Two weeks ago, I started a new role at PetPlace, and it's been incredible. The responsibility, the challenge, the potential for growth. Everything I'd hoped for. But there's been an unexpected side effect. I can feel myself getting close to burnout.

This isn't your typical "I'm working too many hours" burnout. It's more subtle than that. As an individual contributor with emerging product owner responsibilities and potential management duties, my brain is being pushed to new limits every day. By the time I close my laptop, I'm mentally exhausted in a way I haven't experienced in years.

The ripple effects have been immediate. I've been out of ketosis for three weeks despite sticking to my keto diet. Stress has a way of messing with even our best plans. My daily practices are still intact, but barely. And this newsletter has shifted into what I can only call "maintenance mode."

I'm still hitting publish every Tuesday morning, but that's about it. The community engagement, the promotional work, and the thoughtful responses to your comments. All of it has fallen by the wayside. I'm going through the motions, but the energy that made this newsletter valuable simply isn't there anymore.

Even in maintenance mode, this newsletter still demands significant mental bandwidth. There's the pressure to find a meaningful insight each week, the expectation to mine my personal development work for publishable content, and the feeling that I should be doing more to grow this community. It's become a weight I carry rather than something I enjoy.

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The Garden Lesson

This morning, during a tarot session, something clicked for me. My life over the past few months has been like a gardening season, and I've been thinking about it all wrong.

In spring, any good gardener plants more seeds than they expect to harvest. You plant extra because you know some won't grow, others will struggle, and some might get eaten by pests. It's a numbers game at first. But here's the part I forgot about. Once things start growing, successful gardening requires making tough choices.

You can't let every plant that sprouts continue to grow. If you do, they'll compete for the same nutrients, water, and sunlight. What you'll end up with is a garden full of weak, struggling plants instead of a few that actually thrive. Sometimes you have to pull up perfectly healthy plants. Not because they're bad, but because letting them continue will prevent something more important from growing strong.

The newsletter was one of those spring plantings. It served as accountability. A way to make sure I showed up to my personal development work every day because I knew I'd be writing about it. It was like training wheels for building daily practices. And it worked really well.

But now I have those daily practices. The training wheels did their job, and keeping them on is actually holding me back. The mental energy I'm spending on this newsletter, even at the bare minimum level, is energy that needs to go toward my new role at PetPlace.

This isn't about failure or giving up. It's about recognizing when something has served its purpose and being smart enough to let it go so something else can thrive.

Making Space to Thrive

So I'm pausing this newsletter.

This decision isn't easy. Over the past three months, this weekly practice has been a catalyst for big changes in my life. The daily journaling, the self-reflection, the accountability. All of it helped me land this new role and build the foundation for what comes next.

But if I've learned anything about personal growth, it's that holding onto what got you here can prevent you from getting to where you need to go next. Right now, I need to give my full attention to my new responsibilities, to fixing other areas of my life that have slipped into maintenance mode, and to finishing the projects that are draining my energy instead of giving me energy.

I'm not shutting down completely. I'll still be working on personal projects, still journaling daily, still growing. But I need to create space for what's actually right for this season of my life.

Thank you for being part of this journey. If you've found value in these weekly thoughts, I encourage you to start your own practice of regular self-reflection. The real growth happens in the daily work, not in the weekly recap.

If there's anything I can help you with as you navigate your own seasons of growth and tough choices, please reach out. Sometimes the most helpful thing we can do is step back from what we've been doing so we can be fully present for what we're supposed to do next.

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At my last job, I could literally go days without accomplishing anything significant.

I'd wake up with the best intentions, but then I'd open my computer and immediately feel overwhelmed by everything I needed to do. So, instead of tackling any of it, I'd escape into a game like Hogwarts Legacy or binge the Lord of the Rings extended cuts. Days would disappear.

Other times, I'd be "productive," but I would work on completely the wrong things. I'd spend three days redesigning my personal website while my actual work deadlines piled up. Or I'd dive deep into a side project and suddenly realize I hadn't touched my main responsibilities all week.

The problem wasn't laziness. At one point, I did a brain dump of everything I was working on. I had over 40 things on that list. Everything felt important. Everything felt urgent. So my brain just... froze.

This overwhelm-to-paralysis cycle is a real struggle for me. When too many priorities compete for attention at once, I shut down completely. It's like my nervous system hits the emergency brake rather than risk making the wrong choice.

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Time Blocks as Brain Extensions

I've been thinking about this differently lately. Time blocking isn't just about organization. It's externalizing cognitive load.

Instead of trying to juggle 40 competing priorities, I can put most of that decision-making onto my calendar. The "what should I work on right now" question gets answered during planning time, not in the moment when I'm already overwhelmed.

This is why I'm experimenting with category-based time blocks. Rather than scheduling specific tasks, I'm scheduling types of work. Here's what I'm planning:

* Four-hour blocks every workday for PetPlace deep work

* Several two-hour blocks for important side projects like building my friend's new website theme

* Additional blocks every week for learning, like the iCanStudy or Project 369 courses I'm enrolled in

* Blocks for my daily journaling and weekly newsletter writing

The goal isn't just to get organized. It's to make sure the urgent doesn't completely drown out the important.

Right now, I have a tendency to hyperfocus on one thing and let everything else fall through the cracks. If I get absorbed in coding for PetPlace, I might forget about Monica's website deadline. If I spend all day on a side project, I feel guilty about not doing my main work.

Category blocks create boundaries. They gave me permission to focus completely on courses, knowing I'd already completed my daily PetPlace work. And they create urgency, too. If I only have two hours before work for Substack, I need to stay on task so I can tackle my other priorities during the day.

I'm also treating my time allocation as an experiment. Maybe two hours is too long to focus on a course, and I need to split it up. Maybe one hour isn't enough for daily writing, and I need two blocks instead. The beauty is I don't have to get it perfect immediately. I can adjust based on what actually happens.

Structure as Prevention

The structure isn't just about being more productive. It's about preventing the complete breakdown I experienced in my story.

Most of my past dysfunction came from overwhelm. Too many open loops competing for attention. No clear way to decide what deserved my focus. So I'd either freeze up completely or work frantically on the wrong things.

Category blocks solve both problems. They reduce the cognitive load by making decisions ahead of time. They also ensure that my actual priorities are protected instead of being pushed aside by whatever feels most urgent at the moment.

Here's what I'm taking away from this experiment so far:

Your brain can only hold so many priorities before it shuts down. When everything feels important, nothing gets the attention it deserves. Time blocking isn't about rigid scheduling. It's about creating a system that makes decisions for you when you're too overwhelmed to think clearly.

The structure prevents burnout better than it fixes burnout.

What's one area of your life where you keep meaning to make progress, but it always gets pushed aside by more urgent things? Maybe it's time to dedicate a block to your calendar.

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“Hey Dad, do you want to hear some popular music?”

I looked up from my phone. My daughter was sitting next to me on the couch, already queuing up her favorite songs. Then she jumped up and started showing me the dances she’d learned from YouTube.

It was spontaneous and surprisingly sweet.

And it never would’ve happened if I’d been in my office like I usually am.

I wasn’t doing anything special. I was just nearby. And that made all the difference.

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The Power of Just Being There

That little moment stuck with me.

Because I was there, the connection had space to happen.

We often think parenting is about planning activities or teaching lessons.

But some of the best moments can’t be scheduled. They show up when you’re within reach.

It turns out that presence doesn’t always mean engagement. Sometimes it’s just physically being there.

When I’m in my office, I miss those chances. When I’m on the couch, even doing my own thing, I give those moments a chance to find me.

That’s what I’m trying to do more of. Be around. Be close. Be available.

Make Room for Connection

This isn’t about planning more activities.

It’s about being around more.

Not hovering. Not performing. Just staying within reach.

Sit on the couch. Work in the same room.

Some of the best moments happen when you’re nearby.

You don’t need to be entertaining.

You just need to be there.

That’s enough to change everything.

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It’s 5:30 a.m. My house is still. My mind isn’t.

Every morning before my daughter wakes up, I pull a tarot card and ask ChatGPT to give me an inspired journal prompt. I spend time mining my subconscious, bringing thoughts and feelings that had been buried to the surface.

But what if the most important parts of your life never make it into your journal?

A few weeks ago, ChatGPT analyzed a week of my journals and uncovered seven big open loops I wrestled with daily. Topics like expressing vulnerability, my professional identity, and, of course, my fixed mindset.

So, this week I asked ChatGPT to identify what areas I wasn’t writing about.

Areas like parenting, quality of life, and my life vision were absent from my journal. It turns out, I’d been missing the parts that matter most.

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Quiet Wheels Need Oil Too

Growth doesn’t just come from solving urgent problems.

One question that ChatGPT asked me was, “What role does my environment (home, workspace, routines) play in my energy and creativity?”

Two years ago, when I moved into my home, I had a panic attack.

I left a clean, well-organized apartment and moved into a “fixer-upper.” It didn’t occur to me that even though I’ve made a ton of progress, the chaos surrounding my house still weighs on me. A lot.

Now, I’m thinking about what I could do to make my home a calmer, more relaxing place. This is especially important since I’ll be working fully remotely once again next week. What can I do in my office to optimize it so that I can do my best work?

What Are You Not Looking At?

Take a moment and ask yourself, “What parts of my life haven’t had a voice lately?”

What’s been steady, quiet, or easy to overlook?

Make space for what isn’t urgent. That quiet part of your life might be the key to real momentum.

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The part of me that needs to look smart is panicking. The rest of me is trying to breathe.

I just quit a job I held for over five years—and I'm walking into something I don’t feel fully ready for.

I'm changing jobs. After 5.5 years at Johnson Health Tech, my last day will be May 13th. I accepted an offer at PetPlace, a new team building software for pet shelters.

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Starting Over (or) A New Chapter

I keep telling myself I’m excited. But if I’m honest? I’m terrified. I’ll get to help build something meaningful from the ground up. But in many ways, I’m starting over.

I've built and shipped production apps, co-founded a startup, and launched multiple SaaS products. But React has never been at the core of those builds. Now I am stepping into a role where it is the foundation. That makes me feel like a beginner again.

The fear I feel, I now know, is coming from my fixed mindset.

I’ve been noticing this fixed mindset show up everywhere lately. It has been surprising to see how deep it runs. Quietly shaping the way I think, the way I react, the way I avoid risk.

The smart kid in me wants people to see me as someone who achieves things effortlessly. If I'm smart, I shouldn't have to try hard, it should come naturally. That belief has kept me playing small for a long time.

After accepting the job and putting in my notice I felt panic. I felt the urge to plan, to figure out what I have to do in the next two weeks to prepare for the first day on the job. Fortunately I spotted the fixed mindset rearing it's ugly head.

I know that I'll be using React, React Router, and most likely Express on the backend. However, there are many unknowns. There is no actual way for me to be fully prepared for my first day. I will have to show up as I am, do my best, and identify my gaps, every day, on the job.

~ Breathe. ~

Fortunately, I can say that I interviewed with complete integrity. I was fully transparent about my skills, my strengths, and weaknesses.

My second interview was pushed back by a week because the engineering director wanted to meet other candidates before moving forward with me, specifically because I lacked recent experience with their specific tech stack.

They still offered me the position.

I am enough.

I have something that they want.

~ Breathe. ~

Integration in Real Life

This weekend I spent three days in Minneapolis. I did not study, I did not work on courses from my hotel room, I did not binge audiobooks during each 4 hour drive.

I had fun. I explored bookstores, I attended Minnebar, I met up with friends and my niece.

This shouldn't be difficult, but it is. This is part of integration. This is applying what I've learned to my daily life.

I'm practicing things that do not come easily to me. I'm doing the work.

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I thought I was just tired from a busy Easter weekend.

A few days of family events and broken routines. I figured a good night’s sleep would fix it. But by the middle of the week, I was still exhausted. It was not the kind of tired that rest could solve.

I knew it was not about having too much to do. I have been careful lately to give myself space and avoid overloading my schedule. This was something else. I just didn't know what.

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When Growth Becomes Another To-Do List

On Wednesday I came across an essay called I Rushed My Transformation and Paid the Price. It made me pause. It described how easy it is to chase growth and keep pushing for progress without giving yourself time to absorb any of it.

That was when it clicked. Growth is not just about learning new things or having insights. At some point, you have to stop and let those changes sink in. You have to embody them. Review what you have learned. Practice it. Give it time to become part of how you live.

I realized I had been focused on figuring things out and making progress but I had not given myself space to integrate any of it.

Seeing the Invisible Workload

I knew I had a lot on my mind but I could not see it clearly. I was too drained to untangle it on my own so I asked ChatGPT to help me review my journal entries from the past week.

It found seven major emotional open loops. Seven big areas of inner work I had been processing without realizing how much energy it was taking.

As I read through them I kept nodding. Each one was accurate. But seeing them all listed out made it obvious why I felt so wiped out.

I also noticed something else. I was not stuck. I had made real progress. The problem was not that I needed to push harder. I needed to stop and let that progress settle.

Letting Progress Sink In

It is easy to think that growth means always working on yourself. Always fixing. Always moving forward. But sometimes the real work is knowing when to pause.

You cannot rush transformation. At some point, you have to stop searching for the next breakthrough and start living the lessons you have already uncovered.

If you are feeling drained but you cannot point to anything obvious, ask yourself if you are carrying too many emotional open loops. You might not need to figure out more. You might just need to give yourself time to embody what you already know.

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I’ve been working through the iCanStudy course, and while it’s packed with valuable ideas, the biggest thing it’s done is force me to confront a pattern I didn’t know I was stuck in. I thought I was just learning how to learn. What I actually found was a deeper issue that’s been driving how I approach all my projects.

One of the significant lessons in the “High-Yield Phase” is a warning against rushing through the material. They recommend a minimum of 5 hours of practice for every hour of theory, with more complex techniques requiring even more practice.

Since I’m not a university student cramming for exams, I’m comfortable taking my time and making sure I actually learn the techniques before moving on.

But how can I actually practice these techniques?

Turns out, all of my current projects revolve around trying to improve the way I approach learning. My thinking had been, “I need to effectively learn how to learn so I don’t waste my time trying to learn and then forgetting everything.” I have no current projects on which to practice these skills.

I started to realize I wasn’t just struggling with how to practice. I had actually built an entire system that kept me busy while avoiding real work. That’s what I now think of as the Meta-Work Trap.

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How I Fell Into the Meta-Work Trap

In Why I Avoid Tracking, I talked about how the iCanStudy course described fixed vs growth mindset and my realization that I have all the signs of a fixed mindset. Basically, I am continuing to use “what if” questions and trying to prepare, all while continuing to put off the actual work.

It turns out that my fixed mindset is also showing up in the projects I’ve selected. In fact, 8 of the top 10 projects in my project ranking system are meta-projects, or projects where I learn skills to use on other projects.

The two that aren’t purely meta-projects are this newsletter and reading the book On The Shortness of Life. If I’m being completely honest, they are both borderline meta-projects. At least this newsletter is a project where I produce something.

These are all project versions of asking “what if” questions. It’s me procrastinating on doing something real by staying busy learning “skills I’ll need” to do the amorphous “real” projects in the future.

What I’m Doing to Break Out of It

If I don’t shift out of this loop, I’ll just go from wasting time learning and forgetting to wasting time mastering techniques I never use.

The only solution is to reconsider all of my projects. The two I’m keeping right now are this newsletter and the iCanStudy course. Yes, the iCanStudy course is a meta-project, but since it was the catalyst for me figuring out this issue, I see a lot of value in continuing.

Since my day job is working as a software developer, two interrelated skills that I think might be good candidates for iCanStudy practice are React and Typescript skills. These are both skills I’m expected to use at work, but I still consider myself a beginner.

There is also the ability to get coach feedback through the iCanStudy course, so I’ll do my best this week to learn these skills using the iCanStudy techniques and then submit a request for feedback with the coaches.

Takeaways

I started this journey trying to improve how I learn. What I uncovered instead was a pattern of avoidance. I had filled my time with preparation work, telling myself it was productive when really I was putting off anything that required risk or real execution. The Meta-Work Trap isn’t just about overthinking. It’s about building systems that feel like progress but keep you from doing the actual work.

If this sounds familiar, take a closer look at your own projects. Are they helping you move forward or just helping you stay busy?

If you found this helpful, please share it with someone else who might be stuck in the same loop.

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This week, I’m going to circle back to a concept I mentioned in How I’m Making My Learning Actually Useful, and that’s the concept of 12 Favorite Questions.

I had mentioned that Richard Feynman liked to have a written list of his 12 favorite problems, so he’d always be on the lookout for things to support solving these problems.

People seemed to have some questions about the concept, as well as how I was going about solving these problems. I decided it was worth a deeper dive into how I view these questions, how I came up with my current 5, and how I’m going about trying to answer these questions.

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Coming Up With My Questions

One of my favorite tools for self-discovery has been ChatGPT, in particular, a custom GTP I created called LifeCoachLens. It is designed not to offer advice but rather to analyze my writing and ask me follow-up questions, helping me dig deeper and identify gaps and biases on my own.

I started out with:

Help me identify “12 favorite problems” that I can keep in mind like Richard Feynman did.

This way, I could brainstorm what projects and topics I’m curious about, and LifeCoachLens will keep asking me follow-up questions and trying to get me to dig deeper and think about things differently. If you’re really interested in the nitty-gritty details, here’s the entire conversation.

What the Questions Represent

One thing that might be a little bit weird and potentially different than Feynman’s questions is that these questions represent my curiosities and interests, and I don’t expect them to ever have one specific answer.

I’ll briefly discuss each of my current five questions (I haven’t gotten to 12 yet) and explain what they mean and how I’m going about trying to find answers to them. Hopefully, by the time I’m finished, you’ll understand what I’m doing here, and maybe you’ll try to come up with a list of your own.

1. How do I focus on the work that matters most?

You’ll find that many of my questions have several layers to them. This is no exception. The origin of this question comes from projects like my SHELL Framework, where I’m ranking projects by different criteria to identify which are the most likely to generate a return on my investment of time, money, and effort.

As I get older, and my perceived future time dwindles, I feel the urge to not waste my time on frivolous projects. I should have some idea of why I’m working on the project and what I hope to get out of it. That’s not to say that there isn’t value in chasing inspiration, but I need to be aware that when I do that, I need to time-box it and not let it take up tons of time without any objective.

The other part of this is the “How do I focus” part. I am a fairly distractible person, and I need to develop discipline around focus. Some of my current reading projects have the benefit of helping me practice extended focus blocks, which is a skill I need to develop.

So I’d connect to this question projects like “Follow the Well Educated Mind process while reading the first 10 chapters of Don Quixote” as well as the development of frameworks like SHELL, so I can feel some confidence that I’m working on something that matters.

2. How can I uncover and influence hidden systems shaping my life?

On the surface, this connects with my lifelong interest in the occult (from Latin occultus ‘hidden, secret’), which can mean magical or mystical practices (e.g., tarot, pendulum divination, etc.) or real science behind many occult phenomena (e.g., reticular activating system, hypnagogia, default mode network, etc.)

On a deeper level, this connects to a lot of my self-reflection. Trying to understand my own motivations and biases. Tools like LifeCoachLens are very much part of answering this question.

3. How can I build invisible bridges that multiply existing value?

The origin of this question is that I like connecting people and connecting systems. I’ve founded meetup groups, participated in online communities, and enjoy federated wikis and open formats like RSS and ActivityPub. A key component of my day job is building API integrations.

I’m very driven to find existing groups and platforms and find ways to “multiply value” by connecting them, either socially, “Hey, have you seen this other person’s work?” or through technology (e.g., writing code that literally connects different systems), aka “invisible bridges”

One example is the federated wiki (fedwiki for short) community. There are a bunch of solo wikis where people write about various things. However, tracking down or following what people are working on is hard. I also do a lot of work with RSS and news aggregation.

My way of creating a bridge between these systems and writers was to build a platform (fedwikiriver.com and feeds.fedwikiriver.com) where people can follow and discover the interesting things happening across all the different wikis.

This site is a bridge between people writing on wikis, as well as a bridge between the fedwiki platform and RSS/Rivers of News, which I’ve been involved with in many different ways.

4. How do I maximize the applied value of what I learn?

This comes out of my frustration with reading books, listening to podcasts, and promptly forgetting everything I learned.

I’m in the middle of the iCanStudy course, where I’m learning new techniques that will allow me to remember and integrate what I’m learning with my day-to-day life.

Books like The Well Educated Mind and How To Read A Book are within the sphere of this question. Too much of my learning has been passive, so learning skills to make my learning more active and actionable are very important if I want to leverage what I’m learning in the future.

5. How do I design a meaningful life with momentum and alignment?

This newsletter is very much an investigation into this question. It also ties together many of the other questions. Why should I learn anything? What’s the point? What do I want to get out of life? These are all pieces of this question.

I want to feel like what I do is meaningful and not just a waste of time. I also want to feel like I’m building a flywheel where what I learn today feeds into the momentum of what I’ll learn tomorrow.

This connects to my desire to study philosophy and read classic literature. People have been thinking and writing about the search for meaning for a very long time.

I think even this exercise of trying to come up with 12 favorite questions is part of trying to understand what gives my life meaning, connecting to this question.

Summary

Hopefully, what you take away from this week’s issue is that it can be helpful to identify the underlying questions that motivate you. By reverse engineering what you’re curious about, you can start to connect seemingly disparate interests and threads in your life.

As someone who would like to someday figure out “my passion,” I think this is a very tangible artifact.

If you try out LifeCoachLens or take a shot at forming some of your own favorite questions, please share your results with me.

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At 43, I’m not scared of dying. I’m scared of wasting time.

Neil deGrasse Tyson says mortality gives life meaning. I think it robs us of ambition.

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As I get older, I have less time left, and because of that, I can’t take the wild swings I would have when I was younger. What I prioritize to work on becomes much more important, and the feeling that if I’m going to work on a project, I need to “get it right” so I’m not wasting my limited time.

There is also a growing list of things that I find interesting, but I’ll never do them because I don’t feel like there is enough time left to realize its benefits. For instance, as a software developer, I’ve thought it might be fun to create a point-and-click adventure game like Maniac Mansion. But at this point in my life, I think, “What’s the point?”

I’m disillusioned with software development, and I have no experience with game design, either technically or creatively. It might be fun, but there are better ways to spend my time right now.

I previously talked about my SHELL Framework, where I score perspective projects on the basis of Speed, Heart, Effort, Longevity, and Leverage, and building an adventure game would score very low.

* Speed: 1 - This is neither a quick project nor a long-term project with a minimal weekly commitment.

* Heart: 2 - I’d have fun with the creative part, but the technical side would be tedious.

* Effort: 1 - So much effort. Even if I used an off-the-shelf platform like Adventure Game Studio, there is a lot to learn.

* Longevity: 1 - At best, I’d make one game. I’m not looking to turn this into a career.

* Leverage: 1 - No relation to any other project or goal I have.

In fact, there is a study that showed that “as future time becomes more limited with age, curiosity is less valued; hence, curiosity is negatively associated with the advance of age.”

That’s right. As you get older and see the amount of time you have left diminish, you’re less interested in learning new things. It goes on to say that “older adults tend to prioritize emotionally meaningful goals over instrumental or knowledge-related goals.”

But this is super depressing. I don’t want to lose my intellectual curiosity. I don’t want to turn into my mother, who has zero interest in learning new things. She’s perfectly happy sitting on her couch watching TV, waiting until she dies.

My Good Fight

I’m not ready to give up. I’m only 43, and assuming nothing catastrophic happens, I hope to have at least another good 40-50 years (hopefully much more) ahead of me.

I have two big goals/projects that I’m working on this year:

iCanStudy is a course I’ve mentioned that I’m currently enrolled in. My primary goal in taking this course is “to overcome my sieve-like brain and learn quickly and effectively.” I have a very difficult time retaining anything after reading a book or taking a course. This is not conducive to using my remaining years effectively.

Working through The Well Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. My primary goal in working through this course (in book form) is to develop my ability to focus (especially when reading), tackle difficult texts, and actually digest and form new opinions from what I’m reading (as opposed to passively consuming). This focuses on reading classic literature in fiction, history, autobiographies, drama, poetry, and science. I’m starting out by reading Don Quixote. Additionally, my hope is that by reading classical literature (especially philosophy), I’ll develop not only knowledge but wisdom.

Both of these goals score highly on the SHELL Framework. Not only am I very interested (Heart), but the ongoing weekly commitment and effort are manageable, and the long-term benefits and leverage are high. Learning to learn and read well will multiply all other future projects.

Allegedly, Gandhi said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever,” which seems like pretty good advice.

I’m not ready to fade into routine. I want to keep learning, keep building, and stay curious for as long as I can. I hope I get more time. If I ever do end up living forever as a robot in space, I want to be the kind that never stops learning.

If this hit a nerve or made you think about how you spend your time, please share it or let me know what you’re working on. I’d like to hear.

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I bought a course to improve my study skills and time management. I block time on my calendar to work on the course, but I keep missing my study sessions.

The irony? The first module of the course talks specifically about urgency trapping, which is exactly why I kept missing those sessions. Each time I set aside time to study, I ended up doing tasks that felt more urgent instead.

The course suggests tracking distractions to help manage this problem. But tracking is something I've resisted my whole life. Only recently have I managed to start tracking my diet and finances. I'm already seeing benefits and I'm making improvements, but this resistance persists.

Tracking means facing uncomfortable truths and having to make changes. I'm finally recognizing how this lifelong pattern of avoidance has kept me stuck. To break free, I need to confront not just the habit itself, but the hidden costs that come with it.

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The Hidden Cost of Avoidance

All of this avoidance doesn't actually eliminate the consequences, just delays them and magnifies their impact. That's why I'm now digging myself out of a mountain of debt and on a keto diet to lose over a hundred extra pounds.

Procrastination is leading to a life of stress and anxiety. It turns routine tasks into urgent emergencies because I put them off for too long.

There's an uncomfortable truth hidden behind all this avoidance. As someone who loves to learn, and spends an absurd amount of time on personal growth, I’m realizing I have all the signs of a fixed mindset. I'm someone that avoids failure, discomfort, and responsibility at every turn.

The Identity Trap

The tricky thing about a fixed mindset is that it usually takes root in childhood. While much of mine is a blur, there are a few memories that hint at when those seeds might have been planted.

For as long as I can remember I was a "smart kid" although I'm not sure where this started. I recall stories of me reading the encyclopedia in preschool. We got our first computer when I was five and I remember helping my first grade teacher with computer problems.

By fourth grade the fixed mindset must have been somewhat established because I remember cheating with my friend to avoid having to work hard memorizing my multiplication tables. In high school I leveraged my ability to program my calculator to succeed without needing to learn the underlying math concepts.

I focused on things that were fun and easy. Fortunately for me, computer programming has historically been fun and easy for me. I've been able to have a successful career without that much effort.

This pattern reveals that effort, risk, and the possibility of failure have always felt threatening. Being labeled as "the smart kid" created an identity trap where I was praised for natural ability, not effort. Challenges felt like evidence that I wasn't who everyone believed me to be.

Because of this, I've always felt like a fraud, that one day people will discover that I've been tricking people all along and that I'm really a moron. This generates so much anxiety and has really eliminated my self worth.

Instead of working hard and striving for bigger and better results, I take what I can get. I don't take risks because I don't want to be put in a place that would expose my inadequacies.

Why can't I take my own advice? That question stuck with me. It made me realize I needed help figuring this out. Luckily, the iCanStudy course I'm working through doesn’t just talk about the problem. It gives me a place to start.

Takeaways

The course talks a lot about the difference between fixed and growth mindsets. Someone with a fixed mindset asks a lot of questions ahead of time to prevent mistakes, while a person with a growth mindset tries the best they can and asks "How did I do?" afterwards.

One recommendation is setting aside several hours as a practice block, spend that time practicing and failing, then reviewing "how did I do?" writing down the errors I made, so I can identify trends.

I'll need to figure out something I can practice in this way. Figuring this out is a challenge as I've avoided hard practice for so long. But if I want to move forward, this seems like the place to start.

What's one uncomfortable truth you've been avoiding, and what would happen if you faced it today?

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