I grew up in a largely white, affluent suburb in Indiana.
It was safe. Comfortable. Familiar.
My family was nearby. Most of my closest friends had been around for years. I knew the roads, the schools, the restaurants, the expectations. College was something almost everyone around me talked about as an inevitability rather than a possibility.
There is something incredibly nice about familiarity.
There is also something a little dangerous about it.
Not dangerous in the dramatic sense. More in the you don’t know what you don’t know sense.
When your environment is relatively comfortable, it becomes very easy to assume that your experience of the world is simply…the world.
Most of us don’t build a life from a blank page.
We inherit a first draft.
Family.
Geography.
School.
Money.
Culture.
Religion.
Expectations.
The people available to us.
Long before we are old enough to call anything a choice, these forces begin shaping what feels normal, desirable, responsible, or even possible.
Then we keep moving.
We attend the schools people around us attend. We consider the careers we have seen. We build relationships with the people our environment places within reach. We construct lives from the options we know exist.
None of that automatically makes those choices wrong.
A familiar life can be a beautiful one.
But it does raise a question:
How much of the life I am building did I actually choose, and how much did I simply continue?
The strange problem is that you cannot evaluate possibilities you do not know exist.
You cannot see the water if you have never gotten out.
Then, at eighteen, I moved to the Bronx.
Which was subtle.
Indiana to New York City is basically the same thing if you ignore the population density, diversity, noise, subway system, pace of life, cost of everything, accents, cultures, neighborhoods, and nearly every other observable feature of human existence.
I left my parents, my brother, my closest friends, and almost everything familiar to attend Fordham.
I wanted that.
At least I thought I did.
Then I actually had to do it.
I Would Like to Go Home Now, Please
Freshman year was hard.
Making friends suddenly required effort. Nobody had known me since middle school. Nobody automatically understood my personality, history, sense of humor, or the version of myself I had gotten used to being.
I had to build a life from scratch.
And there were absolutely moments when I wondered what the hell I had done.
One night in particular has stayed with me.
It was after winter break freshman year.
That break had been the first real stretch of time I had spent back home since leaving for college. I saw my high school friends again. I was back with my family. Everything felt easy and familiar again.
Then break ended.
I returned to New York, got to my dorm, and almost immediately called my parents.
I was upset.
Not the sophisticated, reflective kind of upset where I calmly explained that I was experiencing a temporary tension between familiarity and personal growth.
I basically kept saying:
“I just want to come home.”
They listened.
They didn’t tell me I was being ridiculous. They didn’t dismiss how uncomfortable I felt. They didn’t give me some speech about how lucky I was or tell me to suck it up.
They validated it.
They reminded me why I had wanted to go there in the first place. They reassured me that feeling miserable in that moment didn’t mean I had made the wrong decision. They lovingly challenged me to stick it out.
And, importantly, they reminded me that if I truly needed them, they would always be there.
Eventually I calmed down.
And I stayed.
Looking back, that phone call means much more to me now than it did at eighteen.
My parents didn’t remove the discomfort for me.
They helped me tolerate it.
There is a difference.
They gave me enough safety to keep moving into something uncomfortable instead of rescuing me from it.
At the time, I mostly experienced the discomfort as evidence that something might be wrong.
Now I see it differently.
Something was happening to me that I couldn’t recognize yet.
My world was getting bigger.
Every new friendship required me to become a little more socially flexible.
Every person whose upbringing looked different from mine gave me another data point about how people become who they are.
Every unfamiliar experience forced me to separate:
“This is different”
from
“This is bad.”
And none of this felt profound while it was happening.
That’s one of the strange things about growth.
It rarely announces itself.
Nobody taps you on the shoulder and says:
Congratulations. The uncomfortable conversation you just had is going to alter your worldview for the next twenty years.
Usually you’re just uncomfortable.
Then years later you look backward and realize:
Oh.
That mattered.
Brené Brown Shows Up at a Convenient Time
Shortly after getting to Fordham, I opened one of the first books that would really change how I thought: Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.
I couldn’t put it down.
Which surprised me.
I don’t think eighteen-year-old me was wandering around thinking:
You know what would really hit the spot right now? Several hundred pages about vulnerability and shame.
But apparently it was exactly what I needed.
Brown challenged something I had unconsciously believed: that vulnerability was basically another word for weakness.
Instead, she describes vulnerability as inseparable from courage.
“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage.”
That landed differently while I was trying to build an entirely new social life.
Making friends requires vulnerability.
You have to text first.
Ask someone to hang out.
Tell someone something real.
Risk an awkward silence.
Risk caring more than the other person.
Risk rejection.
Risk being misunderstood.
Basically, human connection has terrible quality control.
There is no version where you receive all the meaningful parts of love and friendship while maintaining complete emotional protection.
If you want love, you accept the possibility of rejection.
If you want friendship, you have to put yourself out there.
If you want to try something ambitious, you risk failing.
If you want to live authentically, somebody might not like the authentic version.
Very inconvenient system.
It would be much nicer if courage felt like confidence.
Usually it doesn’t.
Usually courage feels suspiciously like anxiety while you do the thing anyway.
Daring Greatly helped deepen my interest in psychology because psychology suddenly felt much larger than diagnoses and theories.
It was about questions I was already starting to ask.
Why do we hide parts of ourselves?
Why do we care so much what other people think?
What makes people feel connected?
Why do some experiences fundamentally change us?
Why do we avoid the exact things we suspect would be good for us?
And one question that would keep following me:
How much of our life is being shaped by forces we don’t even realize are operating?
This Is Water
One night freshman year, I was sitting in a friend’s dorm room.
We had somehow ended up deep in one of those late-night philosophical conversations that college freshmen are uniquely qualified to have despite possessing approximately six months of adult life experience.
At some point he pulled out his phone.
He told me there was this commencement speech he thought was one of the best things he had ever heard. He said he still thought about it all the time.
It was David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water.
We listened.
And I understood why he kept thinking about it.
Wallace begins with a parable about two young fish swimming along when an older fish passes them and asks:
“How’s the water?”
The younger fish continue swimming before one eventually asks the other:
“What the hell is water?”
Simple.
Almost stupidly simple.
And brilliant.
The point is that the most constant and important realities surrounding us can become the hardest ones to notice.
Our assumptions.
Our routines.
Our culture.
Our ego.
Our definitions of success.
Our biases.
Our attention.
The stories we tell ourselves.
The expectations everyone around us accepts as normal.
The water.
Suddenly a lot of the experiences I was already having at Fordham made more sense.
Moving away had changed the water.
And because the water changed, I could finally see some of the water I had been swimming in before.
Wallace’s larger point was about awareness and choice.
Education isn’t just accumulating information.
It is learning to recognize your default settings and realizing that you have some ability to choose where you place your attention and how you interpret the world around you.
Wallace also names a more uncomfortable default: I experience every moment from the center of my own consciousness.
Traffic is delaying me.
The slow person in line is inconveniencing me.
Someone else’s bad mood becomes an intrusion into my day.
It is easy for the people around us to become supporting characters in a story we can only experience from the inside.
That isn’t necessarily narcissism in the dramatic sense. It is part of the architecture of consciousness. I cannot directly experience another person’s exhaustion, grief, fear, responsibilities, or history. I experience the inconvenience their behavior creates for me.
The challenge is remembering that other people are not extras.
The driver who cuts me off, the cashier moving slowly, the person who seems difficult, and the stranger who responds sharply each occupy the center of a life as detailed and emotionally real as mine.
Moving beyond the default does not require inventing a flattering explanation for everyone. It means recognizing that my first interpretation is not the only possible one.
That makes attention more than a productivity tool.
It becomes an ethical choice.
What am I noticing?
What story am I assigning to what I see?
Can I make room for a reality that is not centered on me?
One idea from the speech has stayed with me ever since:
“Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
I don’t understand “worship” only in the religious sense.
We worship things whenever we build our identity and self-worth around them.
Money.
Status.
Appearance.
Achievement.
Being liked.
Productivity.
A career.
A relationship.
Our intelligence.
Being right.
Even self-improvement can become something we worship if we’re not careful.
The question isn’t whether your life will organize itself around something.
It will.
The question is whether you ever stop long enough to decide what deserves to be there.
That became one of the earliest foundations of how I now think about a deliberate life.
What am I paying attention to?
What am I assigning meaning to?
What am I allowing to determine my self-worth?
And perhaps most importantly:
Did I actually choose these things, or did I just absorb them?
Dystopia Was Apparently an Elective
Another unexpectedly influential class was dystopian literature.
We read 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Brave New World.
Extremely uplifting semester.
Nothing prepares you for the weekend like several hundred pages about surveillance, authoritarianism, reproductive control, social conditioning, propaganda, and the collapse of personal autonomy.
But I loved the class.
Because the more disturbing theme wasn’t simply:
Bad governments can do bad things.
Obviously.
The deeper warning was about normalization.
People adapt.
Language changes.
Expectations shift.
Technology changes.
Institutions evolve.
And things that would have seemed unthinkable to one generation can eventually become completely ordinary to another.
That’s much scarier.
Control doesn’t always require someone standing over you and ordering you what to think.
Sometimes the more effective form of control is shaping the environment in which thinking happens.
1984 made me think about surveillance, propaganda, language, and truth.
The Handmaid’s Tale made me think about power, autonomy, ideology, and how institutions can use moral certainty to justify control.
And Brave New World introduced a different possibility that I found especially interesting.
What if people weren’t controlled primarily through fear?
What if they were controlled through comfort?
Convenience.
Entertainment.
Pleasure.
Consumption.
Distraction.
What if you didn’t have to censor difficult ideas because people were too entertained to engage with them?
Years later, when I started thinking seriously about social media, this became much less theoretical.
An algorithm doesn’t have to hate you.
It doesn’t have to have a political philosophy.
It doesn’t need some evil mastermind sitting behind a monitor.
It just has to learn what keeps you watching.
Anger works.
Fear works.
Validation works.
Outrage works.
Conflict works.
Novelty works.
Then our feeds gradually become personalized versions of whatever most reliably captures our attention.
If attention shapes perception, perception shapes beliefs, and beliefs influence behavior…
At what point does the tool start shaping the user?
And would the user know?
Again:
This is water.
Then the Bronx Stopped Being the Place Outside Campus
Fordham gave me an unusual experience.
I could spend part of my day discussing philosophy or psychology on a beautiful college campus and then travel a short distance and encounter a completely different social reality.
As a psychology student, I helped with research in local schools and volunteered with patients at a nearby hospital. The Bronx slowly stopped being a backdrop to my college experience.
I started paying attention.
One memory from a public high school has never really left me.
As part of a research project, we were working with a physical education class at a Bronx public high school.
At the beginning of class, the teacher started taking attendance.
He rattled off name after name.
Students answered.
Then he called another name.
Nothing.
He paused.
“Anyone know where he is?”
Someone would answer or shrug.
Another name.
Nothing.
“Anybody seen her?”
This happened several times.
Then after one absent student’s name, the teacher said something along the lines of:
“Well, he won’t be getting a perfect grade today.”
I remember initially finding it almost funny.
Then it clicked.
Showing up was essentially the requirement.
That was it.
They didn’t have to be the fastest runner.
They didn’t have to dominate the class.
They didn’t have to demonstrate some elaborate level of mastery.
Just come.
And even that was apparently a meaningful threshold.
I remember standing there thinking about how different that educational environment felt from the one I had grown up in.
In my schools, conversations were often about AP classes, SAT scores, extracurriculars, which college someone wanted to attend, and what would make an application more competitive.
At this school, some of the battle was simply getting students physically into the building.
That forced me to think differently about education.
Why wasn’t a student there?
Lazy?
Maybe.
But what if he had to help care for younger siblings?
What if his parent worked nights?
What if getting to school required unreliable transportation?
What if home wasn’t stable?
What if nobody in his family had gone to college?
What if school had never given him much evidence that it was going to change his life?
What if being absent wasn’t the problem but a symptom of five other problems?
I learned more about the realities faced by many families in the Bronx—single parents working multiple jobs, under-resourced schools, poverty, neighborhood inequality, and barriers that could accumulate long before a student reached high school.
For many of my peers growing up, the question was:
“Where are you going to college?”
For someone else, the question might be:
“Is college realistically available to me at all?”
Those are completely different starting points.
Effort matters.
Personal responsibility matters.
Choices matter.
But starting points matter too.
Over time I’ve come to believe both things can be true:
Systems matter enormously.
And:
Individual agency matters enormously.
We don’t choose all our circumstances.
But we do have some ability to respond to them.
The amount of freedom we have is not equally distributed, but wherever agency exists, it matters.
That realization changed how I judged people.
Or at least made me much more cautious about doing it.
Because behavior makes more sense in context.
Before asking:
“What’s wrong with this person?”
Maybe sometimes we should ask:
“What happened around this person?”
“What opportunities did they actually have?”
“What environment shaped this?”
“What would I be like if I had lived their life?”
Perspective was becoming more than a nice personality trait.
It was becoming an ethical responsibility.
Philosophy Enters the Chat
Then I took Philosophical Ethics.
Another class that quietly rearranged my brain.
We would read Michael Sandel’s Justice, watch his Harvard lectures online, and then come into class and debate.
I loved it.
Not because I always knew the answer.
Almost the opposite.
You would walk into class believing something was obviously right.
Then somebody would ask one annoying question.
Suddenly:
Well, shit.
Should we maximize total happiness?
Sounds reasonable.
Okay.
What if maximizing total happiness requires sacrificing one innocent person?
Should adults have complete freedom over what they do with their own bodies?
Okay.
Can someone sell an organ?
Sell their vote?
Sell themselves into permanent servitude?
Should everything people freely agree to be permitted?
What if one person’s “free choice” exists under conditions of extreme desperation?
Are markets morally neutral?
Are there some things money shouldn’t buy?
What do we owe strangers?
What do we owe society?
What makes something fair?
Consequences?
Intentions?
Rules?
Virtue?
Equality?
Freedom?
The class taught me something that would become central to how I think:
Don’t stop at what you believe. Ask why you believe it.
Where did that belief come from?
What assumptions does it depend on?
Would you hold it if you had been born in another country?
Another religion?
Another economic class?
Another family?
Can you articulate the strongest argument against your own position?
And one of my favorite questions:
What evidence would change your mind?
Because if the answer is nothing, we’re probably no longer reasoning.
We’re protecting an identity.
Philosophy made me more comfortable saying:
“I don’t know.”
That phrase deserves much better PR.
Bioethics Makes the Questions Uncomfortably Real
I liked Philosophical Ethics enough that it helped push me toward a bioethics minor.
And suddenly the questions involved patients, bodies, suffering, illness, death, and actual human lives.
It is easy to talk abstractly about autonomy and justice.
It gets harder when there is a person lying in a hospital bed.
I became fascinated with the question:
What makes human life valuable?
Is value innate?
If so, why?
Does consciousness matter?
The ability to suffer?
Autonomy?
Relationships?
Potential?
Is the life of a healthy twenty-year-old worth the same as the life of someone in a permanent vegetative state?
My instinct says every person has dignity.
But what exactly do we mean by dignity?
If we’re allocating a scarce organ, are all claims equal?
If not, what factors are morally legitimate?
Age?
Prognosis?
Years of expected life?
Responsibility for illness?
Social role?
Need?
Then another uncomfortable question:
Why do human beings automatically sit at the top of our moral hierarchy?
Is it intelligence?
Language?
Self-awareness?
The ability to suffer?
Our relationships?
If those traits explain moral worth, what do we owe animals who possess some of them too?
I wasn’t interested in bioethics because I expected to find the answer key.
There isn’t one.
I liked it because it trained me to recognize that difficult decisions often involve multiple legitimate values colliding.
Sometimes maturity isn’t arriving at perfect certainty.
Sometimes it is understanding the competing values well enough to make the best decision you can.
New Zealand: Apparently I Had Not Learned the Moving-Away Lesson Yet
Then came study abroad.
I had originally been looking at Australia.
A friend of mine—someone I was decently close with but not someone who represented a whole ready-made social circle—started talking to me about New Zealand.
She convinced me to look into it.
Eventually I decided to go with her.
So after nearly calling my parents in tears because New York was too far from Indiana, I apparently decided the logical solution was to move almost as far away from Indiana as physically possible.
Growth.
I knew basically one person.
Again.
I was nervous.
Again.
And New Zealand became one of the most formative experiences of my life.
There were huge adventures.
Travel.
Camping.
Hikes.
Road trips.
Australia.
Mountains.
Lakes.
Ocean.
Landscapes that looked almost fake.
But when I think about that semester, one of the memories I return to isn’t some major tourist destination.
It’s a bonfire.
I remember sitting outside in front of it with new friends.
We had drinks in our hands.
The sun was setting almost perfectly across one of New Zealand’s ridiculously beautiful lakes.
The kind of sunset that makes every phone camera look inadequate.
And we were just sitting there.
Telling stories.
Laughing.
Getting to know one another.
I remember looking around and having one of those rare moments where you’re actually aware that you’re in a moment you will probably remember.
Not later.
While it’s happening.
A few months earlier, these people had been strangers.
This country had been an intimidating idea on the other side of the world.
And now there I was, in front of a fire, laughing with people I never would have known if I hadn’t been willing to go somewhere unfamiliar.
That memory became a quiet argument against the part of me that wants certainty before saying yes.
How many of the best experiences of my life would never have happened if I had waited until I was completely comfortable?
Probably most of them.
New Zealand also changed the way I thought about nature.
I spent more time camping, hiking, driving through enormous open landscapes, and simply being outside.
It made me appreciate land differently.
There was something grounding about being somewhere beautiful enough to make your problems feel appropriately sized.
Nature has a strange ability to remind you simultaneously that your life matters deeply and that the universe will, in fact, continue functioning if you don’t answer an email tonight.
Christchurch: When the Headlines Came Close
Then on March 15, 2019, a gunman attacked two mosques in Christchurch.
I was nearby.
And suddenly something I had always experienced through screens felt physically close.
Mass shootings were something I knew from American news.
Headlines.
Statistics.
Videos.
Breaking-news alerts.
They were horrifying, but there was still some psychological distance.
Then one happened within miles of me.
That distance disappeared.
I remember how unsettling it was.
The fear.
The confusion.
The realization that something horrific could happen in a place that had felt so peaceful.
I was also struck by the response of New Zealand’s then-prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, and the country’s rapid move to change its firearms laws after the attack.
Whatever someone’s broader politics, the experience challenged assumptions I had developed about how quickly large institutions could respond after tragedy.
More broadly, New Zealand reinforced something the Bronx had already started teaching me:
You understand the world differently when you physically enter someone else’s environment.
Travel doesn’t automatically make anyone enlightened.
You can fly halfway around the world, stay inside a resort, take twelve Instagram pictures, and return home having learned primarily that airport food remains overpriced internationally.
But travel can interrupt your defaults if you let it.
Why do people here live this way?
Why don’t we?
Why does this culture prioritize something mine doesn’t?
Which parts of my lifestyle are genuine preferences, and which parts have I confused with universal truths?
New Zealand strengthened my independence.
I traveled.
Camped.
Got lost.
Figured things out.
Made new friends.
Navigated unfamiliar places.
And a pattern was becoming difficult to ignore.
Moving to New York had scared me.
New Zealand had scared me.
Meeting new people scared me.
Trying unfamiliar things scared me.
Yet many of those experiences became exactly the ones I valued most afterward.
If nearly every meaningful period of growth begins with some version of:
“I don’t know if I can do this…”
Maybe that feeling isn’t always a stop sign.
Sometimes it’s an arrow.
Meaning, Relationships, and the Question Behind Everything
By senior year, a lot of these threads were colliding.
Psychology.
Ethics.
Perspective.
Systems.
Meaning.
Relationships.
Technology.
Identity.
Purpose.
Then I took an honors seminar called Psychology of Human Values.
And Viktor Frankl entered the picture.
We read Man’s Search for Meaning.
Frankl was a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor whose work centered on the human search for meaning.
The book asks an enormous question:
What remains when almost everything a person normally relies upon has been stripped away?
Comfort.
Possessions.
Status.
Security.
Freedom.
Certainty.
Frankl does not pretend that people simply choose whether horrible circumstances hurt them.
But he does argue that even when suffering cannot be avoided, there can remain a degree of freedom in how a person responds to it.
One line that stayed with me was:
“The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
What I took from Frankl wasn’t:
Suffering is good.
It isn’t.
Or:
Everything happens for a reason.
I don’t know that it does.
Sometimes terrible things simply happen.
The more useful question became:
What am I going to do with what happened?
Meaning doesn’t necessarily explain suffering.
Sometimes meaning is something we construct afterward.
That distinction matters to me.
We do not choose everything that happens to us.
But we participate in deciding what receives our attention, what meaning an experience acquires, and what we do next.
A setback can become evidence that I am incapable, or information that my strategy needs to change. A painful ending can become proof that life is over, or the beginning of a life I could not yet see.
The event is still real. The pain is still real. But the meaning attached to it influences the action that follows.
This is not a positive-thinking trick.
Some experiences are devastating, and no reframing makes them harmless.
It is a smaller but meaningful freedom: circumstances can shape the story without always getting to write its final sentence.
Around this same period, I became fascinated by the Harvard Study of Adult Development and its recurring finding that close relationships are deeply connected to health and well-being.
That fascinated me.
Because look at what we spend our lives chasing.
Grades.
Money.
Recognition.
Jobs.
Prestige.
Promotions.
Status.
Followers.
Possessions.
And one of the longest studies of adult life keeps pointing back toward something that makes for a much less impressive LinkedIn announcement:
Relationships.
The people you can call.
The people who know you.
The people you love.
The people around whom you don’t have to constantly perform.
Suddenly the ideas weren’t living in separate classes anymore.
Maybe the good life wasn’t primarily about maximizing comfort.
Maybe it was some combination of:
Meaning.
Connection.
Growth.
Contribution.
Agency.
Curiosity.
Love.
Perspective.
Attention.
Social Media: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
My honors thesis deepened another interest that had been growing in the background: social media and human behavior.
I researched personality, social media usage, and well-being.
Social media fascinated me because it seemed capable of being genuinely wonderful and genuinely terrible at the exact same time.
It can create community.
Teach.
Connect people across continents.
Introduce ideas.
Help someone find others like them.
And also:
Fuel comparison.
Spread misinformation.
Reward outrage.
Fragment attention.
Create status anxiety.
Encourage performative living.
Reinforce polarization.
Make someone feel lonely while technically being “connected” to thousands of people.
The more psychology I studied, the more obvious it became that these technologies were not being deployed onto perfectly rational creatures.
They were being deployed onto us.
Humans.
Social.
Status-sensitive.
Emotionally reactive.
Novelty-seeking.
Desperate to belong.
Interested in what everybody else is doing.
Then we gave ourselves devices that can provide infinite social information every second of every day.
Solid plan.
That matters because attention is finite, while the business built around capturing it is enormous.
Every notification, autoplayed video, streak, recommendation, and infinite feed is another attempt to interrupt whatever I had intended to notice.
The system can test which cue makes me look, which emotion keeps me watching, and which version of reality is most likely to bring me back.
What feels like an individual failure to focus can therefore happen inside an environment optimized to make focus difficult.
And the cost is not only time.
Every ping, feed, message, advertisement, and recommendation asks for another tiny decision.
Look or ignore?
Respond or wait?
Click or continue?
Compare or disengage?
Buy or resist?
Across a day, those decisions accumulate.
Our attention can be captured, monetized, and gradually trained without any single moment feeling like a meaningful choice.
That does not eliminate personal responsibility.
It makes deliberate attention more demanding.
We increasingly have to build boundaries against systems designed to cross them.
The dystopian literature class came rushing back.
Again, the right question wasn’t:
Is technology good or bad?
That’s too simple.
Better questions were:
What does the system reward?
What emotions does it amplify?
Who benefits from capturing my attention?
What happens when my view of reality gets filtered through an engagement algorithm?
And:
Am I using the technology deliberately, or is the technology using me predictably?
This became one of the foundations of The LifeMinded Project and the broader framework I started calling Building a Deliberate Life.
Protect your attention.
Then the Entire World Became a Dystopian Novel for a Little While
After Fordham, I moved again for a post-baccalaureate program in the Washington, D.C. area.
New city.
New people.
Starting over.
Apparently by this point it was becoming a hobby.
Except there was a minor complication.
COVID.
Nothing like moving somewhere new to meet people while public health guidance is essentially:
Please stop meeting people.
The world became smaller.
Classes changed.
Social life changed.
Travel changed.
Routines disappeared.
Plans suddenly felt provisional.
And once again, disruption revealed things that normal life made easy to ignore.
What did I miss?
People.
Freedom.
Ordinary social interaction.
Health.
Going somewhere without thinking about it.
Sitting around a table.
A crowded room.
Routine.
Things feel incredibly valuable the moment they’re taken away.
Which raises another annoying question about human psychology:
Why are we so good at appreciating things retrospectively?
Maybe part of deliberate living is learning how to notice ordinary things before they’re gone.
Austin, Then the Unexpected Return to Indiana
After finishing the post-bacc, I moved to Austin for a gap year before medical school.
Friends.
A new city.
By that point I was beginning to understand something about myself.
I liked what new places did to me.
Different cities expose different versions of you.
New York demanded one kind of adaptation.
New Zealand another.
D.C. another.
Austin another.
When you’re new somewhere, you pay attention.
You ask questions.
You can’t move completely on autopilot.
Then medical school brought me back to Indiana.
I was…
not thrilled.
I had spent years trying new places only to somehow end up back near where the story started.
Very funny, universe.
But then something unexpected happened.
I started appreciating Indiana differently.
My parents were nearby.
My brother was nearby.
Family became part of ordinary life rather than something squeezed into holidays and visits.
That mattered much more to me than it had when I was eighteen and desperate to experience anywhere else.
Leaving home had helped me appreciate home.
Perspective isn’t necessarily replacing one belief with its opposite.
Sometimes it’s just seeing more.
And Then I Failed My First Medical School Exam
Medical school had been a dream for so long that I had spent much more time imagining getting there than imagining what it would actually feel like once I did.
Then I took my first exam.
And failed it.
I remember sitting there afterward absolutely crushed.
I had failed things before. I had struggled before. I had certainly experienced stress before.
But this felt different.
Medicine was the first thing I had ever pursued that demanded this much from me, day after day.
The volume was enormous.
The pace was relentless.
There was always more you could study.
You could finish six hours of work and somehow still feel behind.
It was one of the first environments where effort itself required strategy because simply working harder indefinitely wasn’t sustainable.
If you weren’t careful, medicine could consume every available hour and then politely request a few more.
Sitting there after that exam, I questioned myself.
Is this actually what I want?
It was a scary question because medicine had been part of how I imagined my future for so long.
But before I could even answer honestly, another image came into my mind.
Me at about three years old.
Wearing a little white coat.
A stethoscope around my neck.
Both gifts from my grandpa.
I thought about all the years after that.
The pre-med courses.
The post-bacc.
The applications.
The uncertainty.
All those times I had imagined what it would feel like to finally get into medical school.
How badly I had wanted the opportunity that I was now sitting there questioning because of one exam.
And I remember thinking:
Why would I let one exam break me?
Why would I give up now?
That didn’t suddenly make the exam hurt less.
And it certainly didn’t make the next exam easier.
But it helped separate two things I had accidentally fused together.
I failed an exam.
That was true.
I am incapable of doing this.
That was a story.
Those are not the same statement.
It became another version of a lesson I had already encountered repeatedly:
One uncomfortable moment doesn’t get to make every future decision.
Freshman-year me had wanted to come home.
That didn’t mean Fordham was wrong.
Feeling terrified before New Zealand didn’t mean I shouldn’t go.
And failing an exam didn’t mean medicine wasn’t for me.
Sometimes difficulty is information that something needs to change.
It isn’t automatically evidence that you should stop.
Medical school forced me to develop a different relationship with work.
There was no realistic way to feel fully caught up all the time.
I had to prioritize.
Adapt.
Learn how I learned.
Become more efficient.
Accept that perfection was impossible.
And eventually recognize something else:
There is a difference between working hard and working in a way that can actually be sustained.
I wouldn’t understand that part fully until later.
The Other Classroom in My Headphones
During medical school, a lot of my education about psychology, meaning, habits, relationships, and the systems shaping us became informal.
Podcasts.
Audiobooks.
Interviews.
Long drives.
Walks.
YouTube rabbit holes that begin with a ten-minute clip about motivation and somehow conclude three hours later with a neuroscientist explaining dopamine to a former monk.
A fairly normal evening in my informal education.
I found Jay Shetty and his discussions of mindfulness, purpose, relationships, and service.
One idea connected immediately with everything I had learned about meaning:
“Service is what motivates purpose.”
That connected with Frankl.
Medicine.
Volunteering.
Relationships.
The Harvard study.
A life aimed completely at yourself becomes strangely small.
Achievement feels good.
But helping someone creates a different kind of satisfaction.
Teaching.
Serving.
Showing up.
Building something useful.
Being needed.
Then I found Mel Robbins.
And she helped reinforce one of the most useful ideas I least wanted to hear:
Stop waiting until you feel like doing it.
Her 5 Second Rule is intentionally simple: when you know you need to act, count backward—5, 4, 3, 2, 1—and move before hesitation turns into avoidance.
This was relevant because I had spent a lot of time unconsciously believing:
Once I feel motivated, I’ll start.
Beautiful theory.
Terrible results.
I’ll exercise when I feel motivated.
I’ll study once I feel focused.
I’ll have that conversation when I feel confident.
I’ll start the project when inspiration hits.
I’ll change when I feel ready.
Then “ready” mysteriously misses every appointment.
We imagine:
Motivation → Action → Accomplishment → Feeling Good
But often reality is closer to:
Action → Momentum → Accomplishment → Motivation
You frequently feel good after doing the hard thing.
Not before.
Nobody sits on the couch receiving the psychological benefits of the workout they’re actively avoiding.
Those arrive later.
That changed how I thought about procrastination too.
Procrastination isn’t always a time-management problem.
Often it’s emotional avoidance.
The assignment makes me anxious.
The email makes me uncomfortable.
The workout creates physical discomfort.
The conversation carries a risk of rejection.
So I avoid the task and immediately receive a reward:
Relief.
Fantastic.
Except the task still exists.
Now accompanied by guilt.
And stress.
And less time.
Amazing strategy.
Sometimes the answer isn’t thinking your way into motivation.
It’s movement.
Thoughts Aren’t Commands
Then there was Dan Harris and Ten Percent Happier.
What I liked about Harris was that his approach to meditation felt skeptical enough for people who hear the word mindfulness and immediately picture someone levitating above a mountain.
His work reinforced a simple idea:
You don’t have to believe every thought your brain produces.
A thought can show up without receiving a vote.
That connected right back to Wallace.
Pay attention to what’s happening inside your own head.
Not so you can eliminate negative thoughts.
Good luck with that.
But so there can occasionally be a tiny gap between:
Thought
and
Action.
Inside that gap is choice.
That is a form of freedom.
Then came The Diary of a CEO.
Modern Wisdom.
Long-form conversations with psychologists, physicians, entrepreneurs, neuroscientists, philosophers, relationship experts, athletes, and people who had done weirdly interesting things with their lives.
Eventually I stopped looking for the person who had figured out life.
There probably isn’t one.
Instead, I became interested in patterns.
When people working in completely different fields keep arriving at similar conclusions, I pay attention.
Meaning matters.
Relationships matter.
Attention matters.
Action matters.
Contribution matters.
Your environment matters.
Repeated behavior matters.
Maybe there is something there.
Gabor Maté and the Question Underneath the Question
Eventually I found Dr. Gabor Maté.
His work around trauma, addiction, stress, development, and environment connected immediately with something I had begun learning years earlier in the Bronx:
Behavior makes more sense in context.
Instead of only asking:
“Why is this person doing this?”
Ask:
What happened before this?
What function does the behavior serve?
What need is being met?
What pain is being avoided?
What adaptation might once have been useful?
This does not mean excusing destructive behavior.
Understanding and endorsement are different things.
People remain responsible for what they do.
But understanding usually gives us a better chance of changing something than shame does.
And that question applies inward too.
Why do I procrastinate?
Why do I seek approval?
Why do I avoid something?
Why does criticism hit me so hard?
Why do I reach for distraction?
What is the behavior doing for me?
Because if you only remove a behavior without understanding its function, another behavior often appears to do the same job.
Find the pattern underneath it.
When the Conveyor Belt Finally Stopped
After years of moving almost continuously from one goal and deadline to the next, I eventually took time away from medical school.
That period would become one of the most important chapters in this entire story.
Not because I spent every day sitting cross-legged under a tree discovering the meaning of existence.
There was considerably more sweat, travel, family, golf, basketball, and therapy involved.
Medical training creates momentum.
There is always another exam.
Another rotation.
Another deadline.
Another requirement.
Another thing you could be doing.
For a long time, my instinct when things became difficult was essentially:
Push harder.
There is value in that.
Sometimes you genuinely do need to power through.
But if “push harder” is your answer to every problem, eventually your solution becomes part of the problem.
Taking time away forced the conveyor belt to stop.
And once it stopped, I had to reconnect with parts of myself that weren’t defined by the next exam.
I spent time in therapy.
Not because I wanted somebody to hand me a completely new personality.
I wanted to understand myself better.
The same curiosity I had spent years applying to other people, systems, and ideas had to eventually turn inward.
What patterns did I have?
What was useful?
What wasn’t?
Where was I making life unnecessarily harder?
What did I need more of?
What did I need less of?
And importantly:
Who am I when I’m not constantly trying to accomplish the next thing?
Rebuilding the Parts That Made Me Feel Like Me
I spent more time with my family.
My parents and I took trips to New York to see my sister.
Later, we traveled to Amsterdam for her wedding.
Those experiences reminded me of something that had been showing up in almost every meaningful book, study, and life experience I’d encountered:
Relationships are not what remains after the important stuff gets done.
Relationships are some of the important stuff.
I started working out more consistently.
I tried boxing classes.
Which is a very efficient way to discover muscles you were previously unaware existed.
I started playing basketball again.
I took golf lessons.
I made more room for things that were fun simply because they were fun.
Not because they improved my CV.
Not because they prepared me for medicine.
Not because I could somehow convert them into productivity.
Because I enjoyed them.
That sounds obvious.
It wasn’t.
There can be a strange pressure in ambitious environments to justify time.
If an activity isn’t productive, educational, impressive, or useful, what is it doing there?
Maybe making you happy is enough.
Maybe joy doesn’t need to submit supporting documentation.
Then I Went to Croatia Alone
During that time, I also traveled solo through Croatia.
There is something almost funny about putting that next to the opening chapter of this story.
At eighteen, I called my parents from New York saying:
“I want to come home.”
Years later, I was voluntarily traveling through another country by myself.
Not because I had become someone who never felt nervous.
I still did.
The difference was that unfamiliarity itself no longer automatically meant danger.
I had accumulated evidence.
New York.
New Zealand.
D.C.
Austin.
Every time I had stepped into something unfamiliar, I had learned that I could build a life there.
I could meet people.
Figure things out.
Get lost and get unlost.
Sit alone at a restaurant without spontaneously combusting.
Ask strangers questions.
Change plans.
Solve problems.
Traveling alone has a way of exposing you to yourself.
There is no familiar friend beside you to automatically fill silence.
No group deciding what happens next.
You choose.
Where do I go?
What do I want to do today?
Who do I talk to?
What happens if the plan falls apart?
And Croatia became another reminder that independence isn’t the absence of needing other people.
I deeply value people.
Independence is knowing that I can also trust myself.
The scared eighteen-year-old hadn’t disappeared.
I had just given him more evidence.
The LifeMinded Project
I also started an Instagram page that eventually grew into The LifeMinded Project.
That project grew out of everything I had been reading, listening to, thinking about, and trying to apply.
Psychology.
Meaning.
Habits.
Relationships.
Technology.
Purpose.
Attention.
Growth.
Health.
Systems.
I didn’t want it to be another page yelling motivational quotes at people over videos of Lamborghinis.
There seemed to be enough of those.
I wanted a place to collect ideas about how to actually live better.
Not perfectly.
Deliberately.
How do we recognize what is shaping us?
How do we identify patterns?
How do we choose what deserves our attention?
How do we take all these books and podcasts and studies and translate any of them into an ordinary Tuesday afternoon?
That phrase became shorthand for the unremarkable part of life where values either become behavior or remain ideas.
That project helped me externalize something that had been slowly developing for years.
Understand what shaped you.
Then:
Decide what deserves to shape you next.
The Return Wasn’t About Becoming Invincible
The goal of my time away was never to return to school as some completely optimized human incapable of stress.
That person does not exist.
And if he does, I probably don’t want to spend much time with him.
The goal was to come back better equipped.
I created a motivational board next to my desk.
Not because looking at motivational quotes magically teaches pharmacology.
Unfortunately.
But because I wanted my environment to remind me why I was doing the work when the work itself became exhausting.
I worked on becoming more efficient.
How could I learn the same material with less wasted time?
What actually helped me retain information?
Which study habits were productive, and which ones merely felt productive?
I became more conscious of when I needed to keep going and when I needed to stop.
That was an important distinction for me.
Sometimes the answer really is:
Power through.
You’re tired.
You don’t feel like it.
Do it anyway.
But sometimes continuing isn’t discipline.
Sometimes it is just refusing to listen to your own warning lights.
Learning the difference is hard.
I had spent years becoming comfortable with the idea that growth requires discomfort.
That remained true.
But I began adding a second lesson:
Not all discomfort needs to be conquered.
Sometimes you need rest.
Sometimes you need sleep.
Sometimes you need your family.
Sometimes you need exercise.
Sometimes you need an afternoon where nothing productive happens.
Sometimes the disciplined choice is to stop.
That changed my definition of resilience.
I used to think resilience meant:
I can keep going no matter what.
Now I think it’s closer to:
I know how to keep going over time.
Those are not the same thing.
A car that never stops for fuel isn’t resilient.
It is briefly impressive and then stranded.
Human beings aren’t that different.
Tony Robbins, at Maximum Volume
During that period, I also dove deeper into Tony Robbins.
His style is not subtle.
This isn’t whispering affirmations beside a candle.
It is personal development at approximately playoff-game volume.
But underneath the presentation were ideas I found genuinely useful.
State.
Beliefs.
Patterns.
Decision-making.
Standards.
Associations.
Action.
Eventually I did his Unleash the Power Within conference.
And there was one experience in particular I still think about:
The Dickens Process.
The exercise borrows its structure from A Christmas Carol.
Past.
Present.
Future.
You identify beliefs that are limiting you.
But you don’t simply write them down and say:
Hmm. Interesting.
You’re asked to confront what those beliefs have already cost you.
What have they cost in the past?
What are they costing now?
Your relationships?
Your confidence?
Your choices?
Then comes the uncomfortable part.
You project them forward.
What happens if I keep believing this?
A year?
Five years?
Ten years?
What does this pattern eventually cost?
What opportunities disappear?
What relationships suffer?
What version of me exists at the end of that road?
It was long.
Emotional.
Intense.
And much more moving than I expected.
Because humans are very good at focusing on the pain of changing.
The difficult conversation.
The scary decision.
Breaking the habit.
Doing something unfamiliar.
The Dickens Process forces another question:
What is the pain of staying exactly the same?
Doing nothing feels neutral.
It isn’t.
Staying is still a decision.
A relationship, career, location, or identity can stop serving us long before we become willing to leave it.
Not necessarily because we enjoy the pain.
The familiar discomfort comes with a map.
We know the job we dislike.
We know the argument we will have.
We know the city, the routine, and the version of ourselves expected there.
Change removes the map.
It introduces the possibility of failure, loneliness, grief, regret, and discovering that the new life is not automatically better.
This does not mean everyone can or should leave.
Money, children, health, safety, obligations, and timing matter. Sometimes staying is deliberate and courageous.
But sometimes we call something safe when what we really mean is familiar.
We choose the discomfort we understand over the possibility we cannot predict.
The Dickens Process made me ask not only what changing might cost, but what staying would cost.
Avoidance still has a direction.
Patterns still have destinations.
And suddenly this exercise connected right back to freshman year.
Wallace had taught me:
Notice the water.
The Dickens Process added:
Now imagine where the current carries you if you never change direction.
The Pattern Underneath Everything
By this point, I realized that nearly everything I was interested in came back to patterns.
Psychology studies patterns of thought and behavior.
Relationships develop patterns of interaction.
Trauma produces adaptive patterns.
Habits are repeated patterns.
Social media algorithms identify behavioral patterns.
Economic systems create incentive patterns.
Families pass down patterns.
Organizations develop cultural patterns.
Health is largely affected by repeated patterns over time.
Even identity contains patterns.
“I’m just the kind of person who…”
So I became fascinated with a process that sounds almost ridiculously straightforward:
Notice the pattern.
Understand it.
Interrupt it.
Replace it deliberately.
Easy to write.
Much harder to live.
But awareness comes first.
You can’t change water you don’t know you’re swimming in.
Then comes agency.
Not the fantasy that you control everything.
You don’t.
But you can ask:
What part of this is actually mine to influence?
My next action?
My environment?
My interpretation?
My boundary?
My routine?
Who I spend time with?
What I consume?
What I practice?
That’s a much more useful definition of control.
Atomic Habits and the Death of the Dramatic Reinvention Fantasy
Then James Clear’s Atomic Habits gave me a practical framework for a lot of this.
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”
I love that idea because people love dramatic reinvention.
New year.
New me.
Wake up at 4:30.
Journal.
Meditate.
Cold plunge.
Run five miles.
Read forty pages.
Meal prep.
Learn Spanish.
Build a business.
Call Grandma.
Develop perfect emotional regulation.
All before breakfast.
Then three days later:
I may have overcommitted.
Real change is usually less exciting.
Tiny action.
Repeated.
The action itself doesn’t look impressive.
The trajectory does.
A goal says:
I want to be healthy.
A system asks:
What do you actually do every day?
A goal says:
I want better friendships.
A system asks:
How often do you reach out?
A goal says:
I want to be less distracted.
A system asks:
Where does your phone sleep?
A goal says:
I want a meaningful life.
A system asks:
What repeatedly creates meaning in your week?
That changed how I thought about personal growth.
One percent.
One behavior.
One vote.
One piece of evidence.
You don’t need to convince yourself you’re disciplined.
Do something disciplined.
You don’t need to stare into a mirror and announce that you’re courageous.
Do one scary thing.
You don’t need to build an elaborate identity around being a good friend.
Call your friend.
Build proof, not ego.
Evidence is persuasive.
Especially to yourself.
The Hard Thing Is Frequently Sitting Directly in Front of Me
Another pattern became impossible not to notice.
The thing I was avoiding was often the exact thing that would make me feel better afterward.
The workout.
The assignment.
The difficult text.
The apology.
The application.
The conversation.
The decision.
The first five minutes.
This doesn’t mean:
Harder automatically equals better.
If two roads lead to the same destination, you do not receive bonus character points for crawling barefoot over broken glass.
But worthwhile discomfort is different.
Some discomfort is simply the price of something you value.
Exercise is uncomfortable.
So is declining health.
Honesty is uncomfortable.
So is carrying a lie.
Boundaries are uncomfortable.
So is resentment.
Studying is uncomfortable.
So is being unprepared.
Making a decision is uncomfortable.
So is remaining stuck.
So maybe the goal isn’t:
How do I avoid discomfort?
Maybe the better question is:
Which discomfort is worth choosing?
That changed how I interpreted fear.
Fear isn’t always a stop sign.
Sometimes it’s information.
Sometimes it’s an arrow pointing directly at the thing that would make you grow.
Freshman-year me wanted the discomfort gone.
Older me is trying to get better at asking what it might be trying to teach me.
Do the Hard Thing First—But Know When to Stop
That eventually became a practical rule I started experimenting with.
Do the hard thing first.
Not because suffering makes you morally superior.
Because avoidance has a cost.
When something important is hanging over you, you don’t actually get to avoid it.
You carry it.
You renegotiate with it.
You tell yourself you’ll start in thirty minutes.
You feel guilty.
You distract yourself.
Then you remember it while distracting yourself.
So now you’re scrolling and stressed.
Very efficient.
Doing the thing creates traction.
But my time away added an important qualifier.
Do the hard thing first when the hard thing is what needs doing.
Don’t turn “push through” into your only strategy.
Sometimes action is medicine.
Sometimes rest is.
Knowing which one you need is a skill.
Maybe maturity is partly learning the difference between:
I don’t want to do this
and
I genuinely need to recover.
One calls for discipline.
The other calls for wisdom.
Values Are Not Decorative
I also became increasingly interested in values.
Almost everyone claims to have good ones.
Family matters.
Health matters.
Friendship matters.
Integrity matters.
Growth matters.
Fantastic.
Now show me an ordinary Tuesday.
Values don’t matter much as abstract words.
They have to eventually appear in behavior.
You say family matters.
When did you call them?
You say health matters.
What’s happening in your week?
You say friendship matters.
Who have you made time for?
You say curiosity matters.
When did you last seriously engage with an idea you disagree with?
You say courage matters.
What have you done recently that scared you?
Values without behavior become personal branding.
And I’ve noticed that I tend to feel best when my behavior aligns with what I say matters.
Not always happiest in the immediate sense.
Sometimes values-aligned behavior is difficult.
But it produces something deeper:
Coherence.
You trust yourself more when your behavior and beliefs agree.
Maybe confidence isn’t always:
“I’m amazing.”
Sometimes it’s much quieter:
“I know I can rely on myself to act on what matters.”
When Service Made Progress Personal
Service kept reappearing too.
Frankl.
Shetty.
Medicine.
Volunteering.
Relationships.
But the idea became real through experiences I had before medical school.
For several months, I worked one-on-one as a registered behavior technician (RBT) with children with autism. The work focused on helping each child build communication and daily-living skills through small, repeated steps.
One young boy I worked with used very few spoken words.
Progress was tiny.
A new sound.
A gesture.
A little more eye contact.
A few seconds of shared attention.
Things another person might barely notice could represent weeks of work.
Then one day, without prompting, he looked at his mother and told her he loved her.
That moment changed the way I think about progress.
Progress isn’t objective.
It’s personal.
The goal isn’t always bigger.
Faster.
More.
Sometimes progress is one sentence.
Sometimes it’s walking ten feet.
Sometimes it’s asking for help.
Sometimes it’s getting out of bed.
Sometimes it’s trying again.
I also volunteered with a hospice program, making regular home visits to a man living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
Suddenly questions I had discussed in bioethics about dignity, autonomy, ability, and human value had a face.
What makes someone’s life meaningful when their body is progressively losing function?
What can we offer when medicine can’t fix the underlying disease?
Attention.
Presence.
Company.
Listening.
Dignity.
Relationship.
The human stuff.
Medicine ultimately appealed to me because science matters tremendously—but medicine happens between people.
Relationships: The Extremely Important Thing We Keep Scheduling Around
Relationships have probably been the most consistent theme across everything.
Family.
Friends.
Romantic relationships.
Mentors.
Patients.
Community.
Humans are social animals.
We need belonging.
Attachment.
Recognition.
Love.
Someone who notices when we’re gone.
Someone who cares what happens to us.
And we also need opportunities to give those things.
There’s something grounding about mattering to someone besides yourself.
Think about the memories people treasure.
Family dinners.
Trips with friends.
Inside jokes.
Long conversations.
Someone showing up unexpectedly.
Falling in love.
Helping someone.
Being helped.
My sister getting married in Amsterdam.
Sitting around a bonfire in New Zealand laughing with people who had been strangers months earlier.
Relationships keep winning.
Yet they’re easy to neglect because many of them lack deadlines.
Work has deadlines.
School has deadlines.
Taxes have deadlines.
Friendship rarely sends an alert:
WARNING: RELATIONSHIP HAS RECEIVED INSUFFICIENT MAINTENANCE FOR 46 DAYS.
Maybe it should.
Relationships often decay quietly.
Which means they need deliberate attention too.
The Gottmans and the Surprisingly Unsexy Science of Love
Eventually I found John and Julie Gottman’s work.
What fascinated me was how ordinary many of the important behaviors are.
Love isn’t sustained solely by grand gestures.
Often it’s built through tiny interactions.
One partner says:
“Look at that dog.”
That’s a bid.
A tiny request for shared attention.
You can turn toward it.
Ignore it.
Respond irritably.
Think about how funny that is.
We imagine romance as:
Paris.
Candlelight.
A surprise vacation.
And relationship science comes along and says:
Your partner showed you a stupid TikTok. Did you look?
Love is alive.
But it makes sense.
What you’re really communicating is:
The thing you’re interested in matters to me because you matter to me.
Repeat that thousands of times and you build something.
Ignore it thousands of times and you build something too.
Their work also emphasizes destructive conflict patterns like criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling, along with the importance of repair.
Because conflict itself isn’t the enemy.
You’re going to irritate people you love.
They’re going to irritate you.
You’re going to be tired.
Say something badly.
Misinterpret something.
Become defensive.
The goal isn’t zero conflict.
That’s not a relationship.
That’s two mannequins.
The goal is learning how to move through conflict while preserving respect and emotional safety.
That changed the compatibility question for me.
Instead of:
Can I find someone with whom I’ll have no problems?
Good luck.
Maybe:
What kinds of problems can we navigate well together?
And:
Can we stay kind while we do it?
Eventually I Realized Everyone Had Been Talking About the Same Things
At some point, these stopped feeling like separate books, classes, podcasts, trips, and life experiences.
They were all connected.
Brené Brown taught me that connection requires vulnerability.
David Foster Wallace taught me to notice the water and choose my attention.
Dystopian literature taught me to question systems that become invisible through normalization.
The Bronx taught me that people make more sense in context.
Michael Sandel taught me to interrogate assumptions and take opposing arguments seriously.
Bioethics taught me to tolerate moral uncertainty.
New Zealand taught me independence, perspective, nature, and the value of willingly entering unfamiliar places.
Viktor Frankl taught me to think about meaning.
The Harvard study reinforced the importance of relationships.
My thesis made me suspicious of anything competing too aggressively for my attention.
Medical school taught me that difficulty does not automatically mean I’m on the wrong path.
My time away taught me that resilience is not just pushing harder—it is learning how to sustain yourself.
Therapy made me turn the same curiosity I had about other people inward.
Solo travel gave me evidence that I could trust myself.
The LifeMinded Project gave me a place to start organizing all of these ideas.
Jay Shetty reinforced service and purpose.
Mel Robbins reinforced action before motivation.
Dan Harris reinforced awareness before reaction.
Gabor Maté reinforced looking beneath behavior.
Tony Robbins reinforced patterns, decisions, and the cost of staying the same.
James Clear taught me to translate intentions into systems and tiny repeated actions.
The Gottmans showed me that relationships are built in ordinary moments.
Different languages.
Different fields.
Different personalities.
Same themes.
What I Think I’ve Learned So Far
I don’t think I’ve figured out life.
That would be a concerning conclusion for someone who still occasionally opens Instagram without consciously deciding to and forgets why he walked into a room.
But certain ideas have survived repeated testing.
Pay attention.
Your attention is your life in real time.
Where it goes matters.
What you repeatedly notice becomes the raw material from which you construct meaning.
Understand what shaped you.
Family.
Culture.
Opportunity.
Trauma.
Education.
Money.
Friends.
Neighborhood.
Technology.
Algorithms.
History.
None of us constructed ourselves from scratch.
Your first draft was being written before you could hold the pen.
Then decide what deserves to shape you next.
This might be the center of Building a Deliberate Life.
You don’t choose your starting point.
But eventually you can begin examining what you inherited.
Keep what serves you.
Question what doesn’t.
The goal is not to reject everything you inherited. It is to examine it closely enough that keeping it becomes a choice.
Don’t confuse context with helplessness.
Systems matter.
Luck matters.
Opportunity matters.
Circumstances matter.
Your choices still matter.
Both can be true.
Choose worthwhile discomfort.
Hard things are unavoidable.
Try to choose the ones that move toward something you value.
But don’t confuse burnout with courage.
Sometimes you need to push.
Sometimes you need to recover.
Sustainable progress requires both.
Stop waiting to feel ready.
Ready is unreliable.
Start.
Build momentum.
Movement produces evidence.
Evidence changes belief.
Build systems, not just intentions.
What repeatedly happens on an ordinary Tuesday matters more than what you promise yourself once a year.
Protect your attention.
There are enormous financial incentives for other people to decide what occupies your mind.
Treat attention accordingly.
Your focus can be captured, monetized, and trained. Do not rely entirely on willpower inside an environment designed to exhaust it.
Make room for joy that accomplishes nothing.
Basketball does not need to advance your career.
A trip does not need to become content.
A hobby does not need to become a side hustle.
Fun is allowed to remain fun.
Stay curious.
Especially when you’re absolutely certain.
Everyone is a teacher.
Some people teach you what to do.
Others provide extremely useful demonstrations of what not to do.
Both are educational.
Invest in relationships.
Turn toward people.
Call them.
Show up.
Say the thing.
Repair quickly.
Serve something larger than yourself.
Family.
Medicine.
Community.
Teaching.
Creating.
Helping.
Something.
A life pointed entirely inward becomes small.
Progress over perfection.
One percent counts.
Especially when compounded.
Build proof, not ego.
Do the thing.
Then believe the evidence.
But Be Careful: Self-Improvement Can Become Another Trap
There is a strange irony in all of this.
You can become so obsessed with building a good life that you forget to actually live it.
Optimize sleep.
Optimize diet.
Optimize workouts.
Optimize productivity.
Optimize your morning routine.
Optimize your relationships.
Optimize your dopamine.
Optimize your breathing.
Optimize the optimization process.
Eventually somebody has to ask:
For what?
Efficiency isn’t purpose.
Productivity isn’t meaning.
A long life isn’t automatically a good life.
Success doesn’t guarantee fulfillment.
Technology isn’t automatically progress.
More isn’t automatically better.
The deeper question beneath all of these tools is:
What Kind of Life Am I Actually Trying to Build?
And I don’t think somebody else can fully answer that.
There is no universally optimal life.
People have different responsibilities.
Different families.
Different bodies.
Different cultures.
Different circumstances.
Different values.
Different dreams.
So Building a Deliberate Life isn’t supposed to be:
Here are the twelve rules everyone should follow because I have solved human existence.
That would be insane.
It’s more about learning to ask better questions.
What matters to me?
Why?
Where did that belief come from?
Does my behavior match it?
What am I avoiding?
What is shaping my attention?
Which patterns am I repeating?
Where do those patterns eventually lead?
What discomfort is worth choosing?
When do I need to push?
When do I need to recover?
Am I leaving enough room for joy?
Who matters to me?
Do they know?
What am I serving?
What am I taking for granted?
What needs more attention?
What am I trying too hard to control?
Where am I waiting to feel ready?
And one question that somehow survived from a conversation in a freshman dorm room all the way into adulthood:
What is the water I’m swimming in right now that I still can’t see?
Where I Am Now
I’m still figuring it out.
I hope that never entirely stops.
The older I get, the less interested I am in becoming somebody who has all the answers.
I’d rather become somebody who notices more.
Questions more.
Listens better.
Changes his mind when the evidence changes.
Takes worthwhile risks.
Stays curious.
Shows up for people.
Protects what matters.
Knows when to push.
Knows when to recover.
Keeps growing.
And increasingly lives the ideas he claims to believe.
Sometimes I think back to that freshman dorm room after winter break.
Eighteen-year-old me was on the phone with my parents saying:
“I want to come home.”
He couldn’t see what staying would give him.
He couldn’t see the friendships.
The Bronx.
The books.
The philosophy classes.
The research.
New Zealand.
The bonfire.
The people he hadn’t met.
The cities he hadn’t lived in.
The patients he hadn’t cared for.
The exam he would fail.
The moments he would question himself.
The time he would eventually need away.
The therapy.
The basketball court.
The boxing gym.
The golf lessons.
His sister’s wedding in Amsterdam.
The Croatian coastline he would eventually explore alone.
The page that would grow into The LifeMinded Project.
The questions he hadn’t learned to ask yet.
All he could see was how uncomfortable he felt that night.
And maybe that’s one of the most important things I’ve learned.
You usually cannot see the entire reason something difficult is worth doing while you’re standing at the beginning of it.
Sometimes you only know:
This matters to me.
I’m scared.
I’m going anyway.
Years later, sitting after a failed medical school exam, I was essentially back in that dorm room again.
Different problem.
Same question.
Is this discomfort telling me to leave, or is it asking me to grow?
And later, taking time away from medical school, I learned the opposite question mattered too:
Is pushing through helping me grow, or am I refusing to recognize that I need to stop and rebuild?
Both questions matter.
Maybe deliberate living isn’t about always choosing the hard thing.
It isn’t about relentless productivity.
It isn’t about optimizing yourself into some emotionless machine that wakes up at 4:30 every morning and has already journaled, meditated, exercised, and reached enlightenment before everyone else has found the coffee.
It is about paying attention.
Knowing what matters.
Understanding your patterns.
Choosing more consciously.
Moving when fear is the thing holding you back.
Resting when exhaustion is the thing asking for attention.
Investing in people.
Doing work that matters.
Protecting space for joy.
And understanding that no single exam, mistake, bad day, rejection, or difficult chapter gets to write the entire story.
Usually growth is much quieter.
One uncomfortable decision.
One conversation.
One new perspective.
One workout.
One break.
One therapy session.
One apology.
One flight to somewhere unfamiliar.
One hour without the phone.
One call to someone you love.
One tiny habit.
One attempt after failure.
One moment of noticing the water.
Then another.
Then another.
Maybe a deliberate life isn’t built in the dramatic moments after all.
Maybe it’s built in thousands of ordinary ones.
And maybe that’s good news.
Because ordinary moments are the ones we get the most of.
The LifeMinded Project begins here, but the project is about what comes next: holding complexity, connecting the pieces, and building a life more deliberately.
Explore The LifeMinded Project lens