if you didn't make progress in 2025, listen to the first 10 minutes

I’ve got something that genuinely changed my life—the five‑year diary—and it’s blowing my mind to see last year’s me on the same date.

Mine has each day with five short slots stacked by year, and hitting year two was a gut punch because I realized I’m wrestling with the same stuff.

I keep looping on the same questions—how I spend time, where to live, front‑stage versus behind‑the‑scenes, losing my temper—so I concluded inertia is the default and systems are what actually move you.

Whenever I’ve changed, it was because a system removed my mood from the decision—like a trainer, a plan, scripts for sales, checklists, and clear blocks of work—so let’s trade systems that created real change.

That journal is a time machine for perspective, and the bigger point is we don’t rise to goals, we sink to our habits, so the autopilot matters more than how we feel any given day.

But before systems, you need the blueprint—what feeling are you actually chasing—because if the goal isn’t aligned to the feeling, you build a great machine to run in the wrong direction.

The hardest part is picking the target, but once you have it, reminders beat novelty, and accountability forces follow‑through.

I read a lot, but truth sticks when it’s repeated and lived, which is why training teams takes saying the same thing seven, ten, fifty times, and why hiring people makes me show up because I don’t want to let them down.

On that note, I stepped out of the CEO seat and became an unpaid high school assistant basketball coach, and it’s the most fun I’ve had in years.

A former trainer took a head coaching job at a tiny school, I joked about helping, then committed, and now I’m doing four practices a week, long drives, film study, helping a kid with math, and we just flipped a thirty‑point preseason loss into a thirty‑point win.

Does coaching actually move the needle, or is it mostly predetermined by size and talent?

Sports prove repetition is the work: you can only change one to three things at a time, and you have to drill them fifty times with the same energy or inertia wins.

One of our big changes is “play off two feet,” which gives small guards control and options in traffic, and we rep it daily until the mantra is in their dreams.

You know it’s landed when players repeat it to each other, which is the same test I use with companies on priorities—if your execs can’t name the top three, you haven’t installed them.

I love the story of the NASA janitor saying he was helping get to the moon, because that’s what full alignment sounds like.

We’ve also got kids showing up late from real jobs—one guard came from the shop with grease on his hands—so we’re teaching habits that help them win games and win at life.

With all else equal, I think leadership can take a five to almost a ten, and reading about SEAL training made me realize the leader sets the boat’s outcome.

We tried installing team identity, and the only value that stuck was a phrase with a pass‑fail bar—“max effort”—because vague values don’t guide behavior.

We should market to ourselves and our families the way we market to customers—memorable phrases, repeated often—because cute lines work when they drive action.

If you want sticky values, steal from marketers, the military, and politics, and use structures like the JFK line that flips the sentence to mirror itself, because the brain loves symmetry the way it loves clearing lines in Tetris.

When I don’t know how to get better, I ask whose livelihood depends on this, then borrow their process—comedians bomb at open mics, musicians share drafts, and Pixar built a trust system that Disney adopted to start making hits.

We should run a give‑back, and your coaching sounds like the dog rescuing you, because giving time locally feels real in a way writing checks doesn’t.

My trainer calls it our local economy and measures it in smiles per hour, and pouring into a dozen kids feels bigger than sending money into a black box.

A friend who built a huge company gives away the bulk of what he pulls out because giving now quiets the greedy voice and feels better than buying the next shiny thing.

People on GLP‑1s talk about food noise going quiet, and I wonder about the money voice like that, because many of us have already earned the last dollar we’ll ever spend and still trade great hours for mediocre dollars.

I work because idle time feels wrong, my self‑worth is tangled up with outcomes, wins give me a rush, and I sometimes justify it as setting an example when my kids probably just want me home.

The real constraint is imagination, not resources—Sully put that in my head—and the right next chapter might be something odd like coaching instead of another startup.

I’m building capabilities—a new office and team—so ideas can become real without hunting down people from scratch every time.

I also think video is the internet’s native language, so I’m starting a weekly coaching series for this season, not business guru stuff, just the journey.

I’m doing more Instagram too—spatula as a mic to keep it loose—and the algorithm finds the right viewers, so a few thousand can still move a business, and the best feedback is friends texting when it hits.

Then I look at the generations—my grandpa did real, dangerous work; my dad did suits and flights; I talk into a phone—and our kids’ jobs will look even stranger to us.

Thinking about immigrants and people like Shackleton makes me laugh at my own softness, and here we are closing out a podcast wondering why I smell like chives—right, because I’m basically cream cheese compared to those legends.