Give a Shit
I didn't find enlightenment at a silent retreat or rewire my brain with a cold plunge morning routine. To be honest, I am not sure what this post is, other than seeing if I can get away with cussing on LinkedIn.
The TL;DR here is I just started being more intentional about a handful of things, and over time, it quietly made me a sharper leader, a better father, a more present husband, and someone who truly enjoys the life I have. Not in a gratitude-journal, manifestation-board kind of way. In a real, tangible, "I like who I am becoming" kind of way.
As you read this, take what's useful and ignore what's not. None of this is prescriptive and I am most certainly not your guru.
Delete the app
For me, it was Instagram, but it might be TikTok or Facebook for you. Doesn't matter, they're all the same machine. I deleted it when I finally admitted that there was nothing there for me. Regardless of how many good recipes I saw, some new way to train my rear delts, or justifying that its a good way to keep in touch, none of it made up for the hours I was feeding to a six-inch display whose entire job is to keep me addicted so it can sell me something.
The true cost isn't the time lost, getting emotionally charged, or losing sleep because you're scrolling at 1am though. It is the inability to be bored.
I had trained my brain to fill every single little gap in life. Every red light, every line at the grocery store, every quiet moment got filled with someone else's content for clicks. I rarely sat with my own thoughts and that lead to very little ideas actually marinating. I was consuming constantly and creating nothing.
The average person reaches for their phone ~120 times a day, and most of those aren't conscious decisions. Think about that, you have been trained to look/pic up your phone over 100 times day. Enter boredom. When you're bored, your brain starts doing the thing it was designed to do. You think and start to process and then you start to connect dots. I started having real ideas again. I was more present with my wife and kids. I stopped consuming other people's thoughts and started having my own. I started creating again (hence this long drawn out article I decided to write) and picked up my camera more.
Boredom is where the good stuff lives, so let it happen.
Take walks with nothing
No music or podcasts. Just you, your shoes, and whatever your brain decides to surface.
I call these intentional walks. Which I know sounds pretentious, but the distinction matters. These walks are about creating space (the same kind of space you get when you delete the app) for your brain to wander freely and then lock onto something.
Sometimes it's a work problem I've been avoiding. Sometimes it's an emotion I didn't realize I was carrying. Sometimes it's a conversation I need to have with my wife or a teammate that I've been putting off.
The point is, your brain will tell you what it needs to process if you stop drowning it in noise. You just have to let it get bored enough to speak up. Yes I am once again beating the boredom drum.
Train to failure
Go to the gym, lift weights, and every so often push yourself to absolute failure.
I'm talking about running until you actually puke, not just feeling like you might. Doing lat pulldowns like your life depends on it and you still can't squeeze out that last rep. Getting trapped under a barbell doing hip thrusts because, well, you simply could not thrust any longer.
This isn't about aesthetics, though that's a nice side effect. It's about the mental recalibration that happens when you voluntarily do something difficult. When you push your body to that extreme, you build a kind of resilience that bleeds into everything else. Your capacity for discomfort grows and most of the hard things in life (hard conversations, career pivots, building something new) are just slightly different flavors of discomfort.
Also, and I cannot overstate this, the post workout clarity is very real. Some of my best thinking happens in the 30 minutes after I've destroyed my legs, you guessed it, on an intentional walk.
Get your blood work done
This one's personal. And I'm going to get vulnerable here because I think it matters.
For years, I struggled with depression, chronic fatigue, and a general decrease in well-being. I was doing everything "right". Going to therapy, sobriety (8 years now), eating whole foods, working out, sleeping well. All the optimal things but nothing was moving the needle.
About two years ago, I got my blood work done. Testosterone levels came back mid 200s aka clinically deficient.
Most people would be bummed. For me, it was a sigh of relief. It meant there might actually be an answer that wasn't just "try even harder" or "be even more disciplined."
I started TRT and it was life-changing. Not in a subtle way. In a "my wife noticed within weeks" way. The depression didn't just improve it stopped completely and my patience with my kids went from thin to deep. My focus sharpened and I felt like myself again, except I wasn't sure I'd ever actually felt like myself before.
I'm not saying TRT is for everyone. I am saying if you've been doing the work and things still feel off, get curious about what's happening physiologically. Sometimes the answer isn't another habit, but It's getting under the hood.
Have a system for managing your tasks and ideas
Your brain is for creating ideas, not storing them. Stop trying to hold everything in your head.
I use a framework I picked up from Jeff Su called CORE: Capture, Organize, Review, Engage. It's relatively simple and I think that's exactly why it works (at least for me). You capture everything into an external tool the moment it enters your brain. You organize with minimal metadata. You review on a regular schedule. And you engage, which is a fancy way of saying you actually do the work. Notion offers a free service that is great for this. Google Task and Keep are free as well.
I used to be all over the place, and I probably still am, but slightly more organized chaos now. I can say that so much less gets lost between intake and execution now though.
Find the system that works for you. PARA, GTD, CORE, whatever. The specific methodology matters far less than the commitment to using one. Motivation and discipline are unreliable and systems work even on your worst days. My MEDDPICC folks know exactly what I'm talking about.
Go deep on one thing
There's a growing narrative that generalists will win in the age of AI. Andreessen has hinted at it saying "bet more on basically people who can be broad" and I am sure your favorite LinkedInfluencer has written about it too. And while betting against Marc Andreessen is usually a quick way to look stupid, I am okay looking stupid every once in a while.
I've spent my career going deep on pre-sales solutions engineering. Not sales or product, or software engineering. The very specific craft of understanding a customer's problem, translating it into a technical story with positive business outcomes for them, and making the complex feel relatively simple all before the deal closes. I've led teams across three continents doing exactly this.
AI, at its core, is a generalist. LLMs are trained on massive amounts of data and out of the box and that is how most people interact with them-- as if they are a jack of all trades, master of none. Yes, companies like Glean, Notion, Sierra and others are building fine-tuned models and highly specialized agentic systems that push AI into specialist territory. But that's the point. It takes enormous effort, capital, and human expertise to get AI into that territory.
Someone still has to define what "good" looks like in a domain. Someone still has to know which problems actually matter. AI can give you the right answer, but it can't tell you when the right answer is still the wrong one.
Be that someone. Go so deep in one area that you become the person others consult and that depth will compound in ways going wide never will.
Connect with people
Not "networking" or "building your brand" and definitely not "connecting" with someone on LinkedIn and never speaking to them again.
I mean making the time for a morning coffee. A walk around Lady Bird Lake with a friend where you actually talk about what's going on in your lives. Not just surface-level gossip. (Shout out John Eitel for being that guy.)
The older I get, the more I realize that the quality of your relationships is a big predictor of whether you'll actually enjoy (or are enjoying) your life. Not your title or your comp.
Invest in people and really learn about them. And maybe even more so, let them learn about you.
Give a shit
If I had to distill everything above into a few words, it would be "give a shit".
Deleting Instagram was giving a shit about my attention. Walking without headphones was giving a shit about my inner life. Training to failure was giving a shit about my resilience (and because I am vain). Getting blood work was giving a shit about my health. CORE was giving a shit about my execution. Going deep on SE was giving a shit about my craft.
Being intentional just means caring enough to put real thought and effort into the things that actually matter to you. Your relationships. Your health. Your career. How you show up for your family.
Even how you dress. I'm serious. Study how well dressed people put themselves together (the good stuff from the '50s through the '90s before everything became athleisure) and put some thought into it. Not because clothes make the person, but because the act of caring about the details in one area of your life tends to bleed into every other area.
Intentionality is just like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets.
None of this is groundbreaking and I know that. There's no secret or hack or "one weird trick". There's just the slow, unsexy accumulation of small decisions made with intention.
You are not going to fix it all in a single day (if you somehow did please share). But you can start to move in the right direction and actually enjoy the process more than you might think.
So, start with one thing, and give a shit about it.