Stray Thoughts
Fragments, half-built ideas, and stray signals that never found a home elsewhere. Short takes, raw thoughts, and notes-to-self that slipped out in the margins.
The answers we seek are often found on the other side of things we don’t want to do.
- The body we want hides in workouts skipped.
- Relationships, in conversations delayed.
- Success, in the hours of painful execution avoided.
The premise behind “work-life balance” is that work is something to be endured until life resumes.
The irony is, if you accept that, the best you can hope for is a life spent oscillating between mediocrity and distraction.
You’re always waiting to resume living, never raising the bar for how you spend most of your time.
It’s poverty of ambition disguised as wisdom.
This “work-life balance” trope reflects a failure of imagination.
The problem isn’t that people work too much.
The problem is most people tolerate work that feels deadening and then console themselves with the fantasy that “balance” will make it all okay.
They’re trading their best hours for a paycheck, then chasing fulfillment in the leftovers - a staggeringly stupid deal that most accept without question.
But if you’re segmenting your day into “work” (suffering) and “life” (salvation), you’re dividing your life into parts you endure and parts you chase, and never feeling at home in either.
Creating 5 or 10-year plans is mostly a waste of time.
The best opportunities in life are asymmetric. Nonlinear.
You cannot plan for them.
If you had asked me 5 years ago to map out my life 5 years in the future, I could have written down 20 scenarios, and all of them would’ve been incorrect.
That doesn’t mean drifting passively.
It means having a clear sense of direction, a well-calibrated sense of trade-offs, and absolute clarity what you refuse to tolerate.
Then set your compass and leverage every unpredictable turn along the way.
I walk around and talk to myself more than I’d like to admit.
So I work from coffee shops.
Hard to consult my “expert panel” out loud in public.
Ideas deserve commitment: execute fiercely or bury quickly.
Fence-sitting is intellectual cowardice.
The right problems narrow our attention and silence our worries.
The wrong problems enslave our attention and multiply our worries.
James Clear expressed a fascinating, but incomplete idea:
The problem with smart people is they can come up with a good reason for not doing anything. They are smart enough to find the cracks, to foresee the challenges, and to talk themselves out of the idea. They are experts at justifying their lack of courage or lack of action with an intelligent excuse.
But there’s an uncomfortable flip side he doesn’t acknowledge.
Sometimes, the “good reason” is the right answer.
Sometimes, talking yourself out of something does save you from a dumb risk or a time sink.
Intelligence is not just about manufacturing excuses. It’s also about identifying hazards and dead ends.
The problem is, the mind is a hall of mirrors.
Every argument for action has a counter-argument for restraint, and vice versa.
You don’t get a signal telling you, “This time, your caution is wisdom,” or “This time, you’re just rationalizing your own avoidance.”
You only know in retrospect.
That’s the real agony of being “smart”. It’s the endless capacity to generate convincing reasons for and against anything you care about.
I think...at some level, this is where faith comes in?
Faith in your process, your ability to recover, adapt, or just the fact that movement is usually better than stasis.
Nobody cares about health until their body sends a bill.
Always interesting how “too busy” flips overnight when something breaks.
Working hard ≠ burnout.
Working hard on misaligned things = burnout.
There’s working hard, and then there’s working hard on the wrong things.
One leads to tiredness. The other, to exhaustion you can’t sleep off.
Burnout sticks; tiredness fades.
There’s a particular kind of writing I haven’t done in a while. The kind where the thoughts are so tangled they rattle around in your head with no way out.
The only way to make sense of them is to wrestle them onto the page. It’s not clean.
It’s not elegant.
You start half-wrong and end somewhere surprising.
But that’s the point.
Writing like this isn’t for distribution.
It doesn’t need to be seen.
There’s no ROI, no audience to serve, no CTA at the end.
The reward is the clarity. That moment when your brain, after circling itself in loops, finally lands on a sentence that feels right.
You didn’t start with it, but you earned it.
Clear writing is the byproduct of clear thinking, yes. But more often, it’s the path to it. That gets said a lot, but not enough.
Because so much of what passes for writing today is brand-building in disguise.
And to be clear, I do that too.
But it’s a different muscle. A different outcome.
That kind of writing should have a purpose: Who are you speaking to? What are you known for? What do you help with?
But this other kind of writing—the personal, reflective, disorganized kind—needs no justification.
Everyone should be doing it.
Especially the people who don’t think they need to.
We call it “building an audience.”
Really, it’s “building a self in public,” and some folks just happen to show up.
Obsession carves the exception out of the ordinary.
Obsession stains everything great.
Obsession turns the improbable into the inevitable.
All that endures carries the mark of obsession.\
Build health as leverage.
Grow wealth that answers to no one.
Truth above comfort.
Take the hit for real connection.
Leave beauty that draws the eye, not just the crowd.
Running mental notes for myself (sharing in case you need them too):
- Trust in your adaptability, not your plan.
- The worst prison in the world is having the talent and intelligence to achieve something great but lacking the courage to go out and do it.
- If everyone agrees with you, you're not innovating. True innovation is generally met with misunderstanding and ridicule. Enduring that non-belief is the price of admission to alter the status quo.
- Simplifying isn’t about saying less. It’s about making the complex memorable.
A reminder I need every day:
How unproductive it is to try to control the entire universe with our minds. We worry about bad things happening, thinking that if we worry hard enough, that if we pray for a bad outcome, then it won’t happen. We resent other people, thinking that if we resent them hard enough, they’ll change and we will get what we want. [Jared Dillian]
Americanos exist so that people unready for espresso can still feel included.
A few random thoughts about hard thingscircling my brain today:
- After you outrun your old self, it’s hard to respect people still negotiating with theirs.
- I don’t think less of people who avoid hard things. I just stop thinking about them.
- There’s a cost to doing hard things no one talks about: you stop relating to people who won’t. *Doing what’s hard removes the illusion that other people are trying.
No idea who said this but it’s so good:
There is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.
Since my mid-20s, every meaningful decision faced a single, unforgiving test:
Does this increase the probability that by 35 I’ll answer to no one, depend on nothing, and spend my days exactly as I choose?
Because buying time back is perhaps the most expensive thing there is…and I’m paying up front.
Not mine. Just things that are blunt, uncomfortable, and mostly right.\ If any of these offend you or sting, sit with them longer.
On Ambition
- You cannot live a big life surrounded by small people.
- The only thing crazier than chasing your goals is expecting other people to understand it.
- The willingness to be misunderstood is a requirement for success.
- The lazy lose to the average. The average lose to the focused. The focused lose to the obsessed.
On Control
- You can’t outthink the world into submission. The universe doesn’t take orders from your thoughts.
- Many psychologically-driven life problems trace back to our refusal to accept people and the world as they are—and our compulsion to control them.
- Quitting is an underrated skill.
On Letting Go
- Stress and anxiety are directly proportional to the amount of time we spend in the past or future.
“If” is the most polite way to brace for failure.
A friend asked me: “what’s next”?
I said I’m experimenting with a bunch of things. I’ll let you know when one lands.
He paused: “I like that you said when. Not if.”
That remark been living in my head ever since.
“If” is a cushion. It softens the blow before it hits. It’s a quiet exit route, rehearsed in advance.
But I’ve learned that the only unknown is when, not whether.
And when is infuriating...
It doesn’t follow my demanded pace.
It drags. It stretches. It pretends not to hear.
It doesn’t follow my calendar or care how ready I am.
Hard, asymmetric outcomes often arrive on a massive lag.
Usually after you’ve adjusted your expectations twice.
Sometimes after you’ve already stopped looking.
And in the worst stretches, delay starts to look like dead ends.
In real time, limbo and failure wear the same face.
There’s no label when you’re mid-wait, so you start to interpret the silence.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t coming.
It means that the outcome isn’t listening to my tempo.
So no, it’s not “if.”
It’s “when.” Still.
Even if I hate the pace.
The only thing worse than the wait...is stepping out, and never finding out how close you were.
Made a list today of things I’ve been quietly nudging into some distant, indefinite future, mostly because they’re expensive, a bit risky, or both.
But if not now, when?
- Get a pilot’s license (because flying a plane seems “freeing”)
- Learn how to ride (and get licensed for) motorbikes (two wheels just seem more fun than four)
- Skydiving (gravity deserves respect, but fear doesn’t)
- Get a tat (although I’ve never been able to think of anything cool enough to ink + I don’t want to be banished from Japanese onsens)
There’s a James Clear quote I’ve been turning over:
Focus on how the world is working with you, not against you. Everything you are given is material for the next move. Everything.
I want to believe that in the moment. But I usually don’t.
Because when something misses, when the plan breaks or the outcome falls flat…it doesn’t feel like material.
It feels like a misread.
Like I bet on the wrong thing, or aimed too high, or should’ve seen it coming.
Yet, when I look back, life’s been "directionally" good to me.
Things haven’t always gone to plan.
But the detours, delays, and defeats? The stuff I filed under “setback”. They were never the dead ends I thought they were.
They just didn’t announce what they were becoming.
They were building blocks or early moves. Sometimes even slingshots.
What I keep circling back to isn’t some mindset shift. It’s a simple recalibration:
- What doesn’t work out still becomes part of the material.
- What didn’t work still feeds what’s next.
- What closes might be clearing space.
The harder part is remembering that while it’s happening.
Not that everything has meaning.\
But maybe the world isn’t working against me.
That when something disappears or doesn’t go through, it’s not always sabotage. It might be setup.
I forget that. A lot.
When I remember, something settles.
And I start to build again.
A quiet truth I keep bumping into:
You have enough time. You just don’t have enough obsession.
I used to think that if I understood why something was bothering me, it should stop bothering me.
That if I could map the dynamic, name the pattern, trace the wound—then that would be enough.
And sometimes it is. But not always.
Because intellectual clarity doesn’t neutralize emotional injury.
It doesn’t bring closure.
It just makes the discomfort easier to explain, not easier to feel.
Maybe it’s like using a scalpel to treat a bruise.
So then what?
If understanding doesn’t dissolve it, what’s left?
You get to understand it in high definition.
Clarity doesn’t grant relief. It just removes confusion.
Most of my best thinking doesn’t happen in my head.
It happens somewhere between paragraph two and deleting paragraph four.
You watch yourself on the page, and then you decide if you’re full of shit or not.
Paul Graham once said:
“Writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but to have them.”
That’s always felt true. Not always fun. Not always clean. But true.
So here’s the test: If no one could ever read your writing, would you still do it?
I would.
Same reason I still train, even if no one’s watching. Doesn’t matter whether I like it or not...it gets me the ultimate outcome I want.
It’s not about who’s watching. It’s about who I become.
Audience is a bonus. Clarity is the baseline.
The ultimate status symbol?
Having nowhere to be on a Tuesday afternoon.
No rush. No leash.
Not pulled by obligation.
Not orbiting anyone else’s urgency.
Just open time, and a mind sharp enough to do something interesting with it.
Chasing the sparks your brain throws off when no one’s looking.
And the highest tier? You forget that it’s Tuesday—because the best life runs on signal, not schedule.
And then someone asks why you’re smiling for no reason.
You could explain. But if they were tuned to the same frequency, you wouldn’t have to.