Category: Investing In Yourself

People get the mindset they deserve through the actions they take in life.

Not from intentions…
Not from hopes or wishes…
…But from actions.

It’s hard to be optimistic when you’re constantly engaging with pessimists…
Or gritty when you always talk yourself out of doing hard things…
Or inspiring when you only ever do the bare minimum…

And that’s one of the frustratingly beautiful things about this whole process: action is the great equalizer—you can’t cheat it.

But what you can do is use those intentions, hopes, and wishes as fuel and get your butt in gear and prove you deserve that better mindset. Think:

…Becoming suddenly unavailable for the pessimist gatherings, both in-person and online, and finding a new tribe to start engaging with—one that defaults to more optimistic, healthy, exciting ways of thinking.

…Doing something hard in a large-scale way. Like doing ten minutes of exercise or meditation every day for a year. Running a half-marathon right now and then doing nothing the rest of the year won’t cut it. Large-scale smaller actions is the way to go.

…Creating and building something quietly. Like launching a side-hustle… Taking a skill-building course… signing-up for a new hobby or craft… and not making a big deal out of it publicly. Make it a big deal inwardly and talk about everything you learned after months of progress.

Incredible minds aren’t given… they’re earned.

…And every action you take is an investment into your Mindset Retirement Account.

Earn that mindset the same way you earn your retirement.

Make a deposit today.

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P.s. Do you leave bread on the hook?

With the amount of information that gets firehosed at us each day—it’s no wonder we so often rush when taking in words.

But it’s the space in between reading pieces—especially pieces that have different authors—where all the magic happens.

…Space for the words to saturate in the mind.
…Space for the mind to exhale after having taken a fresh inhale.
…Space to turn inward and see what’s been stirred up from what’s just been introduced.

Space (and time) is how we move from surface understanding towards internalization.

The image I hold in my head is like the lifecycle of rain:

1. Evaporation: The movement of words from paper or screen to the sky of my mind.
2. Condensation: The formation of those words into thought clouds… maybe even insight droplets that grow in size proportional to the space given and time they’re held.
3. Precipitation: The heat of our attention mixed with the cool vastness of our mind’s vast unconscious understanding create water droplets that eventually fall onto the surface of our mind.
4. Understanding: Depending on our attention, intention, and internal environmental condition of the space we create and hold for the rich precipitation that runs down the crevices of our mind… will determine our level of understanding, application, and internalization.

When we rush one piece to the next, the clouds in the sky of our mind move as quickly out as they came in.

Slowing down allows those clouds to linger. To plumpen up. To create a rain droplet size worthy of a rainforest.

Precisely what the environment of our mind deserves.

…Precisely what precipitation-less, fast moving clouds do nothing for.

Here’s a key insight I discovered after nearly two decades of personal development reading: it comes packaged best in the classic literature section of the bookstore.

The major difference is this: self-help books give the essential, actionable, key takeaways needed for… well… personal development. It’s the stripped down version of an insight that we attempt to push into memory from the outside-in.

Classic literature, however, tells a story. And oftentimes, a story that takes hundreds and hundreds of pages to unpack and fully digest. During which time, you’re living another life… seeing reality through another’s eyes… feeling their emotions and living out the consequences of their actions in real time—as if they are your own… and you’re nurturing an understanding that grows from the inside-out.

This difference in how we retain insight and how it affects us cannot be understated.

The insight being pushed down often gets rejected by what’s already deeply rooted and has been growing for decades within. It’s like trying to blow a tree over with your best exhale.

The insight that’s planted and is given hundreds and hundreds of pages worth of space and time to grow is able to entrench its roots and become a powerful tree in its own right. Eventually overtaking the resources from the “old-ways trees” and seesaws power into the new.

So the next time you’re at the bookstore or contemplating what you’d like to dive into next—with the intention of developing yourself personally—consider the classic literature section over the self-help isle.

The classics are called classics and have stood the test of time for good reason.

I spent about 8 hours cleaning, organizing, and preparing my house for 2026 today.

Two observations as I reflect on it:

1. Chain tasks together. Going one task to the next to the next is always easier than doing one task, stopping, and trying to start back up again. This is as true for cleaning as it is for productivity at work as it is for personal development.

2. Prepare your environment in a way that makes getting the things you gotta/wanna get done easier. Keep your workout area clean, have your workout clothes ready, write down your workout the night before, make sure the equipment you need is prepared and organized, and so on. Also: hide the bad foods in the kitchen, keep a fruit bowl out (and filled), meal plan, have healthy cravings alternatives for when you need something sweet/salty, etc.

Getting everything done that I got done today felt incredible.

If you haven’t prepped your environment like this in a while, it’d be an excellent thing to consider at the outset of 2026.

If you’re anything like me, you get more incoming emails than you can typically process day-to-day. And while I’ve actively unsubscribed from much of the fluff and pushy marketing stuff, there’s still a ton of great stuff I receive that I don’t want to unsubscribe from or delete.

As I mentioned a weekish ago, when it comes time for me to open my inbox, rather than read a hodgepodge of different authors who use different tones and speak from various backgrounds and life experiences—and try to context switch email to email… I’ve been bulk reading one email author at a time.

And lately, what I’ve been asking myself when I open my inbox is, “Who do I most want/need to hear from right now?” And after a minute or two of closed eye inward reflection… I usually know who that person is. And let me tell you, it makes reading emails SO much more effective (as far as comprehension) and enjoyable (as far as it being about what you want/need vs getting your inbox number down to a certain count).

Who do YOU most want/need to hear from right now?

Is your inbox filled with voices that serve you or annoy you? Maybe see if some of your favorite people to hear from have an email/newsletter they send out regularly that you can subscribe to? Maybe try unsubscribing from people you no longer want to hear from…

…Maybe try it when opening your inbox today?

“At his house, George [Raveling] has these big red binders filled with notes. He calls them his ‘learning journals.’ They’re his version of a commonplace book—a collection of ideas, quotes, observations, and information gathered over time. The purpose is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life and work. It’s a habit he’s kept since 1972. To this day, he told me, ‘I go back and just read through them. I’ll just get one of the binders and I’ll sit down at the kitchen table and start reading through it. Sometimes I come across stuff that is more applicable today than it was when I wrote it in there.’”

Ryan Holiday

Known as the “Godfather” in college basketball, George Raveling became the first African American basketball coach in what’s now the Pac-12, had a Hall of Fame career, and played an instrumental role in bringing Michael Jordan over to Nike—who he coached in the ’84 Olympics and knew well for decades.

…And what I love about the above quote is that it’s a breadcrumb.

Successful people might claim to have “blueprints” that’ll lead you to a duplicatable success, but what I’ve found is that it’s less about perfect schematics and more about clues.

…And it’s up to us to solve the mystery in the way that’s specifically aligned with our background, circumstances, talents, aptitudes, and aspirations.

Going back and reading through collections of insightful ideas, quotes, observations, etc… is an excellent breadcrumb to consider. One that countless successful people have left behind. One that guides me every day—just instead of being in red binders, it’s all published online for all to see.

On weekday afternoons, as I’m sipping my coffee, I’ll read some insightful content from books and blogs.

Three of the books I’ll check out are page-a-days that feature one focused idea for each day of the year and there are maybe 5-10 blogs I’ll digest in the same way—a short insight sent out either daily or weekly.

What I’ve been feeling lately, however, is that it’s too much jumping around.

…I’ll read maybe 5-10 pages of content in total, but it’s like each page is authored by another person… and I’m noticing that I’m not retaining the ideas as well because I have to context switch so frequently.

What I want to shift to is 5-10 pages from a single content source/person and then rotate who I read from daily. This allows me to keep the context straight and read more seamlessly one idea to the next.

I feel similarly with social media.

I’ll watch video shorts for an hour and feel like some of the stuff is really great—but can’t remember any of it when I’m done. When I watch long-form videos, however, I usually leave with at least a few take-aways.

This is a shift that more of us need to make in our lives.

…Away from shorter, shorter, shorter… and find ways to move towards the opposite. Because one minute of math, one minute of social studies, and one minute of science taught in rotation for 60 rotations is NOT the same as 60 minutes of math, 60 minutes of social studies, and 60 minutes of science taught straight up.

…When do you feel like you retain what you consume the best?