And if you’re stoic, or you lean that way, you’re fucked. The world rewards people for acting out. Their feelings. Their opinions. Their views. Woe is me, pour one out — or the opposite, the grind act: you have to go, you have to be. Social media has trained us for decades now. We vie for the attention of strangers so our own egos can tell us we’re right, we’re seen.

So if you’re the quiet type — nose down, keeps to the work — God help you. In a world that responds to the squeaky wheel like Pavlov’s dog, you don’t telegraph. And by refusing to, you make what you do look easy.

I don’t take days off. I hardly take a real vacation. Family trips are business trips with a nicer name — a little time with the family, the rest of it people asking me about business, running meetings, formal and not. The one time I ask for a day off, everybody looks at me like something’s wrong with me.

What do we see instead? A skill our forefathers never needed: being as good at performing the work as doing it. Letting everyone know you’re the hardest worker in the room.

The hardest worker in the room doesn’t think about being the hardest worker in the room. He’s too busy getting actual shit done.

Complaining about how tired you are, how buried you are — that’s the act. In some places, it’s how you get ahead. It’s become acceptable to let the stakeholders know how hard you grind. While you’re at it, type up a list of everything you do and hand it to your manager. If he’s half as sharp as he thinks, he’ll notice 98% of what you wrote is literally your job.

And if you’re not that? If you’re the exception — the one who shows up every day no matter what, focused on the task, the team, moving the thing forward. No acts. No political games. Get ready. Most people will decide you’ve got it easy, or you don’t do enough. Because as far as optics go, you make it all look easy.

So what’s the solution?

There’s no solution to how they see you. That’s just the way it is. You live with it. For a lot of people, you’ll make it look easy, and that’s the end of it. They’ll never understand. They’ll think you’re lazy, or you haven’t got much on, or you don’t work hard enough. Especially if you’re the one who has it dialed in — the silent, quiet professional. That’s just how it goes for you.

The only real answer is the resilience you build. And once in a while, you speak up. You ask for the thing. You set the boundary.

Mine are clear. When I’m with my kids, nobody gets me — not unless a text says it’s an emergency. I don’t pick up until I’m done. Then I call back. And most of the time the call could’ve waited for the next day, an email, anything at all. Most business calls aren’t emergencies. When they are, your phone lights up — the texts flood in, you’ll know.

Boundaries and discipline are the answer. But to the outside world, you’ll always make it look easy.

Then, on autopilot, I do what I’ve done for months. Plug into my iPad. An interview with a book author. A deep review of a watch. Then a series.

All while my kids sit in another room, watching something else.

Everyone under one roof. Each of us is plugged into a screen.

Last year I did a 30-day digital detox. I’m glad I did — it stuck. I still touch social media now and then, but barely. In and out. Yet as I freed myself from one service, another crawled in to take its place.

Most people, when they talk about a digital detox, mean the social apps. Instagram. TikTok. But what about YouTube? Netflix? The endless stream of programming waiting on every device you own?

Television has been doing this for decades. These devices are no different — on your TV or in your hand. Programming is programming. All of it built to take your attention.

Unlike the old television, though, streaming is a Chinese menu. An endless plethora at your fingertips, and it needs you watching to survive.

The original promise was that you’d cut out the advertising and go straight to your show. Funny how that turned out. Want to skip the commercials? Pay a premium. Don’t want to pay? Sit through most of them. Either way, they live on your attention.

And it’s insidious. First we allow it for ourselves. Then we hand it to our children too.

That’s the observation that hit me, standing at that kitchen counter. Me on the iPad. My kids on a screen in the other room. This is what most modern American households look like.

You can see it in restaurants. The whole family scattered across their devices. The kids handed screens so the adults can talk.

How the fuck did we go from eating at the table together — no phones, no distractions — to this?

This isn’t a social media detox. It’s a fight for every eyeball. Your attention. And it doesn’t stop at the apps — it runs through every screen in the house.

So what did I do?

I didn’t ban the devices. No cold turkey for the family. But leadership starts at the top, and in a family, you lead by example. So the first thing I changed was me.

Now, when I get home, and the kids have already eaten, I have my dinner with a book. When I’m done, I go join them — whatever they’re doing. If it’s watching something they love, that’s what we do. Family time.

Sometimes I sit right there with them, book in hand. They tell me they just love having me there while I read. Really, it’s reading, then talking, then reading again. A constant back-and-forth.

Is it perfect? No. But I’ll tell you what — at restaurants, at any meal together, the rule holds. No phones. No distractions.

As for me, I made the call: in the fight for attention, books win. Books over screens. Books and my kids.

Like I said — is it perfect? No. But my mind is clearer than it was. And I set a better example for my children.

Who now chooses to read. Because they see me reading.

Ex-soldiers who finished their service and went into private security — to her, just mercenaries. I stopped her and told her that was ignorant.

What is a man to do when he finishes a twenty-plus-year career as a professional soldier? If all your life you wanted to be the best — a true commando, risen to the most elite level — because you wanted to test your mettle and because deep down you knew you were made for it, then one day it’s over.

You spend years training for war. You dedicate your life to giving it for your country. You are a professional — like any lawyer, doctor, or engineer — except your specialty is warfare and everything it takes to wage it. Some stand at the tip of the spear. A professional killer for your country. A master of combat arms.

Then you do your twenty years, or more, and one day you retire. You become a civilian.

If that was your profession, and it’s all you know — it’s pretty fucking hard to let go. There is no turning it off.

Plenty of veterans transition into other things. Nothing wrong with that. And nothing wrong with continuing what you did, for a better salary, for your family. Some take other jobs. Some stay in the private sector. Some go and give training.

Warfare is a fine profession. Polite society treats it with disdain, and everyone wants peace — but the fucking reality is the old adage: if you want peace, prepare for war.

To be human is to live as a species that keeps returning to war. To fight. To take lives. We sit in polite society as if this weren’t one of the most familiar acts in our history.

It’s the same as another old adage:

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.

Hopf wrote that — a novelist, distilling something old. Hardship recedes. Prosperity grows. The generations that follow lose contact with the sacrifice that bought the good times. They go soft. And soft sets the stage for the next hard times.

The horrors make us compassionate. Then we forget. And the cycle starts again — always, somewhere.

We like to think we’re evolved. We’re not. We’re just as barbaric — better tools, that’s all. Killing is killing. Being human is being human.

And worst of all, we’re ungrateful. Most of modern society never has to go to war unless war comes to the doorstep — and only because others choose to go into harm’s way so the rest don’t have to. We owe them thanks. In the end, it comes one way or another. We can’t help ourselves.

So I told my colleague to think harder before she judges a professional warfighter. The doctor and the soldier both do humane work. One preserves life. The other takes it. Both are human.

What I started as a labor of love — for myself, for my family, to give them a better life — is murky now. Murky with the seduction of legacy. With the preservation of power.

I get older. I have more money than I know what to do with. And I can’t let go. I’m the founder. So far, no one in the organization has what it takes to do what I do.

At the same time, I don’t want my children to go through what I went through to build this from nothing. From a dream. From sheer perseverance and... luck?

No fucking way it was luck. It was grit. All of it. There’s no such thing as the right place at the right time. Instinct goes a long way in business, and most people don’t have it. Instinct and grit.

My children are not as competent as I am. Some of them are not competent at all. But let them go struggle out there, working for someone else? No. So I bring them in. Soon they have children of their own, and those children have activities, school runs, a hundred small things that need a parent. That’s the privilege of owning the thing. My kids draw a full salary for twenty percent of mediocre work. I’ll never tell them so. I’ll never let anyone else say it either.

In the office, I make a point of it. I remind the executives, the staff, and everyone how hard my children work for this family. They’re hardly ever there. Doesn’t matter. I say it anyway.

Here’s the trick.

You put competent people around the incompetent ones. I need them to run the company, yes. But mostly I need them to do the work my children and their spouses won’t do, can’t do, or simply fuck up. I need a staff that carries their water and smiles while doing it.

Loyalty trumps everything. Even when it costs the company. Especially then. Loyalty is how I keep power — and power was never about competence. Competence doesn’t breed power. Loyalty does. My favorite kind? Blind.

You know who doesn’t have blind loyalty? My son-in-law. The one I keep in an office down the hall and watch like a hawk. The mule, I call him. Because he solves every kind of problem I put in front of him, and the whole organization loves him for it. He’s the bridge between the ivory tower and the floor.

People think that because he married in, he’s family. As good as the rest of them. They don’t know the real secret.

True nepotism doesn’t run between family and outsiders. It runs deeper. The family members who are too competent, too rebellious — they’re not really part of the family. Not where it counts. But they’re useful. Problem solvers. So I keep them close. For the good of the company. For the good of the family.

Best part? He’s not going anywhere. He’s married to my daughter. He won’t blow that up. He knows what it would cost — her, and all of them. So he stays. And he carries the water.

Life is good.

As long as I hold the power and the rest of them dance — marionettes, every one of them. And I’m the one with the strings.

Note: I am not this man. I’ve sat across from many like him.

I was on an early run, waiting at the crosswalk, when a car stopped well back to let me cross. In a city better known for entitlement than for kindness, that surprised me. I waved a thank-you as I stepped into the median — and saw there was no one behind the wheel. A Waymo. A driverless car. Nobody had to make it stop. Nobody had to make it kind.

Then I reached the refuge to cross the last stretch, and a woman in a Porsche saw me waiting and sped up to go first. Right after, a man on an electric bike turned onto my corner, didn’t see me, braked hard, and looked disgusted that I was there at all. Walking. On a sidewalk.

One machine, programmed to stop. Two people, choosing not to. I couldn’t shake the order of it.

You see it everywhere now. Parents who don’t look up from the screen while their kids play. Couples at dinner who don’t look at each other. We used to fear a needle wired into the back of the skull. Turns out all it took was a screen to stare into. The machines didn’t have to conquer us. We handed ourselves over.

That same night, the other side of us.

I read about a doctor in Nebraska. A four-year-old showed up for heart surgery alone — no parent, no adult, just a small kid in a hospital bed with the covers pulled to his chin. She was the one who found him there. Then she adopted him. Then she learned he had five siblings, and she got every one of them a home — some with her family, some with people she worked with. Six kids, scattered across a system, pulled back together because one person decided to.

That’s the part I can’t square. The same species that has to build kindness into a machine is the species that does that. Monstrous apathy and staggering empathy — same animal, same day.

Maybe technology really is the new opium of the masses. Maybe the developed world is rotting from the inside. I don’t know. But I know there’s a subset that sees it and turns their back on it — puts the phone down, looks up, and makes the technology serve them instead of the other way around. They know their kids are watching. They give them their full attention. Some of them still have a whole heart pointed at someone else.

I’m still hopeful.

So, how did my run end? I walked back through the door, and my kids looked up and smiled before anything else. That was enough.

For Greg, maybe. The rest of us sat there and knew better. We’d watched the corporate speak come across the table, and we knew exactly what it meant. This was not good.

This is the story of Jim’s bus.

Picture buying a ticket for one.

You show up, and it’s pristine. You walk around it, and the worry you carried all night starts to lift. The staff treats you well. You wait to board and imagine the people you’ll meet, the places you’ll go.

Your name is called. Seats are assigned — check your ticket, find yours.

You step inside, and something is off. The interior doesn’t match the exterior. Your seatmates are rude, uncooperative, and some of them just don’t agree with you. You give it a chance anyway. Once everyone’s aboard, you feel the bus tilt. The weight isn’t sitting right. It pulls out of the station anyway.

You wanted a smooth ride. You get potholes. The other passengers tell you the bus hasn’t been maintained in years. The shocks are shot.

Doesn’t matter. You’re committed now. You’ve had worse, and no one is taking your destination from you. So you decide to make the best of it.

Then the road climbs. The bus starts to swerve through the mountain pass. Pitch black outside, the mountain wall on one side, the drop on the other. The swerve gets worse — and you realize the driver fell asleep at the wheel. Before you can move, you’re going over the edge with everyone else.

All those plans, gone. Because you never saw what was in front of you.

Jim Collins put it simply: great companies figure out who belongs on the bus and who has to get off, then they put the right people in the right seats. That’s where most executives miss. They hire talent and seat it wrong. Or they hire brilliant people who never belonged in that culture in the first place.

But Collins is talking about the passengers.

The harder problem is the bus. Its condition. The driver. Most professionals never look up.

So how do you end up in that meeting — the one where you already know it’s going sideways, and leadership swears everything is fine? It happens when the people driving stop seeing the forest for the trees. They lose the road. Leadership becomes an absentee landlord, still collecting on a building it no longer walks through.

And you’re in your assigned seat, watching it. So you ask the questions that actually matter. Not the budget, not the pro forma, not the next offsite. What happens to the bus? What happens to the driver? What do you do with a team behind you?

Here’s the answer no one wants. You get off.

Being among the first to jump saves you the heartache. The derailment can take a while, but it comes. The people in power won’t correct course — most of the time, they can’t even see there’s a course to correct. In a centralized company, the odds are worse: no division ever feels the cost of a bad decision, so the culture just erodes quietly until the great organization you thought you had is a shell of itself.

The meeting ended. Greg logged off Teams, certain it had gone well. I looked at the CFO of the company. We stared at each other and knew the look — the look that said Greg had just unnecessarily fucked the organization. And us.

If the driver won’t give up the seat, you go out the door. The landing won’t be graceful. But it beats going down with the bus.

I’ve started and stopped for two years. Time-blocking, habit trackers, alarms — I derailed every time. Then one day it occurred to me: what if I did something engaging right before writing? Something that already pulls my full attention. Maybe that was the ramp.

So. Dry fire.

Some writers walk. Some sit down and type with ease. I practice shooting fundamentals — drawing, aiming, moving, pressing the trigger with an unloaded gun, and using weighted dummy rounds. No live ammunition. A shot timer running. Faster and more accurate, rep after rep. If you can’t picture it, search “practical shooting” on YouTube. Think John Wick, minus the plot.

It demands everything. Where the sights land on the draw. The exact point on the target — not a general area, a precise point. Calling yourself out the second your eyes drift. Fewer mistakes, every time.

Then I put it down and open the page. The focus is already running.

That’s the whole trick. Focus is transferable. You build it in one place and carry it into the next.

Maybe that helps someone.

If you’ve reorganized and tracked and time-blocked and still can’t get to the page — stop fixing the schedule. Find one thing you already focus on with ease. Do it. Ten minutes, an hour, whatever you fancy. The moment you finish, go straight to the notebook or the machine. Don’t stop to think about it.

You’ll find the transition easier. The page lighter.

None of this is groundbreaking. But writing is as fundamental as reading — deeper than reading, even. In a world built to distract you, it’s how you keep your mind sharp and your sanity intact.

So if you’re stuck, try it. Forget the schedule, the alarms, the calendar block. Do the one thing you can already focus on, and ride it onto the page.

And here we are, all of us, fixed on the future instead of the child right in front of us.

This wouldn’t have crossed my mind before my kids were born. Now I think about it all the time. The world we live in. The world they’ve been handed.

My wife and I have tried to give them a childhood close to the one we had in the 80s and 90s. The neighbor kids come to our house. Ours go to theirs. They play in the backyard, not the street — but outdoor play isn’t optional, it’s the rule. We know what a screen does to a developing brain, so we don’t pretend the answer is zero. We aim for balance. The original Zelda. Super Mario. Strict time limits, and that’s it.

And school?

One of mine just finished first grade. The pressure to cram — the volume and pace — is what we used to see in second grade, at least. All of it is sold as preparation for a “bright future” — the best curriculum, the best shot.

What I see is a race.

Parents fully invested in a future their children haven’t reached yet — the best college, the best postgrad, the best job, the best circles. The same life they built, or a better one. All of it pointed at tomorrow. So fixed on tomorrow that they forget the kid is a kid right now. And there is nothing more important than letting a child be a child, here, in the present — because tomorrow is never guaranteed.

The machine runs on this.

Society is built to keep us as moving parts — living parts that wear down with age and get replaced by newer ones, so the economy keeps turning. In a globalized world where technology moves faster than anyone can keep up with, where everyone’s bracing for whatever AI does next, every parent is racing to give their kid the most “unfair advantage” they can buy. And in that race, we trade away the one sacred thing. We don’t let them be. We don’t let them breathe. We don’t let them be fucking kids and do kid things.

Imagination.

At home, I tell my kids that imagination comes first. Draw. Read paper books. Paint on real things. The iPad and the laptop are good for certain work, but the analog world has more to offer than we give it credit for. Or, as my kids put it: “It’s all about Imagi-naaaa-tion.”

Yes. Exactly that.

I want the wildest imagination they can come up with. That childlike curiosity gets protected at all costs, because it’s the thing that has to survive into adulthood. Imagination. Independent thought. Focus that no screen can pull apart. These don’t just matter — they win, no matter what my kids end up doing with their lives.

Here’s the part most people miss.

The bar is low, and it keeps dropping. Every year, more people trade their attention for a screen and let the machine think for them. That’s the trap. The advantage never goes to the person who hands their thinking over to the AI. It goes to the person who keeps the thinking and makes the AI work for them.

Big difference.

A child wants to be a child. Let them. Live in the present alongside them. Join them in it.

Tomorrow is never promised.

I’ve meditated for thirty-plus minutes and for ten. These days I stick to ten—I’d rather give the rest of the time to other pursuits.

So why do I still do it every day? Two reasons, I gather. And neither is “because it’s a habit.”

The first is respite. Ten minutes before the day begins, before anyone else is awake, in the predawn dark. The second is observation—the practice of watching what I feel in the morning. More often than not, I’ll admit, it’s anger, distress, rage at times, or whatever went wrong the day before. Other times, my body is so battered from training and bad sleep that the ten minutes are just to get myself together before the day’s training. Meditation is anchored to training, training to meditation. One happens, the other follows. No exceptions.

That observation is a moment of truth. That’s where I watch and work hard not to judge what I feel. It doesn’t always work, but that’s the intent. That gut-wrenching frustration—or is it hatred? Am I hurt? Scared? I’m sure scared is part of it. If you have children, you’ll understand. It comes with the everlasting doubt: Am I enough? For my children? I’m afraid that’s a question that will never have an answer.

But here’s the deal. Every once in a blue moon, when I least expect it, a session comes in so blissfully perfect that everything flows in harmony—body and soul. Nothing is wasted. The focus, the observation—I can’t describe it except to say you feel light, relaxed, uplifted. In those moments, the ones where I feel connected to myself and to our Creator, it’s all worth it. They’re rare. Sometimes years pass between them. But when it happens, it’s a blessing.

So for those ten minutes, life stops. Everything stops. It’s just me and pure silence. And if you know me, you know silence is my favorite sound in the world. My favorite chaos? My children, of course.

For an introvert, silence and solitude are a gift. My family is the greatest gift of my life. Second after that: the years of solitude I got in my career—days on end sometimes passing without having to hear or say a single word. Just me, my thoughts, the running, the outdoors. Not a city. I miss that. Maybe I’ll write about it someday.

Because it’s all seasons. Seasons of clarity and tranquility, seasons of chaos.

Meditation is the constant.

As I write this, I recall what prompted me to begin. In my twenties, I was feeling aimless—having a degree and a promising future on paper, but lacking a clear purpose. I chose to diverge from the prescribed path, which was nearly unthinkable in my family.

I’ve always been the black sheep. I did things my way—not the right way, often the wrong way, but my way—and right or wrong, no matter the cost, I stuck with my decisions. That first big one left me with no focus, no direction. I can do without a map. I’ve done without a plan plenty of times. But without a compass—without knowing where my true north is—I can’t operate. The times I’ve gone without a bearing have been the worst of my life.

Then, a book found its way to me: Total Relaxation by John R. Harvey. I had owned it for years—books tend to come into my life at just the right moment. I eagerly read it and immediately began practicing the exercises. At that time, I was also reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Somehow, though I can’t quite explain why, this marked the beginning of a daily routine I have maintained since the mid-2000s.

So try it. Not for the advantages they sell you—those may never come. Try it for the ten minutes of silence before the day, for the practice of looking at what’s inside without flinching.

And maybe, once in a blue moon, you’ll get the other thing.

Twenty years in, I’m still waiting on most of them. I show up anyway.

It’s the best advice I’ve gotten in years.

It came from a good friend — a world champion practical shooter and instructor. Classic A-type. You don’t reach what he does without being obsessed to the point of perfection. He’s trained civilians, law enforcement, and Tier One units around the world.

And he quits constantly.

That’s the part people miss. Quitting is how he tests. He runs an idea, a theory, a new method — on shooting, on whatever else catches him — and if it works, he keeps it. If it doesn’t, he drops it and moves on. No second thought. He never quits the core commitments of his life. Everything else is fair game. That’s how he got where he is: not by gripping every interest to the death, but by tasting as many as he could and walking away from the ones that didn’t earn their place.

I know that’s not the advice you expected.

But it’s true. And it’s the opposite of everything modern society and the influencers preach. I wish I’d learned it decades ago. It would have saved me time, effort, and mental bandwidth.

Time is finite. So why keep doing things you don’t like?

I’m not talking about responsibilities. I’m not talking about finishing what you started — especially a commitment you made to yourself, your family, your organization, or someone else. Those you honor. I’m talking about the optional things. The ones you choose. You make time for them, you taste them, and you find out. If they’re not for you, quit. Give that time to something that is.

I tell my kids the same thing: taste things. Find out what you like and what you don’t. The only way to do that is to try a lot of them. No spouse, no friend, no family member — and no AI — will figure that out for you. It has nothing to do with money or prestige.

It takes a childlike curiosity. That’s the hard part. It fades as you get older, and I catch myself working to keep mine alive. But that curiosity is the engine. It’s how you find what you’re good at, what you love, what you can’t stand — at forty, at fifty, at sixty, and past it.

To taste and quit is part of being human.

So the next time a guru tells you to never quit, remember it isn’t true.

Go. Taste. Quit. Until you find what works for you.

I looked at him and told him the truth: “I don’t know, son. It’s impossible for me to say.”

This was not the answer he was expecting. He wanted certainty from his father. But I can’t lie to him like that. I know these questions will come again. The worst thing I could do is deny my son the reality that I could leave this life at any moment.

I hugged him, kissed him, and told him it was just a nightmare and that we all needed to go back to sleep. He went to my wife, asked her the same question, and she hugged him, took him back to bed, and stayed with him until he fell asleep.

I don’t believe in sugarcoating life’s realities when my children ask about them. If they come to me with a question about the world, it means they’ve thought about it enough to ask. The least I can do is answer truthfully, in a way they can understand. And sometimes the answer is “I don’t know,” followed by an explanation of why.

Children are resilient and should be treated as such. They hear the answer, sit with it for a bit, move on, and come back later with the same question or a related one. Back and forth it goes as they learn and cope.

So I tell him the truth. Even when the truth is that I don’t know how many Christmases he has left.

If you read, you should write. At least that's what I tell myself.

I've been in the room when a company was about to go under, and in the room when we restructured so it didn't.

I've seen nepotism wreck an organization that runs anyway—inept top to bottom.

I've seen the acquisitions, the deals, the maneuvering that happen only behind closed doors.

I've seen how it really works.

You don't build anything that lasts without the will to fight a trench war. It's cutthroat. And no one says it out loud: there's no such thing as clean hands.

There's more than business in me—other interests, other ways of taking on life, shaped by where I've been. That comes later.

So what do I write about? Everything. People ask about the family-company world, the family offices, what happens when the doors close. It's like any public company—same politics, sometimes more brutal. I've worked under management I'd follow anywhere, and management I'd warn you about. The second kind taught me more. It's better to know what not to do.

This is where I write it down. Life. Business. Power. The things you only learn from the inside—and the things some don’t like to write or speak about because it’s not acceptable, because doing so means they had their hands unwashed as well and that doesn’t look pristine to a society that values clean optics while under the hood is a fucking wasteland.

So it’s about this and life and other topics that come to mind. I honestly don’t care if you stick around to read it or not. My work ships either way..

How do you like me so far? Good.