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Tag: life-lessons

  • Fake It Till You Make It

    This is post 3 of 6 in the series “Lenses”

    1. Two Kinds of People
    2. The Happiness Curve
    3. Fake It Till You Make It
    4. The Work Is the Flex Scheduled for November 13, 2026
    5. You Are Not Your Title Scheduled for November 27, 2026
    6. Check Again Scheduled for December 11, 2026

    A lot of people say “fake it till you make it.” It sounds like the flex. It is not the same thing.

    The flex is display. You perform for an audience. The display is the whole thing. There is no becoming on the other side.

    Fake it till you make it, done right, is about behavior. You act as if you are the person you are becoming. You take the meeting before you feel ready. You speak with confidence before you feel it. You hold yourself to the standard of the person you want to be.

    The faking is pointed at yourself. It is courage, not costume. And underneath it, you are doing the work. The faking is a bridge, and there is a real become on the other side.

    Here is how you tell the difference. Ask one question: does the fake point at yourself or at others? If it points at yourself, act like the person, do the work, it is growth. If it points at others, look like the person, skip the work, it is flex.

    And one more rule. You can borrow confidence, but you cannot borrow a record. Claiming results you don’t have is not faking it. That is fraud. The record has to be built, not claimed.

    So yes, fake it till you make it. Fake the courage. Fake the posture. Fake the willingness to show up before you feel ready. Then do the work until the fake becomes real. That is not showing off. That is becoming.

  • The Happiness Curve

    This is post 2 of 6 in the series “Lenses”

    1. Two Kinds of People
    2. The Happiness Curve
    3. Fake It Till You Make It
    4. The Work Is the Flex Scheduled for November 13, 2026
    5. You Are Not Your Title Scheduled for November 27, 2026
    6. Check Again Scheduled for December 11, 2026

    Someone posted the happiness curve on LinkedIn, and I got curious.

    The classic finding: happiness is high when you are young, dips to a low point around 47 or 48, then climbs again. An economist named David Blanchflower found it in 132 countries. It even shows up in chimps and orangutans, so part of it is biology, not just mortgages and careers.

    Interesting data. But it needed a double-click for me. Because Blanchflower looked again in 2025, and the curve has changed. The midlife dip has mostly flattened. Not because midlife got better. Because the young got worse. Distress is now highest among the young and falls with age.

    Interesting. But I think there are a few suspects here.

    One, the economy. A generation grew up in homes stressed by the Great Recession, and their own start in work and housing has been harder. Two, COVID. It poured fuel on it, but the fire started years earlier. Three, some of the rise is measurement. We taught young people the language of distress, and some normal hard feelings now get counted as disorders. And four, the phones. But I do not think the blame sits in one place.

    Here is my main suspect. Youth is not as centered anymore. And there is a biological reason the flood hits them hardest. The brain is not finished until about age 25. The prefrontal cortex, the part that weighs consequences and filters impulses, is one of the last parts to mature. That is a generalization. Some people are not ready until later. But the broad point holds. The filter is still under construction at exactly the age the flood arrives.

    Because the landscape changed too fast, and we have not learned how to process it. Information used to be centralized, channelized. It came through a few gates, and parents were the central gate. What a child got exposed to was mostly in someone’s control. Now information is distributed. It comes inbound from too many pathways: phones, laptops, games, the internet, digital music, social apps. The old gate cannot hold, and we have not evolved new gates to replace it.

    Even friendship has changed shape. Friends used to be people you knew, who shared your day-to-day activities. Now some young people have friends they have never met and will never meet. For a developed brain, that is a choice. For an undeveloped one, it is dangerous. It cannot yet weigh that influence.

    On the toolmakers, a balance has to be struck. They are not blameless. A car was not designed to keep you driving forever. These products are designed to harvest your attention, and that design is aimed at brains whose filters are not finished. That is a real fault. And still, when cars replaced horse carriages, accidents rose because of the speed cars made possible. We did not ban cars, and we did not only blame Ford. Because with cars, we did eventually build gates: licenses, age limits, rules of the road. We have not built the equivalent for information yet. The mistakes here are in many places. The toolmakers built harvesting machines. The rest of us handed them to children with no gates at all.

    Information availability is good. But only if you have a way to pre-filter it, to manage it, so your attention stays centered. Without a filter, availability is not a gift. It is a flood.

    The curve did not move because middle age changed. It moved because the starting point dropped. And the starting point dropped, I believe, because attention lost its guard, and we have not built the new one yet.

    Until we do, the gate has to be your own. I ration my time on these tools. I am not much on LinkedIn or X. The others I use all the time, but I treat them as what they are: information sources. Sources get managed. They do not get open access.

    Because time is the most limited resource you have. It is the only thing we cannot grow. Money can grow. Skills can grow. Time only shrinks. Protect your time and attention. That is your gold.

    References

    Blanchflower, D. G. (2020). Unhappiness and age. NBER Working Paper 26641.

    Weiss, A., et al. (2012). Evidence for a midlife crisis in great apes consistent with the U-shape hypothesis. PNAS, 109(51).

    Blanchflower, D. G., Bryson, A., & Xu, X. (2025). The declining mental health of the young and the global disappearance of the unhappiness hump. PLOS ONE.

    Foulkes, L., & Andrews, J. L. (2023). Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems? New Ideas in Psychology, 69.

    Casey, B. J., Jones, R. M., & Hare, T. A. (2008). The adolescent brain. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124(1).

  • One Step Removed

    We are all getting lazy. In the world of AI, we get more summaries than ever. Articles, meetings, books, papers, everything arrives pre-digested.

    Every summary inserts an intermediary. Someone, or something, read the material first and decided what mattered. Their biases and interpretations now sit between you and the source. You are one step removed from the actual thing, and you rarely notice the step.

    And yet, one step removed is also better. There is so much content I want to process, and not all of it deserves my attention. I only have so many intellectual bytes to spend every day. The step is a guard on my attention. Without it, everything walks in.

    So I use summaries on purpose, as a pre-processing filter. Like the back cover of a book. The summary tells me what a thing is and whether it deserves more of me. The ones I like, or feel curious about, get the full treatment. I read the actual thing. The rest I let go without guilt.

    The rule I follow is simple. Match the source to the stakes. Low stakes, the summary is fine. High stakes, or high impact, I read the actual material, not the summary. Summaries for quick overviews. Deep dives when it is warranted.

    In the end, I rather not be one step removed from the source if that topic or conversation matters. The step is a good guard. It is a bad master.

  • A Good No Needs a Written Why

    No is one of the least used decisions we make.

    It is not because we do not want to say it. Researcher Vanessa Patrick found three reasons we say yes when we want to say no. We worry about the relationship. We worry about our reputation. And we were never taught how. Toddlers are great at no. It gets socialized out of us.

    Here is the part that should free you. The fear is mostly imaginary. In study after study, people overestimate how badly a no will land. Inviters are far more understanding than decliners expect. The no you are dreading costs you more in worry than it would ever cost you in fact.

    And no is where the power is. Every yes is a trade. When you say yes to one thing, you are saying no to something else, whether you admit it or not. Steve Jobs said it in 1997. Focus is not saying yes to the thing. It is saying no to the hundred other good ideas. He was as proud of the things Apple had not done as the things it had done.

    So how do you say it right? Two rules from the research. First, ground it in identity. Patrick found that “I don’t” beats “I can’t.” “I can’t” sounds like an excuse that invites negotiation. “I don’t” says, this is who I am, and it holds. Second, William Ury’s shape: yes to yourself, no to the request, yes to the relationship. The no protects what you value, and it offers the person another door.

    And write the why down. A no with a reason closes the file. A no without one keeps coming back for a second hearing.

    References

    Patrick, V. M., & Hagtvedt, H. (2012). “I don’t” versus “I can’t”: When empowered refusal motivates goal-directed behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(2), 371-381.

    Givi, J., & Kirk, C. P. (2024). Saying no: The negative ramifications from invitation declines are less severe than we think. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 126(6), 1103-1115.

    Lu, J., Fang, Q., & Qiu, T. (2023). Rejecters overestimate the negative consequences they will face from refusal. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 29(2), 280-291.

    Patrick, V. (2023). The Power of Saying No. Sourcebooks.

    Ury, W. (2007). The Power of a Positive No. Bantam.

    Jobs, S. (1997). Remarks on focus, Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.

  • Your Story Is Your Strategy

    I read a line this week from Ben Horowitz: your story is your strategy. The line is new. The idea under it is very old. Man learns through stories.

    We have passed stories down for generations, long before we had books or schools. There is a reason they survived. A story sticks. It becomes memory easily, and it helps us say things to each other that instructions and numbers cannot carry.

    A story also binds a team. Vision is a far-off thing, an aspiration. The story is what carries that vision into the daily work. It helps everyone travel the distance while staying as true to the vision as they can be.

    Ben Horowitz made one more point that stayed with me. The story has to be simple enough that every member of the team can retell it the same way you do. If they cannot, you do not have a strategy. You have a document sitting in a folder somewhere.

    And the story is not fixed. Execution refines it as you go. The road teaches you things no plan could, and the story has to answer to what the road teaches. But be careful about what changes. The telling evolves. The core does not. A core that keeps changing binds nobody.

    So you keep reshaping the story and telling it again, as it evolves. That is what raises your chances of landing close to your vision at the end.

    Think of it this way. The vision is your direction. The strategy is your compass. The story is your turn-by-turn directions. And the execution is the actual road you travel to get there.

  • Two Kinds of People

    This is post 1 of 6 in the series “Lenses”

    1. Two Kinds of People
    2. The Happiness Curve
    3. Fake It Till You Make It
    4. The Work Is the Flex Scheduled for November 13, 2026
    5. You Are Not Your Title Scheduled for November 27, 2026
    6. Check Again Scheduled for December 11, 2026

    I was talking with someone much younger. They were impressed by people who display riches. The cars, the watches, the lifestyle. I told them to look deeper, at the person who appears not so flashy.

    Don’t look at what you see. Look underneath. A book is not to be judged by its cover. Every book has a story to tell. Beauty is skin deep.

    There are two kinds of people in the world. Some show off and flex. Others stay calm. And their steady work over time becomes a flex in itself.

    Rich is not wealthy. Rich is what you see. Wealthy is what you don’t see: assets, freedom, money that works while you sleep. Successful is not accomplished. Successful is what others say about you. Accomplished is what you actually built. Wannabe’s are not are’s. The wannabe performs the identity. The are has it because they did the thing.

    The flex is a signal. It is what you do when the record doesn’t speak for itself. The calm person doesn’t need the signal because the work speaks over time.

    Here is the test. Ask one question: what does this person have that nobody can take away? The display can be repossessed. The skill, the reputation, the relationships, the assets, those cannot.

    The flex depreciates. The car ages. The post gets forgotten. The substance compounds. Trust, reputation, skill, wealth, they grow quietly. That is why the steady calm becomes a flex in itself. The record gets so heavy it cannot be ignored.

    I wish someone told me this when I was younger. Experience is what teaches this lesson. You can’t hand someone the conclusion, they won’t take it even if you do. But you can hand them the lens.