own.

Every now and again, those dead ends weren’t actually dead at all. A few led me to job offers, free flights across the country, new clients, and new friendships. But you can never tell which is which until you find a thread and continue pulling it to see where it leads.

Try a bit of everything, see what sticks.

…

Look out for ten more insights shipping straight to your inbox next week.

Talk soon,

-KPG

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ROCK BOTTOM

From January 15th to January 25th, 2019, I was trapped inside a mental institution in Des Plaines, Illinois.

For nearly two straight weeks I wasn’t allowed outside. I wasn’t allowed to exercise. All my belongings were confiscated, so I rotated between two outfits while I was there.

Every window of the facility was filthy and fogged off, complete with thick metal bars on the outside of the glass - as if I were an inmate and the world needed to be protected from me. I was psychologically affected in a way that has made the rest of my life feel like a cakewalk by comparison.

But to my surprise, I hadn’t hit rock bottom yet.

I was released from Chicago Behavioral Hospital after doing everything I could to pretend I had gotten better, knowing damn well I was still dealing with the lasting effects of psychosis, still struggling to make sense of the world.

I returned to school, starting my second semester days later - as if it were a sickness I “needed to get over”. I re-entered the second half of freshman year a week after everyone else, already behind on schoolwork. I was still making first impressions with the people I’d spend the next five years with, and I didn’t trust anyone enough to share what I had just gone through without fearing I’d scare them away.

I was prescribed daily anti-psychotics that did what they were supposed to do -it slowed my mind to a crawl. With it, the medicine stripped me of my motivation to do nearly everything. I spent that first week of school embarrassed, confused, and stressed out - regularly smoking marijuana in my dorm room to cope.

As you might’ve guessed, pairing a psychoactive drug with a daily anti-psychotic isn’t the best way to start a new semester.

I made it to February 6th… 9 days after I had returned. I had a panic attack so severe, it prompted my RA to call campus services. A police officer came knocking at my dorm room early the next morning. She calmly walked me to her car and escorted me to the hospital. I was released the same day.

My parents picked me up two days later, and pulled me out of school indefinitely.

I spent the next six months living with my parents. I was kept under close watch, took rehabilitation classes, met with a therapist, and kept taking those damn anti-psychotics. All my friends were at school. I didn’t feel stable enough to work a full-time job. The medicine made me lazy and numb while increasing my appetite and killing my metabolism. I gained 25 pounds in 6 weeks through an onslaught of McDonald’s drive-thru runs, endless episodes of South Park, and chronic self-pity as I slowly made the couch my new home.

Meanwhile, my father was pushing through countless rounds of chemotherapy to treat the growing cancer spreading from his esophagus. My mom was working full-time, doing what she could to help support us both, not to mention my younger brother. The future felt bleak for me, something I was scared to slowly uncover.

I remember one specific evening, where I had crawled out of my hole to come down to the kitchen. To my surprise, a friend of my mom’s was visiting the home. I waved and said hi.

“You’re bigger than I remember! ” She said innocently. I nodded, leaning into it.

“Yeah, I’ve gained a bit of weight,” I replied.

“Are you doing it on purpose?” She asked, seeming genuinely curious.

“Yes…” was all I could muster. And that was a lie. I immediately retreated back up the stairs, a little more self-conscious than I already was.

I had become a shell of myself. I lost my confidence, my physical health, and my mental health, while my education and future career was put on pause. I couldn’t help but see myself as a loser. Like I was given every chance to succeed and wasted them all.

I had hit rock bottom.

So I took a photo. I still have it today.

Here it is.

I think some part of me wanted evidence that the kid in the mirror wouldn’t be there forever - though I couldn’t have articulated that at the time. What pains me the most is my own face: disappointed, embarrassed, nearly defeated. My background reveals the rest. The blinds are drawn so I don’t have to face the outside world. My room was an utter mess, complete with a Toblerone wrapper and an empty Arizona can I had finished days before, and two bottles of the anti-psychotics on my dresser to top it all off. In hindsight, it was a perfect photo because it was so brutally revealing.

It served as an inflection point. The beginning of the rest of my life. Everything in the past was etched in stone, but the future was a blank canvas. Whether I’d live a shadow of a life in my mom’s basement or make something of myself was up to me to decide.

I chose the latter.

I’d love to tell you a single thing that happened… a sign from God or a blinking light from the abyss… but it didn’t. My path out was much smaller and more boring than anything you’re expecting.

But that’s exactly what makes it so important to talk about.

MY WAY OUT: SCALING THE DRAGON

When we ask people how they got to where they are, we often hope they respond with one cure-all, one silver button to smash to make things instantly better, forever.

We ask bodybuilders what protein powder they use before asking what they’ve sacrificed to look the way they do. We pick the brains of CEOs and high-achieving people, hoping there’s a Notion template or perfect routine or a weekly sauna/cold-plunge protocol that will make us half as diligent as they are. Maybe you’re waiting for me to give you a morning routine, or a pithy ‘I am enough’ affirmation, or some blend of power greens and blueberries that give you all the vitamins and antioxidants you need to start giving a shit.

And if any of that worked, we’d all be living our dreams. But the real answer is much less sexy.

I started by visualizing what I wanted, and I took a microscopic step in that direction. Goals and dreams are daunting, but every goal can be broken up and scaled down until it can’t be negotiated.

Psychologist Jordan Peterson is great at reframing this in a way I could understand it:

Scale back the dragon until you find one that’s conquerable.

What does this mean exactly?

The dragon is the thing that will slowly destroy you if you don’t fight back. It’s your poor eating habits. Your magnetism to the couch. Your fear of meeting new people. Your self-respect, or lack thereof. These are dragons that will grow stronger the longer you play nice with them.

Fighting back is daunting because it always demands something of you. It requires real action, the kind that reverses entropy and bends the arc of life back in your favor.

The dragon of poor eating habits can be fought through healthier meal choices or smaller portions. The dragon pulling you to the couch can be fought through exercise or cancelling a Netflix subscription. The dragon stopping you from meeting new people is fought with exposure to novel events and environments.

Our logical brains already knew this was true. And if we all could just follow our own advice, we’d all be much closer to the lives we want to live.

However, all of this is much easier said than done, hence why it’s such an ongoing struggle for so many of us.

The liberating part is knowing that you don’t need to overhaul your entire life in a day. You don’t need to flip on a dime and start working out for an hour each morning, just to get upset when the habit doesn’t stick. You’d be fighting your largest dragons before you’ve grown yourself strong enough to stand a chance.

Scaling the dragon is gauging how small you need to make the next action before you actually muster up the drive to do it, or until you feel stupid not to.

Take the idea of cleaning your room. Right now, let’s say your room is a heaping mess. Clothes, trash, random objects from your past that made their way into your home and never left. You don’t even want to think about your closet yet.

This is already overwhelming, causing us to feel paralyzed by the weight of the task. The dragon is too big. Let’s scale it. Could we just clean the trash on the dresser? Still too big? Fine.

Could we just bring a garbage bag into the room? That’s harder to negotiate- it almost feels silly not to.

So you bring the bag in. You pick up the Toblerone wrapper and the Arizona can, and maybe even the dirty socks on the floor from last week. A few minutes later, you already feel more free.

The room is lighter. You’re building momentum and strengthening the mental muscle of doing the things you don’t want to do. It’s only one step, but it’s a step forward nonetheless. You can apply this idea to nearly anything.

You don’t need to finish the whole essay, but you can open the laptop and the notebook. You don’t need to run a marathon, but you can lace up your gym shoes and go outside. The first step is the toughest, but once you take it, the next step becomes noticeably easier. Before you know it, you begin growing stronger, fighting bigger dragons, becoming the hero you always knew you could be.

MY WAY OUT: BUILDING STRUCTURE

It isn’t always glamorous, but every grand, long-term goal can only be achieved by nibbling away at it consistently. We don’t want to be relying on willpower to negotiate the decision with ourselves each day. Instead, it needs to be built into our day before we give ourselves a chance to wrestle out of it.

This is what friction is for. Friction is intention, designing in advance, that makes the hard things easier and the easy things harder. Examples I use in my own life are:

-Putting gym clothes in my work bag and choosing a gym between home and work.

-Taking the stairs at every opportunity.

-Not bringing junk food into my home.

-Cancelling Amazon Prime, McDonald’s Rewards, or anything that incentivizes decisions that aren’t in my best interest.

-Deleting social media apps from my phone for weeks at a time.

Following these rules become habits of their own, nudging you to make the best choices for your own future. This is one element of structure.

Another element is having a routine. I won’t prescribe a 5AM morning routine with a cold plunge, an acai bowl and a meditation session. I don’t do any of that. I unheroically wake up around 7 or 8 every day, shower, eat a small breakfast, pack my bag, and leave my apartment.

I’ve found the best morning routine is the one I can stick to. The point isn’t the time you wake up or what exactly you do afterwards. Instead the priority is waking at the same time each day so my biology can find its rhythm and everything starts to function like clockwork.

From there, building even a small routine creates an anchor, a foundation in your day that you can build from. If you work the same hours each day, you can tie a workout to the beginning or end of your shift, or build a writing block into your Sunday morning after pouring your coffee. This makes doing hard things so much easier, it feels like cheating. Any chance to argue with yourself is out the window - and after three consistent weeks, you won’t even want to argue.

MY WAY OUT: MEANING THROUGH RESPONSIBILITY

This idea, another I absorbed through Jordan Peterson’s work, is about understanding the strong connection between responsibility and meaning.

Most people shirk responsibility. They reframe it as a burden, an inconvenience, something that gets thrust upon them by other people. But responsibility is exactly the thing that gives life its shape. It means you’re being depended on: by your family, by your coworkers, by your future self. The moment life requires something of you, you’re required to show up to life.

The rock-bottom-to-redemption arc never starts with “feeling better” as a prerequisite to building a better life. It starts by taking on some kind of obligation you can’t simply delete without leaving a scar. Accepting a job, taking a class, adopting a dog, or finding a workout partner - all are great examples of this idea. However you slice it, the obligation forces you into a shape, and the shape forces you into motion. This motion is what eventually feels like purpose or meaning.

When you avoid responsibility, the world makes no claims on you. Nothing happens if you don’t show up. What feels like freedom is actually the problem, because a life of no claims has no shape. It can be anything, so it is nothing of substance. A lack of meaning isn’t the fundamental problem, it’s merely a symptom of a lack of commitment. Put yourself in a position that depends on you to show up, and your purpose will grow on top of it like moss on a stone.

For me, this looked like work. I was hardly working when I hit rock bottom. 15 hours a week at a job that demanded little of me. Bumping up to full-time at a different company was a huge shift, and not for the reasons I expected. It had nothing to do with the money. What changed was the fact that, for the first time in months, someone would notice if I didn’t show up, because it mattered. The hours were no longer a void to fill, but a shape to maintain and protect, because other people depended on it.

This is how meaning starts. Nobody really finds their calling or passion before they actually start. It’s built brick by brick, starting with a small, unghostable claim on your life that you decide to honor.

LOOKING BACK

The kid in the mirror didn’t know if he could ever change.

He had a shell of a plan and no guarantee any of it would work. He never believed he would take that photo of himself and immediately be airlifted from the deep chasm of his own making. He took a microscopic step, then another, stumbling and falling many times along the way.

But this chapter of my life was ended through implementing these three principles in my own way. By the summertime, I was off my medication, working a new summer job, and working out consistently, finally shedding all my dead weight by November. I re-entered college life and carried a full course load.

The climb continued one unimpressive week after another, and I was finally hitting my stride until COVID slapped the whole world in the face. Before I knew it, I was taking my classes from my parents’ house, shoved right back into the room I’d just spent half a year climbing out of. Once again, I was alone and indoors, with no imposed structure and no one depending on me.

But that was the test… I didn’t go back. Holding my life together when the world was locking down was proof the climb had been real.

The way I feel about my psychosis is hard to explain. I wouldn’t wish the experience on my worst enemy. Yet, at the same time, I feel grateful it happened.

I saw what the bottom of my own well looks like, and came out of it knowing more about myself than I ever thought I would. I could look at my worst self, shake his hand, and understand his behaviors, and catch myself if I ever start to emulate them. It was important to have suffered, but the suffering didn’t make me better - it’s what I did in spite of it.

That version of me in the mirror, soft and defeated, doesn’t exist anymore. He was shed away like a lizard’s skin as a new, better self was tirelessly built from scratch in the background.

I look back at this version of me, not in pity or disgust, but in admiration. That’s the kid who decided to build me up to what I am today. It wasn’t the founder, writer, and designer I am today, but a bloated, inexperienced 19-year old who didn’t know if everything would work out but tried anyway.

I owe him everything I have now.

You don’t need to imagine the entire path, or believe everything will work out perfectly. The belief will come as you walk it. What comes first… is taking a step.

The kid in the mirror will be just fine.

Your future self is already writing about it.

-KPG

This is the most vulnerable piece I’ve ever shared publicly.

If it resonated with you, or you find yourself in the place I was in at 19, send me a DM or email me at kyle@opalseed.com.

You don’t need to be alone on your journey to change.

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ONE

Ambitious people find clever ways of wasting pieces of their own life, all while appearing productive.

You might be the optimizer type: the one who runs through their morning routine with robotic consistency. Your sleep, diet, and supplements are meticulously tracked without fail. You have a stack of self-help books on your bookshelf, and you’ve devoured all of them. Multiple times. At some point, your preparation became the activity, not the means toward something greater.

Perhaps you’re more of the dabbler type. You’ve developed three detailed business ideas in two years, wrote a weekly newsletter that dropped after the first month, and enrolled in a Coursera class you never finished. You begin each project with conviction and effort, just to shelve it for the next.

Most often, you’re a waiter. You know what you want and you’ve known it for years, but you’re looking for the perfect conditions before you pounce on it. You’re waiting - wishing - for the right point in time to strike, the right partner to enter your life, some arbitrary dollar amount to land in the savings account.

You’ve waited so long it’s nearly become a personality trait.

Whatever example fits you, you want something great out of your life... You just don’t know what.

It feels like there’s something you haven’t figured out yet. Like something needs to happen to you before you commit and go all-in.

But the only way to begin figuring it out is to commit first.

TWO

Indecision feels neutral, almost by definition. We fail to realize that indecision is still a decision. While it isn’t a permanent one (until it is), each day spent in the world of endless options is one less day spent in commitment.

What feels like a phase of vigilance creates a phase of hoarding. Every option unpicked is a potential version of yourself you’re keeping around, but each one is collecting dust on the basement floor. You could be a founder, you could be a parent, you could be a teacher or coach, or a hundred other things.

We can be anything but not everything, especially in the modern age.

Your great-grandparents had a handful of career paths and a hometown that anchored them. Many of you reading have infinite options and could live almost anywhere.

The optionality feels like a gift, but it’s really just another box to stow away. Committing to anything becomes terrifying, and leaves us feeling like a better life was left on the table. Indecision makes us feel like we have every possible life, for the sole reason that we could potentially have any of them.

Hoarding feels like abundance from the inside.

THREE

For most people, narrowing their options down to a single focus tempts them to ask, “what do I want most?”

They ask the question for years, never fully articulating a clear answer. They journaled about it, asked their therapist, and dwelled on it at the end of long Friday nights that slowly became mornings.

If this is you, consider that this question isn’t worth answering in the first place… and maybe it can’t be. Everyone wants something, usually many things at once. Wanting is free. The life built on wants is a life of breadth and no depth; our wants change with the seasons, with age, with new problems and new opportunities.

A simple reframe flips our wanting on its head.

“What am I willing to suffer for?

What am I willing to lose in the process?”

There is no way around this. Anything worth having requires some level of suffering or loss to obtain it. If it didn’t, we’d all have it. You can start with an answer, even a vague, incomplete one, and dial it in as you learn and reassess.

Taking action on your answer is what separates the life you build from one you daydream about.

This doesn’t mean your problems will dissolve. You’ll always have problems, except now they’re just upgraded ones. The founder you admire, the parent you model after, the athlete or actress you always wanted to emulate, they all have their own problems. However, through getting clear on their aspirations, they have the luxury of choosing their problems, rather than being dealt a random hand.

In short, pick a path you’ll be proud you suffered for.

FOUR

If you call yourself ambitious, it’s likely that you prefer to be certain before you commit. You wait for some level of confidence before commitment. The order is backwards: you can’t see the end of the path before walking it. The path has no trailhead- you find it by wandering into an untrodden forest and looking back at your footprints.

The path is created through the act of walking it, not before.

Clarity is only found in the middle of the forest.

If you don’t know what’s worth pursuing, exploration is the right move. This looks different for everyone. It’s working jobs across multiple industries to see where you fit, dating different people before knowing who to marry, touring apartments before signing a lease, or even trying multiple hobbies before honing one into a craft.

But exploration has a shelf life of its own. The inverse problem can be created by exploring forever. It starts as a phase and becomes a lifestyle (see: ‘the dabbler’). A lifetime spent exploring without commitment, vast breadth with no depth, just becomes another form of hiding. After exploring, the only remaining move is to pick the strongest option with the knowledge you have, and double down.

Daunting as it sounds, the right path can only be found in hindsight.

FIVE

The cost of commitment isn’t just suffering, but the mourning of all the maybe-lives you’ll never live. Every choice has an opportunity cost: all the choices you could have picked, but didn’t. It feels dismal at first, but it’s important to remember that our finite time is what makes our choices feel meaningful.

The magic comes from the sacrifice, the removal of alternatives. Even the word itself, “decide”, derives from the Latin root caedere, meaning, “to kill” or “cut off”- the same suffix as pesticide or homicide.

Every decision will offer its own costs and rewards. Early in life, the things we work toward are “freedom to” decisions: freedom to begin adulthood and live the way we choose, freedom to pursue a career in something we’re interested in, freedom to afford the luxuries of a good life. Later on, we work toward “freedom from” decisions: freedom from the 9-5, freedom from financial stress, freedom from doing things we don’t want to do.

Indecision gives you nothing but the freedom of possibility, but even this freedom is fleeting.

Another strong razor of choice-making is the “regret-minimization framework”. It sounds a bit academic upfront, but it’s a simple, forward-thinking strategy that aims for building an optimal life.

When faced with a fork in the road, imagine yourself at 80 years old, looking back. Which path would you most regret not taking? The regret of action usually fades, but the regret of inaction often compounds.

Your older, wiser self has already made the call…it’s up to current-you to listen.

SIX

You might believe you’re afraid of making the wrong choice, but much of our fear comes from the idea of choosing at all. As long as your life remains unchosen, you can cling to the belief that you could’ve been anything: the founder, the author, the athlete, the grandparent, the leader.

All of it, in potential only.

Refusing to commit protects the fantasy that you could’ve been extraordinary at any one thing IF ONLY you had chosen it. The moment you pick, the fantasy ends. You find out what you’re actually made of, not what you could have been in theory.

The thought itself can be terrifying: the heartless execution of every possible version of yourself, except one.

The fear brings hesitation, and you revert to old habits. You optimize, dabble, wait, confusing inaction for patience.

The years fall away so the ‘maybe-lives’ can stay.

Until you realize the cost of indecision wasn’t a delayed start. It was your life itself.

You keep your options open and you let them all expire, one by one. A wasted life was never the by-product of a “slightly-less-optimal” decision, but the failure to make a decision at all.

SEVEN

I was a waiter in my own life for longer than I’d like to admit. All through college I wanted to start a business in something- at least as a side gig. In the meantime, I journaled for three years straight (since October 2022) before I ever shared a word of it. I was deferring projects day after day before realizing there would be no perfect moment to start.

What cracked the pattern was betting the house on something I was willing to suffer for, with no way to wriggle out of it. Launching my business with a few hundred bucks, zero contacts, no formal business knowledge, and a stubborn delusion that I’ll figure it out as I go. I’m still going and I don’t know how it ends, but I know I’d rather find out myself than be left wondering.

The theme that each of my essays seem to point back to is the brevity of life, and how we only have one to live. And we can’t fully grasp what makes it worth living if we aren’t willing to take a chance.

Jean-Paul Sartre phrased it better than I ever could:

“I have led a toothless life. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on- and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.”

Be sure to leave some bite marks.

—KPG

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It feels like chasing a horsefly around your kitchen with a swatter.

You can’t seem to get the thought out of your head… that looming question I rudely posited in your unchallenged psyche last week:

“If the person who built this life could see how you’re spending it, what would you need to change before they’d forgive you?”

You want to interject. Argue that it’s not a question worth answering, move on, and forget it was ever asked. You earned this life, and no one is going to convince you otherwise.

But there are two sides to this coin… you might have a life you worked incredibly hard for, but was it the one you truly wanted?

The thought returns during a Monday commute that feels more like a rude re-entry back into reality. Your same general routine, bedazzled with new tasks that always feel like they were meant for someone else. The days feel inseparable from any other as you drag toward a paycheck that smooths it all over- just long enough to do it again. You celebrate the weekend, rinse and repeat.

A moment of introspection pulls you out of the endless grind.

I’m living the life others could only dream of, you say to yourself.

But is it my dream?

You hear a record scratch. Something’s missing. You realize society’s desires are programmed so deeply into us, they feel like they’re our own - go to school, go to more school, get a 9 to 5, work 40 hours a week for 40 years, retire - when really, much of it a broader societal wish thrust upon us to shape us into the workers we were meant to be. It’s the extra weight we’re “supposed” to carry because “that’s just how life is”. But is it?

You’ve been climbing so long you never stopped to ask if you were scaling the right mountain.

In the past, you’ve wanted things before without knowing the next step to take. During our schooling, there was always someone or something you could refer to: a parent to ask, a course syllabus to follow, or a job posting to apply for. Each one a rung on an imaginary ladder built by others. You’d figure out what was expected and just do it.

But now? It’s just you and the question. And this time, your desire to change doesn’t mean you already know how to.

The path ahead is uncharted- nothing like the one you’re familiar with.

ACT ONE - THE FIRST CLIMB

The first climb wasn’t easy by any means.

It wasn’t always enjoyable either, but it was clearly defined. Someone had already carved the path: earn good grades, score high on your tests, join the right clubs, get into a good college.

College brought transcripts and internships, the right pieces to land the job you thought you wanted, with the salary to match.

Every milestone came with a number so you knew exactly where you stood compared to others. You knew who was “ahead” of you and what the next rung of the ladder looked like, because someone had already climbed it.

Guardrails were added to both sides of the path. You could fail an exam or bomb an interview without having an existential crisis. You couldn’t get lost, and the guardrails made sure of it. Drift too far and you’d be pulled back in by a parent, professor, rubric, or deadline. This system was built to keep you moving in the right direction, even on the days when it didn’t feel worth it.

“Success” was predefined. There was no questioning whether you were climbing the right mountain… it was the mountain. The peak was pointed out so early, it felt like the only way.

And for many of us, it was. We had the map, we just had to keep walking.

The lack of early options isn’t a complaint. The work was challenging. The successes felt rewarding, and they built the person you are today. You earned every one of them. There were no handouts.

Except for the direction. That was free.

You never bore the burden of inventing the path. You never had to defend it, or even imagine an alternative. Your high school days didn’t leave you wide awake at night in existential dread, wondering if it’ll all be worthwhile; the question was internally answered with an exuberant “yes!” …in a volume that slowly withered as years passed.

You didn’t realize what this map had given you until it was already gone.

ACT TWO - THE NEXT ASCENT

It always felt like there’d be a finish line.

The route you had traveled for so long, that seemed to have a destination, was no more than a paved sidewalk that devolved into a footpath, before opening into an infinite, untrodden desert.

There were mini finish lines, sure: the diploma, the job offer, the yearly reviews, a rewarding project completion at work. But there’s no letter in the mail stating: “Congrats! You’ve reached the end of that part of life where someone tells you what to do. Your turn!”

The message settles in over the course of years, from emotionless weekdays to unexplained restlessness to even a midlife (or quarter-life) crisis. There’s an odd sense that you’re missing something important but you don’t know what.

To some it feels like burnout, or a mental rut, or just general anxiety, but you can’t seem to shake it.

This is what I call the Now What? crisis. And I see it happening everywhere.

You structured a life around your goals. You spent years, maybe decades tackling them. Finally, you accomplished them. You expected to feel something grandiose, or at least something more than this, but the hard-earned win falls flat. The crisis sets in, a byproduct of the silence that follows the end of the assigned path.

This is the valley been the two mountains.

The first instinct is to do what’s always worked in your favor. Calibrate your proverbial boat, and just paddle harder. Pack the calendar, add side projects, build in that morning routine you heard about from a Huberman podcast. You go back to the grind because grinding is what got you here.

But the first mountain is behind us.

This is the next ascent. Effort alone won’t work this time.

The first climb was much like a rowboat on a river. The path was marked, the boundaries defined, the goal was set. You didn’t need to know where you’re going because the river already did. Effort was everything.

Your next ascent is like paddling a kayak in the middle of the ocean. There are no other kayaks to compare yourself to; each boat has its own lighthouse to reach. It’s up to you to find yours. You can paddle in any direction and the water doesn’t care. The skills that got you down the river still matter, but it’s not enough anymore. Effort without a destination is just pointless motion. An exhausting way of standing still.

There’s a vague feeling that you’re stuck, unsure of where to move next. What feels like a lack of discipline is actually analysis paralysis: you could go anywhere, so you go nowhere.

This is what separates the second climb from the first. It’s less about the level of difficulty (the first mountain is tough enough) and more about the flavor. The first climb asked “how hard will you work?” while the next ascent asks, “what life do you want to live?” The climb is now multi-dimensional. Steady motion and direction. Concentrated effort and purpose.

The next ascent still rewards effort, but through the lens of authorship. Your first climb chased external rewards: a comfortable salary, an important job title, maybe some LinkedIn clout. The next ascent follows something deeper: purpose, intention, and self-discovery.

It doesn’t mean you quit your day job tomorrow and go write poetry in a forest, or leave your family to take up a life of wakesurfing. The second ascent is simply an individual pursuit that requires you to become something more than you already are.

You can even ascend both mountains - the corporate life and the personally fulfilling path - in parallel. The second path doesn’t necessitate you make money from it either. Your options are infinite. As long as it feels true to you, and frees you to express parts of yourself previously repressed through corporate monotony, it’s the right fit. Plus, you can always pivot your interests with time as you better understand yourself.

Regardless of what you choose, beginning the next ascent is one of the most important things you will ever do for yourself.

You spent decades learning to answer questions. Now, it’s on you to write them.

ACT THREE - THE TRADES

Authorship feels noble, but it’s not without its costs. Your next ascent demands more than just effort and intention; it prompts you to make trades you’ve never had to make before. The same trades the first mountain handled for you before you knew to look out for them.

Three of them are the ones that stop most people before they ever start climbing. Each one cuts directly through the topics I write about most: developing into your “best self”, crafting an intentional life, and building your dreams.

The next ascent takes those pillars and performs open-heart surgery on them. Something has to go before something better can take its place.

1. Internal discovery replaces external applause.

Pursuing a purpose that’s truly yours means you stop wondering what is going to impress or please other people. This also means no one will applaud your achievements the way they used to, and you’ll often find yourself wishing for some kind of validation that never arrives.

During the first climb, you knew when you were winning because someone told you. It looked like a letter grade, a handshake at your graduation, or a raise at work. The applause was so regular you never noticed how much you relied on it.

Your next ascent won’t applaud you… it might not even watch. Your parents won’t understand, your boss won’t care, and the scoreboard doesn’t exist. Every win is personal and private- even if the public knew of your internal wins, they wouldn’t really get it.

Most people can’t make this trade, so they never do. They feel the silence and mistake it for failure, and then search for something that makes the audience clap for them once again. This looks like titles, status, shiny objects- things that only feel worth pursuing because everyone else will see them.

This is often described as “keeping up with the Joneses”, pursuing external rewards when comparison brings a sense of lack. When validation comes from inside, you can move forward in peace, knowing you’re discovering your unprogrammed self by pursuing something worth suffering for.

2. Self-imposed rules replace someone else’s.

Your freedom is heavier than it looks.

You’ve lived your entire life wishing someone would stop telling you what to do. Now no one is, and you don’t know what to do with yourself.

Turns out, freedom doesn’t feel the way you thought it would. It feels like the kayak in the ocean: every direction is available but no choice is convincing enough to commit to. You’ve been taught that people who do nothing are lazy, so you confuse your paralysis with sloth and feel guilty for your own inaction.

In reality, you’re experiencing withdrawal symptoms from a life where the next step was always templated for you.

The only way to elegantly carry freedom is to build your own rules- your own proverbial guardrails. You have to think them through, so following them leads somewhere you want to go. Here are a few examples of rules I’ve created for myself:

-I should be in bed by 10pm every night. Maybe 11 or 12 on weekends.

-I write every Tuesday morning, no excuses. This time is blocked off and it is sacred. No one can take it from me.

-I post every Sunday without fail.

-I don’t spend more than $100 per week on things I don’t absolutely need. Coffee, clothes, snacks, alcohol, Uber rides, etc., all fall in this bucket.

-I update my books (accounting) every other Friday.

-My partner and I clean the apartment top to bottom every Sunday.

Without rules, freedom is just drift. You float in the ocean, waiting for the next tide to take you somewhere you didn’t choose.

The first climb provided structure that slowly started to become a cage. Your next ascent doesn’t remove the cage, but it asks you to reshape it as a tool instead of a restraint.

3. Owned failure replaces shared blame.

When you pursue your own path, be it a project, side hustle, or just a creative hobby you’ve been sitting on, you are the author. Sometimes, you’ll accomplish something incredibly challenging and nobody will notice. Or worse, you’ll fail in public and leave yourself open to criticism.

On the first climb, failure was shared. If the path you followed didn’t work out, you could blame it on a shitty economy, a careless professor, or a boss that held you back. There was always something else to point at, and this made the failure more tolerable. Our shame can be deflected.

On your next ascent, the failures are yours and yours alone. You decided what was worth doing, so you set your aim and put in the work. When the outcome falls short, that failure is on you. The universe doesn’t owe you a thing, and when you screw up, you eat the cost.

Tough.

And that’s a reason most people refuse their next ascent. They might be capable, but they’d rather remain in a position where accountability is softened.

But ownership is a two-way street. You can’t claim success on a mountain you never climbed. Those who take complete accountability for their own life have decided that owned failure was a price worth paying to achieve owned success.

ACT FOUR - THE BLANK PAGE

The rest of our life, no matter how thoughtfully planned, is nothing more than a blank page. Our future is unwritten- for now.

The page doesn’t stay blank. You can refuse to pick up the pen, waiting for the perfect phrase to strike you. You can wait for a year, or you can wait for ten, but the page doesn’t wait for you to be ready.

Something is always writing.

Fail to pick up the pen and your employer will- filling it with deadlines, meetings, and Q2 goals that build their dreams instead of yours.

Fail to pick up the pen and social media starts to write it for you, using algorithms that fit you like a fingerprint- steeping you into the endless opinions of others until you can’t remember which ideas were even yours to begin with, endless consumption at the sacrifice of your own inner voice.

Fail to pick up the pen and notice your color-coded calendar fill with obligations you never agreed to, because our busyness protects us from facing our highest purpose.

A life on autopilot still looks like a complete life from the outside, but that’s exactly what makes it dangerous. You might just look up one day and notice that entire years passed you by, pages filled out with handwriting that isn’t yours.

The younger version of you didn’t fight that first climb to let the rest of their story get ghostwritten. They built the desk, adjusted the lighting, and laid out the pen and paper exactly where you’d find it. But the rest of the work is up to you.

Your next ascent begins on a blank page. It’s the only page you get.

If you don’t write the story,

someone else will.

-KPG

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You’ve made it.

Congrats. Seriously.

You have a job that feels important, and you’re paid well enough that panic isn’t the first instinct when the rent is due. The fridge is full of quality food… and frankly, you wouldn’t expect otherwise.

Imagine going back in time and describing this life to your younger self: the version of you crammed into a shared dorm room, surviving on ramen, oatmeal, and cheap beer; the one who pushed through four hours of sleep and still made it to 8 A.M. lectures. There was no certainty that any of it would work out, but hell, there was hope. If you described your life today to that version of you, they’d assume you were describing a dream.

And it is. You’re living a life they could only dream about.

Your steady paycheck covers all your needs and more. Your weekends are for relaxing, not studying for exams or finishing assignments. On a good weekend, you might even check out a new restaurant without needing to double-check the bank account first. Money, status, stability… all those things that used to keep you up at night… they’ve been handled.

But there are finer details, things no one would know unless you told them.

This Monday feels exactly the same as last Monday. Which was the same as the one before it.

The weeks themselves feel interchangeable. You commute to work at the same time every day, same route (except now there’s a lane closure on the interstate, so you enter the freeway two exits farther than you used to). You sit in the same squeaky chair that rocks backward a little more than you’d like it to, while spending the afternoon answering emails that should’ve been real conversations- if they even mattered at all. Lunches are largely the same, perhaps on Friday you treat yourself with some takeout and eat at your desk so you can hurry out of the office before rush hour hits.

You like Fridays because you can feel your chest loosening, your body fileld with a mix of youthful enthusiasm and corporate exhaustion. Saturday feels like a long exhale, a sigh of relief- before Sunday afternoon swings back around, and the weight starts to build again. It doesn’t always feel like dread, but it’s not exactly invigorating, either.

Your life isn’t bad by any measure. You almost feel guilty for complaining about any of it. This is what makes it so hard to talk about.

Everything is fine. Just fine.

But somewhere between the time you pursued your dreams and the time you lived them, the color drained out… a slow fade that you could hardly notice until everything had become another shade of gray. Now it’s here, and you can’t remember the last time anything made you spring out of bed, kept you awake in excitement, or made you sit up straighter. You can’t remember the last time you were truly building something instead of just maintaining it.

You didn’t earn this.

Not in the way you think, anyway. This life you’re living - complete with its stability, status, responsibility, and shiny objects - isn’t something you built. It was built by someone else.

There was a high-school kid with heavy purple eyelids, heart pounding from a mix of strong coffee and borderline insomnia, who stayed up until 3 o’clock in the morning polishing an essay that was ready to submit the day before. Who finished Wednesday night practice and showered in the locker room so they could go straight their closing shift, knowing they’d be still be starting tomorrow’s morning at 6AM. Who studied what the popular kids wore and always rehearsed what they’d say before approaching them, just to feel like they could belong. Who took the ACT and did well enough to stop. Then took it again, then a third time, because “good enough” wasn’t a part of their vocabulary.

There was the college student who pulled all-nighters on a semi-regular basis because they refused to put their name behind anything they weren’t proud of. Who always chose the toughest courses and kept showing up when half the class dropped out before midterms. Who heard their best friends heading out to the bars on a Thursday night, then closed the door, and went back to work.

And there was a young adult, maybe early twenties, who went through all of this just to find themselves broke, lonely, and exhausted after graduation. Who ate cheap food in a tiny, stuffy apartment but still woke up each day with this half-delusional belief that all of this is building toward something more.

They built this house. You’re the one who moved in.

You think this person went through hell so you could rest, mistaking a salary and a routine for a finish line. But the younger you was building a launchpad. You took the launchpad and put a couch on it. You decorated it the way you liked and made it comfortable. Then you sat down.

There’s a subtle sense of lack that lives inside you. It surfaces in the soft moments between the louder ones: when you drive home alone at night after a long day, or catch yourself daydreaming during a weekly meeting that could’ve been an email. That vague, nagging sense that something is missing. How the life you live, while nice on paper, feels somewhat loose… in the same way a stranger’s jacket can cover you and keep you warm, though it wasn’t sewn to fit you.

But you refuse to entertain this feeling. The moment it arises, a second voice kicks in:

“What’s the matter with you? You have an amazing life. There are people who would kill to have what you have. You should be more grateful.”

You hope the feeling goes away, but instead, it doubles. You’re not merely dissatisfied; you feel guilty for feeling dissatisfied. You feel bad about feeling bad, folding the feeling in half so it’s small enough to shove into your back pocket and pretend it doesn’t exist.

You go back to your routine.

You believe the guilt is protecting your virtues; it’s protecting the couch. The unease of a ‘good enough’ life feels like a moral failing instead of what it really is: proof that the part of you who built this life isn’t done building.

Wanting more out of life is far from a lack of gratitude. What’s far more ungrateful is wasting the life that someone else fought so hard to build for you.

You feel empty inside because there’s nothing new to strive for. If there is another rung to climb, it hardly feels worth reaching. At least, not in the same way a diploma or a job offer felt- back when you’d never tasted it before.

Think back to the times you felt most alive. It wasn’t when things were easy. You were in the middle of something- building, testing, failing, adjusting, trying again. School, clubs, and sports always had a “next thing” to chase: the tournament, the playoffs, the internship, the graduation. Every endeavor had a finish line that promised more than anything that came before it.

Then in the early days of your career, there was an element of survival. Showing up and proving yourself. A reason to get up in the morning and keep moving forward. It felt like more than just existing. You were becoming.

Your purpose was baked into the effort. Slowly, the constant effort became more exhausting and less rewarding. As effort slowed to a crawl, purpose dissolved with it. The drive inside you never died; it’s pacing because you haven’t given it anywhere to go. For years, there was always a defined finish line with clear guardrails. Now, you could go anywhere, so you go nowhere.

Picture that version of you who built all this. The one who worked for every inch of what you have, and had every reason to quit, but didn’t.

Picture the version of you that exists now. Forget the job title, the comfy salary, the new car, the clean home, anything else external. Just imagine your typical weekday, the hours between waking up and falling asleep. Think of how you spend them, how you feel as the day passes, and what you’ve been committing yourself to.

Look that younger version of you in the eye.

Would they recognize you?

Could they still see the person they were fighting so hard to become?

Would they still find it worthwhile to push through every sleepless night, every rejection, every weak moment, for a life their future self wouldn’t attempt to make remarkable?

-

I offer no framework, no 3-step plan, no solutions. Just a question:

If the person who built this life could see how you’re spending it, what would you need to change before they’d forgive you?

…

They didn’t fight for this.

They fought for what comes next.

-KPG

If this essay struck a chord with you for any reason, I encourage you to think about why. Remember that acknowledgement is the first step to change, and I’m ready to help you make the next step toward a life that suits you best.

It is never too late to change.

Send me a DM, message me at kyle@opalseed.com, or just reply if you received this over email. Let’s earn the life you dream of, together.

See you next week.

A breakthrough moment can happen with a single word, at any time… even during a mundane dinner conversation.

Imagine yourself in a red booth at a neighborhood diner, sitting across from two strangers. Each is sipping those glasses of water the waitress hands out to keep you pacified until you order a ‘real’ drink.

Neither stranger feels compelled to start the conversation, so you break the silence by asking them both, “how’s life going?”

They both give the same answer. “I’m good.”

Your two tablemates each have the same calmness to their voices. A steady tone that comes off as a subtle satisfaction.

From your perspective, they appear identical.

Beneath the surface, one of them is thriving; they’re grounded and full of purpose, moving their lives forward with steady clarity. The other has a soul that’s slowly dying inside them, and they hardly even realize it.

Your acquaintances’ names are Contentment and Complacency.

Their parents could’ve picked better baby names, but as it turns out, they each live up to their respective titles.

Better yet, they’re twins. They each wear the same face, use the same language, and express the same emotions… but one of them operates from a place of power, while the other is settling into a dangerous stasis.

You caught the distance between them in a single word.

Contentment says, “I’m grateful for what I have, and I’m still reaching for what’s next.”

Complacency says, “I’m grateful for what I have, so I don’t need to reach for what’s next.”

It feels like a game of semantics at first: and vs. so. The difference seems insignificant, but it means everything, like a hairline fracture in a dam. You could walk past it without even blinking, but that crack wields the power to collapse its own structure. This kind of crack should cause panic- if anyone ever stopped to notice it.

What looks like peace in one person looks like paralysis in the other.

Contentment built “enough” as a floor: the stable ground they stood on as they slowly built something great. Complacency built a ceiling: an invisible lid they’re living under, mistaking a limiting belief for a protective roof.

The difference isn’t how you feel moment to moment, but the direction you’re headed.

A Stoic Paradox

I’ve noticed a general myth that inner peace and outer ambition can’t coexist in one person at the same time. We’re afraid that wanting more for our lives will get us labelled as “ungrateful”. That our striving will convey that we’re “not at peace”. It’s a comfortable lie- and really just complacency in disguise.

About a month ago, I wrote about the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, one of my go-to historical role models. The guy wasn’t running a small business or starting a little side project. He ruled the world’s largest empire for twenty years, while under constant threat of plague, war, and societal collapse. And through it all, he would journal about gratitude, impermanence, and the importance of doing the right thing. He was deeply content, no matter how you slice it, yet he also showed relentless discipline and constant evolution.

Seneca - another Stoic born just generations earlier - was exiled to Corsica in the year 41 AD. He was stripped of everything: status, influence, and purpose. He returned to Rome eight years later, advising an emperor while producing more philosophical work than most writers produce in a lifetime. He argued that life isn’t all that short- we just waste most of it. Then he proved it by refusing to waste a single day of his own.

These two men weren’t conflicted; they serve as proof that contentment and personal growth are actually partners, not opposites. You don’t have to choose one at the expense of the other- in fact, doing so might be the most dangerous thing you can do to yourself.

Believing peace requires you to stop growing is to hand your life to the throne of complacency and call it wisdom.

Contentment shouldn’t force you to want less, or feel guilty for wanting more. It actually frees you to find your wants with a sense of clarity, instead of some vague mix of anxiety and desperation. Complacency takes the same sense of calm, but uses it as justification for standing still.

The two traits express themselves the same way... for very different reasons.

A Point of Introspection

Knowing the difference intellectually is the easy part. The tough part is knowing which twin you’ve been sitting with, and for how long.

1. The Five-Year Mirror.

If absolutely nothing in your daily life changed over the next five years, how would you feel about it? Would you be silently hoping for circumstances to change, or do you imagine your current life being enough?

The irony here is that the content person wants change. A content person can sit with themselves and ask the question honestly. Growth is part of their plan, not a threat to their inner peace. The complacent person is afraid to even ask, because they sense that the answer might demand something of them.

2. The Numbing Agent.

In a world so endlessly pacified by screens and stimulus, can your peace survive without distraction? Imagine quitting all habits of scrolling, binge-watching, and mindless snacking. Even the innocent habits- like refreshing your email during your leisure time, or filling your schedule with busy-work that keeps your wheels spinning but moves you nowhere.

What’s left? How do you feel?

A content person doesn’t need constant noise just to keep existing. If your version of peace requires screens, sounds, and other forms of numbing to maintain, it might be a false version of peace. Put bluntly, it’s a short-term avoidance to the long-term reality around you.

When’s the last time you truly felt bored, or under-stimulated?

As a challenge, try to find that feeling again. Bring a notepad. See what thoughts arise.

3. The Deathbed Question.

I use this morbid thought exercise nearly once a week, as a thin razor for decision-making.

Imagine yourself, on a hospital bed or in your bedroom, surrounded by loved ones, sharing stories about your life as your voice grows hoarse and your consciousness slowly fades.

When you meet your final day and look back at your life, will you be glad you lived your days the way you are now? Will you be glad you took that risk? Whether it’s moving to a new city or country, starting a passion project, having that tough conversation, trying a new activity, any example works.

Or more commonly, will you be wishing you had taken the risk?

Bronnie Ware spent eight years working in palliative care, assisting with terminally-ill patients and recording the regrets of the dying. Her book, the Top Five Regrets of the Dying, offers a sense of wisdom that many people realize too late. Here are the top five:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish I had let myself be happier.

There was not a single documented regret about a patient wishing they were more comfortable. Nobody regretted being at peace, but many regretted settling for something that looked like peace (but wasn’t).

If you noticed an internal shift after answering these questions, good. You’re noticing the hairline fracture in the dam before it causes a slow, silent catastrophe.

Contentment as a Spectrum

Up to this point, we’ve framed complacency and contentment as if the issue were binary, two separate ideas.

The reality is, you’re a little bit of both, all the time.

Where you stand on this spectrum will shift every day, and in different directions across different parts of your life.

Let’s say your health is totally dialed in. You train every day, eat intentionally, and wake up feeling great. That’s contentment.

Meanwhile, your career feels like it’s flatlined over the last two years, and you’ve convinced yourself that the unwavering stability is satisfying. That’s complacency.

Or, you’ve been saving money every month, putting it toward retirement, and actively finding ways to be more diligent with your finances.

Contentment.

To save money, you’ve passed up invitations to amazing concerts, cancelled dinners at new restaurants, and dismissed opportunities to meet new people as a strategy to save time and money. You tell yourself it’s not necessary or worth it, as your long-term relationships decay invisibly.

Complacency.

Start FARCHing

So once you’ve spotted the cracks where complacency crept in, what can you do about it?

Each year, my partner and I set goals across five domains, using an acronym we made up, FARCH (or CHARF, if your heart desires). It represents the buckets we aim to grow in to keep our lives well-rounded: Finance, Activities, Relationships, Career, and Health.

We set two goals for each: a growth goal (I want to achieve) and a maintenance goal (I won’t let this slip).

Of course, we have priorities, and we can’t always be great at everything. We have seasons where we focus on one thing, then shift focus as we approach another. For example, my partner and I are focused on our careers at the moment. I’m building a small business while she works long hours, studying to become a licensed architect. This is our priority while the Seattle weather stays gloomy and rainy. Everything else is on the backburner for now.

When the sun comes back out and the weather warms up, we plan to dial back our working hours to place more focus on exercise, family, and hobbies, but at the moment, these buckets are in maintenance mode.

Maintaining areas of your life is a way of saying “I’m grateful for what I already have.” Focusing one area for growth says “And I’m not done yet.”

That single line keeps complacency from sneaking in through the back door.

The Down Escalator

We often depict life as a staircase or ladder, where you start at the bottom and climb your way up- not without the blood, sweat, tears, and toil along the way.

The reality is more complex than this. You’re not climbing a staircase. It’s more akin to climbing a downward escalator.

Every day, entropy pulls you backward. If you don’t use your skills, they start to dull. Alienate your friends, and your relationships start to fade away. Stop exercising and your body weakens. When you decide to stop expanding, your ambitions shrink to fit the mold.

Standing still doesn’t keep you in place. It moves you backward: slowly, gently. You never feel it though; the escalator is smooth and the music is pleasant enough. It’s even more subtle when everyone around you is standing still too.

Complacency sits on a descending step and calls it ground. Contentment knows the escalator exists and keeps climbing anyway- not from fear or panic, but out of a bold decision to refuse letting the default life win out.

You don’t have to sprint, but you owe it to yourself to keep climbing.

This one life is all you get.

Conclusion

So here you are, back at the booth.

Contentment and Complacency.

Physically adjacent, cosmetically identical. Psychologically miles apart.

Both twins still sit across that diner table. Only one of them is headed somewhere worth going.

…

You’ve been sitting across from yourself this entire time.

The check is on the table. It’s time to pick who you’re leaving with.

Choose wisely.

-KPG

You didn’t choose this life.

Or maybe you did, one time, way back when. When you picked the profession you thought would be your ticket to the good life. Or when you took the job that aligned with the ways you wanted to grow. Or when you moved to a new city to give yourself a fresh start, a new chapter for your life.

But that choice was made a long time ago. Somewhere, between then and now, you slowly stopped choosing without realizing it. Every decision that worked out became locked into a routine, and that hand-picked routine became the default. One piece at a time, each default quietly removed a choice from your day, until there were no choices left to make.

Without noticing, you optimized yourself out of your own life.

Every now and then, something whispers at you. It happens in the shower, or on a rainy late commute home from work, or in the silent moments before you fall asleep, you hear yourself asking:

Is this really it?

You try your best to push it down and dismiss the tugging of your own heart. You remind yourself you’re doing just fine. But that word, fine, is the trap. It’s autopilot in its purest form. When someone asks you how you’re doing, you shoot back: “good!”, or “busy!”, or “tired!” without really checking what you’re responding to.

It’s far from a true report on how you feel.

You’re running on a script.

In Living Beige

Autopilot is inherently misleading.

It doesn’t feel like failure - or weakness - or giving up - or self-disgust.

It feels…normal. Like a typical Monday or Tuesday.

But this is exactly what makes it so dangerous: you can be productive, fully employed, socially connected, and constantly busy, while sleepwalking through your own life.

Take a look at your morning, which might go a bit like this:

Your alarm goes off. You hit snooze. You unlock your phone before your ass leaves the mattress. You spend the youngest minutes of your day checking on pointless notifications as your brain slowly boots up.

Now you’re running behind, so you spend the next chunk of your day rushing through the morning- shower, get dressed, skip breakfast, commute to work. No part of this power-up routine involved a single conscious decision; it was all muscle memory.

Now look at the rest of your day. The same lunches, the same conversations at work. The same route home, every time, because Google Maps said it’s the fastest option. Then you get home and make the same dinners, before you watch the same tv shows at the same times.

It’s likely that the routine exists simply because choosing differently doesn’t feel like energy worth spending.

Or worse, you forget you even have a choice to begin with.

The rebuttal here is that “this is just having good habits”. Agree to disagree. Good habits are tools you build into your day, on purpose, that serve you each time you complete them. Autopilot happens when the habits stop serving you, and start replacing you instead.

Brushing your teeth is a habit. Living your entire day without making a single deliberate choice is autopilot.

One feels like mastery over your domain.

The other feels like an unconscious surrender.

The Science of Autopilot

A Harvard study titled: “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind ” tracked 2,250 people of all ages, over the course of several months- collecting over a quarter-million data points in the process.

They found a few troubling insights. To start, participants’ minds were wandering nearly 47% of the time. While their minds were wandering, they were generally less happy than when they focused on the task at hand. Lastly, the study suggested that mind wandering was actually the cause of unhappiness, not just the symptom of it.

In other words, your mental drifting isn’t just a byproduct of a dull life- it’s the very thing that makes your life feel dull.

You have goals too, the ones you keep telling yourself you’ll get to soon: get in shape, start that project, stop doing this or that, make the change. Some of these stories will play in the background for months or years before the goal is either started, or dropped completely.

One trap that limits you is the way you tell others how you want to change before actually doing anything. Your brain treats this little announcement as an accomplishment, and the nods of approval from the ones listening only serve to trick you further.

The satisfaction of declaring the goal quietly drains the motivation to actually pursue it. Your constant “I’m going to…” is telling your brain, “I did.” And this little trick lets you off the hook for another week, then another, then another.

These moments compound into feelings you don’t really have names for. It doesn’t feel like depression, or a state of crisis. It feels more like nothing. An emotional beige. Not awful enough to completely blow up your own life and hit the factory reset, but not enjoyable enough to really call it living, either.

This feeling is something rarely talked about. It’s not the pain of a bad life, but the quiet aching of a life not fully lived. It’s a strange sense of grief, finally having everything you were supposed to want, the things that were supposed to make everything better… and yet you feel nothing.

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, called this the Existential Vacuum: A state of inner emptiness that shows up when life starts to feel meaningless; when it looks fine from the outside but feels hollow from within. This is merely one symptom of a life run on autopilot.

There’s a word for what happens as these feelings go unchallenged long enough. When your own numbness settles in so deep that you stop recognizing it. When feelings start to become facts, or “just the way life is.”

Complacency.

Autopilot creates the conditions, while complacency steps in to make sure you never leave. The former rocks you to sleep, while the latter convinces you there’s nothing to wake up to. This creates a dangerous concoction where the main side effect is the loss of months, years, or even decades.

But the cost of autopilot isn’t measured in time lost.

It’s measured in the delta between the person you are against the person you could have been.

The conversations you never had. The risks you never took. A richer, more fulfilling life that was always within arm’s reach but never grasped.

A lack of willpower isn’t the issue. What you need, instead, is a reason and a redesign.

You gave up agency over your daily choices in the name of efficiency. You told yourself this was normal, this is what it feels like to mature, or “this is just how life works.”

In many ways, each choice that becomes the default is a little piece of you that disappears.

The most important choice you have left to make,

Is whether you’ll start choosing again.

—KPG

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My teeth didn’t hurt because I recently stopped grinding them down in the middle of the night. I got myself ready at my own pace, then began walking out the door, in search of a coffee shop.

I took my headphones out and listened to birds chirping, cars passing, wind rushing past my eardrums. The trees had noticeably more color and detail, as if my morning vitamins were laced with something- or maybe the man upstairs had upgraded my vision to 4K overnight.

I entered the coffee shop and sat down to write. I’d look up four hours later, wondering where the time went.

I never forced myself to stay- I forgot about leaving.

This is what the system feels like when it starts to work.

Mornings can be slow and unrushed. Breaks can be long and restorative. Work and life seem to mesh together in a way that feels more like alignment than compromise. I can choose what to pursue and what to leave behind. I can show up for the morning with a plan, while allowing space for serendipity in the afternoon. I combine my skills with the things I care about, and can use it to help people and make the world ever-so-slightly better off.

While I’m beginning to see consistent income from my efforts, I’d do all this for free. That’s how I knew something was working for me.

It’s a nice place to be, but it took me years to get here- and several broken systems along the way.

Parts I and II provided the pieces:

I. Using willpower as a backup generator, not as a primary fuel source.

II. Using the pull to draw you forward, then using friction to clear the runway and block the off-ramps.

These principles are helpful to understand, but knowing them simply isn’t enough.

We also need to understand how the system falls apart, and how to fix it. From there, we can actually build it into our lives through intention and action.

The Three Modes of Failure

Imagine willpower, purpose, and friction as three legs of a stool. These three modes of failure can happen once any one leg starts to crumble.

-

Mode 1: Passionate Frustration. (High Purpose + High Friction)

You want it so badly, you can almost taste it. But the conditions around you make everything feel impossible.

I felt this way last summer, at the tail end of working my last job. I knew I wanted to create something of my own, and the vision was clear. However, I was consistently working 50 hours a week, and by evening I would show up at my apartment with nothing left in the tank. I’d sit down to create and stare at a blank screen, my mind feeling fried. More often, I couldn’t muster up the courage to start creating at all.

My purpose was alive, but my routine was pinning it to the ground.

The trap: You blame your lack of willpower. You push harder, but pushing yourself into a brick wall only leaves you scraped and bruised.

The fix: Remove one obstacle to start. Just one. Delete one app that is sucking your time. Reduce the decisions and distractions you face on a daily basis. Making your path even 1% clearer is enough to make progress, so long as you keep going.

-

Mode 2: Comfortable Drift. (Low Purpose + Low Friction)

When everything is easy and nothing is hard, nothing seems to matter.

When I was 19, I spent six months in this state. After a stint in a mental institution and a string of bad decisions, I moved back home with my parents, and even considered dropping out of college. I had no pressure to achieve anything, and no expectations set for myself. I’d stay up late, wake up late, doom-scroll for hours, watch excessive TV, eat garbage, and see no one but my family.

It didn’t feel like suffering at the time. But in hindsight, I was evaporating. Two months in, I hardly recognized myself. I gained twenty pounds, lost my self-confidence, and seemed to have no direction for my future.

The trap: You mistake comfort for contentment, but the absence of pain isn’t the presence of meaning.

The fix: Tomorrow morning, before you check your phone, do one thing that interests you for just 5 minutes. Read a page, write a sentence, stretch, move, meditate, draw, anything. The size doesn’t matter, but the direction does. Do this each day until you’ve established a foundation, then build momentum.

-

Mode 3: Burnout (Low Purpose + High Willpower)

You’re pushing hard. You have been for a long time. You’re disciplined. You’ve been “doing everything right”.

And yet, you feel nothing.

This was how I felt in my former job, before I even had the thought I should (or could) build a business. Before I realized I belonged somewhere else.

I was working hard. I hit deadlines, finished my tasks, and got my subcontracts out when they were needed. I waited to feel satisfaction that never arrived.

The friction was manageable, but the destination was misguided. I was climbing a ladder that was leaning against the wrong wall.

The trap: It feels like the answer is more willpower, better systems, longer hours, harder work. You’re optimizing for the life you thought you wanted.

The fix: Write down one goal you’re currently chasing. Ask yourself: whose voice first told me to want this? Would I keep pursuing this if no one knew I ever completed it? If your dream isn’t yours, give yourself permission to let it go.

The Sweet Spot

It’s a clear purpose, and a clear path, knowing there’s willpower in reserve for when it matters.

This isn’t about eliminating all effort, but instead directing it upstream, and building a life that doesn’t fight you at every turn.

My morning commute is a meditative walk, not a stress-inducing battle through freeway traffic to start the day. I stopped losing my hair because I’m no longer constantly thinking about whether I’ll lose my job. My teeth aren’t grinding each other down to stumps while I sleep. And the world seems to have more color than it used to, in the most literal sense.

Recalling the order from Part II: fix friction first, clarify purpose second, build willpower last. Aligning these three has ceased my need to be superhuman. The system carries me instead.

A good-day doesn’t revolve around productivity hacks or white-knuckling through your to-do list. It’s more about waking up with a calm rush of excitement about the day, viewing work as a “get to” thing instead of a “have to”, and ending the day peacefully without a sense of dread for tomorrow.

I still have hard days, of course- I shouldn’t expect otherwise. What’s different is how the hard days don’t derail me like they used to, because my defaults are set in my favor.

This is the sweet spot.

It’s not a life without effort, but a life where your efforts finally make sense.

You’re Not Broken

If you caught a glimpse of yourself in any of these failure modes, that’s okay. It’s expected, actually.

It doesn’t mean you’re weak, or lazy. You’ve been running on a faulty system with a few missing pieces.

Discipline matters, but it’s overrated. Life design is underrated; hardly anyone talks about it.

The people who seem to have infinite willpower have actually built systems that don’t require it much willpower all. They have a pull that makes their effort feel meaningful, and designed their life in a way that allocates friction to the right places- making progress not only natural, but inevitable.

You can build this too, but you won’t find it by grinding harder and “hustling”. We need to diagnose the problem, calmly and honestly. Which piece is missing? Fix that first, forget the rest for now.

And when you do make a change (even a tiny one), let yourself feel it. Just a moment of recognition: “I did that”.

Emotions create habits faster than logic and rationale ever will.

You Have One Life

I think about the version of me, sitting in that dusty parking lot less than a year ago. Engine off, visible tears on my face, scolding myself for being unable to push through like everyone else.

That person wasn’t as weak as he thought. He was running on backup power for months, wondering why the lights kept flickering.

You have one life. Don’t keep engaging in battles you never needed to fight. Stop tolerating the friction you could remove today. Quit chasing goals that were never yours to begin with.

Start building a life that pulls you forward.

Your Move

Part I prompted you to see willpower differently.

Part II taught you the other fuel sources.

Part III is asking you to commit.

Which failure mode are you in? Say it out loud if you need to. Then make one change to your system. Make it tiny. The size of the change doesn’t matter- the continuous act of changing does.

Anchor these changes to the things you already do. After I brush my teeth, I’ll drink a glass of water. Once I sit down at my desk, I’ll turn my phone off. An anchor helps the change become automatic, not an act of will.

Try to notice when you do something that feels oriented in the direction of the person you wish to be. You’re not fixing yourself as much as you are rewiring your system in your favor. This is worth a moment of recognition.

Find the pull, manage the friction, then build the life you were meant to build.

You were never broken. You were just running on backup fuel.

It’s time to turn the main power on.

-KPG

This is Part III of a 3-part series. Part I was posted two Sundays ago. Part II was posted last Sunday.

This is not an academic essay. It’s meant to help you take action in your own life.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting my newsletter. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to get the most value out of my work.

This newsletter is a side project to my business, opalseed.com. Feel free to engage with my work here.

Nearly three dozen of my high school friends found themselves back in the town they each grew up in, each running as far as they could to raise money for a local fundraiser.

This summer created an emotional stir in nearly everyone. We had just passed the height of the COVID pandemic, and the death of George Floyd had ignited political movements across the United States. Seeing a world on fire, we all wanted to use the little power we had to bring people together for a good cause.

Somewhere around mile 34, my energy was fading. I had never run half that many miles in a single day before. My legs felt like weights, each step requiring conscious effort to complete. My body offered me every excuse to quit.

Then, something shifted. A second wind. One step, then another.

The finishing effort didn’t beg for my willpower. I wasn’t gritting my way through. I felt like I was being pulled- toward a cause that mattered, toward a version of myself who follows through on his promises.

This is the first force: Your ‘Pull’.

In Part One, I explained willpower as a backup generator: essential for emergencies, a great last-resort, but disastrous as a primary power source. If you find yourself exhausting your backup fuel every day, your issue stems beyond willpower.

Put differently, you have an infrastructure problem.

-

So if willpower isn’t the engine, then what is?

The engine consists of two primary forces most people never learn how to use, let alone maximize.

One force pulls you toward your dreams, the other force clears the path.

Pull: The First Force

When you’re pulled toward something, effort doesn’t disappear- it just transforms. Instead of pushing a proverbial boulder uphill, you feel drawn to the top, and the boulder tags along for the ride. The climb is still real, but gravity becomes a vehicle for growth, rather than a burden to carry.

The people who seem to have endless discipline aren’t pushing any harder than you. Instead, they’re pulled toward something you can’t see.

When I imagine willpower, I imagine the effort I put into my former job. I hit my deadlines, I participated in every meeting, and sent contracts out in time. Through it all, I felt nothing. No satisfaction or pride, just short-lived relief that the task was finished, only to be replaced by the weight of the next one.

You’ve felt this before. Maybe it’s how you feel right now. You go through the motions, hit your targets, say the right things to the right people, and none of it lands.

This feels like burnout. In reality, it’s your gut telling you that you’re burning the wrong fuel.

You’re still the same person, same work ethic. Completely different experience. Except the difference was an alignment problem, not discipline.

Finding Your Pull

The “find your purpose” industry has become enormous, convincing people worldwide that their purpose must move mountains if it truly matters. We’re meant to believe that, unless you’re curing cancer or solving world hunger, you haven’t found your thing yet.

As you might’ve guessed, this is a trap. The illusion of necessary grandeur is an avoidance strategy in disguise. It gives the sense that your purpose has to be world-changing. Worse yet, if you haven’t found this calling, it feels like a free pass to wait patiently until your perfect purpose finally finds you, paired with a feeling of regret when that day never comes.

Purpose doesn’t require scale. Raising one child well is a great example of purpose. The drive to make your neighborhood more beautiful creates purpose. Helping a few people think about their lives differently is a purpose.

True purpose, or ‘pull’ requires sacrifice. It’s more than just doing something you love. Purpose calls for you to find something noble worth suffering for.

-

I found my pull by accident.

I’ve loved reading since I was a little kid, reading Dr. Seuss books before I knew how to use a toilet.

Reading has taught me so much, and I rekindled this love for books as I started my adult life. In college, I remember admiring authors who wrote their life’s work, shared it with the world, and created an independent, creative lifestyle off of their success.

I started writing just a few months ago - not because I had everything figured out, but because I loved the idea of being a writer - even if it didn’t pay the bills.

I would pour hours into a piece of writing that I believed in, and after that, I’d have this writing forever. Better yet, I could share it with the world, and help give others another perspective into the subjects I cared deeply about.

Once I started, I realized it was the piece of my life I’d been missing.

Jump to today, and at least two mornings a week, I sit down at a coffee shop, open a laptop, and look up hours later wondering where the time went. When I finish the week’s blog, I make progress on the book I’m drafting. I normally don’t have to push myself to write; I have to push myself to stop.

This has often been described as a “flow state” but it doesn’t means there’s an absence of effort. Rather it’s effort that works with you, not against you.

When it comes to writing, my purpose is simple: give people the nudge they need to become better versions of themselves, and start building their dreams, and slowly forge their own best lives.

I don’t need to reach millions of people to feel purpose. I just want to reach that version of me who feels trapped in their own life: hiding in their car, wondering why they can’t push through, failing to realize they’re burning the wrong fuel.

For the time being, this is my pull. It took me a while to find it, and it’s because I was looking in all the wrong places.

-

The issue isn’t that we lack the ability to find our purpose, but that we try to manufacture it from the outside in. We aim for goals, lifestyles, and status that sound impressive to others, announce them publicly, and build systems that force ourselves into compliance.

And we still wonder why we struggle to get out of bed in the morning.

If you’re constantly searching for reasons to give a shit, the dream may not be yours. If you continue pursuing the idea when no one’s watching, it probably is.

Purpose can’t be found by thinking harder. It’s impossible to ‘force’ it out of yourself, which is really just willpower creeping in through the back door.

You find your purpose by paying attention.

Take a close look at the things you do when you’re alone. Bring yourself to notice the moments where time seems to evaporate. Try asking: “what would I do with my time if I knew I’d never impress anyone else?”

The answers are much quieter and less glamorous than you’d expect.

Friction: The Second Force

The pull provides direction, but direction isn’t enough if the path is blocked.

This is where friction comes in.

Friction is an invisible force that guides much of our behavior. It’s the abstract architecture of our environment, making behaviors easier or harder to perform without your conscious decision.

It’s why you eat whatever’s in the fridge, check your phone when it buzzes in your pocket, and skip the gym when the weather turns sour.

When we talk about change, we love to jam on about motivation and discipline, while lifestyle design takes a backseat.

Every environment makes an argument for how you should live. Make sure yours is arguing on your behalf.

How Friction Changed My Life

Before I lived in Seattle, I earned my Master’s Degree in Lawrence, Kansas.

It was a college town, where 1 in 3 people were students. The beer was cheap, and there were over a dozen bars closer to my apartment than the nearest grocery store or gym. The roads were wide, straight, and flat: built for driving, not walking.

Fast food and liquor stores dotted the three busiest roads in town. Nature existed, but it was elsewhere; it was a destination you planned for, not something you could weave into your day.

I truly loved my time there. But for me, the comfort became dangerous. Nothing in my environment demanded urgency. Many times, I found myself drifting, and it would’ve been easy to lose years before realizing it.

I didn’t notice how much this environment was shaping me until I left.

Two years ago, I moved to Seattle, into a walkable neighborhood between green parks, glistening lakes, and people who were building their dreams. In a moment, it felt like everything shifted.

Nearly every errand can be done by walking. I drive so seldom, I often start my car on the weekends so the battery doesn’t die. My partner and I order sushi every Tuesday, and the man who prepares it knows us both by name. At this point, he’s become a tiny part of our lives.

I believe I’m happier because I live in a place where new things are always happening. I’m healthier because my diet is cleaner, and I live miles away from the nearest drive thru. I’m more active because I can complete all my errands on foot. I’ve become more productive since I don’t have to fight my environment. Instead, it carries me.

Back in Kansas, I did my best to live in spite of my environment. In Seattle, the environment does half the work. This didn’t require willpower on my end. I changed my surroundings, and the behaviors followed suit.

Tiny Changes Still Create Results

Moving halfway across the country is a massive change. Most people are not in a position to make a shift this dramatic, and they may not even want to. Moving cities is an easy example to understand because the changes are so evident. However, most friction adjustments are embarrassingly small. That’s why they’re often overlooked.

One shift that changed my mornings was putting my phone in another room. To turn the alarm off each morning, I have to get out of bed. If I’m out of bed, I might as well start my day. That momentary decision has shaped every morning since. No willpower required. My environment made the decision for me.

You don’t need more willpower, you just need to build a life that forces you to make fewer decisions.

I stopped bringing junk food home. If I truly want it, I have to leave my apartment, but that’s usually enough friction to stop me in my tracks.

I disconnect the TV when I’m not using it. This tiny barrier makes the decision a conscious one. I have to plug it back in, find the remote, and turn it on. This is enough time to ask myself, “do I really want to watch anything, or is there something I’m avoiding?”

I keep my journal on my desk, and I’ve written in it consistently for over three years. I like to delete my social media apps (yes, even Substack), forcing me to redownload them if I actually want to use them. I keep gym clothes in my workbag, so I can go straight there without stopping home.

None of these behaviors are heroic; they’re simply design choices. They make preferred behaviors easier and destructive behaviors harder.

Designing your environment is discipline applied upstream. For example, if you make a choice to remove any instance of junk food before the craving hits, you’re still doing the work- except this time, it’s done well in advance.

Taking the easy route doesn’t always make you weaker. Sometimes, it’s just the smarter option.

The System

Here’s how the three forces work together, and why neglecting any one of them will eventually break you.

Willpower (Push): This force is useful for emergencies and finishing tasks that are difficult and unpleasant, but necessary. However, it’s not sustainable as a daily operating system.

Purpose (Pull): Provides direction, makes effort feel meaningful. Without it, you can still move fast, but you won’t go anywhere that actually matters to you.

Friction (Environment): Makes your desired path easier or harder regardless of motivation or purpose. It’s often the place of highest leverage if you’re starting out.

I’ve found it helps to think of them in a specific order.

1. Fix friction. Reduce obstacles between you and the life you want to live. Increase the obstacles between you and your distractions.

2. Clarify your purpose. Make sure you’re moving towards a dream that feels like yours.

3. Build willpower last. Use it strategically for specific moments that truly need it.

If friction is high, you quickly burn through willpower and purpose feels distant.

If purpose is absent, low friction will make you comfortable, but not directed.

If you keep friction low, and purpose clear, you can keep moving even when willpower is weak.

I think back to who I was as a student in Kansas: wanting to become successful, but fighting my environment at every turn.

I remember who I was at my former job: constantly exhausted, always pushing, going somewhere I didn’t want to go.

Both versions of me had the willpower, but neither version had the systems make willpower obsolete.

These forces all work in tandem. Neglect one, and the others will compensate…until they can’t.

Where This Leaves Us

The system works best when all three forces are aligned. It breaks when any of them is missing, or pointing in the wrong direction.

Next week, I’ll break down exactly how the system fails, and what to do when you catch yourself in each trap.

But don’t wait until then to act.

Tonight, create one piece of friction that makes a bad habit tougher to act on. Delete one app. Unplug your TV. Move your junk food out of sight.

It won’t change your life overnight, but it will prove you can win the battles you never needed to fight. Every vote counts.

Tune in next week: The System (Why You’re Not Broken).

We understand the pull and the friction.

Now, we need a system that makes it all work in our favor.

Let’s finish rebuilding the engine.

-KPG

This is Part II of a 3-part series. Part I was posted last Sunday. Part III will be posted next Sunday.

This is not an academic essay. It’s meant to help you take action in your own life.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting my newsletter. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to get the most value out of my work.

This newsletter is a side project to my business, opalseed.com. Feel free to engage with my work here.

Subscribe now

When I first got the job, I was thrilled.

Just before graduating with my Master’s in 2024, I landed a role as a Project Engineer for a high-end general contractor in Seattle, Washington. The company was building some of the most architecturally-bespoke houses in the country. It was a respected title, and a solid paycheck- the type of job someone would nod at approvingly if you mentioned it at a party.

My family was proud of me. Hell, I was proud of me. This, I convinced myself, was the right path. It checked every box I thought I was supposed to check. Ten days after graduating, I threw my entire life into my car, said farewell to my home in Kansas, and ventured out west.

I made it to Washington at the end of May, and started the shiny new job two weeks later. For the first few months, I was satisfied with my choice, and knew the general discomfort of growing into this role was normal.

“This is just the learning curve.”

“Everyone feels this way at first.”

“I should be grateful.”

The learning curve never really ended. My discomfort morphed, but didn’t fade. I felt guilty for wishing I were doing something else.

Some weeks were tougher than others. I developed a habit of silently sitting in my car, engine off, tearing up from my growing frustration. It felt needed after making another $5,000 mistake, or facing a problem beyond my understanding, or just getting through another day of vague unease and feelings of inadequacy.

I felt borderline unstable at times, and subdued it by reminding myself, “This is what hard feels like. Just keep pushing. Don’t give up.”

Fifty hours a week was typical. I was exhausted by tasks that didn’t match the work I truly wanted to do. It slowly became clear- every day, I was building someone else’s dream while mine collected dust.

I desperately wanted to start something of my own. I wanted to own my schedule, and use my skills to create the change I truly cared about. In the meantime, I was writing contracts and reviewing drawings for details I’d forget about the moment they ended.

The pressure was almost entirely internal. No one stood over me demanding more. I did that to myself.

My situation grew worse. I walked onto the job site one November morning, finding my manager’s desk completely cleared out. He was fired. I foresaw no warning, no reason to believe he wasn’t fit for the job.

I cried again that day- partly because it all felt unfair, partly because I enjoyed working with him, and partly because I feared I’d be next.

I stayed nine more months anyway. At the time, my savings account often hit three digits as I aggressively paid off the car I had bought prior- simply to meet the job qualifications. Here I was, 1,800 miles from anywhere I’d lived before, feeling trapped inside a life I had intentionally built.

Then, in September of 2025, I found myself laid off. Suddenly, the future became an open canvas. I wasn’t starting over- I was starting fresh. Time and space opened up for me to take a step back and think about the things I really wanted.

When I started building something that was actually mine, everything flipped. I started designing again, meeting new people, and finding new ways to bring value into the world. I’d look up and realize hours had passed me by. I wasn’t watching the clock, or counting down to the end of anything. I was just… in it.

In my former job, I often worried I was losing my willpower with age. Creating great work, something that was once a source of enjoyment to me, had become a chore.

Turns out, it was a warning from my gut that I was running in the wrong direction. I wasn’t weak-minded, I wasn’t lazy, I wasn’t broken.

I was simply burning the wrong fuel. And I’m not the only one.

The Lie, The Science, The Cost.

Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that willpower was the master virtue- the thing that separates the winners from the losers.

The grind became another religion. Busyness is now worn as a badge of honor. The success stories we celebrate are always about the people who succeed despite everything, as if their suffering was the source of admiration.

The implication is brutal:

If you can’t white-knuckle your way through something you hate, you’re weak.

The problem is, the entire frame is wrong.

-

For decades, psychologist Roy Baumeister’s theory of “ego depletion” dominated how we think about willpower.

The theory suggests self-control is a limited resource. Every decision drains the tank. By the end of the day, you’re running on fumes- explaining why the cookies in the office kitchen look much more tempting at 5PM than they did at 9AM.

This theory became dogma. The productivity books, corporate workshops, and self-help gurus all repeated this message like scripture.

Years later, 23 labs of researchers tried replicating these studies on 2,000+ participants. Most failed. The effect was far smaller than expected- sometimes, it was non-existent.

The science that shaped a generation of advice had suddenly found itself on shaky ground.

-

So, what do we actually know?

It’s still being contested, but here’s my take:

The idea of whether willpower depletes or not is beside the point.

The entire debate is struggling to find the correct answer to the wrong question.

Yes, willpower is real, and we can use it, but it was never meant to be the main engine of our lives. We’re arguing over whether a backup generator has a 10-gallon tank or a 15-gallon tank, while trying to run a building on it permanently.

And yet, most people rely on their backup generators all too often.

We white-knuckle through jobs we hate, relationships that drain us, goals we inherited from someone else. We use self-control to force ourselves toward things we don’t actually want, then we wonder why it never gets easier.

It doesn’t get easier when we have to fight against our instincts for every decision, every day. We often wake up and immediately face conflict against our own impulses. We often go to bed having won these small battles while losing the larger war.

What feels like discipline is merely exhaustion cosplaying as virtue.

Each time you use willpower to force yourself toward a goal you don’t truly want, you don’t build discipline- you build resentment. Resentment towards your goals, towards yourself, towards life. Towards the entire idea of trying at all.

I believe this because I lived it for nine months. Nine months of knowing I was wrong, and pushing through anyway, telling myself the discomfort only meant I was growing. Pain is weakness leaving the body, right? Sometimes, yes. In this case, pain was a signal that my dreams were slowly dying in a life that wasn’t mine.

Willpower As a Backup Generator

This reframe changed everything for me.

Backup generators, like the ones mentioned earlier, are installed in buildings where steady power is critical. They kick in when the power goes out.

Be it a thunderstorm, a grid failure, or a pure accident, these generators will take on the job- but only when they’re needed. The backups keep the lights on while the main power source is diagnosed and restored. They keep critical systems running and buy us time.

But nobody runs a building on backup power permanently. The generator isn’t designed for it. It’s loud, expensive, inefficient, and will fail if pushed to its limits. Worse yet, the backup generator doesn’t typically have its own backup. If the backup dies, you’re toast.

That’s willpower.

It’s essential. There will be moments where nothing else will get you through. But if you’re running on backup power every single day, it’s not a willpower problem, it’s an infrastructure problem.

The building isn’t broken, and the generator works fine, but the main power is out- and nobody else is coming to fix it.

The Right Question

Most people, when they struggle, ask: “how can I find more willpower?” This is the wrong question.

The right question is: “Why do I need so much willpower in the first place?”

If you need heroic discipline just to get through an average Tuesday, something may be fundamentally wrong with the design of your life. If you find yourself constantly fighting tiny battles just to do the things you supposedly want to do, maybe you don’t actually want them. Or, perhaps you do really want them, but you’ve created an environment that makes these decisions unnecessarily hard.

Either way, the answer isn’t to develop superhuman control. The answer is to figure out why the main power is out. Once this is understood, it’s easier to look differently at the people whose traits you used to envy.

Think about someone in your life who seems to have infinite discipline. They wake up on a schedule, stay consistent, and continually make progress. We look at these people and think: “I could never have that kind of willpower.”

You’re probably wrong about what you’re seeing. Most of these people aren’t running on willpower. They’ve built systems where their desired behavior becomes the default. They’ve aligned their days with the things they genuinely want, and removed the friction that makes the same tasks feel so hard for everyone else.

These people are no more disciplined than you. They just need less of it, because they’ve designed a life that doesn’t fight them at every turn.

The gap between you and them isn’t about willpower. The difference lies in the systems you’ve built- how you make the hard things easier, and the easy things harder.

The Other Two Forces

So if willpower is merely a backup generator we’ve been using as a primary engine, then what actually works?

If willpower feels like a push, there are two other forces most people never learn to use.

One pulls you forward.

The other clears the path ahead.

If you’ve ever lost track of time doing something out of pure enjoyment, that’s the first force. I felt this when I started designing and writing again. Hours would disappear in minutes. I didn’t push myself. Instead, I was being pulled.

If you’ve ever deleted an addicting app and watched your screen time dwindle, or started journaling more because you kept the notebook in plain sight, that’s the second force. You didn’t need discipline. You either built or removed friction, and your behaviors shifted organically.

In BEYOND WILLPOWER, PART II, I’ll break down both forces, and provide strategies to implement these ideas in your own life.

Let’s rebuild the engine together.

-KPG

This is Part I of a 3-part series. Part II will be posted March 22nd, 2026. Part III will be posted March 29th, 2026.

This is not an academic essay. It’s meant to help you take action in your own life. The links provided are not sources, but avenues to explore that help provide context to my ideas.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting my newsletter. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to get the most value out of my work.

This newsletter is a side project to my business, opalseed.com. Feel free to engage with my work here.

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The writing was unedited and unpolished. He had no “audience demographic” to cater to, or reputation to protect. He was just one leader, arguing with his own weaknesses by candlelight, talking himself into becoming a better person before overcoming his next battle, plague, or political betrayal.

His work was never cleaned up into a final draft, or wrapped together with a cute title. He simply wrote, night after night, year after year, reminding himself of the same lessons through new context and experiences.

That man was Marcus Aurelius. His private notebooks would later become one of the most influential philosophical texts in history.

Welcome to BIOS OPSIS. I’ll be using this format on special occasions.

Bios Opsis is derived from Greek, meaning “view of life”- said otherwise, a personal perspective. This series will detail how people across history viewed their own existence- using the rules, lessons, or wisdom they lived by as they were striving to fulfill their own potential.

I will center each post around one person or group, using their ideas to dissect the philosophy they lived by, and how their actions put preaching into practice.

This is less of a celebration to a public persona, but rather an excavation into the way these people navigated their daily lives.

Better yet, I will do my best to distill these teachings into a strategy or mindset you can use to navigate your own life, week to week.

A War Fought in Private

Marcus Aurelius didn’t name his notebook Meditations. That title came long after, from people who found his writings and turned it into something that could be shared. His original title was Ta Eis Heauton, meaning, “To Himself”.

This framing is important, because his writing was never meant to lecture others on virtue. He was one flawed leader reminding himself not to lose his temper, grow petty, or waste the day. The constant repetition tells us he struggled with these ideas, and wrote about the advice he needed as much as anyone.

Here are the principles he aimed to live by, and how you can use them.

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You Control Your Judgments, Not Your Circumstances

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

-Meditations, 8.47

Marcus spent years on the Danube frontier, which marked the edge of his empire. He fought Germanic tribes in brutal conditions. Disease swept through his camps. His most trusted general betrayed him. His wife’s fidelity was publicly questioned. He couldn’t control any of this.

What he could control, however, was how he let these issues affect his mind, and his future.

You only have so much energy to spend across your days on Earth. Spending an unnecessary level of energy on things you can’t change is a choice, though not a useful one. Marcus constantly returned to this idea as his life continued testing his values.

If you read my previous essay regarding the “Locus Of Control”, Marcus was working with this concept two millennia ago.

Your power lies in the space between stimulus and response.

Marcus didn’t invent circumstances that favored him- instead, he trained himself to play the cards he was dealt, without losing his center.

This week, when something frustrates you, ask yourself: can I change this?

If yes, take the first step to acting on it, no matter how small. If not, aim to redirect your frustration toward something useful to you. The middle ground, complaining about things we can’t change, is where our agency goes to die.

Memento Mori: Use Death as Your Filter

“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”

-Meditations, 7.56

The Antonine Plague killed 5 to 10 million people during Marcus’s reign. It’s likely his co-emperor, Lucius Verus, died from this Plague as well. Death wasn’t an abstract concept in his life. It was right in front of him: in his camps, across his cities, and even within his own family. Of the fourteen children Marcus raised with his wife, only five outlived him.

Most people avoid thinking about death entirely. Our leader, instead, leaned into it, using it as a lens. If this year might be your last (at the time, this wasn’t just a fun thought exercise), what actually deserves your time?

Are you nursing a grudge? Rehearsing an argument in your head? Working a job you hate? Spending time with people who don’t bring you joy?

Marcus taught himself urgency without panic. The shortness of life didn’t cause him to retreat from life, but to engage with it more intentionally. There’s only so much time to do the things that matter to us, so it’s important to take life seriously, even if that means seriously enjoying it.

This week, pick something you’ve been putting off for months, maybe years.

Example are starting a new project, having that tough conversation, quitting a habit, or making a major life change. Ask yourself what you’d do if you had a year left to live. You likely have many more years ahead of you, but those years are never guaranteed.

The Work Is the Point

“Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness.”

-Meditations, 2.5

Marcus Aurelius did not want to be emperor, nor did he think he was suited for it. The position was thrust upon him, and he accepted it with grace, showing up day after day for nearly twenty years.

There’s a quote popularized by Abraham Lincoln: “whatever you are, be a good one.” Marcus lived this principle 1,700 years prior. He accepted that this was his role, and he committed to doing it well.

His journals overflow with self-correction. He didn’t write these notes to be remembered as a great leader- he simply wanted to finish each day as a better version of himself than he had been the day before. This was his grand project, and it goes beyond legacy or achievement. Instead, he simply aimed upwards, and his legacy as ‘the last of the Five Good Emperors‘ fell downstream from his inner work.

This week, I encourage you to stop waiting for motivation to strike. Don’t wait until the task you’re doing feels meaningful. Do the next thing in front of you, and do it well.

Oftentimes, the meaning comes because from the doing, not before it.

Conclusion

Marcus Aurelius wasn’t born wise. He privately wrote himself into wisdom, word by word, and followed it with action. The fact that we can read his ideas today is a miraculous accident of history.

What’s not an accident, however, are the principles he embodied. These principles were tested against plague, war, betrayal, and decades of responsibility.

They worked for a man who governed an empire.

They can work for you as you govern your Tuesday.

-KPG

Notes: The links scattered across the document are not sources necessarily, just doors to open if you’re interested in learning more about any specific topic.

All quotes are from Gregory Hays’s translation of Meditations. Historical details are drawn from Britannica and Wikipedia.

This is not an academic essay. It’s meant to help you take action in your own life.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting my newsletter. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to my writing to get the most value from my work.

This newsletter is a side project to my business, opalseed.com. Feel free to engage with my work here.

The Fundamental Error

Many of us wake up immediately alarmed by factors we cannot directly control. This might be anything from the opinions of others, to the weather forecast, to some horrific event unfolding on the news.

We spend our energy trying to control whether our family approves of our life choices, if that company will send us a job offer, or what our friends really think about us.

These are the wars you’ve chosen for yourself, and you’re losing all of them, because they were never yours to win in the first place.

Why not?

You’re fighting an external battle in a game that’s won internally.

The people you admire who charge forward, build meaningful lives, and create the change they wish to see, aren’t any smarter than you. They might not even work harder than you do.

What they do have over you, however, is a fundamentally different understanding of where their agency lives. They’ve stopped trying to control the world around them.

Instead, they mastered the world within them.

This mastery boils down to a simple concept: control the things within your power to control. Your discipline, choices, responses to setbacks, and daily habits, is the territory you have the right to govern.

However, it’s likely that your internal world remains undisciplined, unexplored, and unorganized. You’re too busy working to change external circumstances that you’ve abandoned the place where all change is truly possible. This hands your power to the unpredictable vicissitudes of the world, leaving you surprised to find yourself utterly powerless.

If this is how many people think, it’s worth our while to investigate the psychology behind these thought patterns.

We blame the external world because, well, it’s the easy route. It’s comforting.

We get to avoid the responsibility of taking action, because the problem doesn’t have to be ours to begin with. If we can blame our problems on the economy, the household we grew up in, or the opportunities we’ve received, or our age, it’s not our fault, right?

Well, you might be right. You might have been dealt a bad hand or experienced a setback few other people have had to go through. I will never discredit that. However, it’s important to ask yourself, “is my belief system useful to myself, and the world? “

This external focus you carry isn’t just ineffective. It’s a shield, protecting you from the truth that you could start where you’re at, make different choices right now, and have the chance of changing the entire trajectory of your future.

First, I’ll help define what the internal locus of control is and isn’t.

Next, I’ll explain how to take meaningful action in strengthening it.

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Clearing the Fog: The Internal Locus of Control

I will aim to be precise when explaining the internal locus, as there is dangerous confusion around what the internal locus requires of you. This section will serve to chip away at the misconceptions surrounding the topic.

1. This concept does not permit you to deny reality.

Having an internal locus of control doesn’t mean we pretend external factors don’t exist. This would be delusional, by definition.

Yes, circumstances matter. Your starting point is still your starting point. It’s completely possible you could’ve benefitted from kinder parents, or an environment with more opportunities, or a better metabolism. I’m acknowledging every barrier fully.

What is not determined by your circumstance, however, is the way you respond to it.

You can encounter a barrier and say “this barrier exists- I can’t do anything about it”, or you can say “this barrier exists- what can I do to minimize it, avoid it, or overcome it?”

One assessment leads to paralysis, and one leads to action. Distinguish what you can control and what you can’t, then act accordingly.

You can spend your life defeated by your circumstances, or you can act on your life in spite of them, using the few tools you do have. Both are choices, only one moves you forward.

2. This concept will not make you omnipotent.

You can influence outcomes, but you can’t control them.

It’s possible to work harder than anyone else and still fail to get the promotion. You can be an exceptional partner and get dumped without warning. You can eat perfectly, exercise every day, and still end up getting sick. The truth is unappealing, but it’s better to face it head-on than turn a blind eye.

However, there are things you absolutely do control.

The effort you exert, your attitude, your choices, your persistence, and your willingness to learn- these all serve to influence outcomes by controlling the inputs and ensuring the outputs.

It’s never guaranteed you’ll build a successful business, but you can nearly guarantee you can give it one focused hour of work each day.

It’s not guaranteed you’ll get the shiny new job, but you can study the company, write down questions, and bring your best self to the table when you interview.

It can be helpful to study outcomes, but don’t obsess over it. You can’t ensure success, but you can work so hard its seems unreasonable to fail.

Monitor outcomes, but focus on outputs.

3. This concept is not about victim blaming.

You don’t need to blame yourself for what has happened to you. Your genetics, your childhood, traumatic events, discrimination you’ve faced, is not your fault in the slightest.

With this said, you are completely responsible for what you do about it. The past is set in stone, but the future is unwritten.

Blame looks backward and assigns action. Responsibility looks forward and assigns action. Blaming yourself is paralyzing. Taking responsibility empowers you with agency.

If you can understand this distinction deeply, our worldview pivots. We stop asking “who’s fault is this?” and instead ask “what can I do about it?”

Asking this question consistently creates agency and drives progress.

Where Your Power Lives

There are many territories of life that no one else will govern for you.

-Your ability to show up every day and exert meaningful effort.

-Your response to setbacks.

-What you choose to learn and how you intend to grow.

-How you allocate your time and attention.

-The standards you set for yourself.

-The narrative you decide to construct about your life.

-Whether you take action or stay paralyzed.

These appear as abstract concepts, but they’re levers you can pull every day.

In your career, you can’t control whether you’ll get hired or whether your boss appreciates you- but you have full control over your attitude, skill development, the quality of your work, and if you show up prepared.

In relationships, you can’t control whether or not someone loves you back, or how your partner speaks of you when you’re not around- but you do control what it means to show up for another person, and how you maintain your standards for the way you wish to be treated.

In health, you can’t control your genetics, but you can control what you put into your body, how you treat your mind, and how much energy you exert each day.

In finance, you can’t control the economy or the price of eggs, but you find new ways to spend and save your money to facilitate the most growth in your life.

Focus on the things in your power, and your power will drive you forward.

Try writing two lists:

-The life circumstances outside your control

-The circumstances within your control.

Take list one and store it somewhere safe, where you won’t look at it. Act on list two every day, without exception, for 90 days.

After 90 days, rewrite list one, then compare it to the original. Analyze the ways your narrative has changed.

The Path Forward

Stop waiting for the world to change in your favor. Quit seeking permission to escape your circumstances.

Cease wasting your time fighting battles you’ll never win.

Turn your attention inward to your responses, choices, and actions. I know this is easier said than done, and I still struggle to fully embrace these ideas in my own life.

It’s much harder to take agency than to assign blame, but choosing to own your life is the only pathway that leads anywhere worth going.

There are no practice rounds in this life. The world won’t bless you with a royal flush, so don’t delay the process by wishing for it. Play the cards you’re dealt in the best way possible, and you might just be rewarded with a better hand.

Your potential won’t wait forever.

You decide your next move.

-KPG

If you’ve taken action from my writing thus far, you’re already using your awareness to transition between understanding your goals and undertaking them.

You’re making changes, testing what works, and cutting out what doesn’t push you ahead.

If this isn’t you, the essay you’re reading now won’t convince you to start… I’ve shared multiple pieces on that topic already.

Instead, I’ll be explaining an unorthodox, no-frills approach to tackle this new life you’ve started, when effort alone doesn’t feel like enough.

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Actions have a way of exposing the subtle details of your life you don’t want to see. It reveals where your resistance builds up, and where friction slows you down.

You can be doing all the right things while constantly negotiating with yourself. You can be moving forward with a chamber of excuses loaded in your back pocket, ready to fire as soon as the going gets tough.

This is where I see others get stuck when attempting a long-term goal. It’s not that they always quit, but they justify, explain, and soften the standard enough to remain comfortable.

Thinking like a victim doesn’t feel dramatic, or damaging.

Actually, it feels oddly reasonable.

Excuses hide behind thin veils of logic, timing, and circumstances, saying “this isn’t the right time”, for this reason or that.

The problem with this outlook is that the problem isn’t your responsibility, so the solution isn’t yours either.

-

Life Ownership isn’t centered around ‘trying harder’, or even aiming higher. It’s more about the way you posture yourself as you take on the world, and the future.

It marks the difference between reacting to your life and redirecting it.

When ownership is total, your progress builds faster. When it’s partial, it feels as though your hard-won effort is leaking through excuse-shaped holes in your psyche.

The three pillars I’ll present to you here are not novel, and they aren’t the least bit motivational. They’re old, and uncomfortable, but effective. It strips away the noise and replaces it with clarity.

These principles don’t care how you feel. Rather, it centers on how you think, and what you do as a result.

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Rule 1: Claim, Don’t Blame.

You have a past.

It’s beautiful, and it’s messy.

It was hard-earned, and it was terrifying at the same time.

It’s more than likely you’ve gone through a horrible experience or two: a tough breakup with the person you thought you’d spend forever with. The divorce of your parents when you were young. Harassment and abuse at school, work, or home. The death of someone close to you.

These things hurt, and we don’t need to pretend otherwise. Taking ownership doesn’t invalidate your experience, it simply means you refuse to let it run your life.

-

Blaming others, or the world, for your problems in the present keeps past trauma alive by giving them authority over your present. You can say someone else is the reason why you are the way you are- and maybe you’re right.

However, by continuing this narrative, you’re giving them power over how you live. Is this what you prefer?

Blame feels justified because, well, it usually is. People fail you, systems fall apart, and life doesn’t play fair.

But the moment you assign responsibility for your future to something in your past, you give your power away, word by word, thought by thought. Instead of living for yourself, you live a life in reaction to what’s happened to you, what was taken from you, or what should’ve been different.

Claiming your own life means drawing a hard boundary between explanation and control: your past can explain you, but it doesn’t have to decide for you.

Ownership is letting the past be as it is, and choosing which beliefs are useful to carry with you into the future.

You don’t need to bring it all.

Whatever you do bring with you, own it. No one else will.

Rule 2: Be the hero, not the victim.

Your life is a story in progress.

More gets written everyday, but who’s holding the pen?

The victim lets the world write their narrative. Heroes decide what to write next.

Acting as the hero doesn’t deny your pain. It means refusing to let this pain become your identity, or worse, your future. It means refusing to use this hurt as permission to hurt others or waste your potential.

-

In traditional stories, we imagine the villain as the perpetrator, when the villain is actually just another victim.

They say: “the world has hurt me, I’m going to hurt it back”.

The hero, instead, takes agency. They say: “the world has hurt me, I won’t let it hurt anyone else.”

This thinking is the byproduct of ownership and intention.

When you position yourself as the hero, you claim your life, instead of letting it claim you. You make choices based on who you want to become, not what has happened to you. Your circumstances are merely growth opportunities disguised as obstacles.

The alternative is letting your circumstances become the source for excuses and unnecessary pain. Take control of your world, don’t let it control you.

Once you do, your story stops revolving about the challenges you survived, but what you built in spite of them.

Rule 3: Maximize Action, Minimize Excuses.

Taking action is the fastest way to reclaim control.

Excuses, even when reasonable, give your control away.

Some people fail because they lack options. More often, however, we fail because we spend too much time explaining why the options aren’t perfect. The more energy you give away to things outside your control, the less energy remains to tackle the things you can actually change.

Maximizing action means narrowing your focus to what you can do next, with what you have and where you are.

Making progress doesn’t require certainty or ideal conditions- it requires continuous movement in at least one direction. Even the smallest of actions can compound into hard evidence that you’re moving forward.

When you minimize excuses, you create agency. The word agency, in this context, is the feeling that your choices matter, because they do. The more you act to influence your circumstances, the more your agency grows.

This is how freedom is built, piece by piece. Instead of waiting for permission, or waiting until the time is right, we’re choosing action- no matter the circumstances. No singular choice will change your life. Your future will be shaped by the actions you took yesterday, today, and tomorrow, especially when the route of excuses would be easier.

Why These Rules Matter

Following these principles is powerful because it restores control: the very thing that’s so easy to give away.

You won’t control the world, but you will have control over yourself- your decisions, your standards, and your path forward.

Choosing to claim your life, be the hero, and double-down on your actions, is what creates agency. Life ceases to be something that simply happens to you, and morphs into something you actively shape.

I can’t promise this will remove hardship, or make your life any easier, but it simplifies your thoughts and empowers you to be the person that can take life head-on.

You will have clearer goals and experience a deeper sense of meaning by bearing responsibility.

When you own your life and act in accordance with your own vision, you don’t just find your way into your future, you create it.

Create a life of intention, agency, action, and growth.

But most importantly, create a life that’s uniquely your own,

and owned by you.

-KPG

It tried its best to humble me, and in many ways, it succeeded.

I was laid off from my first professional job, wrestled with financial anxiety, felt chronically short on time, and experienced many periods of numbness, shame, and vague frustration with life.

But zooming out, it was one of the most formative years of life so far.

I moved into a new apartment, living with my partner for the first time. I renewed my energy by exercising more and eating cleaner. I was visited by close family multiple times, and joined a once-in-a-decade hiking trip with 10 of my childhood friends.

Most recently, I started a graphic design business from scratch, and began my side-project of writing online each week.

At the tail end of the year, I had the chance to take a hard look at the life I was building, and how I plan to move forward with it.

Here are five lessons I’m bringing with me into next year. None of them were painless, but each one of them was necessary.

1. Your job doesn’t love you back.

My layoff occurred in September. I was let go without notice or reason.

The conversation lasted four minutes; there wasn’t much to say. Immediately afterwards, I packed my belongings in my backpack and left the office for the last time.

The part that stung was the fact that I had taken that job seriously. I stressed over deadlines, prepared for weekly meetings, lost sleep (and some hair) over things that were ultimately negligible to the company that let me go.

The takeaway shouldn’t be that your employer is heartless, or that you aren’t worthy of your role. I doubt either one is true. It speaks to the fact that you can be cut at any point, for virtually any reason, even reasons you have nothing to do with.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, though. Actually, it’s extremely liberating.

Knowing you’re replaceable means you don’t need to tie your entire identity to your job, allow it to rob you of your sanity, or let it take significant focus away from the things that matter most to you.

The sooner you accept this reality, the sooner you can start quietly building something that’s truly yours… something that can’t be taken from you in a single conversation. Luckily, I was already building the foundation of my own project in the months prior.

Once you have a fallback option, the stakes of everything drop dramatically, and you can transition to something new much more smoothly.

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