At 3:47 PM on a Tuesday, I decided to quit my job and start a company. Or did I? Maybe the decision was already made by unconscious neural processes seconds before I became aware of it. Maybe my genes, my upbringing, my brain chemistry, and the exact configuration of neurons firing that afternoon determined that choice, and the feeling of choosing was just a story my brain told itself afterward. ...
When I was in college, a professor made a claim that stopped me mid-note: “Intelligence is about 50-80% heritable. Your genes, not your effort or education, largely determine how smart you’ll be.” I was stunned. And honestly, a little angry. I’d grown up believing that hard work mattered most. That anyone could achieve anything with enough effort. That your background didn’t determine your destiny. Was all of that naive? Were we just puppets dancing to our genetic programming? ...
It’s 2 AM. I should be sleeping. Instead, I’m lying in bed thinking about that bug I almost fixed. I know exactly where the problem is. I know how to solve it. I just ran out of time. My brain won’t let it go. Or that blog post I started writing three days ago. I have the outline. I wrote the intro. But I haven’t finished it, and it’s nagging at me every time I sit down to work. ...
I was reading a psychology paper that promised to change how I thought about willpower. The study claimed that ego depletion-the idea that willpower is a limited resource that gets exhausted-had been proven through rigorous experiments. Hundreds of studies supported it. It was taught in psychology courses. It was in textbooks. I built my productivity system around this concept. I scheduled important decisions for the morning. I avoided making choices when I was tired. I believed willpower worked like a muscle that could be depleted. ...
“I’m an INTJ, so I prefer working alone. That’s just how my brain is wired.” I’ve heard variations of this hundreds of times. In job interviews. In team retrospectives. In dating profiles. In therapy sessions. Myers-Briggs (MBTI), Enneagram, DiSC, StrengthsFinder-personality tests are everywhere. Companies use them for hiring. Therapists use them for counseling. People use them to explain their behavior, predict compatibility, and justify their preferences. But here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve discovered after diving deep into the research: ...
I once turned down a $40,000 freelance contract because I was afraid of losing my $80,000 salary. The math was simple: take the contract, it would take 3 months, that’s $160k annualized. Way better than my salary. But my brain didn’t see “$160k potential.” It saw “giving up the guaranteed $80k.” The fear of losing my steady paycheck was stronger than the excitement of potentially making more. I said no. The person who took the gig finished it in 2 months, got referred to three more clients, and now runs a six-figure freelance business. ...
I once deployed code to production because a VP told me to, even though I knew it would break things. I was a junior engineer. They were a VP of Engineering. They said, “Ship it now. We need this for the demo tomorrow.” I tried to explain: “The tests are failing. The database migration isn’t ready. This will cause data corruption.” They responded: “I understand your concerns, but I’ve been doing this for 20 years. Trust me. Ship it.” ...
It’s 8 PM. You’ve been in meetings all day. You resisted checking Twitter during presentations. You held back your frustration when that one coworker interrupted you for the third time. You made yourself exercise even though you didn’t feel like it. You ate a salad for lunch instead of pizza. Now you’re home. You sit down to work on your side project-the one you’re genuinely excited about. And you have absolutely nothing left. You stare at the screen. You open Twitter (ironically, the thing you resisted all day). You order takeout. You binge-watch Netflix. ...
I deleted Twitter from my phone last Tuesday. Not because of the politics or the drama. Because I couldn’t stop comparing myself to people who seemed to be crushing it while I was struggling. Every time I opened the app: Someone raised a $50M Series B Someone hit $100K MRR on their SaaS Someone gave a keynote at a major conference Someone got acquired by Google Meanwhile, my startup was barely break-even, my side project had 47 users, and I’d just had a PR rejected for the third time. ...
I once rejected a brilliant engineering candidate because their resume had a typo. Not in their work history. Not in their technical skills. In the summary section: “atention to detail” instead of “attention to detail.” My brain went: “Typo → careless → probably writes buggy code → not a good hire.” I passed. Another company hired them. They became a principal engineer there and later gave a keynote at a major conference. ...