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“Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it by use.”

Ruth Gordon

You can run a marathon and still dodge a hard talk with your wife.

I heard Alex Hormozi make that point on the Modern Wisdom podcast:

“I think that there’s been a big misconception around hard stuff, which is just that like running a marathon necessarily means that you can have a hard conversation with your wife by saying, like, I do hard things, but those hard things don’t necessarily generalize.”

Sure, I thought. Of course.

A marathon and a hard talk with your wife ask for different kinds of courage. There are three:

• Mental: you face something uncomfortable, like an inbox you’ve been dreading or putting your phone away at 5 p.m.
• Social: you risk rejection, like asking a stranger for a favor.
• Physical: you push your body, like running longer than you ever have.

One of my mental courage challenges was a financial statement I kept avoiding.

Economists call that avoidance the ostrich effect. A 2015 study tracked 1.1 million investors over two years and found logins to their accounts dropped 9.5% the day after the market fell.

We check least when the news is likely to be bad.

One of my social courage challenges was going to a chess meetup.

Jia Jiang turned social courage challenges into a daily practice. In 2012 an investor backed out of Hooplus, the to-do list app he built.

The rejection crushed him.

He decided the fear of hearing no was a bigger problem than the no itself. He spent the next 100 days asking strangers for things he expected them to refuse.

Day 1 he asked a stranger to lend him $100. Day 3 he walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked for doughnuts shaped like the Olympic rings. An employee named Jackie made them.

A marathon can be a physical courage challenge.

I tried to run for two and a half hours and made it 90 minutes.

The marathoner who dreads the talk with his wife has trained one kind of courage out of three.

🦁

What kind of courage challenge (mental, social or physical) do you find hardest?

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“Attention is all you need.”

Llion Jones

When I had a day job in 2012, I got up early to build Shommi, a tool that watched Twitter for people ready to buy and sent them to businesses.

I gave it two hours of deep work each morning before my job. My mind was fresh and my attention was at its highest.

In about three months I had a working product.

Nobody bought it.

Shommi failed, but the habit behind it was right. My blunder was dropping the habit along with the product.

For years after that I moved from project to project without giving any of them two morning hours of deep work.

METR, a research group, grades each AI model by the longest software task it can finish, measured by how long that task takes a person. GPT-2, one of the early models, could finish tasks that take a person about 2 seconds. Give it anything longer and it failed more often than it got it right.

By May 2026, the best model METR measured, an early version of Claude Mythos, could finish tasks that take a person 16 hours or more.

A person whose attention gets chopped up is stuck where GPT-2 was.

In the summer of 1969, Ken Thompson had a month to himself. His wife took their baby son to California to visit his parents. Thompson, an engineer at Bell Labs, split that time into four weeks and gave each week to one piece of a new operating system.

“Essentially one person for a month, it was just my self,” he said later.

Those four weeks became Unix, the system macOS still descends from.

Now each morning I meditate, then do about two and a half hours of deep work. This time I want to keep the habit for good.

🧠

What could you accomplish with hours of uninterrupted focus?

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“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Carl Sagan

The weather was great and my runs felt easy. After a week of hour-long runs, I was ready to make an hour my new floor.

Then I remembered my rule: before I raise a habit’s floor, I first do one session far beyond it, like a single run of about two and a half hours.

I pictured that run and kept my floor where it was, at half an hour.

Buyers in a bubble reason the way I did that week: prices rose last month, so they’ll rise next month. I use the rule so I don’t set a floor in good conditions that I can’t hold once they change.

After 35 years of wins, Seán Quinn kept adding to his stake in one Irish bank. In 1973 he borrowed £100 to dig gravel out of his family’s 23-acre farm in Ireland. By 2008 Forbes put him at $6 billion, the richest person in Ireland.

From 2005 he bought into Anglo Irish Bank, mostly through bets on its share price, until he controlled more than a quarter of it.

In a 2022 documentary he explained why he kept adding: “Anything I had done for the previous 35, 40 years I suppose turned out to be successful and any wee hiccups were always ironed out over a six-, 12-month period.”

The bank’s shares collapsed in the 2008 crash. The stake cost him about €3 billion. An Irish court declared him bankrupt in 2012.

“It was stupid to increase it at all,” he said of his stake in the bank.

⚓

What rule would you set so ambition can’t crush your consistency?

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“Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.”

Galeazzo Ciano

I looked up dozens of people who got rich before 50 and what they did each day. When I went looking for people with the same habits who never got rich, I could barely find any.

Rockefeller and Buffett got biographies and interviews.

The people who didn’t make it rarely get either.

The same thing happens in medicine.

A British doctor named Ben Goldacre had a patient with depression.

He wanted to get the prescription right, so he read every study he could find on a newer drug called reboxetine.

They all said it worked. He wrote the prescription.

Years later, researchers in Germany got the drugmaker to hand over every study it ran.

Most of them never made it into a journal. In those, reboxetine did no better than a sugar pill.

Goldacre read everything he could find.

The people who didn’t make it rarely get written about, so the next person copies a winner’s habit without seeing who else kept it.

Before you copy a winner’s habit, go looking for the people who kept it and didn’t make it.

A biography tells you what a winner did. The people who didn’t make it tell you whether it mattered.

🔍

What advice should you verify before following it?

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“When the music changes, so does the dance.”

Hausa proverb

I love to bike. But I run instead.

Drivers here rarely yield to pedestrians. On foot I feel safer than on a bike.

I gave up the habit I love for one that fits my environment.

As cars spread through the Netherlands in the 1960s, the average Dutch person went from biking 1,500 km a year to about 800.

In 1971, cars killed more than 3,000 people in the Netherlands, 450 of them children. A journalist named Vic Langenhoff lost his daughter, killed while biking to school.

The next year he published an article headlined Stop de Kindermoord: stop the child murder.

The article caused an uproar across the country.

His first idea was to bus children to school. Other campaigners won him over to a different fix: make the roads safe to bike on.

Over the following decades the Dutch built about 35,000 km of bike paths separated from cars.

Today 27% of trips in the Netherlands happen on a bike.

The Dutch kept biking and changed their environment instead.

Habit harmony is when your habits and your environment support each other.

The better your habits suit your environment, the more likely the habit (and sometimes you) will survive.

🎶

Which habit could you swap for one your environment supports?

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“Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.”

Cal Newport

This is my fourth try at the method from Gary Keller’s book The ONE Thing.

Each of the first three attempts started with early wins. Then I stopped.

The method starts with a question:

What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

The version I kept hearing was simple: answer the question, then do that one thing.

I read “do” as “finish.”

The Ivy Lee method says the same thing: work on your top task until it’s done.

I tried that too.

When I took Keller’s question literally, the one thing I picked was often big. I scored each day done or not done. By bedtime it wasn’t done. I got discouraged.

So I made the one thing smaller, then smaller again. Once it fit in a few minutes, I checked it off and stopped.

The check marks piled up. The work I cared about barely moved.

So I stopped using the ONE thing method.

A few weeks ago I heard Keller in an interview. He blocks four hours a day for his one thing.

I’d been doing one thing method incorrectly.

The score is yes or no: did you put in the time you said you would?

When I finish the one thing early, now I ask the question again and keep going until the time is up.

In a 1949 letter, the crime novelist Raymond Chandler laid out his rule for a working writer: set aside at least four hours a day.

In those hours, writing was optional. He could look out the window or writhe on the floor. The one rule was to do nothing else. “Either write or nothing,” he wrote.

• Alex Hormozi protects four hours of uninterrupted work.
• Cal Newport wrote his first book in 60 to 90 minutes a day.
• Haruki Murakami writes for five to six hours, starting at 4 a.m.
• Charles Darwin worked in three 90-minute blocks a day.

Two hours can outweigh a day of interruptions.

⏱️

What could you build with two focused hours a day?

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“Man is a creature that can get used to anything.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky

My goals used to center on net worth, homes and cars.

Reaching these types of goals gives you a brief high. Then a day, week or month later, your life feels the same as before.

Now I focus on how my days feel: control over my schedule, aerobic capacity and strength.

Buzz Aldrin reached one of the biggest goals a person can: in July 1969, he walked on the moon. Back on earth, the goal was behind him.

In his memoir Magnificent Desolation he wrote: “There was no goal, no sense of calling, no project worth pouring myself into.”

Aldrin spent 21 hours on the moon.

Then he spent the next decade fighting depression and alcoholism.

Run a marathon and then what? Visit each country and then what?

That’s the hedonic treadmill: we get used to the goals we reach and want the next one.

A Vanity Goal leaves your days the same or worse once the high fades. A 10,000-square-foot house is more to take care of. A team of 1,000 people is more to manage each day.

A Sanity Goal makes your ordinary days better after you reach it. If you can’t get to work without a car, owning one makes each workday easier.

Going from a $30,000 car to a $1 million one changes far less: you drive the same roads to the same places.

Now you also worry about potholes and theft.

Financial independence is a Sanity Goal. Mr. Money Mustache, a blogger who retired at 30 by saving most of his pay, wrote that having enough money is reassuring for “a naturally worry-prone person (like I tend to be).”

The peace of mind from financial independence shows up on each day after you reach it.

Vanity Goal	Sanity Goal
A $1,000,000 supercar	A reliable car
A private jet	Eliminating your daily commute
A 10,000-square-foot mansion	Living close to friends
A $1 billion net worth	Reaching financial independence
Employing 100 people	Making enough profit to control your time
Working 80 hours a week	Doing 4 hours of focused work a day
An invitation to exclusive galas	Weekly dinner with people you trust
Winning an industry award	Making a product customers love

Judge a goal by how long it pays you after you reach it.

🌝

Which vanity goal would you swap for a sanity goal?

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“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.”

Seneca

A few months ago, I was reading Maurice Ashley’s Move by Move.

On March 14, 1999, Maurice became the first Black player to earn the grandmaster title.

He got there by working backward. The title required three tournament norms and a 2500 rating. Aiming at that target told him which tournaments to enter and what to study each day.

A goal needs a system to reach it. A system needs a goal to give it direction.

So I hate to hear “systems beat goals.”

Bill Walsh titled his book The Score Takes Care of Itself, but his system was in service of the score.

When he took over the San Francisco 49ers in 1979, his first season ended with 2 wins and 14 losses.

• He started writing out the first plays of each game before kickoff, a list that grew to 15. Nobody had to pick them under pressure.
• Each practice ran on a written schedule, with each drill given its minutes.
• Even the receptionists got instructions on how to answer the phone.

Walsh wrote that he focused on “the process of improving.” But he checked that process against winning: when the wins didn’t come, he raised the standard. Within three seasons, the 49ers won the Super Bowl.

Without a goal, daily effort has no direction. Habits serve goals.

Decide what you want first, then work backward to the habits that make it inevitable.

🎯

What habits do you need to reach your most important goal?

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“If you can keep playing tennis when somebody is shooting a gun down the street, that’s concentration.”

Serena Williams

I spread one daily marketing block across 8 products and each one lost momentum while I tended to the other seven.

With 8 products sharing that block, each one got marketing time once or twice a week. If that.

Hit a piece of metal with a hammer and it gets hot. Move to a second piece and the first one cools while you hammer the other.

Each product sat cold for days before I touched it again.

You cannot start a fire by hand without continuous pressure. Friction only turns into flame if you keep going. With a bow drill, you spin a wooden spindle against a board until the dust at the bottom gets hot enough to glow.

A bushcraft guide warns that one slip of the bow can mean starting again, because the heat you built up is lost.

Starting a fire by hand demands unbroken speed and downward force. First comes wood dust, then heat, then smoke. If you keep driving the bow, the hot dust turns into a glowing ember.

One slip of the cord or one pause resets the board. The heat bleeds into the air and you start from cold wood all over again.

You can tend a fire a few minutes at a time, but starting one takes continuous pressure.

🔥

What project deserves your focus until it catches fire?

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“Please Note: I will not engage in work emails after 7pm or on weekends.”

Shonda Rhimes

I’m in the middle of a big habit push.

Each day I reach out to 13 people. It might be my best friend, a family member, someone I heard on a podcast, someone whose tweet I reply to or someone I’m asking on a date.

I do 8 courage challenges, up from 5 in August. A courage challenge is a hard thing I pick when nothing is making me do it.

Running went from 13 minutes to 34.

An anti-habit is a rule about what I won’t do.

As my habits got bigger, I tightened my anti-habits:

1. Fasting runs until 2pm. It used to end at noon.

2. Eating stops at 8pm instead of 10pm, so dinner is digested before bed. Sleep comes faster and goes deeper.

3. Messaging and social apps stay closed until 2pm. They used to open at noon.

4. Chess stops at 8pm, with 5 games as my daily max.

Haruki Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo and smoked 60 cigarettes a day before he wrote novels full time. When he made the switch, he and his wife started going to bed soon after dark. He quit smoking.

In writing mode he wakes at 4am, writes for 5 to 6 hours, runs 10 kilometers in the afternoon and goes to bed at 9pm.

Going to bed at 9pm buys him the 4am start.

A Formula 1 car can go from 300 km/h to a full stop in under 4 seconds. Brakes that strong let a driver stay at full speed longer before each corner.

The more aggressive your habits are, the more aggressive your anti-habits need to be. They’re the boundaries that protect the time, energy and attention the aggressive habits run on.

What anti-habit can you set before you push a habit harder?