I’m building a calmer, more deliberate version of the life I was sprinting through a couple of years ago. Same core (human connection first, a healthy appetite for life second), just with more patience and fewer moving parts.
Mostly Europe these days, with the door left open.
What I’m actually doing
- Building my agency the slow, sustainable way. Lean over large, compound over flashy. I’d rather run a small thing well for ten years than a big thing badly for two.
- Training for the Munich marathon in October. After thirteen years of calisthenics, running is the humbling new discipline, and the one kind of training I can take anywhere.
- Learning Mandarin. Badly, happily, still losing most fights with the tones.
- Cooking my way through Italian and Japanese food. Slow ragù, fresh pasta, ramen broth built from scratch. Two cuisines that reward patience and good ingredients, which turns out to be the same lesson I keep running into everywhere else.
What I’m optimizing for
Connection, still. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to people near the end of long, wide lives, and the answer is always the same: it comes down to feeling loved and being at peace with your relationships. So that’s what I build for. Fewer, deeper things. People who do what they say. Work that’s good for the people it touches.
What I’ve changed my mind about
For years my motto was “work smart, not hard,” and I was a little proud of how much I could get away without. I’m less sure now. Some things only arrive when you show up over and over with no clever shortcut on offer: a marathon, a language, a real business, a real relationship. I’m testing whether the version of me that believed in shortcuts still has anything to teach the version that’s learning to just do the reps.
What I still can’t do
Sit still without a plan. Working on it. Allegedly.
This is a Now page, an idea I borrowed from Derek Sivers. If you’ve got one, send it my way.