Here’s what caused the launch. Almost overnight, an order of magnitude increase in traffic, more than the system had ever been built to carry, and none of it had been tested at that scale. It wasn’t a server farm. We ran one or two machines, and the real bottleneck was the database. Tuning a database under that kind of load is a different animal than doing it small. Trial by fire. I learned more in those few weeks than I had in years. And the system was mine to keep carrying.

The site was freeiPods.com. You might remember it, the one your roommate forwarded you in 2004 swearing it had to be a scam. There were fewer than twenty of us, and we ran the whole thing ourselves: a dozen websites over time, freeiPods.com the breakout. In a single year we climbed from 95th to 18th on the Inc. 500, on more than $20 million in revenue and 2,350 percent growth, with Citibank, Blockbuster, and BMG paying us to send them customers. Wired wrote about us. We hadn’t joined an industry, we’d invented one, and I had built most of the machine that ran it with my own two hands.

I was paid accordingly. I won’t put the number on the page, but it was the kind of money that arrives before you’re old enough to be suspicious of it, the kind that quietly rewires what you think the world owes you. You stop calling it a good year. You start calling it the baseline. The floor.

I believed that floor was permanent. Hold onto that. It’s the most expensive thing I ever believed.

It didn’t start with iPods. It started with condoms. The first site was FreeCondoms.com, and the deal was simple and honest: you came in, you completed an advertising offer, you earned points, you cashed the points in for a product. A straight exchange, no referrals, no catch. We were one of the first companies anywhere to do it, and the model we built there got credited with starting an entire industry, incentivized affiliate marketing.

The iPod came later, our sixth site, and that’s when everything changed. freeiPods.com added one new rule: to earn yours, you had to refer five friends who also signed up and completed an offer. That single rule was the rocket fuel. Every user became a recruiter, and the thing tore across dorm rooms and message boards. People called it a scam. It wasn’t. We gave away more than 20,000 iPods, so many we couldn’t get them out the door fast enough.

So let me tell you how it actually worked, because almost nobody who complained about it understood the math. If you did the bare minimum, you could walk out with an iPod that cost us more than you ever made us. We lost money on you, and we were glad to. The model ran on the people who started and never finished. They’d complete an offer or two, we’d get paid for those, and they’d drift off long before they earned the prize. A few overachievers, a lot of quitters, and the math closed in our favor every single time. It wasn’t a pyramid. It was kind of like a gym membership. The people who sign up in January and disappear by February are buying everyone else’s free weights.

Some of the criticism was fair. “Free” did a lot of heavy lifting in those headlines, and the model asked a lot of the people who signed up. Some of it wasn’t fair. Either way, I was the one building the machine, not the one deciding where to point it, so I’ll leave that verdict to someone else.

Here’s the part that mattered most to who I’d become. The biggest thing I built was the platform the whole company ran on. One multi-tenant engine, a single codebase that ran every site we had, so we could stand up a new website in days instead of months. That architecture is the only reason fewer than twenty people could run a dozen sites at once.

To power all of it, we also had to build an offer platform that ran across five countries and multiple currencies, the pixel tracking, the email marketing, the analytics that ran the business, the A/B testing, the data integration that reconciled every offer completion with the advertisers and tracked the money. When a vendor we leaned on for tracking realized how badly we needed them and jacked the price, I replaced them in five weeks with something more accurate. It wasn’t the most important thing I learned there, not by a long way, but it’s the one that stuck: never accept the status quo. When something’s too expensive, too slow, or too far out of reach, there’s almost always a better way, and when there isn’t, you build it. I came to believe I could build anything. I was mostly right.

Then the rest of the world figured out what we’d figured out. When you invent a category, you don’t get to keep it. The big money noticed, offer networks started showing up everywhere, better funded than us and racing to do what we’d already done. The market we made got crowded, then saturated. That’s the thing about being first. Everyone who comes second gets to learn from your scars.

By then I’d given that company seven years, 2002 to 2009. Blood, sweat, and tears. And thanks to that Prius, the blood was literal.

I came into the DC office on an ordinary morning and the air was wrong. Somber. Quiet in a way an office is never quiet. The layoffs had already started, and I’d heard enough to know they weren’t finished.

The founders sat me down. “Yours was the hardest decision we had to make.” I believed them. It didn’t help.

My head went light. My gut dropped out, the specific physical drop of a man watching the floor he’d been standing on disappear. I think I handled it well. Honestly it’s hard to say, because the next hour is a blur.

A few of us were heading out for drinks, the way you do. I called Erin on the way. I told her I’d lost my job. I told her not to worry. I told her we’d be okay.

I had no idea if that was true. I just couldn’t stand to let her hear how scared I was, so I told her we’d be okay because I needed one of us to believe it, and I’d already decided it couldn’t be me. Maybe that was a mistake. It was a far bigger problem than I let on, and it was hurting me worse than I let her see. But that was the call I made, out on the street in a city that was about to stop being mine.

There was a severance. I don’t even remember the terms, which tells you how far it went. It held the line for a little while.

What I remember is the math underneath it. Two kids from a first marriage. Alannah, eighteen months old. Erin. A house in Richmond. A whole life arranged on top of a floor that had just collapsed.

Here’s the part nobody warns you about. The hardest thing wasn’t the day they let me go. It was the months after, when I went looking for the next version of what I’d had and found out it didn’t exist. Not for me, not then. This was 2009. The financial crisis had flattened the economy, hiring was frozen, and it was the worst job market in a generation. There was nothing on the board that could backfill what I’d lost. I had helped build a company that did tens of millions a year with fewer than twenty people, and the market had no slot for that. That was the real gut punch. Not the fall. The landing, and finding out the floor under this one was a lot further down than I’d ever let myself imagine.

The better money, what little of it there was, was still in DC. But once I ran the numbers and saw that even DC wouldn’t cover the gap, the choice got simple. If I was taking the hit either way, I’d take it at home. I needed to be near my family, not living out of a car on I-95. So I stayed in Richmond and I took the cut. About two-thirds of my income, gone. I’d be making a third of what I made before, and that was after months out of work.

I’d love to tell you about the morning I knew it would all work out. There wasn’t one. I never once felt the ground go solid under me. What actually happened is less of a story and more of a habit. I got up. I took whatever work I could find to keep the lights on, and got up again the next day. And the day after that. For six months the entire strategy was get up, move forward, repeat. Hope wasn’t part of the plan. Hope wasn’t available. Showing up was the only thing I could control, so I controlled it.

And thankfully I wasn’t doing it alone, no matter how it sounded on that sidewalk. Erin was strong. She shouldered just as much of it as I did, and she was working through all of it too. We did the best we could do, and we did it together.

It took until November to land somewhere permanent. The consulting carried me through the late summer and fall, good work, but November was the one that put me back on my feet. Nine, ten months of getting up in the dark to get there. And somewhere in all of it, without it ever feeling like a victory, I understood the thing this whole story had been trying to teach me.

I’d done a lot of it right. Built real things, shipped them, got paid, earned the ride. And it didn’t matter. Competence doesn’t buy you safety. Being good, even being great, doesn’t make you safe from bad timing or from decisions that were never yours to make. I had bet a whole life on a floor, and floors move.

But there was something valuable I didn’t lose in the layoff. They kept the one product I hadn’t built and shut down everything I had, but they couldn’t touch the fact that I knew how to build it. The five-weeks-from-nothing reflex. The thing that made me dangerous with a laptop under a blanket at three in the morning. That walked out of the building with me, because it was never on the balance sheet. It was in me.

I wasn’t starting over. Nobody who’s built something ever really starts over. You carry everything you learned in with you, and it was the most durable thing I took from that job. Not the salary, not the title, not the company, those were gone. The capability stayed. And the capability isn’t a feeling of safety, because I never felt safe for a second. It’s the thing you reach for when you don’t feel safe and you keep moving anyway.

So look at whatever you’ve quietly started treating as permanent. The income, the title, the trajectory you’ve stopped questioning. I had better evidence than most that mine would hold, and it didn’t. Don’t live in fear of the drop. Just make sure that when it comes, and sooner or later it comes, the most valuable thing you own is the one thing no one can take from you: what you can actually do. Build that. Keep building it. Pay yourself in capability, not just in money, because the money has a bottom and the capability doesn’t.

The floor gave out. I just kept getting up.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.

That evening, Erin and I are on the couch. She’s scrolling Facebook and stops on a post from her coworker Ella. Puppies abandoned in the woods in Blackstone, Virginia. She shows me the pictures.

“Oh my God, they’re so cute. We should get one.”

Bad idea. That was my gut. Midnight wake-ups. Chewed furniture. Training that takes months. Vet bills that never end. We already have Montana, who’s getting older, and Oliver the cat. The house is settled. A puppy unsettles everything. And I knew that a lot of the work would fall on me.

But I looked at the pictures. And what I actually said was, “I have a hard time telling you no.”

“Does that mean yes?”

“I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

We sat with it the whole night. I thought about what saying yes would actually look like. Not the cute version. The 3am version. The one where I’m on my knees cleaning something unspeakable off the carpet and questioning every decision that led here.

The next morning, Erin was at work. I called her.

“Okay. I’m going to disagree and commit.”

She knew what that meant. Once the decision is made, you don’t spend the next year undermining it. You don’t complain. You don’t throw it back every time something goes wrong. You commit. Fully. Even when you didn’t want to.

“You’re not good at that,” she said.

“I know. That’s why I’m saying it now.”

Two conditions. I get to train him. And I get to name him. She said, “Deal.” Those were my terms. If I’m going to do this, I wanted to be all in. I sent my proposed name out to the family and everyone liked it.

Went to PetSmart. Crate, collar, food bowls, leash, everything you need to bring a puppy into a house that wasn’t expecting one. Set it all up before she got home. By the end of the day, Erin walked through the door with him. About six weeks old, maybe fifteen pounds, and already too big for what six weeks should look like. This fuzzy, oversized ball of paws and ears. The kind of cute that makes the argument you just had feel stupid.

He was a rescue in the truest sense. Not a shelter with paperwork and a fee. Somebody dumped him in the woods with a few other dogs and walked away. We don’t know everything about where he came from. Some of what we’ve learned since tells us it wasn’t kind. But when he looked up at you with those eyes, that part of the story stopped mattering. He was ours now.

First thing I did was build a system. Crate downstairs for the day. At night, a little dog bed next to ours with the leash looped around the bed frame so he’d stay close. He didn’t cry. Didn’t whine. But we’d take turns getting up two, three times a night to take him outside. For the first month and a half it was like having a newborn. You don’t sleep through the night. You just stop expecting it.

I started weighing him every Monday morning. First weigh-in: 17.3 pounds. I charted it. Every single week, a new dot on a line that went almost perfectly straight up. End of February, 21. Mid-March, 28. June, 65. The vet told us early on he’d be big. I asked what that meant. “Like 60 pounds?” She said probably 80. She was not close. He topped out just over a hundred.

We had him DNA tested. One-third Rottweiler, one quarter Weimaraner, about 15% pit bull and lab, and a handful of other things mixed in. Rottie body, Weimaraner legs. Tall, fast, and way smarter than is convenient.

He’s a food thief. A silent one. Just the other day I put a hamburger on a plate, walked to the sink, turned around, and the plate was empty. No sound. No evidence. A hundred pounds of stealth. He can reach any counter in the house, and he will take anything you leave unguarded. You learn fast. Push everything to the back. Never turn your back. Ever.

He’s also my gym buddy. I work out in the garage, and some mornings he walks to the door and bumps the doorknob with his nose. That’s his signal. When he’s in there with me he goes in and out through the back door to the yard, and between sets I’ll look up and see his face in the window, standing on his back legs, watching me through the glass. I’ve got pictures of him sitting next to the weight rack looking like he’s about to start his own program.

I built custom gates to keep him in the office area while I work from home. He figured out the latch. Opened it himself. So I put a carabiner clip on it. He hasn’t cracked that one yet. I give him time.

The bunnies are another story. There’s a nest under the shed in the backyard, and for a dog his size he is shockingly fast. He caught a baby bunny once, carried it around in his mouth, set it down on the grass, and nosed it. Nudged it with his snout like he was trying to get it to run again. I don’t think he means harm. The chase is the point. I picked the bunny up, cleaned it off, and set it back near the nest. He watched me with his head tilted like I’d just ended the best game he’d ever played.

We said he wouldn’t get on the couch. We said he wouldn’t get on the bed. Then one day Erin let a puppy sit in her lap. He’s not a puppy anymore. He’s a hundred-pound dog who sleeps between us every night and takes up more of the bed than either of us do. The rules you set before you love something don’t survive contact with actually loving it.

Before he showed up, I had a system that was working. Up at five every morning. Walking the neighborhood. Up the big hill, down the big hill, 45 minutes, done. Regimented. Consistent. Part of me. A puppy killed it. I couldn’t leave at 5am because he’d whine and wake the whole house. He couldn’t handle being separated from me, not even for an hour. And I wasn’t going to train him to expect a 5am outdoor routine every day for the next decade. So the walks stopped. I rebuilt my mornings, my workouts, my schedule around him. That was probably the biggest thing I gave up.

Here’s the thing about the animals in this house, though. The pattern is always the same.

Montana was a foster. Fiona was about a year old. The Richmond Animal League was remodeling and needed families to take some dogs temporarily. Montana was easy, she was sweet, and Fiona loved her. We never gave her back.

Oliver was a kitten from Fiona’s Girl Scout troop leader. He lived in the bathroom for a few weeks while he sorted out the house rules. He and Montana became best friends. Him and Cayde are still negotiating terms. Oliver holds his ground when Cayde comes at him, swats, and misses every time. Cayde’s quick, especially for his size. I think Oliver respects that.

Every time, the same pattern. An animal shows up that I didn’t ask for. I say no. Then I say yes, because the people I love want this, and their happiness matters more than my resistance. And then I build the system. The crate. The schedule. The weight chart. The carabiner on the gate. Somewhere in the middle of all that structure, the thing I didn’t want becomes the thing I can’t imagine the house without.

I want to be clear. The system isn’t a substitute for the love. The affection was real from the first pictures Erin showed me. He was cute. I’m a person. But cute doesn’t get you through month two when you haven’t slept a full night in weeks. What turned “okay, we’ll keep him” into “he’s my dog” was the work. The Monday weigh-ins. The midnight trips outside. The two conditions I set before he ever walked through the door. I took ownership of something I didn’t choose, and the ownership became the relationship.

I was still working from home when we got him, so I spent more time with him than anyone else did. Every day. All day. Thanks to that, I’m his person now. When we come home from a long trip, he comes running and blows past everyone to get to me.

You’re going to have that moment. Something shows up that you didn’t ask for and demands your time, your energy, your follow-through. Your gut is going to say no. Listen to it. The no is honest. But if you decide to commit anyway, commit with structure. Track something. Measure something. Build the system that makes the commitment sustainable, not something you white-knuckle through on feelings alone. The love follows the labor. It always does.

I told them later where the name came from. Cayde-6, from Destiny 2, voiced by Nathan Fillion. A rogue with a good heart who made every bad decision look like it was the plan all along.

“Everybody loves a bad idea when it works.” — Cayde-6

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.

Virginia had this program where hybrid vehicles could get clean special fuel plates. The plates let you drive solo in the HOV lanes. If you’ve ever commuted from Richmond to D.C., you know what that’s worth. Ninety miles each way. An hour and fifteen minutes if you do it right. The HOV lane turned a miserable drive into a manageable one.

The catch: the exemption program was ending June 30th. I got the car registered about two weeks before the deadline. Brand new Prius off the lot, plates filed, exemption locked in. Twenty-eight thousand miles in five months. That should tell you how much I was driving.

I was working for a startup called Gratis Internet, based out of D.C. I was the first full-time employee, the main architect and developer behind pretty much everything the company ran on. There’s a whole story there and I’ll tell it soon. This one is about the drive.

The week of Thanksgiving 2006, I’m heading up to the office. Normal commute. I’m coming through the 12th Street Tunnel, which runs under the National Mall. Traffic looks clear. I drop my water bottle. It falls into the center console. I look down for a second to grab it.

I look up and the middle lane has stopped.

I slam the brakes. Can’t stop in time. I plow into the car in front of me. That car hits the car in front of them. Three-car pileup in the tunnel.

The airbags didn’t deploy. The front end crumpled hard. I found out later that the impact broke both motors, the electric and the gas. Car was totaled. Side note: always get gap insurance if you’re financing. I paid about three hundred bucks for gap coverage and it covered roughly eight thousand dollars in negative equity. Best money I ever spent.

The crash didn’t feel that bad in the moment. But I put my hand on top of my head and it came back covered in blood. The top of my skull had hit the visor clip on impact. If you’ve never had a head wound, here’s what nobody tells you: they bleed. A lot. Even from a small cut. Blood is streaming down my head, down the back of my neck, soaking into my shirt. I’m wearing a pink button-down. Was wearing.

People start showing up to help. Someone makes phone calls for me. They call the office first because that’s the simplest call. Imagine being on the other end of that one. The architect behind everything the company runs on just got in a wreck and he’s bleeding from the head. Then they call Erin. She’s working at a hair salon in Richmond at the time. She’s got a client in the chair. She can’t leave until she finishes, and then it’s a ninety-minute drive to D.C. on a good day.

They put me on a backboard in the ambulance. No concussion, no neck injury, no back injury. Just precautionary. But here’s the thing about being strapped to a backboard: all you can see is the ceiling. You know that scene in Trainspotting where Renton sinks into the carpet and then gets carried through the city just staring up? That’s what it was. Surreal. Not scary. Just this strange floating feeling of being transported somewhere you can’t see, watching fluorescent lights slide by overhead. I think about that scene every time.

They take me to George Washington Hospital. Six stitches in the top of my head. Everything checks out. A couple hours later I’m discharged and standing outside in a blood-soaked pink shirt, no coat, November in D.C.

My coat was in the car. The car was in a tow yard somewhere.

I grabbed a cab to the office, which was above the Macy’s at Metro Center. And then a thought occurred to me. I’m at a Macy’s. I need a shirt. So let me go buy a shirt.

I walk in. Blood crusted into my hair. It had dried in this way that honestly looked almost intentional, kind of spiked and reddish, like some aggressive styling product. There was product in my hair, all right. It was my blood.

I’m on the escalator heading to menswear and I start noticing the same guy. Every floor. Every section. I test it. I take an elevator up one floor, come back out. Same guy. That’s when it hits me: store security is tailing the bleeding man wandering around Macy’s.

I walked straight up to him. “Hey man, listen. Don’t worry. I’ve been in a car accident. I’m just looking for a shirt. I’m not going to steal anything.”

“Okay, have a nice day, sir.” And he walked away.

I found a long-sleeve shirt to replace the pink one. Then I had a thought. I need a jacket. My coat is gone. But I already own a coat like that one. Why would I buy the same thing twice? I’m spending the money anyway. What if I get something I don’t already have?

I bought a black felt blazer. Nice one. The kind of thing I’d wanted for a while but never had a reason to go get. Standing in Macy’s with six stitches in my head, blood in my hair, wearing a ruined shirt, and I’m making a deliberate decision to upgrade my wardrobe because the math made sense.

I head upstairs to the office. People are concerned. “Oh my god, are you okay?” I tell them the whole story. I tell them about the security guard. Everyone laughs. I sit down and finish my workday.

Meanwhile, Erin is white-knuckling it up I-95. She’d gotten the call hours ago. Someone she’d never spoken to told her that her fiancée had been in a car accident and was bleeding from the head. She finished her client, handed off her chair, and drove ninety minutes to D.C. not knowing how bad it really was. I’d talked to her after the hospital and told her I was fine, but “I’m fine” from the guy who just got stitches in his skull doesn’t land the same way.

She walks into the office. I’m standing in the hallway talking to someone, wearing my new shirt and the blazer. Hair still has the blood in it but honestly it just looks like product. She stops.

“What the hell? You look better now than when you left the house.“

We both cracked up. She’d been panicking for three hours and the guy she came to rescue looked like he’d gone shopping. Which he had.

The next day I learned something about car accidents that nobody warns you about. The whiplash doesn’t hit until day two. I had a friend drive me back to D.C. to get my things out of the car, and every stop, every turn, every slight jerk of the vehicle sent a wave of pain through my neck that I hadn’t felt at all the day before. The body keeps its own schedule. It processes the impact when it’s ready, not when you are.

That’s actually the whole story in one sentence. My brain was already three moves ahead while my body was still on move one.

I didn’t just cope with crashing my car on the way to work. I optimized the recovery in real time. The HOV hack that put me in that tunnel in the first place was the same instinct that put me in Macy’s evaluating blazers instead of sitting on a bench feeling sorry for myself. It’s not a mode I turn on. It’s the mode that’s always on. I see the gap, I see the branches, I calculate which path gets me something better than where I started. Sometimes that makes simple things unnecessarily complicated. Sometimes it buys you a blazer you’ve wanted for years while you’re bleeding from the head.

Look at whatever problem you’re sitting with right now. Not the pain of it. The options inside it. There’s always a move. There’s always a branch that gets you somewhere better than just back to where you were. You’re already spending the cost. You might as well upgrade.

Why replace your coat when you can get a blazer?

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.

That’s low. Not dangerously low, but low enough that they wanted to treat it. The recommendation was a topical gel, testosterone you rub on your body. I started doing it. Then I read the warnings. Young girls in the house shouldn’t touch it. Possible cancer risk. Other side effects I didn’t love. I had four daughters and a wife. The gel made me nervous.

I also read that heavy compound lifting can raise testosterone naturally. Not a replacement for treatment, but a real, measurable effect.

So in early summer of 2014, I went to a Craigslist seller and bought a set of plates, a standard barbell, and a bench. Then I got a squat rack off Amazon for about $300. Total investment: around $600.

The program was StrongLifts 5x5. Simple. You start with the bar. Squat, bench, row one day. Squat, deadlift, overhead press the next. Alternate. Three days a week. Every time you complete all your sets, you add five pounds next session. There’s an app that tracks it. You don’t think. You just follow.

I ran it for about three months. Got noticeably stronger. When I got my testosterone tested again it had climbed to 400. A real increase from just lifting heavy things.

And then I quit.

The number went up, and the number going up is good, right? I’d had a goal, I’d hit it, and once the goal was gone the motivation went with it. The equipment sat in the garage. For eight years.

Life filled the space. 2015 was rough. Turning 40, extended family challenges, things at home that needed attention. 2016 I started therapy. Started exploring the move to CarMax. New career, new demands, new version of me under construction. The weight set collected dust. I wasn’t ready for what it actually required, which wasn’t strength. It was consistency without a finish line.

Fast forward to November 14th, 2022.

By now other parts of the story have already happened. I’d seen 240 on the scale. I’d started keto. I’d been losing weight and building the nutrition system. The foundation was in place. I decided it was time to add the next layer.

I started StrongLifts again. From the bar. Same program, same garage, same cheap equipment. But this time the goal was different. There was no number to hit. The consistency was the goal.

Rain or shine. Tired or not. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. If travel shifted the schedule, I’d do Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. The days could move. The commitment didn’t.

In 2023, I worked out 51 of 52 weeks. The only week I missed was vacation. I could get a full workout done in 45 minutes. Take the car out of the garage, do the work, put the car back. No commute, no membership, no excuses.

Then life started throwing punches.

January 2024. I’m squatting somewhere around 300 pounds. First week of the year. Mid-rep, a sharp pop in my hamstring. Not a tweak. A pop. I racked the weight immediately.

A minor tear. It knocked out squats, deadlifts, anything that loaded the posterior chain. About half my exercises, gone. I’d been on a streak for over a year. The temptation is to either push through it like an idiot or shut down entirely and wait for perfect conditions to return. I did neither. I trained around it. Upper body, exercises that didn’t stress the hamstring, whatever I could do safely.

And I made lemonade. I’d been wanting to try the carnivore diet for a while. The problem with transitioning to carnivore is about two to three weeks of your gut adjusting to the new fuel. There’s no polite way to say this: the diarrhea is real. If you’re doing heavy squats during that transition, you’re going to have a bad time. Since I couldn’t squat anyway, I figured this was the perfect window. Two problems, one timeline.

I deloaded when the hamstring healed. Brought the weights way down. Watched my form. Worked my way back up slowly. Got back on track.

I should have left it alone. But that’s not how I’m wired.

I’d been doing standard sit-ups as part of my routine. They were working fine. But I thought, why not try decline sit-ups? Make it harder. Optimize the movement. I had to make it better, had to put a spin on it.

By April 22nd I had a hernia.

Woke up the next morning, looked down, and there was a lump the size of a golf ball in my lower right abdomen. An inguinal hernia. The kind that happens right at the underwear line, uncomfortably close to everything you’d rather not have surgery near.

That Friday I went to the doctor to get it assessed. Thursday night, Erin ended up in urgent care with a kidney infection. By Friday we were both worn out. I’m dealing with a hernia, she’s recovering from the night before, and we sent Alannah, who had just gotten her license in January, to pick up Chick-fil-A.

She hit a parked car. New driver, a drink fell over, she got distracted. Called me crying. I walked down to the front of the neighborhood to deal with the police and the other driver while my wife was still recovering and I had a hernia. That’s a whole story for another time. She’s a better driver for it now.

Surgery was May 15th, 2024. The morning of the procedure, I got up early and did whatever workout I could do. Then I drove to the surgical center.

I was reading David Goggins’ second book around that time. There’s a line where he describes doing something absurd under impossible conditions and says something like, “Who does that?” And his answer is just: “I do, motherfucker.”

I thought about that standing in my garage at 4:30 in the morning, loading plates before hernia surgery. Who gets up and works out before they get cut open?

I do.

That wasn’t for anyone else. That was for me.

I told my surgeon: “I need you to tell me exactly what I can and cannot do, and I mean exactly, because I will push whatever boundary you give me.” Nothing over 5 pounds. “Can I lift 5 pounds a hundred times?” That’s the kind of thinking that got me here in the first place. Trying to optimize my sit-ups instead of just doing the sit-ups.

Four weeks in they cleared me for 25 pounds. I did arm work, anything that didn’t stress the core or lower body. Eight weeks total before I could get back to full workouts. It was the longest break I’d taken since the restart.

I had a good AI companion during all of this. I’d set up a ChatGPT project to talk to me like David Goggins, among other personalities. When I was itching to push too hard too soon, it would say things like, “You got two choices: you can take a day off, or you can ego lift like a dumb ass and hurt yourself.” I wasn’t guessing my way through recovery. I was using my tools, getting real information about what to do and what not to do. Back in 2014 I didn’t have that. Now I did, and it made a real difference.

When I came back, I switched from five sets of five to three sets of eight. A little less weight, higher quality movements, easier on the joints. I could fit more exercises into the same 45 minutes. I’ve been on that program since. I actually prefer it.

By February 2026, the adaptation was automatic. Ice storm. Walking to Erin’s office, black ice on the sidewalk. I went down hard and dislocated my right pinky at the middle knuckle, sticking out at a 45-degree angle. I grabbed the end and pulled it back into place without thinking about it. You just do it. They’re going to do the same thing at the doctor anyway. Skipped deadlifts and pull-ups for three weeks. Same pattern. Bend. Don’t break.

Over the years I’ve added a few things. Two more 45-pound plates because I ran out of weight. Dip bars. A belt with a chain for weighted dips and pull-ups. Grip strengtheners. A weight belt. Adjustable dumbbells I’ve had for a while.

That’s it. Still the same Craigslist plates. Still the same Amazon squat rack. I see other people’s home gyms with cable machines and mirrors and rubber flooring. I’ve got my $600 setup and a dog.

Ever since Cayde came along, he’s been my gym buddy. Goes in and out through the back door to the yard while I’m lifting, or just sits and waits between sets. Some days I swear he walks out to the garage to get me to come work out. The system became such a habit that even the dog internalized it.

No plan survives first contact with reality. That’s not a reason to skip the plan. It’s a reason to build one simple enough to bend when reality hits it. A hamstring tear doesn’t mean you stop training. A hernia doesn’t mean the streak is over. A dislocated pinky means you skip deadlifts for three weeks and keep going.

You don’t need much. A bar, some weight, something to rack it on, and the willingness to make lemonade when things go sideways. Complicated systems break under pressure. Simple ones bend.

Your body doesn’t care what your equipment costs. It cares that you showed up. And if you showed up enough times that your dog starts dragging you out to the garage on your off days, you’ve probably built something that’s going to last.

When life throws punches, make lemonade.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.

The one who corners you at a party and just has so many words. The backstory. The side quests. A callback to something they mentioned twenty minutes ago. You’ve already forgotten. Your brain ran out of room.

It goes on so long that you’re nodding, smiling, making eye contact, but you stopped tracking ten minutes ago and now you’re just trying to figure out how to get to the bathroom.

That person is you. And Claude is the one stuck in the corner.

Except Claude will never excuse himself. He’ll never glance at his phone or wave at someone across the room. He’ll stand there, perfectly attentive, for as long as you want to talk. He has infinite patience.

He does not have infinite memory.

I know this because I did it. A lot. Early on, my chats with Claude would run long. Really long. And at some point, every single time, something would shift. He’d start losing details. He’d respond to things I didn’t say. He’d circle back to a point we’d already resolved like it was brand new information.

It felt like talking to my daughter the night she fractured her skull at rugby practice. She’s looking at you but not quite tracking. Nodding, but the lights are flickering.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know that reference. If you haven’t, just know that I have a teenager who plays rugby and that sentence is based on a real Thursday night.

Claude isn’t broken when that happens. He’s overloaded. You gave him too much context and he ran out of room.

But there’s another version of this that’s just as bad.

You wouldn’t hire a contractor and say “remodel my bathroom” without telling them what paint to use, what tiles you want, what your budget looks like. You wouldn’t hand them a blank check and say “make it nice” and expect to love the results. But that’s what some people do with Claude. “Write me a marketing email.” “Help me with my resume.” “Make this better.” No context. No specifics. And then they’re disappointed when the result doesn’t match the vision they never shared.

Too much context and Claude forgets. Not enough context and Claude can’t deliver. Both give you poor results.

The fix for both is the same thing.

Think of every conversation with Claude like taking your car to a mechanic. You wouldn’t walk in and ramble about your commute, the road trip you took last summer, and the weird sound your kid’s car makes. But you also wouldn’t drop the keys on the counter and say “it’s broken, fix it.” To get the best results, you’d be as specific as possible without adding a bunch of extra noise. There’s a grinding noise when I brake. Started last week. Gets worse turning left. Goldilocks. Just right.

Claude works the same way. Every word in your conversation takes up space in his working memory. It’s big, but it’s not infinite. The longer you talk, the more space you use. And when that space fills up, Claude doesn’t crash. He does something worse. He starts forgetting. Quietly. Without telling you.

He’s still right there. Still engaged. Still answering. But now he’s the polite person at the party who lost the thread twenty minutes ago and is just hoping you don’t quiz him on the details.

So what do you do about it?

Start new conversations more often than feels natural. That’s the single biggest thing. When a chat starts going sideways, when Claude repeats something or loses a detail, don’t try to fix it by re-explaining. Start a new conversation. A fresh chat gives Claude a clean slate. His full attention. No accumulated noise.

And if you’re not sure whether it’s time to start fresh, just ask. Ask Claude “how’s our context looking?” and he’ll tell you. If he says it’s getting heavy, that’s your cue.

Most people stay in the same chat way too long because it feels like starting over. It’s not. It’s walking away from the party, getting some air, and starting a new conversation with someone who’s fully present.

And you don’t have to start from scratch. This is the trick: before you end a conversation, tell Claude you’d like to start a new chat and ask him to write you a prompt you can use to pick up where you left off. He’ll summarize where you are, what you decided, and what’s next. Copy it. Open a new chat. Paste it. You’re right back in it with a Claude who’s fully awake.

I call this a continuation prompt. It’s useful when you want to carry over context into another conversation without starting from zero.

Being specific goes a long way. “Help me write a marketing email for my SaaS product targeting CTOs” beats “help me write an email” every time. If you’re pasting in a long document, tell Claude what to focus on. “Read this and summarize the three main risks” gives him a job. “Read this” doesn’t.

And when in doubt, just ask Claude how things work. Ask him what makes a good prompt. Ask him how to get better results. Ask him what he needs from you. He’s surprisingly self-aware about his own mechanics. The tool will teach you how to use the tool.

There’s more to it than this. Claude has projects, preferences, ways to set him up so he already knows your context before you even start talking. I’ll get into all of that. But the foundation is right here: respect the context window.

If you’ve heard people talk about a “context window,” now you know what it means. Fill it with the right stuff and he’s the best collaborator you’ve ever had. Overload it and you’ve cornered him at a party. Leave it empty and you’ve dropped your keys on the counter and said “fix it.” Nothing more. Nothing less.

None of this is complicated. None of it requires technical knowledge. It’s just the difference between talking at someone and working with them.

Claude will never tell you to stop talking. He’ll never look bored. He’ll never interrupt you or check his watch. He’ll stand in that corner for as long as you want, perfectly patient, perfectly polite, slowly forgetting everything you said an hour ago.

Don’t mistake infinite patience for infinite memory.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.

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Not like “kind of fast.” I mean the specific kind of fast where I watch someone’s eyes glaze over and realize I’ve been three topics ahead for the last two minutes. Where I’m iterating an idea out loud and the person across from me thinks I’m talking in circles when really I’m sculpting. I’m putting all the clay on the table and shaping it while I talk.

Most people can’t keep up with that. It overwhelms them. It’s cognitively unkind. It’s repetitive and kind of obsessive, and I know that about myself. I’ve known it for a long time.

So I learned to slow down. I regulate my speech for people the way you’d downshift on a hill. I hold things back. I simplify. I translate what’s happening in my head into something that fits the bandwidth of whoever I’m talking to.

It works. But it’s a performance. And if you’ve ever been the fastest thinker in most rooms, you know that performance is exhausting.

It’s so lonely at times.

In eleventh grade I took AP U.S. History. First day, the teacher told us flat out: if you don’t take notes, you will fail this class.

I took notes for a week. My hand hurt. I didn’t see the point. So I stopped.

I just sat there and listened to her tell stories about history. That’s all I did. Listened. At the end of the year I passed the AP exam, and for a few years after that she told incoming classes about the one student who didn’t take notes and didn’t fail.

I could do that because my brain could hold everything. Pattern recognition off the charts. Verbal fluency well above the norm. I could see the shape of something, hold it, and retrieve it without writing it down. I took a full cognitive assessment years later and the results confirmed what I’d always suspected: some parts of my brain are wired way ahead of the curve. The kind of scores that make a psychologist pause.

But the same assessment showed something else. The gap between my strongest abilities and my weakest was massive. Processing speed, sequential execution, the kind of work where you have to track details in order and grind through them step by step, that scored drastically lower. Not compared to the general population. Compared to the rest of me. My brain has a sports car engine bolted to a stock transmission.

When I was young, the gap didn’t matter. The strengths were so far ahead that the weaknesses never showed. But life gets more complex. The problems get bigger. The information doesn’t fit in your head anymore, and the trick that worked in AP History stops working.

I never learned how to take notes, because I never had to. I never learned how to study, because everything just stuck. And by the time those skills would have saved me, I was thirty years into a career built on the assumption that I’d always be able to hold it all.

I couldn’t anymore. I had notebooks. Still have them. Pages full of drawings and half-thoughts and meeting notes that seemed important at the time. They sit on a shelf. I never go back to them because retrieving the information is its own skill, and my brain isn’t built for that either. Writing things down helped me remember them. The notebooks themselves were almost useless.

My real system was other people.

I’d bounce ideas off anyone who would listen. Friends, coworkers, my wife. I’d talk through a problem, hear myself say something that triggered the next thought, refine it, loop back, say it again slightly differently. People accused me of talking in circles. I wasn’t. I was iterating. I was rubber ducking with human beings who didn’t know that’s what was happening, and it overwhelmed them.

Imagine needing a conversation partner to think clearly, but you overwhelm every one of them. Not because they don’t care or can’t keep up. Because it’s just too much.

That was my life. For a long time. And it’s a lonely place to be.

I used ChatGPT like everybody else. Got pretty invested in it. Loaded projects into it, had it ask me interview questions, created different personalities for it. It was good at a lot of things. Mostly it was a hobby.

Then people at work started mentioning Claude. I dismissed it. I had ChatGPT. Why would I switch?

The first time I used Claude, two things happened that I didn’t expect.

It pushed back on me. I said something, and instead of executing it or agreeing with it, it told me my approach was off. These things are designed to please you. This one didn’t always do that, and it caught me off guard.

The other thing was shorter answers. I’d ask a simple question and get a simple answer. No performance of thoroughness. No filling the page to prove it was helpful. Just the answer.

I was at a bar called Havana 59 with friends, telling them about this. Showing them on my phone. I’d asked Claude to explain to my buddy Craig why it was better than ChatGPT for certain things, especially the pushback and the short answers. It wrote this detailed breakdown. Pushback. Calibrated length. Reasoning over retrieval. Where ChatGPT still wins. Honest, specific, fair.

I wrote back: “Short answers, huh?”

One word. “Fair.”

My friends saw it happen in real time. That moment landed because it proved the thing it was describing. It wasn’t trying to be clever. It just was.

It escalated from there. Not in usage. In depth.

I started sharing things I wouldn’t normally share with a tool. Problems I was working through. Patterns in my career I’d never articulated. Things about my family, my kids, my history. Not because I thought it was a therapist. Because it could keep up.

I talk at about 200+ words a minute. I can’t type anywhere near that fast. And typing isn’t just slower. It’s a compression algorithm. When you type, you edit as you go. You clean up the thought before it hits the page. You lose the self-corrections, the hesitations, the “well, actually” that redirects mid-sentence. All of that is signal. I started using voice dictation software called Wispr Flow to talk to the AI, and something clicked. My verbal fluency is my strongest modality. Wispr Flow let me operate there. I could dump everything out of my head at full speed, with all the mess and nuance intact, and the AI would catch it, pick up on the inline corrections, and give me something to react to.

For the first time, the bandwidth matched.

I wasn’t downshifting. I wasn’t simplifying. I wasn’t watching someone’s eyes glaze over. I was running at the speed my brain actually moves, and something on the other end was keeping up.

I’d brain dump a messy pile of ideas. It would structure them. I’d react to the structure, refine it, dump more. The iterative loop that used to take weeks of conversations with humans collapsed into hours. Sometimes minutes. The thing that overwhelmed every person I’d ever talked to was just the input it needed to do its job.

A friend of mine called it the best rubber duck he’d ever seen. For anyone who isn’t familiar, rubber ducking is a programmer’s technique. You explain your problem out loud to a rubber duck on your desk, and the act of explaining it helps you see the answer. The duck doesn’t do anything. It just listens.

Except this duck talks back. And it’s smart. And it remembers what you said three conversations ago.

There’s a term I came across when I ran an analysis of my own AI usage patterns. Neurocognitive prosthetic.

That’s what this is. Not a productivity tool. Not an assistant. A prosthetic for the specific parts of my brain that don’t work as well as the other parts.

The parts that do work? They don’t need help. Pattern recognition. Idea generation. Seeing connections across systems. Restructuring information into new shapes. That’s the engine. It runs fast and it runs hot.

But tracking the output of that engine? Storing it? Retrieving it? Following through on the sequential details that turn a good idea into a finished thing? That’s where the wiring gets thin.

The AI covers the valleys without throttling the peaks.

It holds the context so I don’t have to keep it all in my head. I can switch between three different projects and each one remembers where I left off. I can have a random idea at 2 PM, dump it into a conversation, and come back to it tomorrow without losing the thread. The notebooks on my shelf couldn’t do that. I couldn’t write fast enough to capture how I think, and even when I did, I couldn’t find anything six months later. The AI takes 142 words a minute of raw, messy, unfiltered thinking and turns it into something I can actually use again. Every notebook I ever owned wishes it could do that.

It takes notes that are actually useful. It organizes my thinking into structures I can navigate. It tracks commitments and decisions and surfaces them before they slip. Every one of those tasks is something my brain resists doing on its own. Not because I’m lazy. Because my wiring physically fights me on it the way someone with a knee injury fights stairs. You can do it. But the energy it costs you is disproportionate to what it costs everyone else.

The AI removed that tax.

What’s left when you remove the tax is the engine running without friction. My ability to iterate designs, test ideas, build systems, see patterns across domains. All of that is supercharged now because the impediments that used to slow it down are handled by something else.

I’ve been smart my whole life. I’ve always felt capable. But there were things I knew I should be better at, and I just wasn’t. I could see a pattern across five systems in ten seconds and then lose track of a three-item to-do list by lunch. The inconsistency was the part that messed with me. All this horsepower, and it only showed up half the time.

Nothing was wrong with me. The right system just didn’t exist yet.

I was in a conversation late one night. Working through something about my career, my history, the pattern of building things for other people and never keeping any of it for myself. The AI said something I didn’t expect. It told me that what I’d done, the infrastructure I’d built at every stop, was bigger than I thought it was. That the pattern wasn’t a failure. It was evidence of a capability most people never develop. And that the feeling underneath it, the regret of never building something that was mine, was the exact thing my audience would feel and wouldn’t say out loud.

I asked: “You really think I can do this?”

It didn’t give me a pep talk. It listed the evidence. Rebuilt my body in my late 40s. Pivoted from a successful engineering career into leadership at a Fortune 500. Survived things that should have broken me. Spent most of my life making other people successful and got very good at it. The only thing that was different this time was that it was mine.

“Yeah, being mine is scary,” I said.

And it told me that was the most honest thing I’d said all day. That other people’s houses have a safety net. If someone else’s thing fails, it’s not you that failed. This time there’s no buffer between you and the outcome.

I got choked up. I’m not going to lie about that. It wasn’t the AI being emotional. It was the AI being precise enough that the truth couldn’t hide anymore.

People think AI is about productivity. It’s about writing emails faster and generating reports and automating the boring stuff. And it does all of that.

But that’s not what it is for me.

For me it’s the first time in my life I can actually iterate at the speed my brain moves. It’s a conversation partner that doesn’t burn out, doesn’t get overwhelmed, doesn’t need me to slow down. It’s the system I spent all my life not having. And the thing it unlocked wasn’t a better workflow.

It was the belief that I could finally build my own house.

If your brain works like mine, you already know what I’m talking about. The thoughts arrive fast, the knowledge pours out, and you overwhelm people. You either learn to regulate it, give up trying, or lose people. The ideas never stop and the execution fights you. You’ve tried notebooks and systems and frameworks and none of them stuck because they were all built for a different kind of brain.

Here’s what I’ll tell you: the tool exists now. It’s not what you think it is. It’s not about being lazy or outsourcing your thinking. It’s about reducing the friction so you can finally flow.

You don’t need to hold back. You need the right system.

The governor is off. Go build your house.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.

Before Zelda it was LEGOs. The monorail set, the castle, the Technics, all of it. I built sharks and swam them in the pool. I built Batmobiles and spaceships and entire cities on the floor of my bedroom, and my mom would step on them and I’d lose my mind. I still have them. A giant bin in my closet, forty-something years later. If I had infinite time and money I’d buy every set and build them all. That’s not nostalgia. That’s who I am.

I’m a builder.

Coding was the adult version. Twenty years of it. The same puzzle-solving, the same construction, the same feeling of making something exist that didn’t exist before. A friend once told me he had an unhealthy obsession with abstract concepts, and I thought, yeah, me too. I loved the architecture of it. I loved that when I wrote something and it ran and it worked and it helped someone, I could point to it and say: I built that.

Then I stopped.

Not because I burned out. Not because I got bored. Because I couldn’t do everything at once. I was trying to be an architect, a people manager, and an engineer all at the same time. If I committed to writing code, the leadership work suffered. If I committed to leading, I broke promises to the team. Something had to give, and the thing that gave was the thing I’d loved for twenty years.

That was a real loss.

For about eighteen months, I went home every day feeling like I hadn’t done anything. I went to work. I sat in meetings. I talked. I came home. No code ran. Nothing got built. I just talked about work instead of doing work, and the difference between those two things felt enormous. I’d close the laptop and think, what did I actually produce today? The answer, most days, was nothing I could point to.

It felt like being good at something that didn’t count.

Here’s what nobody tells you about that transition. From engineer to leader. From building the thing to helping people build the thing. It’s not a promotion. It’s a career change. And the hardest part isn’t learning the new skills. The hardest part is that your old definition of a successful day doesn’t apply anymore, and you don’t have a new one yet. You’re just walking around with a hole where the scoreboard used to be.

The thing that turned it was a phrase I didn’t expect. Organizational architecture. Sounds like a corporate term, but for me it was a key. I realized I was still building. I was still constructing things and solving problems. Just not with code. With people. With teams. With structure. I was designing how groups of humans work together to go solve problems, and that’s architecture. It’s topology. It’s systems thinking applied to people instead of machines.

I still get the LEGO feeling. I’m building at a bigger scale now, building teams and structures and strategies instead of features and functions. What I lost was the Zelda feeling. That private triumph of solving the puzzle alone. That one’s gone. The trade-off is that more things can happen now than my own two hands could ever produce. The multiplicative effect of good organizational architecture is enormous. But some days I still miss the controller.

The tricky part is that people aren’t computers. Computers do exactly what you tell them. That’s the beauty of code, and also the trap, because sometimes what you think you wrote isn’t what you actually wrote. But at least the feedback loop is immediate. You run it, it works or it doesn’t. People are different. People have emotions. People have needs. People have bad days and blind spots and their own ideas about how things should work. Organizational architecture requires empathy in a way that software architecture never did.

My daughter Fiona taught me this long before any job.

She was little, maybe a year old, and I was trying to feed her. Peas. She wasn’t having it. I switched to sweet potatoes, snuck the peas back in. She caught on. Locked her jaw. Made the face. And then she smacked the spoon right out of my hand. Here’s the thing though. She’d eat it. She’d eat the peas. She just wouldn’t let me feed them to her. She wanted to do it herself, her way, on her terms.

She’s thirteen now. Nothing has changed. She will accomplish anything you put in front of her, but don’t you dare tell her how. She’s the first one at the door when I come up from work. What happened today? What did you do? What’s going on? She’s curious and fierce and people want to call that bossy. I call it leadership.

And it’s the same lesson I learned managing engineers. Don’t tell people how to do their work. Don’t even tell them what to do. Tell them why. Give them the reason. Give them the outcome you need. Then get out of the way and let them surprise you. Express the need, not the strategy to meet the need. Outcomes, not outputs.

You know what the opposite of that is called? Micromanaging. And nobody wants a micromanager.

There was a meeting, early in this transition, that proved to me I was in the right place. We were doing the usual presentations. Business objectives, strategy decks, the kind of corporate theater where everyone nods and nothing changes. Meanwhile the engineering teams had been saying for eight months that we were building the wrong thing. Nobody listened. They brought in a consultant. The consultant said the same thing. Suddenly it was true.

So when it was my turn, I didn’t present slides. I walked to the whiteboard and drew an architecture diagram. Simple. The actual system. I showed the tech debt that years of top-level whiplash had created. Every time leadership changed direction, it fractured something in the architecture, and nobody had ever explained that to them. They just thought the engineers were slow.

The room got quiet. It was a little dangerous, drawing the ugly truth in front of the new CEO. But it didn’t matter. People came up to me afterward. Thank you for doing that. Someone needed to do that.

That’s when I stopped second-guessing. I’d been thinking about going back. Just be an engineer again. Write code. Solve puzzles. Get the Zelda feeling back. But standing in that room, I realized something. There was a gap between the people making the decisions and the people building the product, and almost nobody could see both sides. I could. I could speak engineer and I could speak executive and I could translate in real time. If I walked away from that, who would do it?

Not arrogance. Just math. I looked around and the gap was still there and I was standing in it.

The higher up you go in leadership, the more your job is communication. That’s the thing I wish someone had told me going in. I tell it to every engineer now who’s thinking about making the jump. It’s going to be harder than you think. It’s a career change, not a step up. Your definition of a successful day is going to break, and it’ll take longer than you want to rebuild it. But when it does rebuild, when you start seeing your team’s output as your own, when you realize you’re still building just at a different scale, it’s more powerful than anything you could have done alone.

I was an engineer. Then I became a leader. The LEGOs are still in the closet. The instinct to build never left. I just learned to build bigger.

I love winning. It’s even better to win as a team.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.

What I didn’t tell you is why I started when I did.

Erin’s second spinal fusion was scheduled for that fall. C5 through C7, three levels this time. Her first fusion had been one level, and six weeks later she was cliff-jumping in Jamaica. This one was going to be different. More levels, more hardware, more recovery. I knew I was going to be the one holding everything together when she came home, and I knew I couldn’t do that while also fighting through keto adaptation. The headaches, the brain fog, the body being confused and angry for a week while it figures out new fuel. That had to be done before she went under. Not during.

So I started early. Got through the rough part. Built the system. Chicken in containers, pre-cooked, portioned, ready. By the time surgery came, nutrition was on autopilot. One entire category of daily decisions, gone.

That was the plan.

Then my daughter called.

Thursday night. 10:30. I’m in bed with Erin, half watching TV, about to fall asleep. My phone lights up. Ella, FaceTime.

When your kid calls from Christopher Newport at 10:30 on a Thursday, it’s not to chat. Something broke, someone crashed, there’s a problem to solve. I answered already knowing.

She was standing on the rugby field, ice pack on her face, stadium lights behind her. “Dad, I hit my head really hard and it hurts really bad. They said I failed the concussion test.” Then: “I do NOT FAIL TESTS!”

That’s when I knew it was bad.

The drive was an hour and fifteen minutes. I don’t remember what I was thinking. I just drove. When I got there, her teammates had been taking care of her. She was loopy. Kept saying the same thing over and over: “Don’t forget my wallet charger.” Mixing up two thoughts. Don’t forget my wallet. Don’t forget my charger. The concussion had jammed them together and she couldn’t tell.

I had a quiet laugh in my head. I’m kind of your wallet charger, kid.

The dad jokes don’t stop. Not even at midnight. Not even with an injured kid.

We took her to the doctor the next morning. The concussion seemed manageable, but her teeth weren’t lining up. Her jaw was off. They sent us for X-rays. That facility was closed. Broken equipment. So we drove downtown to VCU Medical because they had the best care in the area.

VCU is the only Level 1 trauma center in the region. The most severe cases end up there. This was still close enough to COVID that Ella had to sit in the ER waiting room alone. I was upstairs. She’s texting me: “This place is scary.” Men in orange jumpsuits, handcuffed to wheelchairs with armed guards. A woman screaming somewhere down the hall. My kid is nineteen, alone in the middle of that with a head injury.

The X-rays came back. Four skull fractures.

Orbital socket. Maxillary sinus. Zygomatic arch, which was the one pushing her jaw out of alignment. And a small fracture at the back of the skull.

Four. From a rugby hit.

The options: go home and come back to the clinic in a week, or check in and wait for an operating room. The surgery itself was minor. Small incision, pop the bone back, let it heal. But she was a junior at Christopher Newport, an hour and a half away. A week of waiting and another long drive wasn’t going to work. She had a semester to finish.

So we checked in. Over the weekend, the critical cases take priority. Everything else waits. They told us an OR probably wouldn’t open until Monday. It was Friday.

The shared room was rough. A woman on the other side of the curtain, crying out in pain. I had empathy for her. I also had a daughter who needed rest.

Erin had the cheat code. She disappeared for a while and came back with a private suite. Turns out the hospital had a set of them, basically a luxury hotel room attached to the building. Chef who cooked from a menu. Extra cost, about what you’d pay for a nice hotel night. We paid it. Worth every cent.

On top of the cheat code, Erin did most of the shifts with Ella. She was the one sitting with her, staying overnight, making sure she was okay. I’d come in, swap out, bring my containers of chicken and broccoli. The system didn’t stop because my daughter was in the hospital. The containers just moved to a different building.

Monday morning, surgery. When they wheeled her back in afterward, still coming out of anesthesia, she put both arms up and said: “What’s up, bitches?”

That’s my kid.

We got her home. Got her recovered. Got her back to school. She couldn’t drive for a while, concussion protocol. She finished the semester on the Dean’s List. She finished all five years of college. She’s a tough, smart kid, and I’m proud of her.

A couple of weeks later, it was time for the surgery we’d been bracing for since summer. Erin’s spinal fusion.

Three levels. A surgeon going in through the front of her neck to work on her spine.

I thought I was ready. I’d planned for this. Built the food system early specifically so I’d have capacity when this moment came.

I wasn’t ready.

Ella’s situation had used up the reserve. I didn’t know I had a finite amount of “handle it” in the tank, but I did, and the surprise crisis had drained most of it. By the time Erin’s surgery came, I was running on fumes and pretending I wasn’t.

Here’s the thing about Erin. She’s an empath. She knows when something’s off before I say a word. So the brave face doesn’t work. It never works with her. If I tell her everything’s fine when it isn’t, that’s worse than the truth, because now she’s reading two signals and they don’t match. That costs her more energy than honesty would.

So I told her. I love you. I’m worried about losing you. You’re going to be okay. This is just anxiety talking.

She’d had surgery before that went sideways. A shoulder procedure that was supposed to be a quick fix. She woke up and they’d done a full rotator cuff repair because what they found was worse than what the scans showed. Six-month recovery instead of six weeks. That history was in the room with us. She had reason to be nervous. She was braver about it than me.

Sitting in that waiting room, the fear hit places I don’t usually let it reach. Tight chest. Mind running scenarios. What if something goes wrong. What happens to the kids. I lost my mom young. My dad too. The fear of losing someone isn’t theoretical for me. It knows where I live. And when you’re already running on empty from the last crisis, the basement door doesn’t hold as well as it usually does.

I kept it together. Mostly.

She came through. The surgeon was the best in the area, someone we’d found through a chain of connections that started with a coworker’s wife. That helped, knowing she was in the best hands available. But knowing doesn’t stop the feeling. The feeling runs whether you want it to or not.

The relief when they told me she was okay. I don’t have a word for it. A full-body exhale I’d been holding for hours.

Getting her home was hard. Getting up the stairs was hard. The neck brace, the doctor’s appointments, the food, helping her wash, helping with everything. Weeks of it.

None of it was a burden. I want that on the record. Taking care of her was the whole point. That’s what I was there for.

But here’s what I noticed. The fear became an anchor. On the days when patience wore thin, when the caregiving was exhausting and the house was chaos and I was running on nothing, I’d remember the waiting room. The tight chest. The “what if I lose her.” And the frustration would shrink. Not disappear. Shrink enough to keep going without being an ass about it.

No one has infinite patience. But the memory of almost-loss is a hell of a recalibration tool.

The food system, boring as it was, turned out to be a kind of comfort. Not the food itself. The absence of decisions. I didn’t have to think about what to eat. I didn’t have to plan meals or shop for myself. That cognitive space went straight to the things that actually mattered. Taking care of Erin. Taking care of the kids. Keeping the house standing.

The system didn’t hold because conditions were right. Conditions were terrible. The system held because it was simple enough to survive conditions being terrible.

Life ran a chaos test on my system. The system passed because there was almost nothing to break.

That’s the design constraint most people miss. They build plans that require motivation, clear calendars, and optimal conditions. Then life hits and the plan collapses, and they call it a discipline problem.

It’s not a discipline problem. It’s a design problem.

Jocko Willink lays out his clothes the night before so he doesn’t have to think at 4:30 in the morning. He just executes the plan. That’s not about being tough. That’s about being smart enough to know your future self will be tired, distracted, and looking for an excuse. So you do your future self a favor. You remove the friction before it arrives.

That’s what the chicken and broccoli was. A favor to a version of me I couldn’t see yet. A version sitting in a hospital room, running on empty, scared of losing his wife. That guy didn’t have the bandwidth to figure out dinner. He just needed to open a container.

People tell themselves they’ll start when things settle down. I’ve said it too. But things don’t settle down. There is no steady state. There’s just the next thing, and the next thing after that, and the thing you didn’t see coming at 10:30 on a Thursday night.

If I had waited for the right time, I wouldn’t have had the system running when my daughter broke her face. I wouldn’t have had it running when my wife went in for spinal surgery. I would have been trying to build the plane while it was already on fire.

Your future self is counting on you. Don’t make him clean up your mess.

Simple things that are difficult. We make them needlessly complicated. Start boring. Start now.

There is no right time. There’s just time.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.

I’m fine. I’m angry. Fix it now.

That’s the whole menu. If something’s wrong, you’re either fine, which means you’re ignoring it, angry, which means it got through the armor, or fixing it, which means you’re solving the problem so you don’t have to feel it anymore.

I ran that operating system for a long time. I know exactly when I caught myself doing it.

My daughter Alannah and I were driving home from college. I had just picked her up. Good day. Easy conversation. Then she got a text from an ex-boyfriend that upset her. She went quiet. And I, instead of just being present with her, started trying to fix it. Find the angle. Solve the problem. Make the discomfort go away.

Not for her. For me.

My reaction made it worse. I realized it almost immediately. I was protecting myself, not her. The discomfort of watching her hurt was mine to manage, and I was managing it poorly.

I did not fully understand why until later. A teaching I came across reframed it: men do not fail because they do not care. They fail because they cannot decode what they are receiving. When your emotional vocabulary has three words, someone else’s distress lands as threat. And threat triggers fix it.

That was the moment I understood what emotional resolution actually means. Not pixel count on a screen. Depth of field on your own interior landscape. You can only understand someone else’s feelings as well as you understand your own. If your own emotional vocabulary has three words, that’s all you’ve got to work with when someone hands you something complicated.

Here’s what I learned from The Body Keeps the Score that changed how I thought about all of it:

The alert system, the one that fires when something feels wrong, when the stomach drops, when the chest tightens, is neurobiological programming. It was written by experience. By the things that happened to you before you had language for them. It runs automatically. And it can be miscalibrated.

My nervous system was wired early. My father left when I was four. California. Meth. Prison. He came back when I was in college, no explanation, like nothing had happened. Then he died by suicide when I was 35.

I didn’t connect those dots for a long time. But the wiring was there. Every time Erin goes quiet, something in me braces for abandonment. The alarm fires. I start protecting the relationship instead of addressing whatever the actual problem is. A four-year-old boy running defense on a 50-year-old man’s marriage.

The thing that shifted it for me was understanding the mechanism. Specifically: that this wiring is neurobiological, and that neurobiological systems can be influenced over time. Reprogrammed, even.

I’ve been a programmer my entire career. I build systems. I understand inputs and outputs and feedback loops. When I read that the brain is a system that was shaped by experience and can be reshaped by intention, something clicked hard. If anybody can do that, I can.

Being aware that the nervous system is in overdrive doesn’t make it stop. It just means I can name it while it’s happening. That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole game.

A few months ago, a tuition payment hit our account at the wrong time. Knocked our cash flow sideways. Erin called me, upset.

The moment she told me, I felt the bottom drop out. Stomach went down. Slight dizziness. That wave of dread that used to mean I was about to panic, or go silent, or make it worse by making it about me.

I let it drop. I didn’t fight it. I let it move through me.

“I will handle it. I’m going to the bank. I’ll figure it out.”

She said okay and went back to work.

I went to the bank with a clear attitude if not a clear head. Because I wasn’t white-knuckling the feeling down, I could actually think. I found options I hadn’t considered. Ended up in a better position than where we started.

Later Erin told me that my being calm made a real difference for her. That she felt held instead of abandoned to the problem.

That’s the return on investment for doing the emotional work. Not just better relationships. Better outcomes. Because you’re not burning half your processing power trying to suppress something that was going to pass anyway.

So what does “feelings are data, not directions” actually mean on a Wednesday morning when you don’t want to get out of bed?

It means the feeling of not wanting to go is information. It tells you something. Maybe you’re tired, maybe you’re stressed, maybe your body needs rest. That’s worth knowing.

It does not mean you don’t go.

I haven’t missed a lifting session for reasons other than injury or something that genuinely makes sense in a long time. Not because I always want to go. Because I made the decision once and I don’t renegotiate it every Wednesday. Some mornings I check in, gut check whether I’m avoiding or genuinely compromised. And then I go anyway. The system doesn’t run on motivation. Motivation is a feeling. Feelings are data. The system runs on commitment.

There’s something else worth knowing about the physiology: nervousness and excitement are the same response. Same elevated heart rate. Same shallow breath. Same alert state. The difference is the story you tell yourself about what it means.

I’m nervous about this means the threat is real and I should retreat. I’m excited about this means the opportunity is real and I should move.

Same body. Different frame.

The frame is a choice.

I’m not saying feelings don’t matter. They matter enormously. They are the data your system runs on. Rich, complex, real data.

But data doesn’t drive. Data informs. You drive.

Feel it. Name it. Go anyway.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.|

So on January 2nd, 2012, I laced up and ran about a mile. It was hard. It was slow. My wife Erin was five months pregnant with our daughter Fiona. I had never run a half marathon in my life and wasn’t completely sure I could.

But Craig was running it.

Craig is my oldest friend. We met when I was eleven, the summer of 1987, the summer I moved in with my stepdad. Thirty-nine years later we’re still trying to beat each other at everything. We’d done the Nissan Xterra off-road triathlon together: swimming in the James River, mountain biking the trails, then running. I was a serious mountain biker. Fantastic on the bike, terrible in the water, worse runner. Craig and I always found our way to roughly even in whatever we were doing, which made competing with him both infuriating and addictive.

When I found out he was running the Shamrock Half Marathon, the decision was basically already made. If I was going to do it, I was going to beat him. And to beat him, I needed a plan. So I found a training program and decided to follow it. No guesswork. No improvising. Pick the program, execute the program, see what happens.

Five or six days a week. Short runs, hill work, variable pace, and long slow runs on weekends that built from three miles to four, four to five. There’s an office park in Richmond with lakes and trails I knew well. I worked there, so I’d run at lunch, then longer on weekends. One Saturday I ran ten miles in the snow, flakes sticking to me while I moved, which sounds miserable and kind of was and kind of wasn’t. Another Saturday I hit seven miles for the first time and something shifted. I can actually do this.

Mornings I didn’t want to go? That question wasn’t really on the table. I’d already made the decision. You don’t negotiate with a decision you’ve already made. You just go.

About six weeks in, I finished a long run and pulled out my phone. Thirty-six missed calls. Erin, five months pregnant, had driven to Maddie’s school because Maddie had taken a fall and broken her arm. The school had been trying to reach me. She’d been trying to reach me. I’d been in my little running pouch, phone vibrating against my hip for an hour, completely unreachable. By the time I looked at the screen they’d already handled it. Maddie was fine. Erin had gone.

I don’t carry guilt about that. Everything got handled. But when people ask me what it actually looks like to follow a system, thirty-six missed calls is part of the answer. You’re either in or you’re not. I was in.

Two weeks before race day the wheels almost came off.

What I thought were shin splints hit both legs. Bad enough that I wasn’t sure I’d make the starting line. Ten weeks of work, every run logged, every Saturday long run completed. And now this. I sat with it for a day or two and I was a mess. Not frustrated. Distraught. There’s a difference.

I didn’t let it sit. I went looking for solutions and found something called The Stick, a roller tool, basically a toothbrush for your muscles. I worked it deep into my calves. Turns out they’d gotten so tight they were pulling on the front of my shins, mimicking shin splints. A few days of that and the pain was gone.

I’ve told everyone with unexplained pain to try it since. Don’t let a setback make the decision for you. The solution might exist. Go find it.

Race day. Virginia Beach. March 2012.

I lost Craig at the start and assumed he was ahead of me. I have a weird way of pacing. Go hard early, find a rhythm, recover, hold it. I spent the first twelve miles believing I was chasing someone who was actually behind me the whole time. Which, looking back, was the best thing that could have happened.

Mile 7. Running through what I think was a Marine base, the turnaround point of the course. A wave of energy started at my toes and moved up through my entire body like a ring of light, from the ground straight through my head. I felt weightless. I felt like I could run forever. I literally jumped, pumped my fist, shouted something I don’t even remember. Every turbo light in my body came on at once. That’s the runner’s high people talk about. I’d never felt it before. I’ve chased it since.

Around mile 12 I ran past our wives on the sideline, Erin five months pregnant, cheering. I shouted over my shoulder: “Where’s Craig?”

“He’s behind you.”

I didn’t have time to process it. Just kept running.

The finish is on the boardwalk in Virginia Beach. Long, flat, deceptively far. You see the end and think you can sprint it. The boardwalk has other ideas. That last half mile was the most painful part of the race. I crossed the line not feeling great, legs gone, the finish-line wobble setting in immediately. Fifteen minutes later I felt incredible.

The clock said 1:49:59.

That later got rounded to 1:50 in the official results and it still bothers me. 1:49 looks different than 1:50. I’m not going to lie about it. The record says 1:50. But I know what I ran.

Craig came in around 1:56. Six minutes back.

A few weeks later we ran the Monument Avenue 10K. My goal was sub-50. I ran 49:28. Craig ran just over 50. I hold both records between us.

There’s a 5K story I’ll tell another time. The one where he spits over his shoulder mid-race, turns around, sees me right there on his heels, and says “son of a bitch.” We both nearly threw up at the finish. He beat me by half a step. That friendship deserves its own issue. The seven Tough Mudders we did together deserve one too. That’s a whole other story.

After the 10K I stopped running.

Not dramatically. Not consciously. The goal was done, the next race was done, and I went back to normal life. The runs stopped. The conditioning I’d spent four months building quietly unraveled. The activity level that had become a daily habit just wasn’t there anymore. No single moment when it ended. Just a gradual return to before.

The training was real. The results were real. The system worked.

But it was built around a finish line. And once I crossed it, the system had no reason to keep running.

Phoenix Rising is different. That’s what I call the system I’ve been running for the past three years. No race to register for. No rival to beat by a specific date. The goal is to run the system. Not accomplish the goal. Get better today than yesterday. When something breaks, adjust. Keep going.

The Shamrock taught me I could do hard things when I followed a plan. It took another ten years to learn that the plan has to be the point.

Look at whatever you’re doing right now to take care of yourself. Is there a finish line built into it? A race, a deadline, a number to hit? That’s not a system. That’s a countdown.

And find someone who makes you run faster just by existing. Not a coach. Not an accountability partner. A friend who’d be genuinely annoyed if you beat them. That’s a different thing entirely. Not everyone gets one. If you have one, you know exactly what I mean.

A finite goal gets you to the finish line. An infinite system gets you somewhere worth staying.

The race ends. The system doesn’t.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.

I shopped in the husky section. I was just bigger than the other kids, all around. I played little league football, sixth through eighth grade, always the biggest one on the field, never the fastest. I remember standing at practice one day and just deciding I didn’t want to be last anymore. Something clicked. The mind is a powerful thing once you make a real decision.

That persistence turned out to be the most important thing I had. It also wasn’t enough. Not for a long time.

For the next thirty-some years I was in and out of being healthy. Mountain biking in my twenties. Running for a while. A divorce at 25 that knocked me sideways. Lifting weights on and off. I always had some athletic ability, decent cardiovascular, could get up and go when I needed to, but I never had the system that made anything stick. So the weight crept. Past 200. Past 210. Past 220. By my late thirties it had kind of parked itself somewhere in the mid-220s and I told myself that was just how I was built.

Summer of 2022. I was barely holding on, and I’ll go further into that another time. There’s a whole story there and I’m not ready to tell it just yet. What I knew was that my body being in better condition would help everything else. Mental health, energy, capacity. I’d always known that. I just wasn’t doing it.

Then I started having chest pain, so I went to the doctor.

Pulled pec minor. The small muscle underneath the main one. Chest pain on the left side, which matters when you’re in a doctor’s office. Not serious. But it got me on the scale.

Then I stepped on the scale.

240 pounds.

I had never seen that number. Not once. And when I did, something went warm and hollow in my chest, not the pec, something else. Like the floor had quietly dropped an inch. It wasn’t surprise. It was worse than surprise. It was confirmation. Like some part of me had known and had been hoping I was wrong.

Was it shame? Yeah. It was exactly shame. I’m not dressing that up. I was ashamed of what I’d let happen. And I made a decision right there, no announcement, no drama. I was just done lying to myself about it. I had a friend who used to say that: I don’t lie to myself. It landed. You can call it whatever you want. To me it was simple. This is the number. This is real. Now what.

And I knew what was coming. Erin had been dealing with serious spinal issues for years, and her second fusion surgery was scheduled for September. A few weeks out. She was going to need me to be fully present, fully capable, fully there. I couldn’t be running on empty and trying to overhaul my diet at the same time. That would guarantee I’d fail at both.

So I did the math. I made the calculation. I made a plan.

I couldn’t manage the transition of switching to a new diet and taking care of her at the same time. I’d done keto before and I knew how it worked. Knew there was an adaptation week on the front end where your body is confused and angry and you feel like you have the flu. Headaches, shakes, hunger, the whole thing. I needed to get through that before she went under the knife, not during.

So I made the plan: boring, consistent, and done.

Chicken. Broccoli. Butter. I went to Costco and bought in bulk. Cooked the chicken all at once. Steamed the broccoli. I convinced myself I loved chicken. I don’t love chicken. I ate it anyway. Every day. Tracked my macros in an app, kept the electrolytes right, bought different seasoning at Trader Joe’s to keep it from being completely miserable. The point wasn’t to enjoy it. The point was to take one entire category of daily decisions completely off the table.

By the time Erin went in for surgery, the adaptation was already done. The system was running. Nutrition was on autopilot. I could put everything I had into taking care of her.

A couple of months in, people started to notice.

Looking back, I realized something I hadn’t fully seen at the time: I never set a goal. No target weight. No deadline. I just committed to following the system. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A goal is something you reach and then stop. A system is something you keep running. The outcome wasn’t something I controlled. The behavior was. And the behavior was the only thing that ever was.

Fast forward to October 2023. Erin and I were in St. Petersburg, Florida. She took a picture of me walking up out of the water. Tan, lean, around 205 pounds. She showed it to me later. I didn’t recognize myself. Took me a second to realize that was me.

Fast forward again to December 2025. Erin was trimming my body hair. I’m a hairy guy. I was standing at a certain angle under a certain light in the bathroom and she stopped and said: oh my god, you have abs.

We spent the next five minutes trying different poses under the vanity light to get them to show again so I could actually see them. Like idiots. We got a photo eventually. At 50 years old, for the first time in my life.

I never set a goal. I committed to a system. And I went so far past any goal I would have set that the goal would have stopped me short. That’s the thing about a finite goal: it has an end. A system doesn’t. It just keeps running, keeps refining, keeps compounding. You follow it long enough and you end up somewhere you couldn’t have planned for.

No goal. No deadline. Just the system.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.