Category: Self Help

“In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity, “world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art’s art, and its difficulty lies in the constant conciliation of the dissonance between self and world — a difficulty hardly singular to the particular conditions of our time. Two hundred years before social media, the great French artist Eugène Delacroix lamented the necessary torment of avoiding social distractions in creative work; a century and a half later, Agnes Martin admonished aspiring artists to exercise discernment in the interruptions they allow, or else corrupt the mental, emotional, and spiritual privacy where inspiration arises.

But just as self-criticism is the most merciless kind of criticism and self-compassion the most elusive kind of compassion, self-distraction is the most hazardous kind of distraction, and the most difficult to protect creative work against.

How to hedge against that hazard is what beloved poet Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) explores in a wonderful piece titled “Of Power and Time,” found in the altogether enchanting Upstream: Selected Essays (public library).

Oliver writes:

It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.

Oliver terms this the “intimate interrupter” and cautions that it is far more perilous to creative work than any external distraction, adding:

The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self — and does — is a darker and more curious matter.

Echoing Borges’s puzzlement over our divided personhood, Oliver sets out to excavate the building blocks of the self in order to understand its parallel capacities for focused creative flow and merciless interruption. She identifies three primary selves that she inhabits, and that inhabit her, as they do all of us: the childhood self, which we spend our lives trying to weave into the continuity of our personal identity (“The child I was,” she writes, “is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.”); the social self, “fettered to a thousand notions of obligation”; and a third self, a sort of otherworldly awareness.

The first two selves, she argues, inhabit the ordinary world and are present in all people; the third is of a different order and comes most easily alive in artists — it is where the wellspring of creative energy resides. She writes:

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

Oliver contrasts the existential purpose of the two ordinary selves with that of the creative self:

Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask of the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?

Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do — fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.

[…]

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.

Part of this something-elseness, Oliver argues, is the uncommon integration of the creative self — the artist’s work cannot be separated from the artist’s whole life, nor can its wholeness be broken down into the mechanical bits-and-pieces of specific actions and habits. (Elsewhere, Oliver has written beautifully about how habit gives shape to but must not control our inner lives).

Echoing Keats’s notion of “negative capability,” Dani Shapiro’s insistence that the artist’s task is “to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it,” and Georgia O’Keeffe’s counsel that as an artist you ought to be “keeping the unknown always beyond you,” Oliver considers the central commitment of the creative life — that of making uncertainty and the unknown the raw material of art:

Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Van Gogh’s spirited letter on risk-taking and how inspired mistakes move us forward, Oliver returns to the question of the conditions that coax the creative self into being:

No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.

Above all, Oliver observes from the “fortunate platform” of a long, purposeful, and creatively fertile life, the artist’s task is one of steadfast commitment to the art:

Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.

She returns to the problem of concentration, which for the artist is a form, perhaps the ultimate form, of consecration:

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.

[…]

It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Upstream is a tremendously vitalizing read in its totality, grounding and elevating at the same time. Complement it with Oliver on love and its necessary wildness, what attention really means, and the measure of a life well lived, then revisit Jane Hirshfield on the difficult art of concentration.

Faster than ever, the online world pushes entrepreneurs to build sharper tools while moving at full speed. Launching apps, services, or systems? One thing remains clear: fragile code slows everything down.

Whether you’re launching a SaaS platform, a mobile app, or an internal business tool, software quality can make or break your growth. This is exactly why AI automation testing in QA is no longer just a technical upgrade.

Not magic – just smarter workflows that save time and money. For anyone building tech today, skipping these tools feels less like saving and more like risking too much.

Speed matters now more than ever. Old ways of manually testing software fall behind fast-moving teams. Automation that learns can test smarter, helping small companies grow without spending extra. Fewer errors happen when systems run checks automatically.

Building trust in what you ship gets easier this way. Leaders aiming to keep up must see how these tools change the game. Learning them isn’t optional anymore – it just makes sense.

The Entrepreneur’s Challenge: Speed vs. Quality

Speed matters when launching something new. Yet rushing out the door risks bugs that turn users away. Moving quickly might help stay ahead, though shaky performance chips away at credibility over time.

Testing by hand takes forever, drains resources, and leaves room for error. Old-style automated checks fail each time the app gets updated.

Automation testing powered by AI shifts things quietly. These smart tools watch how your app behaves, adapt when things change, then get better over time – all without needing someone to tweak them nonstop.

Startups running small teams might find that it keeps their growth steady instead of being buried under problems they can’t fix fast enough.

What Is AI Automation Testing (In Simple Terms)?

Testing with AI gets quicker, sharper, and less rigid. Testing automation learn patterns, adapts checks without waiting for human input. What used to take hours now happens in moments. Scripts change themselves when apps shift underneath.

Mistakes get spotted before they spread. Learning from each run makes the next one smoother. Old methods feel slow by comparison. Systems watch, adjust, improve – quietly

Test cases come into being on their own, refreshed whenever needed

• Finding shifts in how things look? Tests fix themselves when they break
• Prioritize high-risk areas to test first
• Analyze defects and predict failure patterns
• Run tests continuously within CI/CD pipelines

Put simply, using AI in automated testing lets teams spend time creating new functions rather than always repairing old scripts.

Why AI Testing Matters for Entrepreneurs

1. Faster Time to Market

Faster deployment defines the startup world. With AI handling test runs at once, problems show up sooner, reducing how long it takes to ship something new.

When checks happen rapidly, products go live faster, responses come in tighter loops, changes stack up quicker – growth feeds on that rhythm.

Hours instead of days – that’s how fast startups move when QA isn’t stuck in slow motion. Confidence grows when testing keeps pace, not drags behind. Speed like that doesn’t just help – it reshapes who gets there first.

2. Lower Costs and Better ROI

Fewer people needed means lower expenses over time. Because automated checks run without constant supervision, less hands-on work adds up to savings down the line. Catching flaws before release avoids bigger headaches later on.

Fewer crashes in live systems mean happier users. That cuts down on support tickets without slowing things down. Mistakes caught early stay fixed longer. Teams move faster when they trust their builds.

3. Scale Your Business Without Adding Staff

When a company expands, products tend to get more complicated. Yet staff numbers often stay flat. Tools powered by artificial intelligence help smaller startup teams handle testing just as thoroughly as bigger firms, even without hiring more people.

Early on, a startup can’t afford wasted effort – so teams turn to AI-powered QA simply because it works fast. One good test cycle catches defects before they spread. Each role matters more when resources are tight. That is why automated checks fit so well at the beginning.

4. Higher product quality leads to improved customer experience

It’s surprising how deeply flawed software can dent a company’s image. Glitchy tools, sluggish performance: these things drive people straight to rival options.

When automated tools learn how users act, they spot weak spots faster. Because of that, tests reach deeper into the system. Old mistakes guide where to look next. This means problems show up earlier.

Releases stand a better chance of going smoothly. Fewer bugs slip through. People using the product feel it works better. They tend to stick around longer. Over time, keeping customers becomes easier. Money follows when things run without hiccups.

5. Smarter Decisions Through Data

Not only does AI execute tests, but it also reveals patterns. Tools powered by artificial intelligence help teams spot weak spots in software, areas prone to failure, functions acting unpredictably, and parts demanding extra checks prior to launch.

Entrepreneurs gain clear direction from real findings instead of guesses. Decisions shift from hunches to evidence.

AI Testing as a Competitive Advantage

Out front, some founders lean on tech to move quickly than others. With machines checking code, updates go live sooner, stay cleaner, and work better when users react.

Ever wondered what really happens when teams implement testing with AI? Here’s a look at how it shapes quality, whether you’re launching a small app or running a big company. Peek behind the scenes of real-world tool use, and see why knowing this matters long before growth hits full speed.

When Should Entrepreneurs Adopt AI Automation Testing?

Sure, it’s closer than expected.

Right away works fine. Start using AI automation before things get complicated. That way, your tests stay neat and grow easily. Day one might just be the smartest moment

• Your release cycles are getting slower
• Testing by hand slows things down more every day
• Bugs are slipping into production
• Your QA costs are increasing
• Fixing tests takes up most of the day.

Instead of adding new parts, effort goes into making old checks work again. Time meant for improvements gets lost in maintenance.

What should move forward ends up stuck in loops. Progress slows without anyone deciding to pause. Getting in early helps founders scale before things get messy.

AI Testing Is a Business Strategy, Not Just a Tool

Small companies can benefit too. For founders and growing teams, smart scaling isn’t out of reach. Automation in testing opens doors. Size doesn’t matter when tools adapt to your pace.

When costs drop, and quality climbs, results follow. Faster releases? That happens too. Small groups work sharply when smart tools help them move. Machines that learn can spot issues fast – this means fewer surprises later.

Trust builds when apps run smoothly. Founders who use these tools often stay ahead simply because their software behaves better. Success isn’t guaranteed – but it shows up more when testing thinks ahead.

Faster builds, sharper results, stronger resilience – this is what founders now expect. When crafting software, skipping AI-powered test automation means falling behind. It simply has to be part of the process.

Have you ever felt like you’re on a financial treadmill, constantly running but never quite getting ahead? Maybe you’ve dreamed of a life where work is a choice, not a necessity, where your days are filled with purpose and passion, not just the pursuit of a paycheck. For many, that sounds like a distant fantasy, a luxury reserved for the ultra-rich or those who hit the lottery. But what if I told you that true financial freedom, the kind that allows you to design your life on your own terms, is far more accessible than you think?

My friend Alan Donegan, co-founder of the Rebel Business School, knows this journey intimately. His path to financial independence wasn’t paved with silver spoons or sudden windfalls. In fact, it was born from a deeply painful experience. Growing up, Alan watched his dad build a successful business, only to lose everything in a financial crash, leaving their family home on the line. That decade-long fight to save their home taught Alan a profound lesson: you don’t need debt to build a business, and you can absolutely sort out your finances to be in a good place. This experience set him on a mission to help others avoid similar financial pickles, leading him to discover the powerful concept of Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE).

So, what exactly is financial independence? Alan and his wife have a beautifully simple definition: it’s when your assets produce more income than you need to live. Imagine a world where your investments, not your daily grind, cover your monthly expenses. This isn’t about accumulating mega-millions or selling a startup for a fortune. For most people, it’s about consistently spending less than you earn, saving diligently, and investing wisely. It’s a journey that might sound simple in theory, but it requires a shift in mindset and a clear roadmap.

The Freedom Equation: Demystifying Your “Enough” Number

One of the biggest myths about financial independence is that you need an astronomical sum to achieve it. When Alan asks university students how much they think they need to retire, the answers often range from one million to thirty million dollars. The truth is, your “enough” number is likely much lower, and there’s a surprisingly simple math behind it.

It’s based on something called the 4% guideline, or the 25x rule. The idea is that if you have your savings and investments in a broad-based index fund, you can safely withdraw 4% of that amount each year, and your money will never run out. To figure out your target, simply take your desired annual living expenses and multiply it by 25. For example, if you need $40,000 a year to live comfortably, you’d need $1 million invested. If you only need $20,000, you’d need $500,000. This simple calculation allows for a personalized target based on your lifestyle, not some arbitrary millionaire status.

What’s your number? Take a moment to calculate it.

Defeating the Lifestyle Monster: Your Secret Weapon for Wealth

If the math seems straightforward, why isn’t everyone financially independent? The biggest culprit is often something called lifestyle inflation. You know how it goes: you get a raise, a promotion, or a bonus, and suddenly you’re thinking, “Woohoo, new car! Bigger house! Fancy vacation!” We’re constantly bombarded with messages to spend every penny we earn, to inflate our lifestyles to match our increased income. This cycle traps many, preventing them from ever truly saving.

Alan and his wife, Katie, aggressively fought lifestyle inflation. They continued to live modestly, even as their income grew. Alan shared a fascinating example: they calculated how much they saved over the years just by making their own salads at home instead of buying them. The total? A staggering $50,000! It sounds crazy, but those small, consistent choices add up to massive savings when invested over time. It’s not about deprivation, but about conscious spending. As the saying goes, it’s not how much you make, it’s how much you keep. Just ask Nicholas Cage, who reportedly blew $150 million in movie earnings and ended up owing taxes. You don’t want to be that person.

Where could you trim a little to gain a lot?

Your Financial GPS: Simple Steps to Chart Your Course

So, how do you actually start this journey? It begins with clarity. Many people don’t know their net worth or where their money goes each month. It’s like trying to navigate without a GPS. Alan suggests starting with these basic questions:

• What is your net worth? This is your balance sheet: what you own minus what you owe. If you don’t know, you can’t track your progress.
• Where does your money go? This is your personal profit and loss statement. Look at your bank and credit card statements. You might be surprised by forgotten subscriptions or unnecessary expenses. Alan, who trains businesses to set up subscriptions, knows firsthand how easy it is for customers to forget these recurring payments. Take control and identify where your money is truly flowing.

Once you have this clarity, the next steps are clear:

• Build an Emergency Fund: Start with a small amount, like $1,000, then aim for three to six months of living expenses. This cushion protects you from unexpected events, like a car breakdown or job loss, preventing you from having to sell investments when the market is down.
• Pay Off High-Interest Debt: Prioritize anything over 5% interest, like credit cards or personal loans. This is a guaranteed return on your money.

Alan and Katie make this process a regular habit. They have a “monthly finance meeting” – often over a delicious breakfast and coffee – where they update their simple Excel spreadsheet, review their spending, and discuss their financial progress. It’s a pleasurable ritual that keeps them aligned and accountable. This simple, consistent review helps them understand if their expenses are growing too much and allows them to adjust course.

Could a monthly financial check-in transform your relationship with money?

Beyond the Beach: Living a Life of Purpose and Choice

If financial independence isn’t about sitting on a beach drinking piña coladas all day, what is it about? Alan emphasizes that humans need meaningful work. FI isn’t about quitting work; it’s about choosing exactly what you want to do. It’s about having the freedom to pursue projects that light you up, whether that’s writing a book, recording a podcast, or helping others achieve their financial goals.

Alan shared his typical day during two months in Mexico: a morning run on the beach, a swim in the ocean, breakfast, then writing articles and recording podcasts. This wasn’t a vacation from work; it was work on his terms, in a beautiful setting. The drive to create and contribute comes from within, not from external deadlines. As someone who started his own business in 2008, Alan learned early on that if something was going to happen, it was up to him. This self-motivation is key when you no longer have a boss or a strict corporate schedule.

What meaningful work would you choose if money wasn’t the primary driver?

The Power of Simplicity: Tools and Habits for Lasting Freedom

Both Alan and I agree: simplicity is your superpower when it comes to productivity and financial management. You don’t need fancy, expensive tools. Alan uses Microsoft OneNote, a free digital notebook, to organize his ideas, projects, and actions. He separates different types of information into tabs – blog ideas, reflections, finances, and a crucial “one project list” with a single next action for each item. This prevents overwhelm and keeps him focused.

He also relies heavily on his calendar. If it’s in the calendar, it’s going to happen. This simple habit, combined with a clear to-do list, is the key to making things happen. The more complex a system, the less likely you are to stick with it. An hour or so a month dedicated to reviewing your finances, perhaps over a nice breakfast, is far more sustainable than an overly complicated budget.

Finally, Alan shared a powerful framework for spending: align your money with your values. If freedom is a core value, then investing is buying a piece of that freedom. Every time he bought into a global index fund, he saw it as buying back years of his life. He retired at 40, gaining 25 to 28 years of freedom compared to the average person in the UK. This isn’t about deprivation; it’s about conscious choices that lead to a life of purpose and joy.

What’s one simple financial or productivity habit you can implement this week to move closer to your freedom?

“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,” Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his influential lecture on the shapes of stories. “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad,” Alan Watts wrote a generation earlier in his sobering case for learning not to think in terms of gain or loss. And yet most of us spend swaths of our days worrying about the prospect of events we judge to be negative, potential losses driven by what we perceive to be “bad news.” In the 1930s, one pastor itemized anxiety into five categories of worries, four of which imaginary and the fifth, “worries that have a real foundation,” occupying “possibly 8% of the total.”

A twenty-four-hour news cycle that preys on this human propensity has undeniably aggravated the problem and swelled the 8% to appear as 98%, but at the heart of this warping of reality is an ancient tendency of mind so hard-wired into our psyche that it exists independently of external events. The great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examined it, and its only real antidote, with uncommon insight in his correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later published as Letters from a Stoic (public library) — the timeless trove of wisdom that gave us Seneca on true and false friendship and the mental discipline of overcoming fear.

In his thirteenth letter, titled “On groundless fears,” Seneca writes:

There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

With an eye to the self-defeating and wearying human habit of bracing ourselves for imaginary disaster, Seneca counsels his young friend:

What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.

Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.

Seneca then offers a critical assessment of reasonable and unreasonable worries, using elegant rhetoric to illuminate the foolishness of squandering our mental and emotional energies on the latter class, which comprises the vast majority of our anxieties:

It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile to better things. What shall you gain by doing this? Time. There will be many happenings meanwhile which will serve to postpone, or end, or pass on to another person, the trials which are near or even in your very presence. A fire has opened the way to flight. Men have been let down softly by a catastrophe. Sometimes the sword has been checked even at the victim’s throat. Men have survived their own executioners. Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the meantime it is not. So look forward to better things.

Sixteen centuries before Descartes examined the vital relationship between fear and hope, Seneca considers its role in mitigating our anxiety:

The mind at times fashions for itself false shapes of evil when there are no signs that point to any evil; it twists into the worst construction some word of doubtful meaning; or it fancies some personal grudge to be more serious than it really is, considering not how angry the enemy is, but to what lengths he may go if he is angry. But life is not worth living, and there is no limit to our sorrows, if we indulge our fears to the greatest possible extent; in this matter, let prudence help you, and contemn with a resolute spirit even when it is in plain sight. If you cannot do this, counter one weakness with another, and temper your fear with hope. There is nothing so certain among these objects of fear that it is not more certain still that things we dread sink into nothing and that things we hope for mock us. Accordingly, weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer. And if fear wins a majority of the votes, incline in the other direction anyhow, and cease to harass your soul, reflecting continually that most mortals, even when no troubles are actually at hand or are certainly to be expected in the future, become excited and disquieted.

But the greatest peril of misplaced worry, Seneca cautions, is that in keeping us constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, it prevents us from fully living. He ends the letter with a quote from Epicurus illustrating this sobering point:

The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.

Complement this particular portion of Seneca’s wholly indispensable Letters from a Stoic with Alan Watts on the antidote to the age of anxiety, Italo Calvino on how to lower your “worryability,” and Claudia Hammond on what the psychology of suicide prevention teaches us about controlling our everyday worries, then revisit Seneca on making the most of life’s shortness and the key to resilience when loss does strike.

Two weeks ago, I turned 50.

And I caught myself doing something subtle but dangerous: I was aging myself.

Not biologically. On paper, I’m doing great. Most longevity and biomarker tests place me 10 to 20 years younger than my chronological age. My body is strong. My health is solid.

But mentally? I had started building a quiet list of excuses.

When my son Hayden, who somehow speaks seven languages, asked why I wasn’t learning Spanish and Italian, my answer came out automatically:

“Well, you’ve got a teenager’s brain. It’s easier for you.”

When my kids invited me to join them in new physical practices, I’d hesitate.

“My wrists aren’t as solid.”

“My recovery isn’t what it used to be.”

“That’s easier when you’re younger.”

None of these thoughts sounded dramatic. They sounded… sensible.

But taken together, they formed a pattern.

I wasn’t listening to my body.

I was talking it into decline.

And then I read a fascinating study by Ellen Langer that completely messed with my worldview.

The study that was almost never published

This study was conducted in 1979.

And here’s the part most people don’t know: The results were so wild that Langer hesitated to publish them.

She feared the scientific community simply wouldn’t accept what she’d found.

At the time, the idea that belief, identity, and mindset could meaningfully alter physical aging was considered fringe,  if not outright heretical.

Today, with what we now know about meditation, placebo effects, neuroplasticity, stress biology, and longevity science, her findings are far easier to digest.

But back then?

They sounded impossible.

And yet, they happened.

When you read this study—really read it—I guarantee it will change how you think about your age and your life.

Here’s what she did.

The counterclockwise experiment

Langer took a group of men in their late 70s—some close to 80—and brought them to a retreat.

No supplements.

No exercise program.

No medical interventions.

Instead, she recreated the world of 1959.

The furniture.
The music.
The magazines.
The radio broadcasts.
The conversations.

The men weren’t asked to remember 1959.

They were instructed to live as if it were happening now.

They spoke in the present tense about events from that era.

They carried their own luggage.

They weren’t treated as fragile or dependent.

They were treated as fully capable men in their prime.

And then Langer measured them—before and after.

What happened next still makes people uneasy.

What changed in just one week

After only seven days, measurable biological and physical shifts occurred.

Not opinions.
Not feelings.
Measured changes.

Their posture improved.
Several men stood taller, reversing the hunched posture we associate with aging.

Their strength and flexibility increased.
Grip strength improved. Movement became easier and more fluid.

Their memory and cognitive performance improved.
Standardized tests showed real gains.

But here’s where it gets truly mind-bending.

Their eyesight improved.
So much so that some of the men were told they needed new glasses.

Not because their vision worsened… but because it got better.

And then there’s my favorite detail.

Their fingers got longer.

No—their bones didn’t grow.

What happened was this:
Inflammation in their finger joints reduced.

As swelling decreased, the fingers could extend more fully. Mobility returned. Measurable length increased.

Aging had been masquerading as inevitability.
But it turned out to be, at least in part, reversible signaling.

Even independent observers noticed. When people who didn’t know the experiment were shown before-and-after photos, they consistently rated the men as looking younger at the end of the week.

No drugs.
No devices.
No hacks.

Just a shift in identity and expectation.

The part that hit me hard

Here’s the implication I couldn’t ignore.

These men didn’t “fix” their bodies.

They changed how they related to themselves.

They stopped behaving like old men—and their biology followed.

That’s when I realized something uncomfortable.

I wasn’t being limited by my health.
I was being limited by my self-talk.

So I changed the rules at 50

Here’s what I decided as I crossed this milestone.

I stopped telling myself I was too old.

I’m learning Spanish and Italian.
I’m picking up skills I once believed had expiration dates.
I’m experimenting with new fitness protocols weekly.

Through ClassPass, I’m trying practices I once avoided—Pilates, yoga, new movement systems. And I’m shocked at how rapidly my body adapts.

Most of all, I’ve returned to martial arts.

At 17, I was an international fighter with a double black belt in taekwondo. Competing at the U.S. Open and training at the Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center shaped my discipline—and my life.

Then I stopped.

Not because I had to.
Because I told myself I was “too old.”

So I’m back.

Working on flexibility. Practicing kicks and forms. Chasing a full split again—yes, like Jean-Claude Van Damme in Kickboxer.

I’ve even redesigned my living space so movement is always within reach. Between meetings, I jump up, stretch, drop push-ups, and practice kicks.

Not because I’m chasing youth.

But because I refuse premature decline.

How you talk to your body matters

What Langer later showed—in another Harvard study—is just as powerful.

She found that how you talk to your body can sometimes have a greater effect than what you give it.

Your body is always listening.

Every decision is a conversation.

When you say,
“I’m too old for this,”
you’re talking to your body.

When you say,
“Let’s try this,”
you’re talking to your body.

When you experiment with a new movement practice,
when you challenge an old belief,
when you act like possibility is still open—

you’re talking to your body.

The question is:

What kind of conversation are you having with yours?

Why I can do all this now

What’s allowing me to explore all these health practices and return to martial arts is that I’ve radically changed how I work.

By using AI to clone how I think, decide, and create, I’ve gained 50× leverage.

What used to take me 50 hours now takes one hour.

As a result, I’m starting new companies and taking a week off every month just to enjoy life.

I’m taking classes in stand-up comedy, music, and languages.
I’m traveling more.
And I’m finally making time for my body.

If you want to learn how to create that kind of time,  so you can actually add health, movement, and exploration back into your life, I’m teaching a class on cloning your brain with AI.

Claim your free spot now.

I’ll show you the exact workflows I use to create 50× leverage.

And then?

I invite you to join me in this adventure.

Stop aging yourself.

Try something new this week.

Your body is listening.

Stay curious,

Deep work isn’t just about willpower… it’s about strategy. In this episode, I’m breaking down the common mistakes that kill your focus, from poor energy management to environment design that works against you. Learn how to align your tasks with your natural rhythms and set realistic expectations so you can finally get the important things done.

Get 20% off your first order: dripdrop.com and use promo code tps.

Links:

Become a member of TPS+ and get ad-free episodes a week before anyone else with other great bonuses like the famous “One Tweak A Week” shirt.

If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts or your favorite podcast player. It’s easy, you’ll get new episodes automatically, and it also helps the show. You can also leave a review!

In the middle of a London August in 1827, a small group of mourners gathered on a hill in the fields just north of the city limits at Bunhill Fields, named for “bone hill,” longtime burial ground for the disgraceful dead. There, in what was now a dissenters’ cemetery, the English Poor Laws had ensured a pauper’s funeral for the man who had died five days earlier in his squalid home and was now being lowered into an unmarked grave. The man whose “Songs of Innocence” would light the creative spark in the young Maurice Sendak’s imagination a century-some later. The man Patti Smith would celebrate as “the loom’s loom, spinning the fiber of revelation” — a guiding sun in the human cosmos of creativity.

Those who knew William Blake (November 28, 1757–August 12, 1827) cherished his overwhelming kindness, his capacity for delight even during his frequent and fathomless depressions, his “expression of great sweetness, but bordering on weakness — except when his features are animated by expression, and then he has an air of inspiration about him.” He was remembered for the strange, koan-like things he said about Jesus (He is the only God. And so am I and so are you.), about the prosperous artists who held his poverty as proof of his failure (I possess my visions and peace. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage.), about the nature of creativity (The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.)

Unseen by his own world, he saw deep into the worlds to come, channeling his visions through anything at hand. It was not the medium that mattered, but its pliancy as he bent it to his vision of the mystery that is itself the message — the message we call art: He was a painter, a poet, a philosopher without meaning to, an early prophet of panpsychism, a mystic who lived not to solve the mystery but to revel in it, to encode it in verses and etch it onto copper plates and stain it onto canvases and seed it into souls for centuries to come.

As an artist, he was resolutely his own standard, his own guiding sun. Like Beethoven, with whom he shared a death-year and the stubborn unwillingness to compromise on the artistic vision he experienced as life, Blake was determined to make what he wanted to make and to make it on his own terms — in a world unready for the art and unfriendly to the terms.

There is no greater act of creative courage than this.

And so, centuries before the technologies existed to enable the proof, William Blake became the first living conjecture of the 1,000 True Fans theory. He knew what we all eventually realize, if we are awake and courageous enough: that the best way — and the only effective way — to complain about the way things are is to make new and better things, untested and unexampled things, things that spring from the gravity of creative conviction and drag the status quo like a tide toward some new horizon.

Poverty is no friend to the creative spirit, nor to this artist who knew that “Man has no body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul.” To feed the body, Blake worked long wearying hours as an engraver for hire, squinting at sheets of copper to scratch and cross-hatch shapes onto them in intricate patterns of dots and lines. “Engraving is Eternal work,” he sighed to a client who grumbled that a project was taking too long.

All the while, Blake’s mind bustled and bloomed with the transcendent chaos of his own ideas. He pressed the plates onto white paper, watching the ink held in the tiny canals of the etchings render stark yet delicate black-and-white shapes, alive with light and shadow.

It was beautiful, but it was intensely toilsome — he could barely make a living illustrating other people’s work, and it left no time for his own art. He yearned for a different technique that could achieve the same result in less time and with less toil.

No such technique existed.

So he invented it.

Rather than cut the shapes onto the plates with his sharp steel burin, he painted directly onto the copper with a quill or brush dipped in acid-resistant varnish, then bathed the plates in acid, which stripped a layer of the surface to revealed the embossed shape of what he had drawn. A complaint made in chemistry and creative restlessness.

It came to him, he said, as a message from his dead brother’s spirit.

The new technique gave Blake full creative freedom and full control of production. Suddenly, he could combine text and image on a single page, in a single process, which neither traditional engraving nor etching could do — both required separate space for lettering and a second production pass for type-setting the words.

There was only one challenge with his invention: Because the print was still made by pressing a plate onto a page, any text he painted onto the plate was printed backward.

So he learned mirror-writing.

Suddenly, William Blake had unfettered himself from the production machine, giving his creative might free rein. His new process, he estimated, enabled him to make what he wanted to make for a quarter of the cost. He was a one-man operation, creating in his own space and with his own hands what ordinarily took entire teams of artisans and craftsmen, each with different training, using different tools, working in different workshops.

Centuries before zines, before blogs, before Instagram, before Substack, William Blake had built himself an autonomous platform on which to share his creative labors, exactly as he wanted them to live.

The magnitude of his innovation was not lost on Blake. In 1793, he composed and printed his Prospectus, addressed “TO THE PUBLIC,” in which he announced that he had “invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered.” It was nothing less than a manifesto for creative self-liberation:

The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.

[…]

If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward.

In William Blake vs. the World (public library) — the best book on Blake in the seven decades since Alfred Kazin’s masterpiece — John Higgs captures just how radical this was, both as a technology of creation and as an ethos:

Eighteenth-century printing was a complex job which involved many specialist tradesmen. One person wrote the book, another was responsible for editing it, and a third typeset the text. An artist designed illustrations for an engraver to produce, and a printer put each page through the press, once for text and a second time for the images. On occasions, these would be hand-coloured by another specialist, and finally a bookseller would sell the finished book. Thanks to Blake’s new technique, he had the ability to do all these tasks himself. He was a one-person publishing industry, writing, designing, printing and colouring illustrated works of his own devising. Although he was still in the Georgian era, Blake was practising the “do it yourself” ethos of punk rock.

Here is where a cynic or a Silicon Valley entrepreneur might scoff, So what? He died a pauper. And here is where Blake would wince back, as he did in a letter, I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory.

Precisely because he was his own standard, because he wanted to make exactly what he wanted to make, it was enough for him that a handful of devoted fans became his collectors and commissioned work he was inspired to make. It was just about enough to live on. And it was never what he lived for. (Centuries later, this ethos — which I believe is the natural state of the creative spirit — still raises eyebrows as radicalism.)

In the very act of this choice, he was modeling a kind of moral beauty that reached beyond art, into life itself — an unwillingness to accept the limitations imposed upon any present by the momentum of its past, a winged willingness to do whatever it takes to transcend them, which begins with a new way of seeing: seeing the limitations and seeing the alternate possibilities. For the Eye altering alters all.

Higgs writes:

Blake’s politics… existed in what he created. He may have had great empathy with the poor, but he did not spend his days working to better their situation. Instead, he believed that the imagination was the tool needed to improve society, and… would do more to liberate people than canvassing or protesting. To do this would take integrity, self-belief, and effort.

It is here that we find the strongest expression of Blake’s politics. True politics are not ideologies to discuss, but an attitude to your relationship with the world which is enacted in your daily life. Your politics are not what you tell yourself you believe. They are not the set of ideas that you identify with, or look to for personal validation of your goodness as a human being. Your politics are expressed in the choices that you make, the way you treat other people, and the actions you perform. It is here that hypocrisy and vanity fall away, as the reality of your politics is revealed in the countless decisions that you make every day. Who you work for, whether you volunteer for charity work, if you become a landlord, whether you eat meat, the extent to which you pursue money and consumer goods — these are the types of decisions in which our true politics are expressed… Blake needed commercial engraving work to keep a roof over his head. But he also needed to be free of compromise when it came to his own work. He produced his art as an individualist antinomian, asking no permission, answering to nobody.

Blake himself put it both beautifully and bluntly:

There cannot be more than two or three great Painters or Poets in any Age or Country; and these, in a corrupt state of Society, are easily excluded, but not so easily obstructed.

For an uncompromising counterpart in music, revisit the story of how Beethoven made his “Ode to Joy,” then savor Esperanza Spalding’s soulful strings-and-voice rendition of Blake’s short existentialist poem “The Fly” and this lovely vintage picture-book celebrating his uncommon legacy.

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Lee H. Baucom, Ph.D.


Lee H. Baucom, Ph.D.

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January 28, 2026
January 27, 2026