A few summers in a row, my family would drive down from Montana for a fishing trip along the Missouri River. It’s the kind of empty that’s easy to underestimate on a map and only too real once you’re inside it. Hours of two-lane road with nothing on either side but fields.

About five hours in, the fields turned to sunflowers, and they didn’t let up for the rest of the drive. Miles of them, all facing the same direction, all staring you down at seventy miles an hour. There was nothing wrong with them. I’d just been looking at them for two hours straight, and they were still out there, turning their faces toward whatever the sun was doing that they found so interesting. By the time we hit Pierre, I’d announced, more than once, that I never wanted to see a sunflower again in my life.

My grandma thought this was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. Sunflowers are supposed to be happy flowers that always turn toward the light, and here I was, ready to fight one. That contradiction delighted her, and she never let me live it down.

That’s who she was. She noticed the specific, odd thing about a person, and instead of smoothing it over, she made you feel like it was the best part of you.

Make Sure You Show Her

Years after that fishing trip, my mom got a birthday card in the mail. Sunflowers all over the front. Inside, past the usual note, my grandma had added one more line: make sure you show this to her.

She meant me. She’d turned my long-time grudge against sunflowers into a bit she kept alive for years. That was the kind of attention she paid. It didn’t fade once the car ride ended. It remembered exactly what made you, specifically you, and found it funny or lovely instead of trying to fix it.

My grandma died peacefully last week. She was 95.

I keep coming back to two things: the pocket dictionary she carried despite a sixth-grade education and the ketchup she loved to put on everything. She never smoothed herself into someone easier to explain. And she gave that same permission to everyone around her, including a granddaughter who was, apparently, ready to fight a sunflower on a South Dakota highway.

Where the Compass Points

In the ENOUGH Principle, Honor What’s Yours means navigating by your own compass instead of someone else’s map. My grandma didn’t need the language for it. She just lived it, plainly, in a hundred small, unbothered ways.

The dictionary wasn’t about proving anything. She just wanted her own words right, on her own terms, for herself. The ketchup wasn’t a lapse in an otherwise adventurous palate. It was just what she liked, and liking things other people considered unsophisticated never once registered to her as a problem to solve.

What I carry from her isn’t a lesson she sat me down and taught. It’s simpler than that, and harder to explain to anyone who didn’t know her. She gave me permission, just by being so unmistakably herself, to live my life out loud in my own way.

A Small Practice

This week, find the thing about yourself that doesn’t obviously fit. The odd pairing, the specific taste, the thing you’d normally downplay. Don’t smooth it over. Let it stand next to the rest of you exactly as it is.

If you’re used to editing yourself into something more consistent, this might feel strange at first. That’s fine. My grandma never once tried to make her contradictions make sense to anyone else, and it made her one of the most memorable people I’ve ever known.

See you next week.

P.S. Who gave you permission to be exactly who you are? I’d love to hear about them.

• You achieved something you genuinely wanted, and the satisfaction faded within days, sometimes hours

• You’ve caught yourself planning the next thing before you finished celebrating the current one. Or you skipped celebrating entirely.

• An open hour feels like a problem to solve, not space to exist in.

• You’ve said “once I get through this, I’ll slow down” and meant it (but still didn’t slow down)

• You can’t remember the last time you did something for no reason other than you wanted to. No optimization. Just because.

• Someone asked you what you do for fun, and you had to think about it.

• You’ve hit a milestone that other people would call a win and felt the question “Is this it?” before you could stop it.

• Part of you suspects that even if you got everything on your current list, you’d just make a new list.

Add up your yes answers. Your score means something specific, and it’s probably not what you’d guess.

Subscribe free to see what it means, and what to do about it.

The car was hot even with the air on, one of those July afternoons where the vents blow cold, and the windshield still feels like a stovetop. My friend was driving. I was in the passenger seat, half listening to the radio, watching heat shimmer off the road ahead of us.

We hadn’t planned to talk about any of this. One minute we were talking about nothing. The next she was talking about turning fifty.

Not About the Stuff Anymore

My friend isn’t new to self-improvement. She stopped buying things she didn’t need years ago. She got free of the pressure to keep up or to prove anything through what she owned. If you met her, you’d call her someone who has her life figured out.

But that wasn’t what was bothering her. She wasn’t wrestling with stuff anymore. She was wrestling with everything the stuff used to distract her from. Fifty had put a marker down, and she was taking inventory, not of her closets, but of her life. Where she’d been and where she still wanted to go.

“I wish there was a formula,” she said, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. “Something that just told me what enough actually feels like.”

The Answer That Fell Short

I know that frustration well. People find out I live with less and tell me some version of “I could never do that.” My answer is almost always the same: yes, you can; you just have to figure out what works for you.

It’s a good answer. It’s even true. But sitting in that car, I felt it fall short before I said a word of it. She wasn’t asking how to get rid of things. She’d already done that part. She was asking for something my usual answer couldn’t reach.

So I didn’t give it to her. I just listened. I told myself that was the gift, showing up without trying to fix it.

The Walk

I believed that for a few days. Then I went for a walk.

I do my clearest thinking on walks, the kind with no destination and no distractions. Just my feet and whatever’s been working itself out inside my brain. I was a few blocks in when it arrived, not an answer for her exactly, but a way of seeing the question that felt truer than anything I’d said in the car.

Enough isn’t a formula. It doesn’t show up on a map anyone else could hand you, and it isn’t even always visible the way a minimalist apartment is visible. Enough works more like a compass. Not the kind that points everyone toward the same fixed star, the same true north for every traveler. Enough is your own compass. It doesn’t care where anyone else is headed. It only tells you where you actually are, not where you’re supposed to end up. Sometimes they’re the same place.

What feels like your true bearing might mean packing up for someone else, or staying put for you. And what feels true today might shift in five years, because the compass isn’t broken when the needle moves. That’s not a flaw. It’s the whole reason a formula could never work in the first place.

I called her that evening and told her all of it: the compass, and the idea that her bearing was allowed to be entirely her own, and allowed to keep shifting. I don’t know if it landed the way I hoped. But I know it landed differently than ‘you just have to figure out what works for you,’ because this time I wasn’t handing her a direction. I was handing her a way to find her own.

The Coordinate: Honor What’s Yours

In the ENOUGH Principle, Honor What’s Yours means navigating by your own compass instead of somebody else’s system. Not the algorithm or the ladder someone else built and handed you to climb. A compass only works because it orients to what’s actually true for you, not to a fixed point everyone else is using to find their way. Your enough was never going to show up on a map calibrated for anyone but you.

That’s what I understood too late to say out loud in the car, but not too late to say at all. She didn’t need my formula. She needed permission to trust what already felt like north, even if north meant standing still. So I let go of having an answer, and gave her a better question instead.

By the time we hung up, she hadn’t landed on a resolution. She’d landed on a different way of finding one. Now, she had a compass to check, instead of a formula to search for.

A Small Practice

This week, catch the moment you check what’s true for you against what’s true for someone else. A book, a framework, a friend who seems to have it figured out. Don’t dismiss what they offer. Just watch for the instant you reach for their compass instead of your own.

Then ask: where does my own compass actually point right now? Not where you think it should but where it actually does.

You might be drifting toward a direction you chose a while ago and stopped checking. You might be standing still on something you haven’t looked at in years. Either way, don’t rush to fix it. Just stay with what’s true.

See you next week.

P.S. Where does your compass point to right now, and has it shifted recently?

My mother has always been my foundation. So when she grabbed my arm in her doctor’s office lobby, I didn’t realize that she was dizzy from her blood pressure spiking. I thought she was just steadying herself before heading up the stairs. It took me a second to understand that she needed me to support her.

Three weeks earlier, she had spent three days in the hospital from an illness that hit fast and hard. Followed by a month off work while she recovered. I flew home around Memorial Day, and I was stunned by how frail she seemed. Her lungs were weak, and she struggled to walk without stopping to catch her breath. She needed my arm just to cross the room.

Her Turn to Lean

I spent that week home driving her to appointments, sitting in waiting rooms, and taking care of whatever needed to be done. After being released from the hospital, all she wanted was a Dairy Queen Blizzard. Then she wanted one after a follow-up appointment, and also the day after that. If a Blizzard was going to get her through the afternoon, then that was the whole plan.

Somewhere in the middle of those days, I felt something I didn’t expect: gratitude. For the chance to be strong for her, the way she had spent my lifetime being strong for me.

She used to be the one who rearranged her whole life around her children’s needs without being asked. This was one of the few times it ran the other direction. I didn’t plan it. I just showed up, and the days filled themselves with whatever she needed that hour.

Nothing to Search For

I’d read Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks during my sabbatical year when I was learning to pay more attention and choose wonder over worry. I didn’t expect to need what I learned so quickly.

In each waiting room, I found myself reaching for my phone. Not to check work but to search what her numbers meant or to see if what she was feeling was normal.

But nothing I searched was going to tell me what I actually wanted to know: that she would be okay. All I knew for certain was that my mother needed a ride to the next appointment and my arm to hold in the hallway. That was the entire job, and for once, I let that be enough.

The Coordinate: Exhale Stillness

In the ENOUGH Principle, Exhale Stillness means pause before you plan.

Burkeman’s argument is that you cannot master time. The average human life runs about four thousand weeks, and no amount of productivity closes that gap. The only real choice we have is what gets to occupy those weeks. In past weeks, I would treat an open hour like a problem to solve. That week back home, the open hours were the whole point.

Scarcity says use every spare minute or it’s wasted. Sufficiency says the waiting room was the real work. Sitting beside my mother, driving her, and holding her arm whenever she needed it. Stillness wasn’t a break from a meaningful week. It was the biggest part of what made that week special.

My mother is back to work now and growing stronger every week. I’m trying not to let my gratitude fade into the background the way it usually does once a scare passes. Burkeman would say I only have so many weeks left with her, and none of them are guaranteed. I don’t want to spend any of them on autopilot.

A Small Practice

Pick one person you love. This week, keep your phone in another room and give them one hour. No plan or agenda for that hour. Just the time together.

See you next week.

P.S. Who’s held you up for years without being asked, and when did you last get the chance to do that for them?

A woman stood at the counter humming the same four bars, over and over again. Her eyes were closed as she struggled to remember the chorus of the song.

“It’s got drums in it,” she said. “Maybe a woman singing? Kind of sad?”

That was all my co-workers and I needed most days. A hummed melody or a half-remembered lyric. Someone would call over to another employee, until three or four of us were standing around the counter throwing out guesses and arguing over an artist none of us could name yet. When somebody finally cracked it, there was a real moment of celebration in the middle of the store, like we’d found something instead of just remembering it.

By Ear

I worked at that music store for years, doing a little bit of everything. Starting out as a cashier, then finally running a whole department. One of my first jobs was rewinding the returned VHS tapes. For a kid who loved stories, the whole store felt like a treasure chest. Books lined one side, with spots to sit and read, and the video department spread across the opposite side of the store. Music was right in the center, with listening stations where you could put on headphones and try before you bought. Every day I was discovering something new. I got to find new artists and hand them to people like I was giving them a gift, because I was.

The “name that song” game wasn’t official. Nobody trained us on it. It just became the thing we were good at. A few lyrics or a sung melody, using nothing but our own ears and everything we absorbed from being surrounded by music eight hours a day. This was years before Shazam. Before you could type half a lyric into a search bar and get an answer in half a second.

If you wanted to know what a song was, you needed a person who had actually been listening.

Catch and Release

A few months ago, I was in a restaurant, and a song came on that stopped me mid-sentence. I pulled out my phone before the second verse and held it up towards the ceiling speaker, waiting for the app to tell me what I already knew I liked.

It got the answer, and I added the song to a playlist. Then I noticed what I’d actually done: I hadn’t listened to that song. I’d captured it, the way you’d capture a Pokémon before it could get away. Identity secured and then back to choosing appetizers.

I used to be the person other people came up to because I could actually hear a song. Now I’m the person holding a phone up to a speaker, more interested in confirming what it is than in finding out what it does to me.

The Coordinate: Notice

In the ENOUGH Principle, Notice means awareness before action.

Working at the music store, noticing was the whole job. You couldn’t identify a song from four hummed notes unless you’d been paying attention to hundreds of songs before that moment. Not half-hearing while you did something else. Actually listening. The skill wasn’t a database. It was accumulated attention, the result of years letting music be the main thing instead of the background thing.

Shazam didn’t replace that skill. It replaced the need for it. And once you don’t need to notice something to get the answer, most of us stop noticing it at all.

A song in a restaurant used to be a shared moment, something you were inside of for three minutes whether you meant to be or not. Now it’s a small task. Identify, capture, file away, return to the conversation.

The naming happens before the listening does, which means the listening mostly stops happening.

A Small Practice

Next time a song catches you somewhere unexpected, don’t reach for your phone. Let it play through instead. Notice what it’s actually doing. Whether it’s the drums pulling you forward or the urge to turn it up. If you still want to know the title once it’s over, look it up then. But give the song the three minutes before you give it a name.

See you next week.

P.S. What’s a song that’s found you somewhere unlikely, and did you let yourself actually listen to it, or did you just capture it and move on?

I finished The Count of Monte Cristo for the first time this past Saturday at 1 am, then lay there in the dark, unable to sleep, still thinking about Edmond Dantès. I hadn’t stayed up past a reasonable hour for a book in years. I felt like I was eleven again, flashlight under the covers, certain that whatever was happening on the page mattered more than whatever was supposed to happen next in real life.

The book had been on my list forever. A PBS adaptation came out this year, and two friends told me separately that it was one of their favorite books of all time. That was enough. I picked it up expecting a classic.

What I didn’t expect was to feel, again, like a kid who couldn’t put a book down.

The Whole World in One Room

I grew up in a small town, but my elementary school library felt like the whole world. I loved walking in and smelling that almost vanilla-like scent of the old books, a smell I could still pick out today. Any book on those shelves could take me somewhere I’d never been or teach me something I didn’t know yet.

Ahead of the Scholastic Book Fair, the once-a-year chance to buy books right at school, they’d send the flyer home. I saved my allowance for weeks, waiting. I remember the newsprint on those thin pages, and the sheer excitement of seeing everything that existed, even the books I’d never be able to afford.

The summer I was in sixth grade, I was reading Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. I remember exactly where I was sitting in my bedroom and exactly how unwilling I was to stop. My mom would come find me and tell me to go outside. Not because I was doing anything wrong. Because I hadn’t moved in hours, and she knew a kid needed sun and dirt and other kids, not just Stephen King and a dead cat that wouldn’t stay dead.

She had to make me stop reading. That was the problem back then.

What Changed

When I moved to New York in 2008, reading came with me. I read on the subway every morning, the city moving past in flashes while I stayed inside someone else’s story.

Then, somewhere in the ten years that followed, I stopped reading. Not all at once. I didn’t wake up one day and decide to quit. It just got crowded out, first by exhaustion, then by the version of me that used every spare minute to catch up or get ahead. By the time I was approaching my first sabbatical, I hadn’t read a book in longer than I wanted to admit.

The pattern repeated seven years later. In the last stretch before I left my director role, I went three full months without reading anything before I even noticed the gap. Three months of a habit I’d had since childhood, gone, and I didn’t clock it until it was already over.

When I finally left and took my second sabbatical, reading found its way back again. Not because I told myself to. Because the space opened up, and that’s where I went.

The Coordinate: Grow Curiously

In the ENOUGH Principle, Grow Curiously means keep asking why.

I used to think that was about staying intellectually sharp, questioning assumptions, and chasing answers. But this pattern taught me something more specific. Sometimes the question isn’t why does this work? It’s why did I stop?

Reading has never been about self-improvement for me. I wasn’t reading Pet Sematary to learn anything. I read Monte Cristo without a single lesson in mind, just the pure pleasure of turning the page. That’s exactly what made it disappear when life got full, and exactly what made it the first thing I reached for once there was room again.

Joy doesn’t announce itself as essential. It slips away when you stop making space for it, and finds its way back the moment you do.

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We treat joy like a reward, something you earn once everything else is handled.
This is scarcity versus sufficiency with joy.

Scarcity says: joy is what’s left over after the real work is done, if there’s anything left over at all.

Sufficiency says: joy isn’t a reward. It’s a requirement. It’s one of the things that keeps you human, and it doesn’t need to earn its place on the list.

A Small Practice

This week, pick one thing back up, something you stopped doing without deciding to stop. The book on your nightstand. The instrument in the closet. The walk with no destination.

Don’t judge how long it’s been gone. Just ask: why this one? What does it still give you?

See you next week.

P.S. What’s the thing you used to do just because you loved it, that got lost somewhere along the way?

The night I performed on “Live at Gotham” at Gotham Comedy Club, I had to be there early for stage makeup. Not the kind you put on in a bathroom mirror. A professional did it. Full stage makeup for a live broadcast. The result was beautiful and more dramatic than I’d ever wear anywhere else.

I remember thinking it felt like a mask.

The show was broadcast live through Oculus and NextVR. The production team reminded us more than once: no stops, no edits. Whatever happened would happen exactly once, and that was it.

Before I went on, I made myself an agreement. Two goals only. Hit my time (exactly ten minutes) and have fun. The rest was out of my control. I couldn’t control who was watching or what they thought. I couldn’t control the technology carrying my voice into headsets I’d never see.

Two goals. Both of them entirely mine to measure. I hit both.

The most real thing that happened that night was invisible to everyone watching.

The Subway Home

On the ride home, I felt something close to relief. The show was over. It went well. I had done the thing. Then the blank space arrived. I had no recording to take home, only a few phone fragments that friends in the audience had caught. I watched those once, the way a quarterback watches game tape: looking for something useful in a moment that was already complete.

The tape couldn’t give me what I was looking for. I’m not sure I knew what I was looking for. There was no next rung waiting. Just the show, and then the open question of what was supposed to come next.

I had been more visible that night than almost any other in my stand-up career. The part no one could see was the part that counted. The moment I knew I’d hit the time. The fact that I’d had fun. The audience saw the performance. Only I saw the rest.

Before the Audience

A few years later, I wrote a children’s book.

It came in big blocks. First, the rough idea, then the work of learning how to actually write one, then a collaboration with an illustrator who helped shape the rough edges into something finished.

The moment I think about most wasn’t holding the physical book for the first time, though that was its own thing. It was earlier. The first time I saw the characters illustrated.

This story and idea I’d written during the pandemic lockdown, when the world had stopped, and there was no audience for anything, had become real enough for someone else to bring to life in color.

The book was real before it had an audience. The audience only confirmed what was already true.

Where the Compass Points

The Bhagavad Gita teaches that we are entitled to our work, not the fruits of it. The two goals I set before walking on stage were exactly that: work I could control. Hit the time. Have fun. What came after was never mine to claim. The video that didn’t exist. The applause I couldn’t carry home. The internal record is the one that lasts.

In the ENOUGH Principle, three coordinates reinforce that lesson:

• Honor What’s Yours: You were there. That record belongs to you, before anyone else weighs in.

• Undo: The moment was already complete. What needed undoing was the urge to mine it for something more.

• Exhale Stillness: The blank space on the subway wasn’t a problem to solve. Stillness after something real isn’t emptiness. It’s the thing itself, if you stay long enough to feel it.

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We’ve been trained to treat visibility as verification. If it wasn’t documented or broadcast, did it really happen? Did it count?

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with proof.

Scarcity says: it only counts if someone else confirms it. Recognition is what makes it real.

Sufficiency says: you were there. You know what happened. The internal record doesn’t need anyone else’s signature to be true.

Enough doesn’t need a witness. It just needs you. For me, that was true at Gotham, and it was true the first time I saw my children’s book illustrated. It’s true wherever you’re standing right now.

A Small Practice

This week, finish something small without an audience. It doesn’t have to be significant. A task completed, a decision made, or something creative seen through to the end.

Let it begin and end with you. No applause, no waiting to see how it lands with someone else.

Just the thing, complete on its own terms.
That’s the whole practice.

See you next week.

P.S. Did you try it? I’d love to hear what you finished this week and what it felt like to let it begin and end with you.

We tell the story wrong.

Goldilocks knew what she was looking for. She just hadn’t found it yet. She tried the porridge that was too hot. She tried the porridge that was too cold. Then she kept going until she found the one that was right.

But somewhere along the way, “Goldilocks” became an insult. A word for someone who can’t just be satisfied with what’s in front of them. We forgot that finding “just right” requires getting it wrong first. More than once.

The story was never about manners. It was about what happens when you don’t stop at “wrong” and keep going until something finally fits.

That’s the Goldilocks Zone. And most of us never find it because we stop too soon or we overcorrect so hard in the other direction that we end up just as lost.

Brass Stencils

When I moved from my second apartment, on Staten Island, to a shared place on the Upper West Side, I couldn’t afford much of a moving service. My new apartment barely had a kitchen. So I purged.

Most of it made sense. Pots I never used and things that had been taking up cabinet space out of habit, not love.

But somewhere in that purge, I also let go of a set of brass letter stencils I’d found in my grandfather’s workshop. They didn’t take up room. I’d always loved them. I gave them away anyway, caught in the momentum of getting rid of everything I could.

I’ve thought about those stencils more than a few times since. They’re the kind of object you don’t replace. You can only remember.

Too Cold

Less than a year later, I was buying back kitchen equipment I’d given away in that same purge.

That’s when I noticed the pattern. I wasn’t getting rid of things because they didn’t fit my life. I was getting rid of things because subtraction felt like the goal itself, and I’d overshot it.

For most of my first decade in New York, that overcorrection made a strange kind of sense. My apartment was where I slept. My real living room was Rudy’s, the dive bar on the corner. Home didn’t need much because home wasn’t where I lived.

Just Right

After the pandemic, I moved outside the city, and something in me started to enjoy home in a way it hadn’t before. Baking bread and pizza dough from scratch. Mixing a drink worth staying home for. Taking care of a space because I wanted to be in it.

That’s when “just right” finally came into focus. No pull toward more. No urge to subtract further. Just enough.

These days, what I keep is small but specific. A KitchenAid mixer that earns its counter space. A fully stocked bar means the best drink of the night is the one I make myself. Neither one has ever made me question the choice. That’s how I know.

Where the Compass Points

Aristotle called this the mean: the right amount of something, not a fixed point on a scale, but the amount calibrated to the person living it. My mean wasn’t going to be the same as my roommate’s, my grandfather’s, or anyone who spends most of their time at a bar down the street. It had to be mine to find.

When you bring the Compass here, it doesn’t ask how much or how little. It asks what’s actually yours:

• Notice: The cost of a decision doesn’t always show up the day you make it. The stencils felt like progress when I gave them away. The loss arrived later.

• Undo: Releasing what no longer fits requires knowing what fits in the first place. The goal is always clarity, not a number in either direction.

• Honor What’s Yours: Just right isn’t a standard someone else can set for you. It’s the point where your life stops asking you to adjust it.

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We treat every question of enough as a competition with two sides. More is ambition. Less is discipline. Pick one and optimize for it. Neither asks what actually fits.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with what balance actually means.

Scarcity says: there’s a right answer, and it’s absolute. Pick a side and commit.

Sufficiency says: enough isn’t a number. It’s the point where nothing feels excessive, and nothing feels missing. And only you know where that is.

A Small Practice

This week, pick one area of your life and ask yourself where you actually are:

• Too hot: you’ve been adding past what actually fits.

• Too cold: you’ve been stripping back past what you actually need.

• Or somewhere in between

You don’t have to fix it this week. Just locate yourself honestly. Goldilocks didn’t find her just right by guessing. She had to try what didn’t fit first.

Getting it wrong is part of getting it right.

See you next week.

P.S. Where are you right now: too hot, too cold, or somewhere in between? And what would just right actually look like?

I was standing in my kitchen in March 2023, the first time I held my book.

Hardcover and glossy with my name printed under the title in a font I’d approved over email months earlier. I remember the weight of it more than anything. Heavier than I expected. Heavier than the file I’d stared at on a laptop screen for over a year.

I held it for maybe ten seconds before I started thinking about the second one. It just arrived, the way thoughts do when you’re not guarding the door. A different character, a different lesson, already forming while the first book was still warm in my hands.

I didn’t notice what had happened until much later. I’d done the thing. The actual, finished, physical thing I’d wanted for years. And before I’d even set it down on the counter, I was already somewhere else.

Two Other Rooms

This wasn’t new. I just hadn’t been paying attention to it before.

Six months later, that same year, I was a director at an eight-figure influencer beauty brand, and we were running the biggest launch in the company’s history. I ended up directing it from a back table at a Starbucks in a strip mall, because my power had gone out, and that was the only Wi-Fi I could find. We broke every record we had. For a moment, the high was real.

Less than a week later, someone was already asking about part two. Could we do it again, but bigger?

Years before either of those rooms, during the sabbatical I’d taken to get back to comedy, I booked Gotham Comedy Live, a show broadcast through Oculus and NextVR. It was a strange kind of stage: performing for a room while a camera carried it into VR, the kind of booking that’s supposed to mark a turning point. There was no recording for me to keep. Just a few clips friends in the audience had caught on their phones, fragments of something I couldn’t actually go back and watch in full.

I rode the subway home that night, trying to remember the parts I couldn’t rewatch. I felt something I’d wanted to feel for years. I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. There was no next rung waiting for me to climb. Just an open, directionless now what.

Three different rooms. Two of them in the same year. And in each one, the ground moved right after I finally felt like I’d made it.

The Same Restlessness

Looking back, each moment was doing something different. The book pulled me forward with what felt like inspiration. The launch pushed me forward with someone else’s bigger ask.

The comedy show was different still. It didn’t push or pull. It just left a gap where the next step was supposed to be, and I rode the subway home with no idea what was supposed to fill it.

Three different mechanisms. The same result every time: I could not stay in enough long enough to feel it.

The Map I Built Instead

This is the question that built this newsletter: why does enough keep refusing to hold still?

I believe this is a structural problem. We’re handed one map for getting more, and no map at all for staying. So when we arrive somewhere good, we don’t know how to do anything except keep walking.

The psychologist Carl Rogers spent decades studying this exact gap. In On Becoming a Person, his conclusion was that the good life isn’t something you finish. It’s something you keep choosing, day by day.

I’ve been building my own map for the same reason: six coordinates to return to whenever the ground starts moving again. I call it the ENOUGH Principle.

E – Exhale Stillness: Pause before you plan. I needed this in the kitchen, the moment before I let the next idea pull me forward without asking if I wanted to go yet.

N – Notice: Awareness before action. This is what let me see the pattern at all, the same restlessness showing up across three different rooms, years apart.

O – One Focus: Choose what actually matters. The one thing in front of me, finished, instead of whatever’s already calling from further down the road.

U – Undo: Release what no longer fits. The belief that arriving should feel like staying. It doesn’t. It was never going to.

G – Grow Curiously: Keep asking why. The comedy show didn’t need a five-year plan. It needed me to be curious about what came next, not anxious about it.

H – Honor What’s Yours: Navigate by your own compass. Nobody else’s idea of what’s next gets a vote in what I actually want.

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

It treats the feeling of enough as a cue, not a destination. Stand still for a second, and the message is everywhere: if you’re satisfied, you’re not pushing hard enough.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with achievement.

Scarcity says: the feeling of enough means it’s time to set a bigger goal.

Sufficiency says: the feeling of enough is the destination. You’re allowed to stand there. You’re allowed to let it be the whole thing.

A Small Practice

This week, pay attention to the next time you finish something that matters. Not the next promotion. Not the milestone you’re already counting down to. The actual moment right after you cross a line you’ve been working toward.

Notice how long the satisfaction lasts before your mind starts reaching for what’s next. Five seconds. Five minutes. However long it is, that’s information.

Then try staying past it. Not by forcing stillness, but by asking one honest question: what am I afraid will happen if I let this be enough?

See you next week.

P.S. I’d love to know: what’s the last thing you finished where you let yourself stay in “I did it” for longer than five minutes? What did that take?

Somewhere on a two-lane highway in Montana, a cassette tape changed the way I understood the world.

I don’t remember the exact summer or the grade I was in. What I remember is the feeling. My family packed into the car, headed somewhere with trees and water and no particular agenda. Music was always part of the road. My mom had her Creedence Clearwater Revival. My dad had his Marty Robbins. But this trip, someone put in Wanted! The Outlaws, and by the second song, I was asking to hear it again.

Wanted! The Outlaws was the first platinum album in country music history. I didn’t know that then. I just knew it sounded like nothing else in the car, and I was hooked.

The album cover showed the stars dressed up like cowboy outlaws. Waylon. Willie. Jessi. Tompall. To me, it looked like proof that you could go wherever you wanted, say whatever you meant, and people would love you for making your own rules.

A Stance, Not a Sound

The Outlaw Country movement was a stance. Nashville in the 1970s had a formula: polished production built for maximum radio play. Waylon and Willie looked at all of that and said no.

They took control of their own recordings and wrote what they meant. Their audience was starved for something real. As a kid in Montana, all I knew was that the rule-breakers were the ones everybody remembered. Their authenticity is what people loved.

I became a Waylon fan after that road trip, chasing down every album I could find. One of them held the line that said it plainest: I’ve always been crazy, but it’s kept me from going insane. The safe path is the risky one. It’s the one that slowly asks you to become someone else.

Saturday Nights

When I was a kid, my family watched Hee-Haw together every Saturday night. If you’ve never seen it, the format sounds almost impossible: cornfield jokes, country music, Minnie Pearl in a hat with the price tag still dangling, and then a singer who could make the whole room go still. Comedy and music sharing the same stage, passing the emotional baton back and forth.

I had no idea I was studying it. I just knew I never wanted to miss it.

Minnie Pearl could make a crowd laugh so hard they were gasping, and then Roy Clark would pick up a guitar and take everyone somewhere completely different. Two entirely different crafts, working by the same principle: the right word, in the right place, at the right moment.

When I Started Writing Jokes

Years later, when I started performing stand-up comedy, I did what most new comics do: I studied the people I admired. George Carlin. Redd Foxx. Rodney Dangerfield. Dave Attell. But I also kept studying songwriters.

What I noticed was structure. A great country lyric earns its last line. Every word before it is load-bearing. Nothing is wasted. When I started writing my own material, my jokes looked strange on the page. More like poems than punchlines, laid out in lines that tracked the rhythm of the thought. I was building jokes the way Waylon built songs. Economy first, with feeling carried by precision.

The same instinct followed me off the page. Moving to a big city to chase stand-up. Living with 132 things when everyone else was accumulating more. Leaving stable careers when something essential was being asked of me that I wasn’t willing to give. From the outside, most of it probably looked crazy.

But the Waylon line kept proving true. The crazy choices kept me from the particular insanity of becoming someone I didn’t recognize.

Where the Compass Points

In the ENOUGH Principle, Honor What’s Yours means navigating by your own compass.

It doesn’t mean ignoring craft. The Outlaws worked harder on their music, not less. It means knowing which standards are yours to uphold, and which ones were handed to you by a system that benefits from your conformity.

Ask yourself:

• Where are you following a formula that was never built for you?

• What have you been calling “crazy” that might actually be your clearest signal?

• What would your work look like if you trusted your own instincts the way the Outlaws trusted theirs?

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We’re taught that credibility comes from conformity. Follow the proven path and use the accepted format. Look like what success is supposed to look like.

This is scarcity thinking applied to identity.

Scarcity says: fit the mold first, find yourself later. The market rewards what’s familiar.

Sufficiency says: the most durable thing you can offer is a genuinely distinct point of view. You can’t manufacture that. You can only protect it.

The Outlaws knew this. So did Minnie Pearl. They weren’t waiting for permission to be themselves. They’d already decided that was the only game worth playing.

A Small Practice

This week, pick a song, an essay, a joke, or a business you genuinely admire. Then ask: what rule did this person refuse to follow? Then ask: what rule are you still following that you haven’t examined in a while?

You don’t have to break it today. Just see it clearly. The Outlaws didn’t burn Nashville down. They just stopped letting it decide what they were worth.

See you next week.

P.S. I’d love to know: what’s a piece of music or art that gave you permission to see the world differently? What did it unlock for you?

It was a late spring day in 2012, and I was walking to the subway in New York City. I lived a block from Cafe d’Alsace on the Upper East Side, which meant I walked past it almost every day without looking twice. On this day, I looked.

Anthony Bourdain was sitting at a patio table, deep in conversation, completely at ease. I spotted him immediately. That unmistakable height and salt and pepper hair. My heart rate jumped before I could think about it. We made eye contact. He smiled and nodded, and I kept walking.

Around the corner, out of sight, I stopped. Just stood there for a moment with that particular rush that comes from being unexpectedly close to someone who has meant something to you. Then I pulled out my phone and texted my oldest friend, Be, my culinary partner in crime.

Just walked past Bourdain eating outside a neighborhood restaurant. One block from my apartment.

Her response came back fast: What was he eating?

I had absolutely no idea. I’d been too busy trying to hold his gaze to look at anything else. She found this as funny as I did.

The Book That Started It

Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential was published in 2000, and I was in my sophomore year of college in Montana. I was already dreaming of leaving. Bourdain started as a chef and writer before spending decades traveling the world and sitting at tables most tourists never find.

His first book did something specific to me. It made restaurants feel alive. Every meal became a story about who made it and why. But it was Bourdain himself who stayed with me. He was hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food. Curious in a way that kept pulling him toward the next table, the next city, the next conversation with a stranger.

Reading it, I wanted to stop waiting for my life to get interesting and go find out what it already was. New York City started to feel less like a dream and more like a direction.

Going Anyway

In the years that followed, I traveled. Not methodically, not with itineraries optimized for efficiency. More the way Bourdain always seemed to travel: with appetite and without a finished picture in my head of what I was supposed to find.

My first international trip was to Japan at 21, to visit a friend who was teaching English there for the year. She had a Japanese boyfriend and a handful of students who immediately folded us into their world. My first meal upon arrival was nankotsu karaage (fried chicken knuckles) and umeshu, ordered from a menu I couldn’t read, chosen by someone I’d just met. I didn’t love the knuckles. I finished them anyway.

There were no translation apps or digital maps, no way to know in advance whether I was headed somewhere interesting or completely wrong. It was equal parts scary and freeing. Getting it wrong was sometimes how you got somewhere worth being.

The world had gotten larger, and I couldn’t make it small again.

That’s what Bourdain kept showing us. You don’t find the real version of a place by staying comfortable. You find it by sitting down at whatever table is in front of you and paying attention.

Hot Dog with Everything

That appetite didn’t go away. It just kept finding new windows. Years later, I was in Reykjavik, the night after finally crossing the Northern Lights off my bucket list. I found myself standing in front of Baejarins Beztu Pylsur, a small hot dog stand that has been serving the same recipe since 1937. A lamb and pork hot dog topped with ketchup, sweet mustard, crispy and raw onions, plus a remoulade sauce. It is one of the best things I have ever eaten.

The night before was still with me. The specific awe of watching the sky move in colors I had never seen before. And here was this hot dog that had no business being as good as it was, in the cold, in a city I had only ever dreamed of visiting.

The meal that stays with you is rarely the most expensive one. It’s the one where you were actually present. Where you let the place be what it was instead of what you needed it to be.

Where the Compass Points

In the ENOUGH Principle, “Grow Curiously” means to keep asking why. It’s the coordinate that asks you to stay in motion without needing to know the destination first.

Bourdain lived this. He didn’t arrive anywhere with a finished plan. He just showed up hungry and paid attention. The curiosity came first. The meaning followed.

That’s the opposite of how most of us are taught to travel, or to do anything. We research until we feel certain and optimize until the surprise is gone. Grow Curiously says: go before you’re ready and sit down before you know what’s on the menu.

Ask yourself:

• What’s a table I’ve been afraid to sit down at?

• Where am I over-preparing instead of just showing up?

• What might I find if I just went?

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We treat experience like a transaction. You invest time and money and expect something worth posting in return. Proof that you made the right choice.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with discovery.

Scarcity says: go prepared. The unknown is a problem to be solved before you arrive.

Sufficiency says: the unknown is the whole point. You can’t stumble onto something extraordinary if you’ve already decided what you’re looking for.

A Small Practice

This week, do one thing without researching it first. A restaurant you’ve never tried. A conversation you’ve been putting off because you’re not sure how it will go.

Don’t optimize it. Don’t document it while it’s happening.
Just show up and find out what’s there.

See you next week.

P.S. Tell me: what’s a meal that surprised you? Not because of the food, but because of everything around it?

In the spring of my last year in Billings, Montana, Be and I sat across from each other at a Thai restaurant neither of us had been to before, trying not to cry. Not from emotion but from the food. The curry was so spicy that we joked it would melt our faces. We ordered more water and finished every bite. Then we crossed it off the list.

We had been doing this for months: picking a restaurant from the local phonebook, showing up, eating, and marking it done. This was the early internet. Yelp and online reviews didn’t exist. If you wanted to know what a restaurant was like, you either knew someone who’d been there or you went and found out yourself.

No cameras, no reviews. Just the understanding, without ever saying it directly, that this time was ending. College graduation was coming, and we were leaving. The question was never if, only when and where.

So we ate.

The Rules Were Simple

No fast food. Sit-down only. Nowhere we’d been together before.

Billings is the largest city in Montana, and the restaurant options ran the full range: everything from diners and buffets to steakhouses and pizza joints. We worked through them steadily, one meal at a time, over six months. Some were forgettable. The Thai place nearly ended us.

We also made it to The Petroleum Club, a now-closed institution on the 22nd floor of the tallest building in Billings. Members only, except for certain dining hours. Floor-to-ceiling windows. Oil money steaks in a room that felt like it had absorbed decades of deals. We went shortly after I’d done stand-up comedy for the first time, and we spent most of that dinner trying to write jokes together over cocktails, the whole city spread out below us.

We never named the project anything. We were just eating at every restaurant in our hometown before we ran out of time.

A Word Arrives

Around the same time, I was taking an Intro to Buddhism class and had picked up Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. One of those combinations that arrives at exactly the right moment.

I had already fallen for Kerouac. On the Road had cracked something open in me: the sense that life was larger than Montana and that I was meant to move through it. Dharma Bums went somewhere different.

That’s where I first encountered the word tathata.

It’s a Sanskrit concept found in Buddhist philosophy, usually translated as “suchness” or “thusness.” Things as they actually are, without improvement or documentation. Just: this meal, this friend, this ordinary Tuesday in a city you’re about to leave.

When I read it, something rang. A word arriving for what Be and I had already been doing every week over watered-down cocktails and face-melting curry.

We were, without knowing it, practicing suchness. Each meal complete in itself. Each cross on the list not a task finished but a moment fully lived.

The Last Restaurant

We saved The Granary for the end. It’s the kind of place people go to mark occasions with the white tablecloths and the good wine list. We had agreed early on to save it for last. I don’t remember what we ordered. I remember the feeling: celebratory and complete.

We talked about the next decade. Be wanted her doctorate in sociology. I wanted to be in New York doing comedy. We raised our glasses to both.

Neither of us said what the project had really been. We didn’t need to. We had spent six months practicing presence in the only way that we knew how: by showing up and paying attention to what was in front of us.

Then we left Billings. Be to her doctorate. Me to Texas, then Denver, then finally New York. Six years of working up to the leap I’d promised myself I’d take.

We both kept our word.

The Coordinate: Notice

In the ENOUGH Principle, Notice means awareness before action. It’s the pause between what’s happening and the story you tell about it.

Most of us move too fast for that. We’re already thinking about the next thing while the current thing is still happening. We’re already documenting the moment before we’re finished living it.

Tathata is the antidote. A practice, not a philosophical exercise. Can you let this meal, this conversation, this ordinary weeknight be exactly what it is?

Ask yourself:

• Where am I moving through my life instead of being in it?

• What would I notice if I stopped trying to make this moment into something?

• What’s already complete that I keep treating as unfinished?

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We treat attention like a resource to be managed rather than a gift to be given.

The culture of more says experiences need to justify themselves: they should produce content, insight, growth, or at minimum a good story. If you can’t extract value from a moment, you’ve wasted it.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with presence.

Scarcity says: experiences only count if they’re building toward something. Anything else is wasted time.

Sufficiency says: the meal in front of you is already complete. Being there is the meaning. You don’t have to extract anything.

A Small Practice

This week, eat one meal without your phone on the table. Not as a digital detox but as an experiment in tathata.

Notice what the food actually tastes like. Notice who’s across from you, or what the room sounds like if you’re alone. Notice the particular quality of this hour that won’t come back.

Just let it be what it is.

See you next week.

P.S. Is there a season of your life you remember with unusual clarity? Not because you documented it, but because you were actually there for it? I’d love to know what it was.

The last course was a cider doughnut with cinnamon ice cream, not what you’d expect from the number one restaurant in the world. But that was the thing about Eleven Madison Park. Nothing was what you expected, and everything was exactly right.

For years, eating at the world’s best restaurant had lived on my bucket list. In November 2017, it stopped being a someday. From the moment they greeted me by name at the door, the evening moved like something choreographed. Midway through the meal, a bar cart appeared. The staff had learned I love cocktails. The old-fashioned they made was one of the best I’ve ever had.

The entire evening felt like time had shifted to a different speed. That’s the only way I can describe it. Time slowed down.

It wasn’t one extraordinary gesture. It was detail after detail, each one given its full moment of attention. Every person who approached the table. Every course that arrived. By the end of the evening, the certainty that nothing had been left to chance.

And then the cider doughnut arrived. Alongside it, a full bottle of Apple Brandy and an open invitation: as much as we wanted. That was when it clicked. The feeling that had been building all evening finally had a name. Abundance. And I had felt it before, just not at a restaurant like this one.

Book It

Growing up, my parents worked hard to make ends meet. Pizza was not an average weeknight dinner. Pizza was a birthday or a good report card. Pizza was a celebration.

In sixth grade, my classroom participated in Pizza Hut’s Book It program. Read enough books, earn enough coupons, and get a personal pan pizza. For a kid who already loved reading, it felt almost too good to be true.

I read everything I could get my hands on. When I had enough coupons, I didn’t use them on myself.

I took my mother, my sister, and my brother to lunch. Each of us ordered our own personal pan pizza. I handed the waitress my coupons. My mom looked at her and said, “She’s paying today.”

I remember thinking I might burst with pride. I was the one treating my family.

The Same Feeling

Will Guidara was the co-owner of Eleven Madison Park. Unreasonable Hospitality is his account of what it actually took to build that restaurant into what I experienced that November, and his theory of why it worked.

Guidara describes presence as caring so much about what you’re doing that you stop thinking about what comes next. That’s what time slowing down actually means.

A full bottle of Apple Brandy at the world’s best restaurant. A personal pan pizza paid for with reading coupons. The same feeling, exactly. Abundance.

The Coordinate: Exhale Stillness

In the ENOUGH Principle, Exhale Stillness means pause before you plan. It’s the first coordinate because without it, nothing else is possible.

Abundance works the same way. You can’t feel it while you’re moving too fast. You have to stop long enough to let the moment arrive.

At EMP, the staff created the conditions for that. Every detail attended to, every distraction removed. Time slowed down because someone had decided it would.

In a Pizza Hut in Montana, a sixth grader arrived at the same place differently. She had saved her coupons, gathered her family, and given them something that felt like more than lunch.

Abundance shows up in more places than we think.

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We rank experiences. We optimize for prestige, for what will make the best story later.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with abundance.

Scarcity says: abundance requires the extraordinary. The bucket list meal, the milestone occasion. Ordinary moments don’t qualify.

Sufficiency says: abundance is a feeling, not a price tag. A meal at the world’s best restaurant and a personal pan pizza paid for with reading coupons can deliver exactly the same thing.

You just have to be present enough to receive it.

A Small Practice

This week, notice one moment where abundance shows up unexpectedly. Not in the extraordinary circumstance, but in an ordinary one.

It might be a meal shared with someone you love. A small gesture that lands harder than it should. The moment when enough stops feeling like a compromise and starts feeling exactly right.

Pay attention to what that feels like in your body. That feeling is the signal. That’s what you’re learning to recognize.

See you next week.

P.S. I'd love to know: what’s a meal or moment that felt like abundance? What made it feel that way?

In 2020, I dreamed about a white wolf.

I was back at my parents’ house in Montana. My father had open heart surgery, and the world was contracting to something no one had a map for.

In the dream, I moved from room to room. The wolf was circling outside, tracking me through the windows. Glass between us. I checked the locks, the latches. Not afraid. Just watching it circle.

Then the wolf was inside. It lay down on top of me, and I felt its weight. Slowly, it disappeared into me.

When the Wolves Came Back

I was fifteen when the wolves came back to Yellowstone.

The reintroduction happened in January 1995. Fourteen wolves from Canada, released into the Lamar Valley. I wrote a school report about it. Hours of research into what the absence of wolves had done to the ecosystem, and what their return might do.

What I learned was this: Yellowstone without wolves wasn’t just missing wolves. It was missing everything wolves kept in balance. The elk overgrazed the riverbanks. The trees thinned. The rivers shifted course without the root systems to hold the soil.

When the wolves returned, the elk moved differently, avoiding open terrain and letting the vegetation recover. The streambanks, no longer stripped bare, began to hold. Scientists called it a trophic cascade: one species restored, and the entire system remembered how to be itself.

I had grown up watching Yellowstone burn in 1988 and recover faster than anyone expected. Now I was watching it remember something older than the fire.

[Last week, I wrote about the summer Yellowstone burned — and what the land’s recovery taught me about belonging. If you missed it, you can read it here.]

The Book That Stayed

Jack London’s Call of the Wild was one of the first books I remember feeling, not just reading. What held me wasn’t the adventure. It was Buck. The domesticated dog heard something ancient in the wilderness, something that had always lived in him beneath the training, beneath the taming. What changed was recognition.

That idea lived in me for years without a frame: that wildness isn’t acquired. It waits. It calls. And when the conditions are right, you can hear it.

When the World Stopped

I stayed in Montana for a year.

My father recovered. The world stayed strange. That year moved differently. The house was still in a way my life in New York never was. Evenings without a calendar pulling at the edges of everything. The kind of stillness that either terrifies you or tells you something.

It told me something. The dream came sometime that year. The white wolf, circling. Entering. Disappearing into me.

I’ve thought about it many times since. What I keep returning to is the feeling: return. Power. The wolf was coming home.

The Coordinate: Honor What’s Yours

In the ENOUGH Principle, Honor What’s Yours means: measure your life against your own values, not someone else’s.

It’s the coordinate that asks you to stop measuring yourself against someone else’s map and start listening to the one you were born with.

Most of us spend years constructing a version of ourselves that other people can understand. The right credentials, the right ambition. And somewhere in all that building, we cover over the wild, inconvenient parts that don’t translate to a resume.

Yellowstone lost its wolves for seventy years. The ecosystem didn’t forget what it needed.

Honor What’s Yours doesn’t ask you to build something new. It asks you to stop covering what was already there.

Ask yourself:

• What part of yourself existed before the world told you who to be?

• What have you been circling without letting yourself name it?

• What would come home if you stopped keeping it out?

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We’re taught that identity is something you construct. Worth is performed and confirmed by others. Add enough, and eventually you’ll feel like enough.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with selfhood.

Scarcity says: you are what you build. Power comes from what you’ve achieved and who can see it.

Sufficiency says: who you are runs deeper than what you’ve built.

A Small Practice

Think back to who you were before the building started. Not necessarily a child. Just an earlier version, before you learned to perform for others.

What did that person love without needing a reason?
What felt true before it needed to be defensible?

You don’t have to go back.

But you might want to check: is that part of you still in the house? Or have you been keeping it outside, circling, wondering when you’ll let it in?

See you next week.

P.S. I'd love to know: is there something in you that’s been waiting to come home? What would it take to let it in?

In the summer of 1988, Yellowstone National Park burned.

The fires started in the spring and didn’t end until the cold weather of fall. By then, it had become the largest wildfire in the park’s recorded history. The smoke reached us from sixty miles away. So did the ash.

What most people don’t know is how quickly the land responded. Fireweed appeared in the burned areas within days. Wildflowers followed in the first years after. The park didn’t wait to recover. It already knew what to do.

Ecologists call it a crown fire cycle. The forest burns, the ash enriches the soil, and within a few years, what comes back is more vital than what was there before. The land was cleaning itself. Making way.

We had moved to Montana the summer before. I was nine years old, watching this happen from my new hometown.

What Terroir Actually Is

In wine, terroir is the idea that a grape’s character comes from more than the grape itself. The soil and the slope of the land shape what the wine becomes. Two vines on neighboring hillsides, of the same variety, can taste entirely different. Not because of the vine. Because of where the roots grew.

The concept has a human equivalent we don’t talk about often enough.

Some people arrive somewhere new and feel it in their body before they feel it anywhere else: this place is mine. Not reasoned into. Not chosen off a list. Recognized. Like you were already carrying the map, and someone just handed you the territory.

Somewhere I’d Never Been

Ten years ago, I traveled to Edinburgh for the first time.

I walked the Royal Mile and felt its pull before I understood why. The long sweep of the street, the energy of the people, the weight of the stone, with the Castle commanding the hill above it. I’d never been to Scotland. I’d never walked that street.

But something in me had. New yet already familiar.

In Zurich, it was different but the same. I was walking through the city when a stranger stopped me and started speaking in Swiss-German, certain I was local. Then it happened again. I have Swiss ancestry. My body apparently held something about that place before I arrived.

On that same trip, I traveled to Innsbruck, Austria. Standing there, I kept stopping. The scale of the mountains. The way the terrain made you feel small in a way that clarified instead of diminished.

The scale was different, but the feeling was Montana.

Norway

I haven’t been to Scandinavia.

My paternal great-grandmother was Norwegian. But there’s a pull toward that landscape that doesn’t come from genealogy or research. It lives somewhere more physical than that. A sense that if I stood in that particular light, on that particular terrain, something in me would recognize it the way I recognized Edinburgh.

I can’t confirm this. I haven’t gone yet.

But I’ve learned to trust the recognitions that live in the body before they have any evidence to stand on. That pull is itself a form of knowing.

The Coordinate: Notice

In the ENOUGH Principle, Notice means awareness before action. It’s the discipline of seeing clearly before you reach for an explanation.

What I recognized in Montana, Edinburgh, and Innsbruck didn’t come from reasoning. It came from paying attention to something the body already held.

That’s the Notice coordinate at its most elemental. Not thinking your way into belonging. Feeling it first, and trusting what you feel.

Ask yourself:

• What place has your body recognized before your mind caught up?

• Where do you feel most like yourself, and have you ever asked why?

• What pull have you been explaining away instead of following?

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We treat belonging as something you build: the right city and the right life staged in a way that signals you’ve arrived.

But belonging isn’t always constructed. Sometimes it’s recognized.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with place and identity.

Scarcity says: home is earned and chosen from a list of logical options. You belong where you’ve done the work to belong.

Sufficiency says: some belonging is already yours. The work is learning to notice it.

The land in Yellowstone already knew what it needed that summer. It had burned and renewed itself for centuries before anyone observed it. It didn’t need permission.

Neither do you.

A Small Practice

This week, think about the places where you’ve felt most like yourself. Not the most impressive ones. Not the ones you were supposed to love. The ones where something in you settled before you told it to.

Ask: What is it about those places that your body already knew?

You don’t need an answer. The noticing is the practice.

See you next week.

P.S. I'd love to know: is there a place you've visited for the first time that felt strangely like home? Or somewhere you've always been pulled toward without being able to explain it?

The first memory I can remember is a hallway.

I am small enough to reach up for my father’s hand and still hold it. We are walking toward a room, and when we get there, my mother is sitting in a hospital bed framed by a window. Sunlight falls around her. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

I didn’t know then what had happened in that room. My mother had just undergone a radical hysterectomy. She had gone in wanting another child and came out having said goodbye to that possibility. She had three children by 25. Her body, in giving us to her, had also taken something from her.

What I knew was simpler: she was there, and being near her felt like home.

That was the first thing she gave me. I just didn’t know yet how hard she had worked to have something to give.

What She Chose

My mother had a difficult childhood. Her father died when she was four. Her mother, a young widow with four small children, couldn’t emotionally find her way back to them. My mom grew up without a stable home. She learned early how to take care of herself.

She met my father at 15, and when she had nowhere to go, he brought her home. My grandparents welcomed her in and gave her something she had never had: a place that felt like hers.

My mother took that gift and made it the whole architecture of our lives.

Our house was not always full of money. But it was always full of love and laughter. I understood even as a child that this was not an accident. It was something she had decided to build for us, because no one had built it for her.

The Gift She Passed Forward

I learned what real listening looks like from my mother. She doesn’t give you her answer. She helps you find yours.

From growing up in Montana, moving across the country, to traveling the world, my mother has been a safe harbor. Not someone who tells you where to go. Someone who makes it safe to figure it out for yourself. When I failed at something, I was never made to feel less than. The question was always the same: what did you learn?

When I first decided to move to New York City, I made a trip home to say goodbye. She cried. Then, in the middle of that goodbye, she made me laugh. She said she had “raised her kids to be way too independent.” Then she told me she was proud of me for following my dreams, and to always live up to who I am.

She didn’t make my decision smaller to make her grief easier. She held both at once.

That is what she taught me: you love people where they are, not where you want them to be. You make space for who they’re becoming, even when it costs you something.

Where the Compass Points

In the ENOUGH Principle, the final coordinate is Honor What’s Yours. It asks a question most of us avoid: what do you know is true for you, even if you can’t explain it to anyone else?

My mother had every reason to pass forward what she received: loss, instability, and a childhood that moved too fast. Instead, she looked at her own life and decided what she wanted to give.

That is the most honest version of this coordinate I have ever witnessed. She honored something she had to build from scratch, then gave it freely to everyone she loved.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with love.

Scarcity says: you can only give what you were given. If your childhood was hard, that becomes the template. That’s what you know how to do.

Sufficiency says: love is a decision. You can choose what to pass forward. You can build the home you never had and give it to someone else.

What I Carry

As long as I can remember, she has signed every card with XOXO.

Fifteen years ago, I had a design created to honor what she means to me. It centers on the philosophy she lived more than she ever articulated: love and laughter. The two things she built our home around and the foundation of who I became.

So I had it tattooed: XOXD. Love and laughter, made permanent.

That’s what she gave me. Not a formula for success or a map for navigating the world. Something simpler and more durable: the belief that a life built around love and laughter is a life well-lived, and that both are always a choice.

She built that from nothing. I carry it on my skin.

A Small Practice

This week, think about one foundational thing you were given, not a possession but a way of moving through the world.

Name it. Say where it came from.
Then ask: how are you passing it forward?

That’s how love survives. Not through monuments or achievements, but through the small daily choice to give someone else what mattered most to you.

See you next week.

P.S. Who taught you how to love? Reply and tell me about them.

It was near closing time at the Louvre when I first stood in front of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

The crowds had thinned. I had the sculpture entirely to myself.

She stands at the top of a long staircase, carved from white marble, over nine feet tall. Her head is missing. Her arms are gone. She has survived two thousand years, and she is incomplete by every measurable standard.

And yet she holds the space around her like she owns it.

Her tunic is carved to look wind-blown, the marble rippling as though caught mid-gust. She is frozen at the moment of landing from flight. Your mind fills in the rest. The sound of wings, the rush of air, and the movement that isn’t there but somehow is.

I stood at the bottom of the staircase and looked up.

A Greek sculptor had made her two millennia before. Whatever he felt carving that moment, the suspension or the life caught mid-breath, I felt it standing there alone at closing time. Transmitted through stone.

I didn’t think about what was missing. I felt the wind.

What the Sculptor Removes

That’s when I understood something about what sculpture actually is. Not what the artist adds. What they take away.

Michelangelo said he saw the angel in the marble and carved until he set it free. He didn’t build the angel. He found it. The figure was already inside the block of stone. His job was removal, chip by chip, until what was always there finally became visible.

A few years later, I stood in front of the David in Florence. I had been first in line when the Galleria dell’Accademia opened, and had a few minutes with the statue before anyone else arrived. I walked the entire circumference of it, taking in each detail. The tension in his hands and the weight of his gaze.

I kept thinking about the stone on the floor. All that material that had to go so the figure could emerge.

David isn’t what Michelangelo added. David is what he was willing to remove.

Nine Years of Marble

By 2018, I had spent nine years adding.

Titles and achievements. A calendar that didn’t feel like my own and a strategy I didn’t believe in. I had been layering things on top of myself for so long that I had started to forget what was underneath.

I moved to New York City in 2008 to write and do stand-up comedy. Somewhere in the promotions and the performance reviews, I had covered that person over almost completely. Not on purpose. But with one reasonable trade at a time. Always telling myself I’d get back to it.

By the time I was staring at a cold-call deck I had no belief in, I knew I wasn’t building anything. I was adding more marble over something that was already there.

I took my first sabbatical in 2018. The work that followed was removal.

I removed the job and the schedule. The version of success I had been performing for over a decade. And slowly, what had always been there started to become visible again. The writer and the comedian. The person who had packed up her life and moved to NYC because she had something to say.

All of it was waiting underneath everything I had piled on top.

The Coordinate: Undo

In the ENOUGH Principle, Undo means release what no longer fits.

But Michelangelo points to something deeper than letting go. He points to the recognition that what you’re looking for was already inside.

The work of undoing is revelation. You chisel away to find what was already there.

Ask yourself:

• What have you been adding to yourself that might actually be covering something that’s already there?

• What version of yourself existed before the accumulation began?

• What would become visible if you stopped trying to build and started removing instead?

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We treat growth as addition. More accomplishments layered on top of more accomplishments. More layers between who we are and who we think we’re supposed to be.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with identity.

Scarcity says: keep adding. The right combination of credentials will eventually make you into the person you want to be.

Sufficiency says: the person you’re looking for is already in the marble. The work isn’t building. The work is carving.

A Small Practice

This week, instead of asking what you need to add to your life, ask what you might remove.

Not the dramatic things. Just one small layer. One commitment maintained out of habit or a role you’ve been performing that isn’t quite yours anymore.

The Winged Victory lost her head and arms, and she still commands the room.

You don’t need to be complete to be whole.

See you next week.

P.S. I’d love to know: what’s something you’ve been adding to yourself that might actually be covering something that was already there?

One month into my new job, I had a page full of handwritten priorities, a growing list of tasks team members were dropping on me, and a portfolio of clients I was still getting up to speed on.

I sat with it all in front of me and felt the weight of how much there was.

The old instinct surfaced immediately: work around the clock until it’s done. I recognized it the way you recognize a habit you’ve worked to break. That version of me would have touched everything at once and finished the month exhausted, having moved everything a little and nothing very far.

Instead, I stopped.

I returned to timeboxing, a time management practice with a simple rule: schedule your most important work before anything else can claim the time. I laid everything out and asked one question: What is the most critical piece to focus on right now?

The answer was the workflow that everything else depended on: how our team tracked work and communicated progress.

Our project management system had become a source of muddy timelines and unclear ownership. As the bridge between our external clients and internal team, I could see exactly what it was costing everyone. Every unclear deadline. Every dropped handoff. Every hour spent trying to figure out what was supposed to happen next.

I could also see roughly forty other things I wanted to help with.

That’s the adjustment that doesn’t show up in a job description: learning what’s actually yours to touch.

Back in the Trenches

My previous roles were strategy. This one is execution.

The difference on an ordinary Tuesday is significant. My mornings start fast, with multiple channels to catch up on before I can pass updates to the internal team, whose daily work depends on them. There’s an underlying tension to it. A constant check: is anything getting missed?

In a director role, you’re standing above the current, watching the water move. In this one, you’re in it.

What I didn’t expect was how much I’d missed that. The texture of actual work. The satisfaction of something done rather than directed.

But being back in execution also means being back in close range of every fire. And my instinct, built over years in senior roles where being indispensable everywhere was part of the job, is to move toward all of them.

That instinct needs regular correction.

What Epictetus Knew

Epictetus taught Stoic philosophy in ancient Rome. His most enduring idea is also his simplest: most of what we try to control isn’t ours to control at all.

He opens The Enchiridion with a distinction that sounds simple and isn’t. Some things, he writes, are up to us. Others are not. What’s up to us: our own judgments and attention. What’s not: outcomes, other people’s responses, the fires burning in someone else's lane.

The dichotomy of control isn’t about passivity. It’s about precision.

When I stopped and laid everything out on the page, I wasn’t ignoring the other problems. I was making a deliberate choice about where my attention could actually do something.

Where the Compass Points

When I bring One Focus to my work right now, it doesn’t ask me to ignore what I see. It asks me to be precise about what I can actually move.

• What’s mine to touch right now, and what am I reaching for out of habit?

• If I could only do one thing this week that would make everything else easier, what is it?

• Can I trust that staying in my lane is enough?

One month in, the answer is yes.

Not because I’ve stopped seeing the fires. But because I’ve learned that the most useful thing I can do is not always the most visible thing.

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

There’s a version of ambition that confuses motion with impact.

It looks productive and responsible. You’re aware of every problem, looped into every conversation, indispensable in every room. But if your attention is everywhere, it’s really nowhere. And the work that only you can do goes undone while you’re busy touching everything else.

Here’s what I didn’t expect: by staying in my lane, I ended up moving more than I would have by reaching beyond it.

Fixing the workflow didn’t just clean up project management. It reduced the confusion-generating questions. Fewer questions meant clearer paths for the internal team. Clearer paths meant fewer dropped handoffs with clients. I didn’t solve those downstream problems directly. I solved my one thing, and the ripple did the rest.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with focus.

Scarcity says: cover more ground. Be visible everywhere. If a fire is burning and you can see it, you should be fighting it.

Sufficiency says: do your one thing with full attention. A well-placed contribution moves more than a scattered one.

A Small Practice

Before you open your calendar or your inbox this week, write down one thing.

Not a list. One thing. The work that, if it got done this week, would make the most difference — to your team and yourself.

Then protect the time for it before anything else can claim it.

You can still respond to fires. You can still show up. But the one thing goes first.

That’s timeboxing as philosophy: decide what matters before the day decides for you.

See you next week.

P.S. What’s the one thing on your list that keeps getting pushed down by everything else? What would it mean to put it first this week?

September 2008

It was my first day in New York City.

Late afternoon in Midtown, somewhere near Rockefeller Center. The air was hot and muggy, the kind of thick summer I wasn’t prepared for. The evening commute had started, and the city hummed. Underneath it all, the unmistakable smell of the city in summer. Garbage, exhaust, and heat rising off the pavement.

My sister and her husband had helped me move, and we had tickets to the Top of the Rock to celebrate. I was navigating, so I walked like I belonged. Projected confidence I didn’t have.

I was watching the lights, not the cars.

I stepped off the curb the moment the signal changed. What I didn’t see was the pothole right in front of me. My ankle twisted. I stumbled forward into the street. And a car that hadn’t quite stopped yet was suddenly much closer than it should have been.

That’s when I heard it. A voice from the curb, loud and clear over the traffic. A homeless man was watching the whole thing unfold.

“Watch the cars, not the light. Nobody ever got run over by the light.”

I jumped back to the curb. Yelled, “Thank you!” without even seeing his face clearly. His voice held the kind of hard-earned wisdom you don’t argue with. The three of us stood there for a moment, equal parts relieved and stunned.

We quoted that line every time we crossed the street for the rest of the weekend.

What the Light Represents

The light is the proxy. The rule. The thing we’ve been taught to trust, so we don’t have to pay attention to what’s actually happening.

Green means go. The signal says it’s safe, and we stop looking.

But the light doesn’t know about the car running late through the intersection. It doesn’t know about the pothole. It doesn’t know that you’re looking too far ahead at your destination instead of what’s directly in front of you.

The light tells you what should be true. The cars tell you what is true.

The Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello spent his life teaching people the difference. His book Awareness is built on a single premise: most of us are asleep. We move through life on autopilot, reacting to labels and rules instead of reality. We think we’re paying attention. We’re not. We’re watching the light.

Waking up, de Mello argues, means seeing what’s actually there. Not the story about what’s there or the rule that’s supposed to keep us safe. The thing itself.

A homeless man in Midtown gave me the same teaching in seven words.

Where the Compass Points

In the ENOUGH Principle, Notice means awareness before action. It’s the discipline of seeing clearly before you move.

Most of us skip this step. We react to signals instead of situations. We follow the rules without checking if they still apply.

That day in Midtown, I was doing both.

I was so focused on proving I belong in NYC that I stopped noticing what was right in front of me. The pothole. The car. The gap between the signal and the street.

Ask yourself:

• Where am I looking so far ahead that I’m missing what’s right in front of me?

• What “light” am I following without checking the actual conditions?

• What would I notice if I stopped trusting the rules and started trusting my eyes?

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We’re taught that if we find the right rules and follow them perfectly, we’ll be safe.

But rules are approximations. They describe what’s usually true, not what’s true right now.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with certainty.

Scarcity says: find the right rules, follow them perfectly, and you’ll be protected.

Sufficiency says: rules are useful shortcuts, but they’re not reality. What you see with your own eyes is what’s actually true.

A Small Practice

This week, pick one area of your life where you’ve been following a signal on autopilot. Maybe it’s a process at work or a habit at home.

Then ask: What are the cars here? What’s actually happening that the rule isn’t showing me?

You don’t have to change yet. Just notice.

That’s where every good decision starts.

See you next week.

P.S. I’d love to know: what’s a “light” you’ve been following that turned out not to match reality? When did you notice?

It was late in the evening when we pulled out our phones.

My oldest friend and I were in her living room, a bottle of wine between us, her husband already gone to bed. Somehow, we started talking about quotes. I mentioned I’d been collecting them for years. So had she.

And then, without planning it, we started reading them to each other.

She’d share one. Then I would. We’d talk about what it meant, whether the other person had heard it before. Usually not. Usually, the other person would write it down.

I don’t remember the specific quotes. That might be the wine’s fault. But I remember the feeling.

Warm and transformative. Vulnerable in a way that felt completely safe.

Over the years, a collection like this becomes a map of your inner life. A record of who you are and who you’ve been becoming.

She received mine without judgment. I received hers the same way.
It felt like being seen.

The Practice

I started collecting quotes in college, around the same time I became a minimalist.

I was letting go of physical possessions, but I’d fallen in love with capturing ideas. Any quote that sparked something in me went into a single notebook. The practice was clean and simple: notice, write, occasionally review.

Then smartphones arrived. And for years, I lost the discipline.

It was too easy to screenshot, bookmark, or save. My digital folder grew and grew. I wasn’t curating anymore. I was hoarding. The signal drowned in noise.

That late night convesation happened during my 2018 sabbatical. After that night, something shifted. I became more grateful for the practice. More discerning about what I captured.

Recently, I learned the actual term for what I’d been doing: a commonplace book. A centuries-old tradition of collecting passages that resonate, returning to them, letting them shape your thinking over time.

I went back through my digital archive. I asked myself: what here is actually worth keeping? And I started writing the important ones down again, by hand, in a physical notebook.

Now I spend ten minutes every morning with it.

The Gleam of Light

Before Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Self-Reliance,” he kept journals. For years, he collected thoughts, observations, and fragments of ideas. The essay that would become his most famous work didn’t arrive fully formed. It emerged from the practice of noticing what he noticed and writing it down.

He was doing what I’d been doing in that notebook since college. Catching recognitions before they disappeared.

Emerson calls it watching for “that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.”

You notice something spark. You write it down before the world tells you whether it matters. Before anyone else confirms your recognition is valid.

You write it down because you noticed it. That’s enough.

Where the Compass Points

In the ENOUGH Compass, Honor What’s Yours means navigating by your own compass.

It’s the coordinate that asks you to claim what you know in your bones, regardless of whether it makes logical sense or earns approval.

A commonplace book is this coordinate as daily practice. Every time you write something down because it sparked something in you, you’re saying: My recognition counts. I don’t need permission to keep this.

The quotes you save, the ideas that stay with you, the sparks that no one else may notice. These aren’t waiting for validation. They’re already yours.

Ask yourself:

• What have you been collecting without realizing it?

• What spark have you dismissed because no one else noticed it?

• What would you share if you knew it would be received without judgment?

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

We’re taught to consume more and optimize our inputs based on what the algorithm rewards.

A commonplace book is the opposite. It’s radically personal. It doesn’t care what’s trending or what the experts recommend. It only asks: Did this spark something for you?

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with attention.

Scarcity says: consume more, curate based on what others value, keep up with what matters to everyone else.

Sufficiency says: trust your own recognition. What you notice matters because you noticed it. Your gleams of light are yours to keep.

A Small Practice

This week, start small.

When something lands for you, write it down. A line from a book. Something a friend said. A thought you had while walking.

Don’t worry about whether it’s profound. Don’t filter for what others would find meaningful.

Just notice what you notice and keep it.
The quotes belong to others. The pattern they form is yours alone.

See you next week.

P.S. Do you collect quotes or ideas? What’s one that stayed with you for years? I’d love to know what you’ve been keeping.