For me, it started on Monday with a faint, unmistakable scratch at the back of my throat. It’s that subtle tickle you try to swallow away, drowning it in extra hydration while making a silent, slightly arrogant promise to yourself: Not me. Not this week.

By Tuesday afternoon, any lingering illusion of physical invincibility had completely dissolved into sheer absurdity.

If you had walked into my kitchen last night before dinner, you would have seen a man waging an all-out, frantic war against his own biology. I stood over the blender building a super-smoothie loaded with every conceivable root, powder, supplement, and immunity booster sitting around. I was trying to blend my way out of this terrible cold (still hitting hard and still miserable today). 🫠

Did I believe a single concoction was going to miraculously wipe out a virus mid-flight? Of course not. But I drank it anyway, along with a few other holistic remedies I procured this week. And today I went with DayQuil for the congestion so I could get through a couple of meetings without gasping.

Call it symptom relief, call it a desperate bid for comfort, or call it the psychological grace of the placebo effect… If it offers even a 2% shift in how I feel, I’m taking it.

Where did this biological takeover come from? The exact patient zero is no mystery. A particular, symptom-heavy boy with blond hair whose initials are HHH (IYKYK 🤣). At this stage of boyhood, personal hygiene remains a distant, purely theoretical concept. Consideration for another human’s respiratory airspace simply does not exist. Coughs are launched into the open room with wild abandon, boundary lines are non-existent, and a casual, affectionate interaction with a child is all it takes to sink the ship. I love them unconditionally, but I have also accepted that living with them means paying a perpetual germ tax.

At the beginning of the week, my natural impulse was to negotiate with my own body. Mentally, I pushed against the fog because I had momentum to maintain, calls to conduct, and weekly responsibilities to protect. I tried to optimize my way around a basic human ailment.

Ultimately, reality won. I had to clear a few meetings off the calendar and accept a significantly slowed pace for the week.

It was a stark reminder of a truth we constantly try to outsmart in the name of performance: I do not have control.

We live in an era that sells us the idea that with enough biohacks, rigid routines, and sheer willpower, we can control our physical state at all times. We treat health like a linear equation where the right inputs guarantee a near-flawless, uninterrupted output. But nature doesn’t care about your calendar. It has its own agenda, and sometimes that agenda includes a hard, involuntary timeout.

What we do have (always) is agency.

Control is demanding the cold disappear so we don’t lose a day of productivity. It’s the friction of fighting what is already happening.

Agency, on the other hand, is recognizing the biological reality of where you are and deciding how to respond. It’s accepting that your body is demanding a slower gear, choosing to put down the nonessential load, and leaning into whatever brings comfort, whether that’s an aggressive green smoothie, a dose of decongestant, or simply closing the laptop an hour early.

Having a healthy body, mind, and spirit doesn’t mean you become bulletproof or immune to the messy reality of being human. It means cultivating the self-awareness to stop fighting the pause when it arrives.

Sometimes, the highest level of health practice isn’t pushing through. It’s just pouring a cup of tea, accepting the foggy head, and letting your body do what it knows how to do.

It always started the same way: “I don’t like swimming,” “I hate the water,” or “I’ve never really swum a lap in my life.”

And it’s rarely about the water.

An open water swim isn’t really testing your stroke technique as much as it’s interrogating your mindset. I’ve coached athletes with zero swim background who harbored real, visceral fears yet jumped into training and racing anyway. On the flip side, I’ve spent time around physically gifted people who talked a massive game but never actually put anything on the line, least of all showing up on a race morning.

The divide was rarely about athletic pedigree. It came down to how they framed the dark open water (lake, bay, ocean, reservoir, etc.). Was it a murky, fixed abyss waiting to swallow them whole? Or was it the great wide open, waiting to be explored and experienced?

Carol Dweck spent her career mapping this split.
A fixed mindset treats your abilities as carved in stone, turning every genuine challenge into a referendum on whether you are inherently “good enough.”
A growth mindset treats capabilities as something built through messy effort, turning that same challenge into just another rep to take on.

Same water, same distance, two completely different outcomes waiting on the other side.

I’m sure you’ve noticed this pattern bleed into other areas of life.

I’ve certainly lived it. As an entrepreneur at a scrappy startup early in my career (WAKA) and later when I built a coaching business from scratch (Train Race Inspire PDX). Those ventures represented entirely new open waters for me. They were full of problems I’d never solved, with zero guarantees I’d be any good at any of it.

The people who launch companies aren’t the ones facing lower stakes, no matter how much we like to joke about the startup life. They are the ones who dive into risk and decided (at a fundamental level) that unfamiliar water is a growth problem rather than a fixed trap.

At the end of the day, it isn’t natural talent that gets someone to a start line. It’s a deliberate decision on what the challenge presents.

Growth lives on the other side of the unknown; it isn’t a mirror reflecting what you already are. Progression awaits.

This morning I woke up flat, even after a good night of sleep. I got moving into my morning routine, but still felt the lag. I have work: meetings, follow-ups, and deliverables. But there is a driving force that feels missing most days. I can usually muster enough juice to get through the day with my relationships, personal and professional goals, or routine... but it’s not the same as the magnetic pull of a North Star.

I’ve had two firm ones in my adult life: Triathlon and Primary (the coworking space I cofounded).

With triathlon, I spent a huge amount of my time coordinating and planning workouts…sometimes more than I actually spent training in them. Then came the socializing afterward, grabbing a bite with whoever from the group was around. I’d go to bed genuinely giddy. My weekends were built entirely around training blocks and race logistics. Waking up to train and coach, grabbing a quick breakfast and heading out the door. I was moving and grooving, and it was an easy flow.

With Primary, there was so much momentum in just operating a living, breathing business that I got sucked into every part of it. I’ve never been pulled into anything else quite that way before. A job is certainly a North Star for many people, whether they own the business or not.

But the wild thing about both of these defining pieces of my life is that I didn’t exactly pick them to be my main focus. I decided to help start a business with my then-wife and our friend Danny, and a crazy ride ensued. Both just pulled me in and had a natural life cycle. I could’ve kept going in either case, but there were logical ends to each…or maybe a transition away is a better description.

Over the last five years, I had a great job with Wix and a mix of consulting with different startups and projects, but nothing has been that singular driving force. Mornings like this present plain evidence for me. There hasn’t been a North Star underneath the work, and I don’t know what the next one is going to be; even now, even while I’m actively trying things, including an interesting community health project I keep circling back to.

The “find your passion, find your purpose” advice is abundant, and it’s worth noting that it’s a fairly recent idea. Most people throughout history didn’t ask what their North Star was. They did the work in front of them because it needed doing. The passion framing shows up more in our modern culture, one where our job is supposed to double as our identity and our personal brand. That’s a useful narrative if you’re trying to get people to work harder, or maybe sell a course on finding purpose. It’s less useful if you’re just trying to figure out how to get through a Tuesday.

There is an interesting study around this worth mentioning. Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiano used data from MIDUS, a study that followed adults for 14 years, and looked at mortality rates. They measured purpose with a specific survey item: how much people agreed with statements like “some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them.” People who scored higher lived longer.

That link held up even after controlling for other measures of well-being, like how positive people generally felt and how good their relationships were. It wasn’t just that purposeful people were happier people in general. It also didn’t matter whether someone was retired, which is notable because a lot of earlier purpose research assumed purpose had to come directly from a traditional job.

What that study actually measured wasn’t “did you pick the right goal.” It was “Are you wandering aimlessly or not?” I really appreciate that distinction since it correlates so closely with my previous experience and my current feeling.

I didn’t pick triathlon or Primary in advance, and I’m not going to pick the next thing out of a hat. I’m trying things out without expecting to know yet which one it’s going to be, or if it’s going to be any of them at all.

What’s your North Star right now, and do you feel like you actually picked it, or did it pull you in?

Not naively. I’d coached long enough to know that the fastest person on the course isn’t always the most whole. But I kept believing, under everything, that if you built the right body and tracked the right numbers, the rest of life would organize itself around that center.

I…

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No room for the ego, no room for the fear. Just the rhythm of swinging the static out.

And then there is road: a long, grey line. The breath becomes steady, the mind turns clear.

No need for the “new,” no need for a sign. Only the work that remains when the noise disappears.

Si…

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So at twenty, playing basketball at …

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I looked healthy from the outside. A decade of endurance training, mostly clean eating, good sleep habits, and great community around me.

Early in 2019, I accepted an invitation to join a new friend’s yoga studio program built around breathwork, hot yoga, clean eating, guided meditation, and immers…

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It knows when it’s hungry. It knows when it’s been sitting too long. It knows when it needs sunlight, water, movement, rest, touch, quiet, and other humans.

It has known these things for 200,000 years. So why does it now require a $200+ device to confirm any of it?

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Henry was maybe eight months old and fast asleep. I had somewhere around 2-3 drinks in me, which had become my reasonable way to end a Tuesday.

The city was doing what the city does at that hour, a steady buzz outside the window. And I was doing what I had gotten…

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Drink plenty of water. Move our body. Sleep eight hours. Eat less of the thing that makes us feel like garbage.

We don’t have an information problem. We have an identity problem.

James Clear has a line in Atomic Habits that I keep returning to. He says every habit is a vote for the type of person …

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When I started with triathlon training, I went all out. By ‘all out’ I mean playing pickup basketball for a couple of hours after each training session. Zone 2? I didn’t need conversational pacing. Aerobic pacing was for people who didn’t have my engine or ego. 🫠

And then I couldn’t get off the couc…

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They played with it for two hours straight the day it arrived. By the end of the day, they were asking about getting another new game or toy.

Within a single afternoon, they had run the…

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When I was coaching athletes, I had one rule that surprised people more than any training protocol.

Sleep is part of training. Not rest. Not recovery. Training.

Many pushed back hard with the usual quips. “I’ll sleep when I’m …

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Mile 18 of a long run. Hour 8 to 9 of an Ironman. Somewhere past the point of plans dissolving, raw instinct takes over.

I’ve been there enough times to know what waits on the other side of that wall. Not the podium. Not a finish line medal.

A deep feeling fo…

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I spent some time on a podcast today looking back at the map of my career. We traced the non-linear path, the pivots from early professional hurdles to the lessons of endurance racing, and finally, to modern leadership.

As we talked, one word kept surfacing: responsibility.

In enduran…

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Day 24: What would I do differently if no one was watching?

I’d probably move more methodically. Talk less. Stop explaining myself so much. Be more deliberate with my time.

I’d let more silences sit without filling them. I’d take the nap instead of pushing through. I’d say “I don’t …

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Morning light through the conference room windows. Coffee going cold because the conversation kept pulling us forward. Last week in review. The week ahead taking fo…

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