I Think I'm Having a Reverse Midlife Crisis

In an apocryphal story, legendary painter Pablo Picasso was walking through the market when a woman approached him and asked for a drawing. Picasso quickly drew a small, but beautiful piece of art and handed it back to her. "That'll be one million dollars," he smiled. "But Mr. Picasso, it only took you thirty seconds!" "On the contrary," he replied. "It took me thirty years to draw that masterpiece in thirty seconds." This story is a perfect example of a modern crisis I'm starting to see in the AI era. It's called the Locksmith Paradox: We have a tendency to undervalue something because of the low visible input required to create it, despite the output being exactly what we requested. In this piece, I talk about the science behind this phenomenon, why it penalizes efficiency and rewards general incompetence, and how to fight back as individuals, leaders, and organizations... •••

A six week stretch of travel had already reduced my output. Then, I got caught in an earthquake in Panama. And finally, upon returning home on little sleep, I was laid out by a bug my son brought home from school. This weekend, as I started to think about the week ahead, I noticed a familiar, building sensation. A clenching tension in my jaw and neck. A heavy drop in my shoulders. An elevated heart rate. It got me thinking about how to find your way out of the land of overwhelm when the pile of work and life debt feels too heavy to even start on. The body and the mind are intimately connected. Every random object is effectively an open loop. I build momentum on the small and then leverage that momentum to knock out the big. In this piece, I talk about my five-step Overwhelm Protocol: move the body, clean your room, make a Weekly Win Card, create a snowball, and knock down a wall... •••

Last Wednesday, I flew to Panama to deliver two keynotes. I was excited for the trip. I’d been once before as a kid and remembered the beautiful country.

Confession: I’ve never been someone who was a natural in social settings. As something of an introvert, I struggled to build new adult relationships. I often felt others weren’t responding to my social signals. In most cases, I just assumed they didn’t like me and moved on. But it turns out I was actually falling victim to a damning collision of two psychological phenomena: Signal Amplification Bias: Our fear of rejection in social situations tempers our ability to convey social signals, and blinds our ability to recognize that tempering effect. The Liking Gap: We assume others like us less than they actually do. In effect, you send less than you think, and you hear less than they send. Two people who like each other leave an interaction convinced the other one doesn’t. In this piece, I share a simple solution that has completely transformed my experience with adult friendships: Like people out loud... •••

When I was 13 years old, a single story changed the course of my life. But to understand it, I need to take you back in time to a strange experiment from decades ago. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga was studying patients who had their corpus callosum surgically severed. His experiments led him to hypothesize that the left hemisphere has a specialized system he called The Interpreter, whose responsibility is to find clear cause and effect. Its job is simple: To take scattered, seemingly random data and facts about the world in front of you and stitch them into a coherent story that feels true. The problem is that we’d rather have a story that’s wrong than no story at all. For me, The Interpreter began telling a story when I was young: I wasn’t very smart. My sister was the smart one. I had to be something else. And then, confirmation bias kicked in. The story determined what “counted” as evidence. Eventually, the story itself constrained my world. In this piece, I talk about the stories we tell ourselves and the empowering truth that allowed me to confront my own: You wrote the stories. Which means you can rewrite them. The most important story in life is the one you tell yourself. Make sure it’s true. •••