It’s been a recurring theme throughout my career. I don’t know exactly when I developed the mental model, but somewhere along the way I became convinced that if something wasn’t working, the solution was almost always to increase my effort.
Over the last twenty-four months, I’ve gained nearly forty pounds. In May, I decided it was time to start running again. Rather than change the way I ate, I simply added running to my already bloated routine.
The results were impressive. I logged many miles and lost exactly zero pounds. What I gained instead were sore knees, aching hips, and another thing I felt obligated to accomplish everyday.
Naturally, my first instinct was to run more. It’s engineering by addition rather than subtraction. I do this everywhere.
Just over a year ago, I started a company. I believed in the product, believed in the team, and believed investors would arrive before our runway ran out.
Unfortunately, they didn’t, and the company ran out of cash. I let everyone go, myself included.
Except, I didn’t want the company to die. So what was my answer?
“Aaron works himself to death.”
For the last two months I’ve tried to rebuild my company while working forty hours a week somewhere else to keep food on the table. At the same time, I’ve tried to write, exercise, pay down debt, repair relationships, bury a family member, raise five children, launch a product that’s within spitting distance of completion, sleep five hours a night, and somehow become more present.
Looking at that list now, it’s almost funny.
Almost.
One of the reasons I became an engineer is because I love the scientific method. I love testing ideas against reality. Unfortunately, I’ve been running the same experiment for years. The hypothesis has always been the same: If life isn’t working, add more effort.
The data has been remarkably consistent, but somehow the hypothesis keeps failing.
Lately, finally, I’ve started paying attention to a deeper current through all of this. I spend a great deal of time thinking about who I want to become.
Healthier.
Smarter.
Kinder.
More grateful.
A better writer.
A better husband.
A better father.
A more devoted disciple.
A better business owner.
Those are all worthwhile pursuits.
In paying closer attention, the thing that surprises me now is how many years I’ve spent believing that becoming more required doing more.
I even wrote a book on that very subject called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free. (You can buy a copy here.)
Apparently the author needs to read it again.
A few days ago, I talked to my brother-in-law about taking blocks of aluminum and subtracting material to make some things and adding material to make others.
Human growth, as it turns out, seems to have a lot less to do with addition than subtraction.
I’m pretty sure I underlined about 30% of Greg McKeown’s Essentialism. The frustrating part is that none of the advice is particularly complicated. Delete the time-wasting app. Turn off the notifications. Say no to the meeting. Eat the apple instead of the ice cream. And, for the love of all that is good in this world, just go to bed.
Here’s the problem: I know what to do, but I don’t do it. I don’t leave enough empty space in my life that the things that matter actually have room to grow.
The lesson I’m learning, but having a hard time implementing, is that becoming more is mostly the discipline of deciding what no longer deserves a place in tomorrow then having the courage to leave it behind today.
Doing less doesn’t necessarily mean lowering your standards. What it does mean, though, is removing everything that keeps your desired standards from becoming your reality.
Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a bowl of ice cream calling my name.
A few years ago, I ran two miles faster than I ever had. I crossed my own finish line feeling victorious for roughly seven seconds before I fell on my hands and knees and vomited on the grass behind some lovely South Jordan homes. I rolled onto my side and lay there for almost as long as it took me to run that sub-14-minute pair of miles.
In some ways, it felt like defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. I couldn’t do what I’d just done without becoming physically ill. But even as I lay there on the slightly damp grass that late spring morning (not in my own “output”), I found myself thinking about those superweight lifting competitions where someone lifts a seemingly impossible amount of weight, completes the lift, drops the bar, and immediately crumples to the floor. They exert so much force that their brains go into “Danger Will Robinson!” mode and shut down everything not required for survival. Their bodies decide, in a pretty dramatic way, that staying alive is more important than trying that again. At some point, pushing harder stops being strength and becomes risk.
In the Western world, we’ve been conditioned for decades to pursue competitive edge over just about everything else. We spend so much of our lives being trained to believe that more effort solves more problems. All you need to get ahead is more discipline, more grit, more self-control, more pushing, and more holding on. I’ve wrestled with this idea for more than two decades and, if I’m honest with myself, I still haven’t figured it out. Over the last eighteen months, I’ve written dozens of articles orbiting this same idea. Apparently I am still trying to learn the same lesson from dozens of different angles.
The basic idea is reasonable enough. Strengthen what’s weak and fix what’s broken or disappoints you. Improve the areas where you’re falling behind. Those principles work well in business, athletics, school, and lots of other areas of life. Where they become dangerous, however, is when we start applying them to ourselves in a “show no mercy” kind of way. Somewhere along the way, self-improvement, donning a referee shirt, picks up its clipboard and whistle, and starts keeping score from the sidelines.
Ann Landers said this:
Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.
I came across that quote more than a year ago and it’s stayed lodged in my brain, surfacing occasionally when my personal referee comes into clear view again. I applied that quote pretty easily to jobs, relationships, and even difficult circumstances, but somehow it stayed in a blind spot related to myself until just recently.
Where self is concerned, this quote applies to situations over which we have almost no control, situations where we have almost complete control, and everything in between. We’re all faced with situations that drive us to keep score, hold on to impossible standards, and cling to the belief that becoming better always requires carrying more weight.
For most of my adult life, I’ve viewed self-improvement and self-acceptance as enemies. Accepting myself felt basically like surrender. If I accepted where I was, what motivation would I have to become something better? Improvement felt productive and like movement while acceptance felt almost dangerous and like standing still.
It was during those years that I encountered ideas like the ones in James Clear’s Atomic Habits. He famously wrote something like habits are the compound interest of self-improvement and that if you get one percent better every day for a year, you’ll end up dramatically better by the end. Conceptually, I don’t disagree with him though he’s clearly not thinking about the reality of long-term compound math.
The inherent problem is that some of us will unintentionally (or intentionally) turn that “one percent better” into a daily punitive performance review. It doesn’t take a massive leap to move from small actions matter because tiny changes compound to if I didn’t improve today, I failed. Every day starts carrying pressure. Did I improve enough? Did I optimize enough? Did I do enough? Did I earn my rest?
Looking back, I’ve literally spent years treating self-improvement like a courtroom instead of a compass. Every missed run became evidence of failure. So did every pound gained. Every bad day became proof that I wasn’t trying hard enough somewhere, somehow. Improvement, in a weird way, became judgment.
Lately, I’ve reevaluated the relationship between self-improvement and self-acceptance. I’ve stopped seeing them as enemies and started wondering if they’re actually dance partners. Self-improvement provides direction while self-acceptance provides footing. One tells us where we hope to go and the other reminds us we’re allowed to stand where we are. Paradoxically, sometimes standing still is exactly what keeps us moving forward.
When Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan without ropes, he didn’t attack the mountain with reckless abandon. He practiced the route dozens upon dozens of times and memorized every handhold and foothold. Inside of his remarkable, terrifying achievement, the thing that caught my attention was how often he stopped to rest and prepare. He slowed down a lot. Rest was an integral part of the climb.
The same might actually be true for the rest of us who aren’t Alex Honnold. We don’t have to let go of effort. We don’t have to stop trying to become healthier, wiser, stronger, kinder, or more disciplined. What we do need to let go of, though, is the belief that our worth is waiting at some imaginary finish line.
I still want to improve. I still want to run faster, become healthier, and continue becoming more of the person I hope to be. I’m just beginning to suspect that self-improvement works best when self-acceptance is willing to dance.
Some months ago, I loaded up my entire team from work (all 5 of us at the time) and headed north to Idaho. We were going out for field training on the product we were building at the time.
30 miles from the north border between Utah and Idaho, traveling 80 miles per hour, my truck’s engine revved unexpectedly and the truck lost both speed and power. We had just enough “juice” to get to the shoulder of the freeway without getting clobbered by a semi before the truck died and refused to start.
It was only 2 years old with barely 30,000 miles on it.
We sat there, wondering what was going on; why a perfectly good truck was suddenly dead on the side of the highway.
Occasionally, I will curse my computer for crashing unexpectedly in the middle of doing “important work.”
On this particular day, however, I didn’t jump out of my truck, kick the tires, and curse it for being a stupid truck. I didn’t stand there thinking, “You disgust me. Why can’t you be more disciplined? Other trucks don’t have this problem.”
In fact, tens of thousands of trucks did have “this problem” but that’s a story for another day.
I studied mechanical engineering in school but I’m definitely not mechanically inclined. I opened the hood of the truck that day to make sure nothing was on fire, and to my untrained eye everything looked normal.
“Yup. I’m pretty sure that’s the engine, and that’s where you put the windshield washer fluid.” I closed the hood satisfied that my four female employees individually and collectively knew more about engines than I did. Again, a story for another day.
Let’s suppose you’ve got a truck that runs a little better than mine did that day. Suppose you’re driving along one day and notice the truck is pulling slightly to the right or making odd noises or maybe struggling on hills (like mine).
You, like I, probably wouldn’t curse your vehicle. You might, instead, say something like, “Something’s off.”
Then, you’d start making either mental, digital, or physical notes:
Has it always done this?
When did it start? What were conditions like when it started?
Is it worse under load?
Then, you’d take it to a mechanic who would tell you that maybe it’s a problem with the alignment or transmission. They’d take it and perform fancy (and not so fancy) diagnostic tests.
You wouldn’t shame your vehicle in hopes it would correct its behavior. There likely wouldn’t be any moral language. You might be angry about the failure, but you’d be mostly curious about what went wrong and what needed to be done to fix it.
What’s weird, however, is that we come along and do stuff like this all the time to ourselves:
“I’m tired.”
“I’ve gained weight.”
“I haven’t exercised.”
“I can’t get myself moving.”
“I’m grieving and can’t stop.”
“My body feels weird.”
And within about eight seconds, we begin to pass judgment. All those things I mentioned above translate into one thing: “Apparently I’m garbage.”
The strange thing is that I don’t actually believe this when I hear it coming from other people, either about me or about them.
If a friend told me he was exhausted, overwhelmed, had gained thirty pounds, hadn’t exercised in months, was sleeping poorly, carrying grief, stress, and responsibilities he didn’t know how to shoulder, I wouldn’t stare at him and conclude that his engine block was morally compromised.
I’d ask questions and stay curious. I’d also try to help him figure out what was going on.
Why is it that I can remain curious and open about other people’s struggles yet be overly-critical of my own? In my mind:
“I’m tired” becomes “I’m lazy.”
“I gained weight” becomes “I lack discipline.”
“I feel overwhelmed” becomes “I’m weak.”
“Something hurts” becomes “I did this to myself.” (To be fair, sometimes this one is actually true. Read about it here.)
Lately my body has felt off.
I’ve gained weight. I haven’t been running as much. I’ve been carrying stress, grief, long workdays, too much Diet Dr. Pepper, and seriously enough emotional freight to qualify for my own commercial transport license.
Almost immediately I started doing what I’ve always done. I didn’t become curious about my own situation. I became judgmental.
Apparently my “truck” lacks moral character.
This will be a “well duh” kind of statement but I’ve never once looked at a check engine light and assumed that my vehicle must be ashamed of itself. A check engine light has never felt personal to me. I’ve always understood it as information, like something deserves attention.
It’s possible that fatigue and sadness work like that too. Maybe weight gain, lack of motivation, strange aches, and all the other things we spend years hiding and judging are a lot more like dashboard lights than we give them credit for.
Truth: I’m not very good at this. My instinct for most of my life has been to assume that every “strange noise” means something is wrong with me rather than something happening inside me. That distinction matters. A lot.
Truth: I’m also learning that curiosity about the world, other people, and myself is way more useful than condemnation.
Trucks don’t become “healthier” because we shame them. Turns out, people don’t either.
Besides, if my truck and I are being honest, we’ve both been carrying more than our recommended payload for a long time now. Turns out neither of us was designed to haul everything alone.
We spent scores of weekends at her condo, sleeping on the hide-a-bed couch and watching movies that may or may not have been “parent approved.” DeAnne, my aunt, could never stay up as late as we could, even when we were young.
I can’t tell you how many times we watched Top Gun or the original Adventures in Babysitting after she’d gone to bed.
And we knew DeAnne wouldn’t be up and ready to make breakfast until 7:00 am.
I’ve been an early riser for more than forty years. I remember waking up and lying there beside one or more of my brothers, listening to the clock tick as the minutes passed while I waited for permission to wake her up.
The day she taught me how to use the toaster oven felt like liberation.
I could finally quietly slip out of bed and make two or three Eggo waffles while everyone else slept.
I was probably fifteen or sixteen the last time I spent a weekend at DeAnne’s house but I can’t see an Eggo waffle at the grocery store without remembering the not-really-that-comfortable hide-a-bed, the fun, the time in the condo complex swimming pool, walks to 7-Eleven, and the love.
DeAnne’s gone now. She passed away a few days ago. I lived by her side in the hospital for nearly six days. The night before she passed, I knew her time was drawing close. For nearly eight hours, I sat by her bed, holding her hand, reading to her, and singing.
2:30 am came and I slept for about ninety minutes.
I woke and she was still with us.
Sunday morning; Mother’s Day.
DeAnne was never a biological mother but that didn’t make her any less of a mother to her extended family.
DeAnne slipped from this life into the next at 2:22 pm on Mother’s Day. My three brothers, my oldest sister-in-law, my wife, my daughter, and DeAnne’s sister were in that room. That sterile hospital room became a sacred space for a few minutes as she took her last breath and was gone.
In the midst of planning DeAnne’s funeral and cleaning up the condo that holds so many memories, I keep thinking about Eggo waffles.
That sounds ridiculous even as I write it.
Grief does weird things with memory. You expect your mind to hold onto the big moments like final conversations, the hospital room, the last breath, and the sacred silence after someone leaves.
It does those things, but it also drifts back to toaster ovens, hide-a-beds, blue-bagged VCRs from Blockbuster, and waffles.
To the exhilaration of waking up and toasting my own waffles before my brothers could eat them all.
Maybe grief works that way because love also works that way.
Life isn’t really built from milestones and grand moments. Those are important, but when someone’s gone, you discover it was mostly built from ordinary Tuesdays talking to your aunt about Larkin lunches, strange little rituals, and toaster waffles before 7:00 in the morning.
Maybe that’s the Eggo Waffle Theory of Grief.
You think you’re grieving the ending.
But maybe you’re really grieving the thousands of little moments you never realized you were collecting.
That was the thought I had when I rolled over and saw the clock. 1:26 am. For some people, I think that still counts as night, a time they see before they go to bed. I’d been asleep for a few hours, and my brain had decided it was time to dredge up all the unresolved bits and baubles from the previous day because 1:26 am is a perfect time for those things to demand attention, right?
There’s something existential about waking upthat early in the morning / late at night, where low, persistent pressure isn’t quite loud enough to cause full-on panic but it still can’t be ignored. My heart rate told me what I suspected the moment my eyes popped open: sleep was going to lose this argument. So, I got up, grabbed my phone, and went downstairs to the couch where I spend approximately 57% of my early mornings, telling myself that the colder air and firmer back support will somehow reset things even though my experience tells me otherwise.
I checked my email, which is never a good idea when the sun’s not shining, scrolled through LinkedIn without really seeing anything, until my mind had backed away from the edge of panic enough that stretching out under a blanket and drifting back into something that resembled rest was possible.
5:12 am still came too early.
That’s how the routine unfolds so many nights, which is part of the problem. After the fitful night of “sleep,” I laid out my running gear on the kitchen counter, filled up a small water bladder, and stood there long enough to know I wasn’t going to follow through with the run. Instead, I settled on a slow walk on the treadmill while half-watching an episode of Castle, which is less about entertainment, honestly, and more about occupying space and time until my day “actually begins.”
There’s nothing especially dramatic about any of this. That’s what makes it easy-ish to dismiss. If you take it all together, it points to something that’s been building for a while. Over the past year or so, especially while writing more than I ever have before, I’ve had to admit something about myself to myself that I used to frame as a strength without ever questioning or counting the cost.
I tend to be a person who carries things whenever they are left unattended. If there’s a gap, I step into it. I absorb ambiguity like an infant’s diaper attempting to contain as much as it can. It’s the same with responsibility. If it hasn’t landed clearly somewhere else, I tend to assume it’s mine. This has been true in work, in relationships, and in all those little spaces where no one is making explicit assignments but something still feels disquieted.
There are environments where that tendency is useful, at least in the short term, because things move forward and problems get handled. There’s also a point, however, where it stops being a contribution and starts becoming a pattern that your body will keep track of even if you self-select ignoring the problem. In the last sixteen months, I’ve gained nearly forty pounds, and while it would be easy to attribute that to diet and schedule and any number of other surface-level explanations, those aren’t complete on their own because they describe the outcome without addressing the underlying dynamic. The more accurate description is that I have been living in a way that keeps me consistently activated, carrying more inputs, more decisions, and more responsibility than I have any realistic way of processing cleanly, and eventually that shows up somewhere whether you like it, want it, or not.
I’ve been reading Building A Non-Anxious Life by Dr. John Delony, and one idea in particular has stuck with me because of the way it frames what I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out on my own: the claim that anxiety itself is not the problem but rather the signal that something underneath it is way off.
For me, there’s nothing subtle about the shift in that idea, and it changes the direction of the conversation in a way that makes a lot of my usual responses feel misapplied, maybe, because if anxiety is functioning as an alarm, then trying to suppress it without addressing what it’s pointing to becomes an endless loop.
What I really like about Delony’s book is that it doesn’t present a clean, idealized version of a life without any tension. In the opening it even acknowledges that the phrase “non-anxious” is more about direction than volume. I find that oddly grounding because it removes the expectation that there is a final state to arrive at and replaces it with the idea that there are choices that either increase or decrease the baseline level of friction you live with everyday.
What’s been harder to reconcile is the implication that many of the ways I respond to that friction are not neutral, even when they feel justified in the moment. Caffeine, for example, makes it easier to keep going, but it also keeps the system on high alert. It’s kind of like trying to use gas to put out a fire. Similarly, multiple screens make it possible to juggle more at once, but they fragment attention in a way that makes resolution impossible.
Pushing into areas where I’m less effective gives me the sense that I’m expanding my capability, but it often comes at the expense of using the areas where I already create leverage.
Like the drama-less state of my sleepless nights, there’s nothing independently significant about those decisions, yet together they create an environment where the internal siren never shuts off. Over time, the responses to that siren start to harden into habits that are really about managing the discomfort it produces while simultaneously ignoring the underlying issue.
There’s a passage in Delony’s book about people gradually becoming accustomed to the very alarms they are trying to quiet, and that observation hits different once you start looking at your own patterns through that lens. It suggests that the goal isn’t to just eliminate anxiety but to understand what conditions you have built that keep generating it in the first place.
When I look at my own life honestly, it gets difficult to argue that the anxiety I experience is disconnected from the way I’ve structured my days, my work, and my sense of responsibility. It’s less an intrusion and more a reflection, which is not a comfortable conclusion but, hey, at least it’s a useful one.
For a long time, my default response has been to treat that reflection as something I can overcome through effort. That works well enough in the short term to reinforce the approach but doesn’t hold water over longer stretches because it never reduces the underlying load. It just redistributes it across more hours, more tasks, and more mental overhead until it eventually surfaces in ways that are hard to ignore: disrupted sleep, physical changes, or a persistent sense that something’s off even when nothing is obviously wrong. At that point, continuing to push in the same direction starts to look a lot like avoidance because it delays the need to examine what I’m actually carrying and why.
It’s time to call off the inner fight. As my Director of Operations likes to remind me—she even got me a shirt—”get someone else to do it.”
Calling off that inner fight, at least as I’m starting to finally understand it, is about changing my relationship to the fight so that it becomes a source of information rather than something to suppress through more effort. It’s easy enough to describe that change but really hard to implement, because it requires looking directly at the systems and structures that I built and deciding which ones are actually necessary and which ones persist out of habit or misplaced obligation.
In my case, that includes acknowledging that not ever problem needs to be mine. My role isn’t to be the point through which everything in my business or my life flows. There are people and systems around me that are capable of carrying more than I sometimes allow. That’s a bitter realization pill to swallow.
That acknowledgement also includes making smaller, less visible adjustments that impact the baseline of my daily life, such as reducing inputs, creating space for focused thinking, and allowing periods of rest to exist without needing to be justified by prior exhaustion.
Delony’s paints this great analogy that’s been in my head since I read it. It captures something easy to miss when you stay in analysis mode too long. There’s this difference between understanding a problem and addressing it. It’s possible to spend a lot of time naming, categorizing, and discussing the nature of anxiety without making any changes that would reduce it. I’ve spent enough time in that space to recognize it when I see it.
The alternative is about action at a scale that feels underwhelming, which is probably why it’s easier to overlook (or actively ignore). Turning off an extra screen (which I did), handing off a responsibility that doesn’t need to be mine (I have 29 employees to choose from), choosing not to reach for something that keeps the system elevated (Goodbye Diet Dr. Pepper. You’ve been a good friend.), and creating space where there was previously constant input don’t present themselves as major interventions, but they do alter the environment in ways that accumulate over time.
I don’t think there’s a version of life where that siren-signal disappears entirely. I’m not convinced that it should. I am starting to see that there’s a difference between living in a constant state of internal resistance and allowing that signal to guide adjustments that make the overall system better and more sustainable.
If there’s a change to be made here, it’s probably not going to be a dramatic swing from one state to another. It’ll probably be a slow, gradual unwinding of the assumption that everything needs to be carried and managed through effort or force. Again, the assumption’s been useful enough to get me where I am, which is part of what makes it so hard to question, yet it’s also the thing that, left unchecked, continues to produce the tension I’ve been trying to eliminate.
So, calling off the inner fight is alignment, not surrender, which is a less visible process that unfolds in decisions that are easy to dismiss individually but meaningful when they change the overall pattern.
To be clear, I’m not there yet, but I can see the direction a bit more clearly than I could before, and that alone feels like a better place to stand than continuing to push against something that was never meant to be fought or carried in the first place.
