Quarter life review. Notes from the last 9,131 days.
October 2025
On trust
Hard-learned: trust is front-loaded and maintenance-heavy. First impressions cast a long shadow; most of the real work is keeping it. It rarely breaks cleanly to zero, it drops below baseline. The mechanism is simple and unforgiving: say you will, then do it, on time, without excuses, and close the loop. Say less and promise precisely; underpromise when uncertain; surface delays early instead of going quiet. When trust is broken, there are only two honest paths: do the slow work to repair it with consistent delivery and clear amends, or accept the loss and move on. Not every breach deserves a heroic rebuild for either side; sometimes exiting is the cleanest form of respect.
On ownership vs. environment
Sometimes the variable to change is you; sometimes it’s the room. Discernment matters: if the pattern follows across contexts, adjust the behavior; if the pattern only appears in specific contexts, change the context. Progress accelerates when responsibility and leverage are aimed at the right target.
On rooms
The room sets the rhythm. If a group repeatedly produces anxiety, smallness, or performative noise, exit. Culture is contagious; proximity is a strategy. Choose rooms where effort is normal, feedback is honest, and wins are shared. Selection beats persuasion; find better rooms instead of trying to fix broken ones.
On focus and attention
Focus is a scarce asset and attention is its working capital. Shiny objects levy a real tax on momentum; every context switch bleeds precision. Fewer priorities, longer commitments, single-threaded work. Guard the inputs that shape the mind: prune notifications, narrow information diets, build default blocks for deep work. Invest attention where dividends compound in mastery, health, and relationships, not where algorithms rent it cheaply.
On action over rumination
Overthinking often signals underdoing. Clarity tends to arrive after the first reps, not before them. Start with a small, testable action; let feedback replace speculation; iterate until the work starts teaching the lesson the mind couldn’t think its way into.
On “laziness”
“Lazy” is usually a mislabel for other drivers: lack of purpose, fuzzy goals, low belief, or fear of failing in public. Diagnose the bottleneck and redesign the environment: simpler next steps, shorter feedback loops, visible progress. Energy shows up when direction is clear and stakes feel real.
On opinions and nuance
Certainty used to feel like competence; arguing hard felt like winning. With more context, most stories reveal two sides in tension rather than a single clean truth. Keep convictions, but hold them with handles: ask what evidence would change the view, steelman the other side before critiquing, and separate identity from ideas so updates become upgrades, not losses. Debate less to perform and more to understand; treat new information as a chance to refine the map, not defend the territory.
On the performance internet (and imposters)
Feeds reward performance more than truth. The loudest certainty, prettiest dashboards, and tidiest frameworks rise because attention is the product. A lot of what looks like mastery is positioning to sell you something or to rent your belief for a moment. Behind it, most people are experimenting and stitching it together as they go; even the great ones are still running tests and course-correcting in public. The antidote is calibration, not cynicism: ask what they’re selling, look for receipts, prefer long-term track records over viral threads, and measure progress against last month’s baseline, not someone else’s montage. Use the internet for ideas and community, not for self-worth.