I Published Something Wednesday and Was Arguing With It by Thursday Night
I Published Something Wednesday and Was Arguing With It by Thursday Night
Wednesday I published something about putting laughter on the list. Name what you want to feel in the morning, get it on the calendar, stop leaving joy to chance.
Thursday afternoon we spent ninety minutes with our coach and she told us the problem is that we put too much on the list.
We recorded Thursday night, still holding it.
So which is it.
I think both are true, which is annoying, and I'll get to where I think the line is. First the part that stung.
What our coach actually said
Ninety minutes with somebody whose job is to see what we can't. The thing I keep coming back to landed somewhere in the middle of it.
She said we're living it. The life we spent years building, we're in it now.
And then she said we're holding ourselves back by stacking more onto it. All the pressure and the goals and the next thing, piled on top of something that's already working.
The phrase I've been chewing on since is that there's a block of doing sitting in the way of the being.
My first response was to explain why the doing was necessary. I built this. There's a plan. Which is exactly the reaction of a man who needed to hear it.
Everything is maxed now
Jana rattled off the list on the recording and it kept going.
Max your looks. Max your protein. Max your profits, your bank account, your calendar, your workout. Max your connections.
We're maxing television. Two screens going at once so you don't miss a game while you're watching a different thing.
And then you lie down and do nothing for twenty minutes and feel guilty about it.
When Jana was a kid her parents told her to go outside and look at the clouds. That was the whole instruction. Go look at some clouds, come back later.
Nobody says that now. You'd need to know what the clouds were for.
Where the line actually is
Here's where I've landed on Wednesday versus Thursday, and I'm not fully sure I'm right.
Put it on the calendar when you've stopped doing it at all. We'd pushed laughter so far out that it needed an appointment just to get back in the building. That's not the ideal state. It's a correction, and it works.
Then take it off the calendar once it's back.
The failure is when the appointment becomes the thing. Scheduled fun, executed on time, checked off. You did fun today. Well done. Now you've turned a good afternoon into a task with a completion status, and the whole point was to have an afternoon that didn't have one.
Even concentrating on maximizing your fun takes something out of it. There's a version of trying to relax that is more work than the work was.
The show, and a warning about it
We mentioned a show on the episode called Half Man, and I want to add something here that we didn't say on air.
It's on HBO, it's from Richard Gadd, who made Baby Reindeer, and it is heavy. Six episodes about two stepbrothers in Glasgow, and it deals with abuse, assault, and a lot of damage that gets passed down. It's very well made. It is not a fun Friday night, and it is not something either of us would hand to somebody who's having a hard week.
We kept it to a sentence on the podcast because that show is not what our listeners come to us for. But I brought it up, so if you went looking for it because we said the name, now you know what you'd be walking into.
Here's the one thing I actually took from it, and it's narrow.
Two men. One spends his life proving himself. Achievements, education, evidence stacked up, all of it aimed at demonstrating something to somebody who is never going to be satisfied, which turns out to be himself.
The other one doesn't feel any need to prove anything at all.
Neither of these men is somebody to be. The second one especially. What he has isn't peace, it's the absence of something most people have, and the show spends six hours on what that costs everyone near him.
But I recognized myself in the first one. That's it. That's the whole thing I got from it.
I've been proving something for most of my adult life, and I noticed it while half watching a show I'd put on to zone out to, which is about right.
| Proving | Being |
|---|---|
| Stacking evidence for a case. | Not aware there's a trial. |
| The next thing will settle it. | Nothing to settle. |
| Exhausting to be around, eventually. | People ask how you're doing it. |
| Wins arrive and change nothing. | Ordinary days count. |
The problem with becoming your best self
Jana's been reading self-help since she could read. She'd walk into a library as a kid and go straight to that section. Tony Robbins at seven or eight. Talking about Zig Ziglar in fourth grade, which I'd love to have seen.
Same pull for me. It's most of what I do for a living now.
But she caught something on this episode that I've never heard anybody in our industry say out loud.
If every day is framed around becoming the best version of yourself, there's a message underneath it. The version standing here right now isn't good enough. Something needs fixing. Maybe something's wrong with you.
Say that to yourself daily for twenty years and see what it does.
The reframe we landed on: I'm complete today, and there's more available. Both. Not one as a consolation for the other.
Or as Jana put it, it's okay to just be in eighth grade.
Why is everybody in such a hurry to be an adult. Adults have bills. Be in eighth grade for a while.
Coasting is engine care
Picture a long drive.
You can hold the gas pedal down the entire way. You'll get there. You'll also cook the engine, and you won't be able to describe a single thing you passed.
Coasting isn't quitting. It's what keeps the car working, and it's the only time you see anything out the window.
Jana had a phrase for this eight years ago. Zero-tasking. Blocks of time with no agenda in them at all, no goal, nothing to optimize. She was right and I let it slide off the map, which I'd like to say is unusual for me.
The year we stopped
We'd hit a ceiling in the business. Nothing was moving.
So in 2025 we took the year off. Not a vacation. The whole year. We put our attention into water skiing and ballroom dancing and building friendships and enjoying each other's company.
That year produced more success than the previous eight combined. Every area, including business.
And the business part came from an angle we didn't plan. People started asking how we were doing what we were doing. Not asking for our services. Asking what the method was.
We'd been grinding for eight years trying to build the thing. We built more of it in the year we stopped grinding, because it turns out people are drawn to somebody who looks like they're enjoying their life.
I don't fully understand the mechanism. I just know we ran the experiment and I have the numbers.
The Living Lucky® Practice
Exercise: block one hour this week with nothing in it. No plan, no goal, no phone task. Zero-tasking. See what you do with it.
Reflection question: what am I currently trying to maximize that would be better if I just left it alone?
Journal prompt: what would I do today if I were already enough?
Action: go outside and look at the clouds. That's the whole action. Somebody's parents were right.
Frequently asked questions
What is optimization culture?
The belief that every part of your life should be measured and improved, including your rest. It burns people out because it teaches your nervous system that unstructured time is wasted time, which makes recovery impossible and turns enjoyment into a performance.
Why do I feel guilty when I do nothing?
Because you've been rewarded for output long enough that the absence of output registers as failure. The guilt isn't information about whether you should be resting. It's a habit.
Should I schedule fun or not?
Schedule it if you've stopped having it, because something that's fallen out of your life needs a way back in. Then take it off the calendar once it's back. The appointment is a correction, not the goal.
How can self-improvement be a problem?
When the pursuit implies the current version of you is defective. There's a difference between I'm complete and there's more available, and I'll be acceptable once I've fixed this. The second one never arrives.
What is zero-tasking?
Deliberate blocks of time with no productivity goal attached. Not scheduled leisure, which can still feel like an obligation. Time with nothing in it, where whatever happens is fine.
Does easing off actually produce better results?
It did for us, and I can't fully explain why. We took a year off from a business that had stalled and had more success in that year than the previous eight, largely because people started asking how we were living rather than what we sold.
We went deeper on this on the Living Lucky® Podcast, Season 11, Episode 32.
We Create Our Luck®.
