In Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Years, Anne Lamott writes about a time she was fixated on a married man—someone she adored and who adored her back. She confessed to a friend, a recovering addict and alcoholic, that she was constantly tempted to call him. Every time they spoke, she wanted to shower him with affection, caught up in the rush of how “luscious and powerful” he was. Her friend listened and kindly replied, “Yeah, yeah, I get it, I’ve done it. But I think each step of the way you gotta ask yourself, Do I want the hit or do I want the serenity?”
“It seemed one of the most profound things I’d ever heard,” Anne reflects. It’s a question that has helped her hundreds of times since—whether with food, men, or anything else that threatens to hijack her peace.
Laundry or writing?
When Louise DeSalvo started writing, she was working full-time, raising two toddlers, caring for her elderly parents, and running a household. Still, she aimed to write two hours a day when she could. If she couldn’t, she would at least write something. “I tried to write every day, no matter what,” she said. “I wrote when my children were napping, or later, when they attended school. Many parents squander that precious time on household tasks. Instead, I did laundry, shopped, and cooked when my children were around.”
Choosing to do one thing means choosing not to do something else. If you want time to write, you have to give something up. “All too often, aspiring writers choose to give up writing. My mentor said it’s important to say, ‘I’m choosing to do the laundry instead of writing,’ instead of saying, ‘I don’t have time to write.’”
Try saying it throughout the day: I’m choosing to read the news instead of a book. I’m choosing to reply to emails instead of starting the project. I’m choosing to look at beautiful houses on Zillow instead of cleaning my own. And on and on.
Special or happy?
A highly respected financier in her mid-fifties—once a star on Wall Street—began to worry her skills were slipping. She wasn’t as sharp as she used to be, and younger colleagues were questioning her judgment. Panicked, she reached out to social scientist Arthur Brooks.
As they spoke, Brooks learned she was deeply unhappy. She “lived to work” and was constantly exhausted. Her marriage was falling apart, and her relationships with her adult children were strained. Now, she feared she was losing her edge in the one thing she had left: her career.
To Brooks, the answer seemed obvious. Why hadn’t she taken time to revive her marriage, reconnect with her kids, or cut back on work? “I knew that her grueling work effort had made her successful in the first place,” he said, “but when you figure out something has secondary consequences that are making you miserable, you find a way to fix it, right? You might love bread, but if you become gluten intolerant, you stop eating it because it makes you sick.” Why hadn’t she been working on the obvious problems?
She thought about it for a moment, then looked at him and said flatly, “Maybe I would prefer to be special rather than happy.”
Brooks was stunned. Her answer lingered in his mind. It reminded him of something. But what? Then it hit him.
Her reasoning—that she preferred being special over being happy—was not unlike the response given by a recovering drug addict when asked why he had continued to get high even though he was fully aware it was making him miserable. “I cared more about being high than being happy,” the addict had said.
The financier, Brooks realized, was an addict, too. A work addict. She cared more about being special than happy. She was choosing her ego over herself, the hit over serenity.
In December 1851, Victor Hugo—the beloved author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame—was exiled from France for defying a rising authoritarian regime. He would remain in exile for nineteen years.
That month, on December 2, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte seized power and rewrote the constitution to suit his will, granting himself unlimited terms in office. Hugo, who had once supported Bonaparte, was horrified. In response, he tried to rally the French National Assembly in a desperate attempt to resist the government’s coup d’état.
But Bonaparte silenced dissent swiftly and ruthlessly, imprisoning or executing anyone who opposed him. In the days that followed, Hugo and his allies—many of them former legislators—were forced to meet in secret, hiding from a regime that was tightening its grip by the hour. It didn’t take long for them to realize their efforts were in vain. “Former legislators were dead, arrested, or missing,” writes Marva A. Barnett in her remarkable book To Love Is to Act.
On December 11, Hugo boarded a night train to Brussels. In a letter to his wife three days later, he expressed a calm pride in having stood up for what he believed was right: “For twelve days, I existed between life and death,” he wrote. “But I had never a moment of distress. I was pleased with myself. And besides, I know that I did my duty and that I did it completely. That brings happiness.”
Eight years later, Emperor Napoleon III offered him amnesty. Hugo refused. He would not return simply because the law now allowed it. Instead, he published a powerful reply: “Faithful in my commitment to my conscience, I will share liberty’s exile right to the end. When liberty returns to France, I will return.”
A decade before Bonaparte’s rise to power, Ralph Waldo Emerson had written the words that would one day echo Hugo’s defiant stance: “No law can be sacred to me but that of my own nature. The only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.”
Like Emerson, Hugo believed that each person must obey their conscience, no matter the cost. “In the end,” Barnett writes, “Hugo . . . did what [he] did because [his] conscience permitted no other action.”
The music in your head
In the final decade of his life, Beethoven composed music that would change the world. He was also completely deaf. His greatest triumph—the Ninth Symphony—was written without the ability to hear a single note.
Early in his career, Beethoven’s compositions echoed the style of his teacher, Joseph Haydn. But after he lost his hearing, his work became radically original, ushering in the Romantic era of music. “It seems counterintuitive, to say the least, that Beethoven became more original and brilliant as a composer in inverse proportion to his ability to hear his own—and others’—music,” Arthur C. Brooks writes. “But maybe it isn’t so surprising. As his hearing deteriorated, he was less influenced by the prevailing compositional fashions and more by the music forming inside his own head.”
The freedom to attend to yourself
Two years into solitary confinement, Shaka Senghor feared he was unraveling.
So he built himself a kind of sanctuary.
Each morning, he turned his cell into a classroom, ordering books on every subject imaginable. He designed quizzes to test himself. “The structure helped,” he writes, “but real changes came when I started keeping a journal. Anytime I got angry at one of the other inmates, I would immediately grab a lined notepad and begin writing down what I wanted to do to him and why.”
One day, after an inmate lied to him, Shaka poured his fury onto the page. Days later, he read it back—and what he saw startled him. “The other inmate had been inconsiderate, no doubt,” he wrote, “but was it really meant as a personal attack? And even if it was, did he really deserve to be harmed or even killed, as payback? . . . It’s hard to express how much this process of examination began to change me.”
That moment marked a shift: he saw that the anger he directed outward was the same anger that had put him behind bars. “I thought I had been fighting for my dignity and respect,” he later reflected, “but I hadn’t realized how undignified and disrespectful my anger had caused me to be.”
There’s a line in The Life of Antony by Athanasius that describes what sparked the saint’s transformation: “He began to pay attention to himself.”
For Shaka, writing became a lifeline—not just to survive, but to heal. The more attention he paid to himself, the more he uncovered: childhood trauma, the ache of abandonment, the violence he had endured—and inflicted. “Each time I filled a page of my journal,” he writes, “I felt as if a great weight had been lifted.”
He stopped feeling bitter. He stopped carrying around his anger, waiting to explode. He grew stronger. He felt more compassion for other inmates. “Each day in the hole was a test of my will to survive, as the insanity continued to unfold around me,” he writes, “but the act of writing about the things I saw helped to take away their power.”
Shaka could have given in to rage. Hugo could have gone along to get along. Beethoven could have stopped composing. Instead, each became a testament to our uniquely human power: our ability to transform our outer world by changing our inner one. And no one and nothing can take that from you.
In 1984, a scientist named Jean-Pierre Petit proposed something strange: what if there were two overlapping worlds—ours and a mirror version of it? A universe layered on top of our own, invisible but just as present.
The idea was mostly ignored. Too weird, too sci-fi. But what if he was onto something? Not necessarily about physics—but about life?
Maybe Petit’s idea describes our lives more than we think.
Because most of what shapes us—and what holds us back—isn’t tangible. It’s internal architecture—rules, beliefs, expectations—built over the years. It can feel like we’re trapped.
We move through this internal world without realizing it, adjusting ourselves to unspoken rules, to barriers no one can see but everyone seems to obey. These are the invisible walls.
Sometimes we run into them. Other times, we build them ourselves. Often, we contort around them, not knowing we could walk straight through.
But here’s the hard part: breaking through these internal barriers doesn’t always feel like progress. It can feel like doubt. Like loss. Like wasted effort. Like nothing at all.
But what if that’s because the barriers don’t actually exist?
It never feels like it’s working…until it is
In 1936, in what’s often called one of the most mentally and physically grueling sports on the planet, the University of Washington crew members Joe Rantz, Roger Morris, and George Hunt led their team to an Olympic gold medal in Berlin, Germany. They won by a fraction of a second.
But that fraction wasn’t won in the race, of course. It was won in the years before, in all the practices, all the invisible miles no one saw.
During their collegiate career, each had taken nearly half a million (469,000) strokes with his oar. Each had rowed approximately 4,344 miles—nearly the equivalent of Seattle to Japan.
But here’s where it gets interesting: of the 4,344 miles rowed, only 28 were during an actual race.
28!
More than 99% of what they did was practice. Invisible.
Each mile, each stroke felt endless—filled with doubt, pain, and exhaustion. Yet they kept rowing, trusting in something they couldn’t see.
There’s the 100/0 rule in relationships (give everything, expect nothing), but what if it applies to anything worth doing? To do the thing you won’t get credit for. To keep showing up when it feels like nothing is changing.
Big wins look like they happen in big moments. They don’t. They happen in the days and months and years of quiet dedication. The problem is that most of us stop when we don’t see immediate proof. We think, If it were working, wouldn’t I feel different by now? Wouldn’t I have something to show for it?
But that’s the thing: it never feels like it’s working—until, one day, it is.
How to escape a room with no door
There’s an old problem in architecture: how do you design a space that feels open, even when it’s enclosed?
The answer?
Natural light.
In other words, you don’t need more doors. You just need a window.
The same is true in life. When Clive Cussler began writing novels in 1965, he produced two manuscripts—Pacific Vortex! and The Mediterranean Caper. There was one problem though: no one would publish them.
So he got creative. “He created a fake letterhead for an agency that didn’t exist,” writes Cal Newport, “and then sent a note to a real agent, Peter Lampack, asking if he was interested in taking on this promising new writer named Clive whom he didn’t have time to represent. The plan worked.”
How often do we feel trapped when a door doesn’t open, as if there was only one route to our destination? How many opportunities do we overlook because the solution isn’t perfect?
Cussler’s solution was another form of invisible effort—quiet, creative, persistent. When the publishing door wouldn’t budge, he was pragmatic enough to spot a window. And flexible enough to slip through.
The real escape
You wouldn’t know it by looking at him today—mentor, author of six books, Director of Strategy and Innovation with #cut50—but in 1991, at just nineteen years old, Shaka Senghor was sentenced to up to 40 years in prison for shooting and killing a man during a paranoid argument.
At first, his sentencing nearly broke him. The grief. The shame. The weight of what he’d done. He’d let his family down. Taken a life. Left his infant son without a father.
But a few years into his sentence, something quietly shifted.
He started to read.
He picked up The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book that would change how he saw himself and the world. He devoured stacks of books—stories about survivors, leaders, men and women who had been shattered and then remade. If they could do it, maybe he could, too.
So he kept reading. He journaled. He faced himself. He mentored younger prisoners. He made plans despite the uncertainty of when he’d be released. Would he get out at age thirty-six? Sixty? Ever? He couldn’t predict his future—that was painfully obvious. But he could do everything in his power to build it.
Over the twenty years he ultimately served—seven of them in solitary confinement—Shaka published essays in national outlets. He co-authored a children’s book. He published a novel. He mentored. He studied. He led.
He did it without physical freedom. Without quiet. Without internet access.
He did it from inside a concrete cell.
Because Shaka had grasped something that few ever do: the strongest walls aren’t made of brick or stone. They’re built from false beliefs. From expectations we accept. From rules we never question. From windows we overlook. From quiet work we leave undone.
What stops us is rarely a lack of skill—it’s a lack of imagination, of flexibility, of will.
Shaka’s greatest rebellion wasn’t against concrete walls—it was against the idea that walls could define him at all.
By rejecting boundaries and doing the invisible, patient work of personal revolution, he freed himself long before his cell door opened.
Here’s a strange thought based on Jean-Pierre Petit’s theory:
Right now, in a parallel version of your life, you’ve already started the thing you’re afraid to start.
You’ve already had the conversation you’re avoiding.
You’ve already let go of what’s weighing you down.
You’ve already become the person you could be.
The only difference between you and that version of you?
That version stopped waiting for permission.
Because the walls were never real.
And you’ve been free this whole time.
Books Read:
-I read Leo Tolstoy’s super short stories The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man, which I really enjoyed. I followed it with another short fictional story that I liked…
–Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Some takeaways I wrote in the flyleaf: consistent, small acts of kindness make up a good life. The fear of not doing something should be bigger than the fear of doing it.
-Oh my gosh, Michael Lewis is just a master storyteller. The Big Short is the story of how a lack of ethics and accountability, doused in greed, led to the housing market’s implosion in ’08. This easily could have been a dull book of numbers. Instead, it’s a thrilling narrative of how it all went down. I’m also eager to read his newest book, released this month, Who is Government?
–Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul by Barry M. Andrews. This is absolutely one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. It’s based on the ideas of Goethe, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and Thoreau, who paved the way for a movement that urged people to think for themselves and follow their unique nature. I need to read Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’sWalden—a book Andrews said “is one of the most memorable treatises ever written on the art of life.” One of the best parts of this book was the bibliography. It led me to the book Writing Down Your Soul by Janet Conner (which I had on my bookshelf and forgot about, and, according to Amazon, I bought it in 2012!), whose recommended reading list led me to Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo—one of the absolute best books I’ve read on writing! (More on that one next month!) DeSalvo’s book is so good that I’ve started reading another of hers, The Art of Slow Writing, which is PHENOMENAL so far.
–Writing My Wrongs by Shaka Senghor. WOW. I only put this book down when I had to. Senghor knows how to tell a story, and he was so candid that I felt like I knew him. I even wrote, “I love this dude!” in the margin. Another favorite read so far this year.
