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Category: Thinking Clearly

On Making *Tangible* Progress

Published on June 25, 2025

A very talented young teenager spoke to me about her struggles with continued martial arts training last night.

She felt like she wasn’t seeing tangible results from taking classes and didn’t feel very motivated to continue because of it.

She’s fit. She’s very flexible. And she’s well coordinated.

…Class-to-class, she wasn’t seeing any noticeable differences in these area—and with no tangible changes, why work so damn hard?

What I spent a solid 20 minutes talking to her about were intangible changes that come with work ethic and dedicated commitment. The obscure—only noticeable to the trained inner eye—changes that happen within.

We talked about further developing the ability to perform under pressure (and how that relates to the high pressure careers she’s aiming for)… her confidence in being able to defend against bigger, stronger, faster assailants… about having a creative outlet for self-expression (something she admitted she didn’t have outside of martial arts)… about having a safe space for mental health breaks/resets… And finally, we talked about legacy and if she was 70 years old looking back on this stage of her life, if she would regret not pushing herself further to see what she was truly capable of… she said she would.

When we don’t try very hard it’s easy to get lost in appearances.

…To judge progress solely on tangibles. To judge a book by its cover. To determine worth based on social media metrics.

But, if we try a little harder… if we look a little closer… we’ll see there’s a whole (inner) world of data to be processed and developed.

…Which might turn out to be the most tangible indicators of progress of all.

Interrupt Annoying Thinking

Published on June 20, 2025

Sitting down to write today, I stared at my screen for around thirty minutes.

…Not a single word typed.

My mind wandered… thinking of people, chores, tasks… and seemed to keep coming back to a task I was dreading that I’d have to do later in the day.

Thirty minutes of thinking about it was enough.

So I reminded myself that, if I wanted to have different, higher quality outputs (in thinking), I needed to interrupt that pattern with new, fresh inputs.

So I read through a few pages of a few books and finished a few thought provoking emails…

And no sooner than when I read those last few words, the idea for this post popped to mind.

Sick of an output? Change the inputs.

Buy For Time Instead

Published on June 19, 2025

Many people like to express their wealth in space—by buying large houses with gigantic rooms on huge plots of land.

But space without time is wasteful.

Real wealth is expressed in time—by having freedom over your calendar to spend large chunks of time doing as you please (in the space you’ve afforded).

Before you buy space… and negatively effect your available time (larger overhead, more maintenance, excessive fees, etc)… maybe you should find ways to buy for time instead.

I’m No Longer Reading Before Bed

Published on June 12, 2025

A change in my life caused me to stop reading before bed.

And before bed was my time to read… established into my lifestyle for years.

But, I simply couldn’t do it with this new life change…

So I’m training myself to become an afternoon reader.

I’m cutting as much afternoon social media time as I can—at mostly zero as of late—and am replacing it with 20-40 minutes of reading time. Outdoors, too, when it’s nice enough outside.

It has taken me a couple of months to get to this point, but I can feel it starting to take hold.

Today’s reminder is to be diligent about making time and space for the things that are important to you in your life.

Life will always challenge you with distractions and by shuffling up priorities.

It’s up to you to keep everything straight in your mind and matched appropriately with the amount of energy and effort you put in.

If It Ain’t Broke…

Published on June 10, 2025

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But, at the same time, if it can break, don’t forget to maintain it.

Too many of us live reactively in the world. Running from one broken situation to the next, exhausted and frustrated. Possibly because ain’t nothing wrong with any of it until of course… something is…

But, if we spent a little more time living proactively… and walking mindfully in our houses, businesses, and amongst our belongings and relationships… looking for things that are vulnerable, weak, or susceptible to getting damaged or broken… we might be able to prevent so many more “brokens” in our life.

Because here’s the thing: just because it ain’t broke, doesn’t mean we should ignore it.

When in fact, a little maintenance is precisely how we keep things from ever getting broken in the first place.

Fatigue Threshold Spectrum

Published on May 23, 2025

When we exercise our body to fatigue, it takes less to get back to that point of fatigue if we do another set of the same exercise within a close enough timespan.

And even after we’re done with our workout, it can take anywhere between 24 – 72 hours before our body is fully recovered… which means we’re in a prolonged state of it requiring less to get us back to that point of fatigue.

This is how it is for mental fatigue as well.

If we push our minds to a point of complete mental fatigue, it’ll require less to get back to that point for at least a day thereafter. And the closer in proximity we are to that initial point of complete fatigue, the easier it’ll be to become re-fatigued.

The reason this is important to understand is because in life… we’re constantly getting hit with mentally fatiguing tasks, challenges, and experiences.

And if we’re not mindful of where we are on this Fatigue Threshold Spectrum… then we might not act in alignment with what our mind needs to perform optimally and most efficiently.

Just like the muscle group that we fatigued needs 24 – 72 hours of rest to fully recover… so, too, do the mental muscles we flexed to similar points. And if we don’t follow this protocol, then we’ll just hit fatigue quicker, using muscles that aren’t fully recovered, and only prolong our full recovery out further.

So either a) get in the habit of stopping at your 70% fatigue level so you can recover quicker or b) find ways you can give yourself more time to get back towards 0 after pushing yourself to 100%.

The REAL Pleasure In Life

Published on May 19, 2025

The more tired I am, the more easily I’m sucked into distraction.

The more easily I’m sucked into distraction, the more tired I get.

At some point, the cycle needs to be broken.

The cycle can be broken by getting more sleep (which makes it easier to avoid/resist distraction and then again get more sleep) or by further removing distraction (which makes it easier to get more sleep and then again further remove more distraction).

The problem is that most people have a really hard time making this up front investment.

They get to the end of their day and don’t want to go to bed early (because they just want to ‘relax and unwind’) so they allow for unnecessary and excessive distraction.

Or while they’re staring at the priority workload they have to complete, they succumb to the distractions instead because it’s easier and more pleasant to get a couple quick dopamine hits than trying to complete a daunting work load.

But once you make that initial upfront investment and deliberately make choices that lead to more sleep or allow you to focus on the priority tasks over the cheap dopamine hits… and the cycle is actually broken… what begins anew is a fresh cycle… an upward spiring cycle… one where more sleep leads to more willpower over distraction and/or less distraction leads to less struggle with sleep.

And THAT is where the real pleasure in life is found.

Inner Work Prompt: How can you break the tired and distracted cycle in your life?

P.s. ICYMI you can read the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week here.