I started working weekly with a therapist after what felt like a panic attack in a supermarket.

Several weeks after I broke my arm, I found myself standing in the freezer aisle with the door open, trying to cool my face. I was suddenly so overwhelmed by the people around me and the pain signals my body was sending that I abandoned my shopping cart, which I was pushing with one hand, and went home. I had reached my pain limit.

After that, these episodes would happen at least once a month. The pain management clinic called them flare-ups, but they rarely looked the same. Because of my back injury, sometimes parts of my body would go numb. Other times it felt like my leg was on fire. Nerve pain is strange that way.

Because the pain was so unpredictable, my brain, which had made it through West Point and five years as an Army officer, began reacting in ways it never had before. I became consumed with anxiety.

My back injury and recovering from my broken arm made it difficult to drive, to sit or stand comfortably in public for more than thirty minutes, or even to make plans with confidence. As someone who had always been fiercely independent, I began to feel like I couldn’t trust my own body.

Therapy helped me understand what was happening. My therapist didn’t promise certainty, because how could she? Instead, she did something better: she helped me rebuild my sense of agency.

What could I do if I was driving and a flare-up started? What could I do if I was in a meeting and the pain became so overwhelming that I couldn’t process what anyone was saying? What could I do if I suddenly needed to lie down?

Over the next four years, we worked on boundaries, patient advocacy, information seeking, perspective shifting, and learning to ask for help. Looking back, I realize we were doing something much bigger than managing chronic pain. We were teaching my brain that uncertainty didn’t have to mean danger.

That lesson has stayed with me long after my recovery because I’ve realized it applies to far more than chronic pain.

Most of us aren’t navigating chronic pain, but all of us are navigating uncertainty. We wait until we’re certain we’ve chosen the right career, found the right partner, or determined it’s the right time to have children. We wait until we’re certain it’s the right business to start, the right city to move to, or the right opportunity to leave.

We tell ourselves that once we’re certain, we’ll act. But is certainty really what we’re looking for? Or are we looking for reassurance that we’ll be okay if things don’t go according to plan?

At some point, we started believing that uncertainty meant we were making the wrong decision. In reality, uncertainty is often just the price of doing something you’ve never done before. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine a life where I stop doing things for the first time.

There’s a difference between being informed and being certain. You should gather information. You should ask questions. You should seek advice from people you trust. But at some point, you run out of information before you run out of decisions. There comes a point when the only way to find out is to participate.

Participation creates information. Otherwise, you could learn whether you’ll enjoy running a business by reading about entrepreneurship. You could discover whether you’ll love a city by studying a map. You don’t learn whether writing is for you by outlining your first book. You don’t learn whether you’ll enjoy being a parent by reading parenting books.

You don’t learn whether a path is right by standing at the trailhead. You have to walk it. Or maybe the phrase is, you get to.

Some of the big decisions I’ve made looked uncertain at the time. Going to West Point. Leaving the Army. Moving to Vietnam. Going to law school. Starting this newsletter. None of them felt like a sure thing.

The only reason I know what those experiences meant to me is because I participated long enough for the answer to reveal itself.

Clarity is often the result of action. The world reveals itself to participants.

My therapist, who helped me navigate unemployment, the GMAT, school applications, law exams, my pituitary disorder, business school, and the bar exam, wasn’t trying to teach me how to eliminate uncertainty. She was teaching me that I could handle it.

That’s what agency really is. Trusting that you’ll be able to respond when something out of your control occurs.

We dedicate a lot of energy trying to build the “perfect” life; we forget the point is to simply live a life. The people who seem to have clarity are the ones who participated long enough for clarity to emerge. They got out there and collected a lot of data points, some really good and some really bad, which made the decision-making process easier.

Fortunately, you can't solve life before you live it. If we could, I would have weaponized my anxiety by now. Instead, I think a fulfilling life is something we discover by participating in it.

So, when has participation taught you something that planning never could?

Or has there been a time when clarity only came after you started?

Subscribe now

Reigns

To train young elephants, the trainer ties one of the elephant’s hind legs to a tree with a thick rope. Naturally, the elephant feeling bound by the rope, tries to break free. Eventually he realizes that his attempts are useless and gradually gets accustomed to being held captive.

As the elephant ages, his restriction of movement will modify his behavior until even a simple string will be sufficient to keep him captive without resistance. The elephant could easily break the string but has convinced himself that the restraining force of the rope is greater than his own strength. So he gives up in defeat.

For many people, past limiting beliefs are like elephant strings. Beliefs...can bind us like thick rope, holding us captive to the past. If we would only look again, try again with our [current] strength, wisdom and capabilities, we would find that it is only string that binds us.

The Elephant Rope

November 2020.

My mom drove me to the hospital and waited in the parking lot. Sometimes I’m thankful that I went through treatment during a pandemic. You don’t want your loved ones to see you getting wheelchaired off. I had three arm surgeries during the pandemic and I’m glad they only saw the aftermath of those. This appointment was for my back. I masked up and got to the waiting room. The wheelchair is for your own safety (liability) but I was embarrassed back then, still not used to looking really young and healthy in a waiting room of senior citizens, old veterans. This was 5 months post op with my arm which was finally in a good place; all the swelling had gone down and you could see the heads of screws that were holding the plates from the ORIF. I had reached full extension and I had not yet known that my ulnar nerve was adhering to one of the plates. Pain is a weird thing. The acute pain from shattering my elbow quieted a lot of the signals in my back. Now that things felt stable, the pain came back with intensity.

Everything until this point had been baseline conservative treatment. Lyrica, gabapentin,medrol during bad flare ups (saddle numbness), prednisone made me hyper. Two surgery consults, two MRIs a year apart. I kept holding out hope that I wouldn’t have to go under the knife. Instead, a monopoly on physical therapy, as much as I could schedule during a pandemic. The pain management clinic was my ally. I saw a Penn doctor and we agreed this was a good next step. I was dying to try a steroid injection just to see if I’d get any relief. Up one rung in treatment. Surgery felt like the last resort. If I played that card now, what recourse would I have left for the rest of my life?

48 hours after the injection was definitely the start to the next phase of recovery. I responded favorably minus a bad headache to the steroid, and felt relief I hadn’t in over a year. This meant more progress at physical therapy. It meant sitting without having to lie down afterward. I could see a little bit of light.

In 2021 I regained my ability to:
-vacuum without breaking out in sweat from the pain
-unpack a luggage bag from the ground
-pick up a 20 lb dog from the ground
-drive an hour
-swim for an hour
-walk 3 miles
-get full extension post op a second time (arm)
-live on my own
-carry all the groceries at once from my car

During this time I got my second arm surgery, got into school, started law school. I was different, a little unrecognizable, but so was life. In retrospect, I’m thankful for all the newness because it kept my brain occupied and present. I slept hard every day. We wore masks in class. My recovery time and the global pandemic overlapped quite a bit, so my anti-social behavior wasn’t completely off-putting.

--

Why revisit the past? Sometimes it’s necessary. I had a bad pain day on Friday, one I haven’t had since 2021. A lot of tears. I haven’t had to exercise that resiliency muscle in some time. The “chin up, this too shall pass” survival muscle. The “more reigns, less whip” muscle. It’s a little atrophied from the lack of use. It also reflects that I’ve come so far. This year, I ran a 10k for the first time in four years. One of the 10ks in July almost felt like it used to before I was injured. All of a sudden in August, I was able to run long again. I’d had at least two surgeons tell me that I’d have to sacrifice any meaningful running to live relatively pain free. This was during a time that I had to be careful wearing anything but sneakers, stepping off the curb. I thought, good enough. I accepted and made peace with this years ago. Those predictions, now are just string. It’s been a lot to process. A lot of emotions, some so all consuming that they scare me. Big enough for me to appreciate and be in awe of the second lease on life in this body. What a privilege and journey it’s been. What joy, not in spite of pain, but because of it. A gift.

Go easy this morning. It’s ok to go long but be gentle. More reigns, less whip. You’re building another layer of strength and fitness. You’ve been through the kiln now let your work cure. Gentle today.

Tommy Rivers Puzey

Subscribe now

Hey,

There are now fewer days left in 2026 than there are behind us.

Life has a way of convincing us we’ll always have another year to start. I’ve lived enough to know that future time isn’t guaranteed.

If you know, even a little bit, what you want to do, start making moves. Go now.

You don’t need the entire operation planned out. You don’t have enough information yet anyway. The wind will change direction. Trust that you’ll know how to adjust the sails. You can always change course later.

You don’t need to announce it to the world. You don’t need anyone else’s permission.

This business is between you and the universe. Make your intentions abundantly clear. No reservations.

Life has a way of meeting people who are already moving.

Don’t spend another six months waiting for certainty.

The longest (and best) days of the year are here. Make the most of them.

I hope that, one day, future you looks back on today’s version of you with gratitude, and maybe a little bewilderment at how much you’ve grown, how much you’ve changed, and how some parts of you have become completely unrecognizable.

See you on the other side -

Subscribe now

When I started the This Crisis Changes Everything series, I hadn’t expected high school and college students to ask for career advice. How did I like being a lawyer? What was the transition like from the military to law?

I think some of these questions are genuinely rooted in curiosity about what it’s like to practice corporate law, and I think most lawyers can answer that question better than I can. But I also think younger people are asking something much broader. How do you decide what to do with your life? How do you narrow down the field? How do you choose well?

And here, I think my experience can actually be helpful.

When you’re building your life, or in this case your career, committing to one path feels incredibly costly. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we develop the belief that time is money, and anything that doesn’t directly produce the outcome we want becomes “wasted time” or a “sunk cost.” If you want to make the best choice, you naturally start trying to optimize every decision.

I noticed this at Wharton, where I earned my MBA in Finance and Entrepreneurship. Every career seemed to be a stepping stone to another career. Investment banking became private equity. Private equity became venture capital. Venture capital became hedge funds. Most people were incredibly driven and genuinely excited about what they were doing, but there was an underlying assumption that every destination was simply preparation for the next one.

I ultimately chose to pursue the JD over my MBA. That decision came down to timing; it’s much harder to start using a law degree years later, the job market, lifestyle, and stability.

When I started working in BigLaw, I expected that maximizing mindset to disappear. But people talked about making partner, going in-house, joining private equity, or starting a company. Every path seemed to lead to another path. To be fair, BigLaw is designed this way. It’s an “up or out” model that serves as a launching point for many different careers.

Again, there is nothing wrong with this. Ambition is one of the reasons people accomplish extraordinary things. I wouldn’t have gone to West Point, become an Army officer, attended Penn Law and Wharton, or become an Ironman without ambition. But I’ve started wondering whether we’ve confused achievement with fulfillment. They’re not the same thing.

Achievement answers the question: What have I accomplished?

Fulfillment answers a different question: How have I lived?

Achievement is measurable. You can count promotions, race times, grades, salaries, and titles.

Fulfillment is much harder to measure. It’s found in your relationships, your curiosity, your sense of purpose, the conversations you still remember years later, the people who show up when life gets difficult, and the quiet satisfaction of becoming someone you respect.

The strange thing about achievement is that it always points toward another achievement. Get into college. Now get the internship. Now get the job. Now get promoted, make partner, start a company. There is always another mountain.

Achievement has a way of convincing us that life begins after the next milestone. It teaches us that nothing is ever enough because there is always another level to reach.

The military taught me something different. In the military, “good enough” isn’t settling. It’s recognizing when additional optimization no longer meaningfully changes the outcome. When time matters, making a good decision today is often better than making the perfect decision tomorrow. I think that lesson extends far beyond the military.

Fulfillment asks something achievement never can. Are you actually living while you’re climbing?

I’m currently reading Win the Inside Game by Steve Magness, and one idea in the book immediately resonated with me. He argues that the healthiest people alternate between exploring broadly and committing deeply. They know how to dig a hole, but they also know when it’s time to climb out and start digging somewhere else.

That reminded me of something we discussed at Wharton, the difference between maximizers and satisficers. Maximizers search endlessly for the best possible option. Satisficers choose an option that’s good enough and invest themselves, reporting higher levels of life satisfaction, happiness and optimism. When I took the survey, I was a satisficer, and it didn’t surprise me. The Army taught me that action is often more valuable than endless deliberation. You gather enough information to make a “good enough” decision, commit to it, and adapt when circumstances change (like they almost always do).

Still, that doesn’t mean excellence doesn’t matter. I work at a firm that, for a long time, famously didn’t believe in Oxford commas. When I’m drafting an agreement, I need to be meticulous. When I’m training for a race, I think carefully about my workouts, nutrition, and recovery. Precision matters. Optimization has its place. But I don’t think life itself is an optimization problem.

Do you really want to optimize friendship? Presence? Watching your kids grow up? Dinner with your parents? You can’t optimize sitting on a porch with someone you love at the end of a long day. Those moments don’t become meaningful because they’re efficient. They’re meaningful because you were there.

If the military taught me anything, it’s that these moments aren’t guaranteed. The moments I treasure most weren’t achievements. They were conversations, running with friends, laughing until my stomach hurt while sweating in the desert somewhere, commiserating with people in the thick of it, mentors who changed the trajectory of my life, and phone calls with people I love. None of those moments appear on my resume. Yet, they’re the moments I would choose to relive.

That doesn’t mean achievement isn’t worthwhile. It means achievement should serve your life, not become your life. Somewhere along the way, many of us started treating our lives like projects to optimize. The cost is exhaustion, comparison, dissatisfaction, always searching, always wondering whether there’s something better.

Eventually, you have to stop asking whether you’ve chosen the perfect path, and start walking it. Military and start-up me would tell you that making a good decision is almost always better than making no decision at all. You can always course correct.

I still believe in ambition, excellence and hard work. But I don’t want to spend my entire life preparing for the next chapter while missing the one I’m living. Maybe achievement and fulfillment aren’t competing goals. Maybe the challenge is knowing when to pursue one and when to prioritize the other.

I’m curious how you’re navigating this balance.

What's something you've achieved that brought you less fulfillment than you expected?

Or something that seemed ordinary at the time but became one of the most meaningful parts of your life?

Subscribe now

A comment on one of my videos asked:

“How do you accept reality without giving up on possibilities? What do you do when you’ve fallen far short of what you wanted?”

They used the example of someone who dreamed of becoming a rock star. They’ve spent decades chasing it, sacrificed for it, and built their identity around it. Now they’re in their forties, and that dream probably isn’t happening. How do you accept that without feeling like you’ve failed?

So this question is not actually about becoming a rock star. And everyone eventually runs into some version of this question: feeling like you’ve failed.

Maybe you wanted to become a professional athlete, make partner, get married by thirty, or thought you’d have children by now.

At some point, life hands all of us a gap between the story we imagined and the story we’re actually living. If you had asked me at eighteen what my life would look like, I never would have predicted I’d be here. I never would have guessed I’d teach English in Vietnam before becoming a lawyer. I never would have imagined that I’d spend my free time doing this. In other words, my life is a culmination of things that were never part of the original plan.

I used to think motivation came from certainty. If I knew exactly where I was headed, I could keep moving. But the more I think about it, the more I realize the opposite is true.

Motivation exists because of uncertainty. We become motivated when there’s something we desperately want but no guarantee we’ll get it. We study because we don’t know if we’ll pass. We train because we don’t know if we’ll win. We work because we don’t know what tomorrow holds. We have real skin in the game. Motivation is our attempt to shape an uncertain future.

The hard part comes when one possible future closes. When you realize the outcome you were working toward may never happen, it’s easy to believe motivation has to disappear with it. But, perhaps not. That's why losing a dream feels so disorienting. It's not just that the goal disappears. The uncertainty disappears too. You stop asking, "Will this happen?" and start believing, "It never will."

And then the disappointment. Disappointment is grieving the version of yourself you thought you were going to become. It’s a real, sometimes heavy, loss, and you should mourn it.

The hard part about dreams, like becoming a rock star or playing professional sports, is that they often have an expiration date. At some point, the opportunity passes, and you’re forced to confront the reality that this version of your future is no longer available. That isn’t just the loss of a goal. It’s the loss of a specific possibility. That deserves to be grieved.

But I also think we measure dreams the wrong way. We tend to judge a dream by whether it produced the outcome we wanted. But that's only one way to measure it. Every meaningful pursuit leaves something behind. Maybe you became more disciplined because you practiced every day. Maybe you became more courageous because you kept putting yourself out there despite rejection. Maybe you built friendships, learned your craft, developed resilience, or discovered what truly mattered to you. Those things don't disappear just because the original dream didn't happen. In some ways, they were the point all along.

But I don’t think moving on means pretending the dream didn’t matter. I think it means taking the time to understand what you were really chasing. Maybe it was creativity, mastery, or community. Maybe it was connection or the desire to move people. Becoming a “rock star” was one expression of those values, but it was never the only one. The dream may no longer be possible, but the values that inspired it are. And that’s where new possibilities begin.

You have to ask yourself this question:

What was I actually chasing? Was it [fame]? Or was it creating something meaningful?

Was it [having children]? Or was it building a family, nurturing others, and leaving a legacy?

Was it becoming [an Olympian]? Or was it seeing what I was capable of?

I think we get ourselves into trouble when we confuse the goal with the values behind the goal. Goals are specific. Values are much bigger.

In the U.S. Army’s Master Resilience Training, the seven-step goal-setting framework asks you to identify the five values that have the greatest impact on your life and your daily decisions before setting a goal. Those values might include service, learning, family, integrity, health, excellence, creativity, leadership, or curiosity. The framework then asks how those values will help you accomplish your goal. In other words, how will you, being you, get you to your goal? Again, goals may be temporary, but values are enduring.

You can lose a goal without losing your values. You can change careers without losing your curiosity. You can leave the military without losing your commitment to service. You can still nurture and teach without teaching elementary students in Vietnam. You can stop competing one way without losing your love of pushing yourself in other ways.

The military emphasizes a values-based identity because at one point, almost all service members will take off the uniform. This way, you can lose one path (the uniform) without losing your overall purpose (your values).

Looking back, almost every meaningful thing that’s happened in my life came from a door I never planned to walk through. Some of the best things in my life were things I never would have had the imagination to ask for. You don’t know who you will be and what you will know in six months. The trick is to believe in possibility (believe you are lucky if you have to) to keep looking and perhaps create your own opportunities.

That’s why I don’t think accepting reality means giving up on possibility.

In the first episode of This Crisis Changes Everything, I talked about Stockdale’s Paradox: confronting the brutal facts of your current reality while never losing faith that you’ll ultimately prevail. Admiral Stockdale attributed his survival as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to this mindset. I’ve always loved that idea because it doesn’t ask you to pretend everything is okay. It simply asks you not to confuse today’s reality with tomorrow’s possibilities. More simply put, you can be “not okay” and still make forward progress.

I think accepting reality means letting go of the belief that possibility only exists in one direction. Your life is going to change, sometimes because you choose it, and sometimes because it chooses you. The people who keep growing are the ones who refuse to believe that one closed door means the end of the story.

In my last episode, I talked about how one of my favorite American ideas is that you don’t have to be your first draft. It’s true of careers, relationships, identities, and dreams. Sometimes the dream changes, and other times, you change.

Some dreams truly cannot be replaced. The point isn't that every loss has an equal substitute. It's that even when one future becomes impossible, your capacity to love, create, serve, grow, and find meaning does not. Life doesn't always give us the future we wanted. But it still asks us what we'll do with the one life we have.

So my questions to you:

What are the five values that most shape your life?

What is a dream that you’ve let go of?

Has it made room for something to grow?

Subscribe now

Whether you’re joining through ROTC, West Point, or OCS, these are the lessons I wish someone had told me.

1. Competence is your greatest advantage.

Some people will make assumptions based on your gender. You may find yourself having to prove your competence before people fully trust you. That isn’t every woman’s experience, but it was mine, and it’s one many women recognize. Do your job well. Do it better than expected, and do it with humility. When the military’s highest levels publicly debate whether women belong in every role, those conversations can influence the culture below. You can’t control that. What you can control is your preparation. You’ll also realize something else: people who are secure in themselves celebrate other people’s success. The loudest criticism often comes from insecurity, not excellence. If you can learn to separate constructive feedback from other people’s insecurity, that skill will serve you long after you leave the military.

2. You don’t have to be liked.

Male officers can joke around with their NCOs and soldiers in ways that are sometimes perceived differently when the officer is a woman. Whether that’s fair or not, perception matters. You don’t have to be liked. You do have to be respected. Respect comes from putting your people first, making fair decisions, keeping your word, and knowing when to lean on the people who know more than you. Boundaries create clarity, and when it’s time to make a difficult decision, people are more likely to respect it.

3. Confidence is a responsibility.

Your soldiers need someone they feel confident following. That doesn’t mean pretending to know everything. It doesn’t mean talking louder or acting more masculine. It means preparing enough that when it’s time to make a decision, you can make one. It means communicating the “why” whenever time permits. It means helping people understand how today’s task connects to the larger mission. It means paying attention to your people so you know when the plan needs to change. When you have to use your rank, use it to advocate for your team.

4. Listen to your NCOs.

Some of your teammates will have been in the Army longer than you’ve been an adult. Respect that experience. Ask questions. Learn from them. Know when to lean on your NCOs to make a better decision for the team. People support what they help build. When people know they’re respected and heard, they become invested in the outcome. That’s the difference between someone doing a job because they’re paid to do it and someone doing it because they believe in the mission.

5. The stakes are high.

In most professions, mistakes cost time or money. In the military, mistakes can cost lives. The people you serve beside will not all grow old. Training accidents, suicide, and war are real parts of military service. That reality teaches you what actually matters. Be present for the people in front of you. Don’t postpone meaningful conversations. Don’t assume there will always be another deployment, another duty station, or another reunion. Life is far more fragile than most people realize.

6. Your reputation follows you.

The military is already a small world. Being a woman in the military makes it even smaller. The way you conduct yourself outside the uniform still becomes part of your professional reputation. That’s why the military is called a profession, not just a job. Keep your personal life as drama-free as possible. Be smart when alcohol is involved. One poor decision can end an officer’s career. Officers are held to a different standard because they’re expected to model the standard. Your credibility as a leader depends on it.

7. Build an identity outside the uniform.

One day, you’ll take the uniform off. Whether that’s after twenty years or not, that day will come. Invest in friendships. Invest in education. Develop hobbies. Leverage the can-do, action-oriented leader you become. You’ll realize the time you spent in the military gave you skills that make you valuable in any job that requires problem-solving. Stay connected to your family. Build a life that’s bigger than this chapter. Your next chapter will begin long before your military career ends.

8. Protect your body.

Your career may last decades. Your body has to last the rest of your life. The military culture often rewards pushing through pain. Sometimes that’s necessary, but other times it’s reckless. Take injuries seriously and learn to recover well. Recovering well is a lesson we all have to learn. That might mean missing a school, deployment, or other opportunity. Other yeses are around the corner. The only question with recovery is whether you learn it the first time or keep relearning it because you’re too stubborn to recover properly.

9. Relationships are what you’ll remember.

The military will give you awards, promotions, and evaluations, but those won’t be what you remember most. The people will. Some of the people you serve with won’t make it to retirement. Some won’t make it home. Others will become lifelong friends. Eat lunch with people. Celebrate promotions. Stay after work for the conversation. Be present for the ordinary moments because one day you’ll realize they were the good times.

10. The reason you join will not be the reason you stay.

There will be difficult days. You’ll have leaders you admire and leaders who teach you how not to lead. But service is bigger than any one assignment, any one commander, or any one difficult season. Go back to your “why.” The military will change you. I hope that it changes you by making you more capable, more resilient, more confident, and more compassionate than when you arrived.

Subscribe now

Not everyone is qualified to evaluate the things that give your life meaning.

We all navigate situations in which we become a different version of ourselves:

• The person leaving a career to pivot

• The athlete recovering from injury

• The veteran transitioning out of the military

• The person leaving a relationship

• The entrepreneur starting from scratch

• The first-generation student pursuing a path nobody in their family has walked

The people witnessing the change may struggle to understand these decisions. I don’t think it’s always because they’re inherently unsupportive. We all evaluate decisions through the lens of our own experiences. And when we haven’t walked the road ourselves, we often struggle to see where it leads and why it’s worth doing.

For a long time, I thought the lesson was learning how to be an underdog. Over time, I’ve started to see it differently. The lesson was learning how to find a map. Or perhaps more accurately, learning how to find people who had already drawn part of one.

Growing up, I reached a point where I knew more English than my mother. This was my only experience, and it felt completely normal. Every day I translated things, sought answers from people around me, made phone calls, and otherwise navigated situations that needed navigating. Children of immigrants can relate.

I wasn’t trying to become independent or resourceful. I was just doing what needed to be done. But looking back, I think those experiences were my first lessons in resourcefulness. Long before I became an Army officer, a lawyer, or a triathlete, I learned that information wasn’t something that simply arrived. If I needed an answer, I had to find it. If I didn’t understand something, I had to ask. If nobody around me knew, I had to figure out who did. Not knowing was not allowed to be a dead end. It was the beginning of a search.

My parents reinforced this lesson in another way. There were many things they wanted me to learn that they couldn’t teach me themselves. So they found people who could. I was fortunate to have math and English tutors, swim and crew coaches, and piano and violin teachers. If there was a gap in knowledge, they didn’t pretend to have the answer. They found someone who did. Without realizing it, they taught me one of the most valuable skills: how to find people who could help me get better. How to be coachable. How to learn quickly. How to build a team around a goal I couldn’t reach alone.

That lesson followed me everywhere: into the Army, into law school, into endurance sports, and into every new environment where I was a beginner again. The pattern was always the same. I didn’t need to know everything, but I needed to know how to find people who knew more than I did.

Along the way, I’ve learned that support and guidance are not the same thing. Support is believing in someone. Guidance is knowing how to help them get where they’re trying to go. The people who love us can provide tremendous support. But they cannot always provide guidance because they haven’t traveled the road.

My parents couldn’t tell me how to apply to college or prepare for the bar exam. They couldn’t tell me how to train for an Ironman or when it was time to see a pain management psychologist. They had never been there. Sometimes the absence of guidance is simply the absence of experience.

For years, I think I unconsciously expected validation from people who couldn’t possibly provide it because they lacked the context. I especially felt this way as a woman in the military. One of the most freeing realizations is that I don’t need everyone to understand. I only need to find the few people who already do. The triathlete finds other triathletes. The entrepreneur finds other entrepreneurs. The person rebuilding their life finds people who have rebuilt theirs.

The goal isn’t to reject the people who love you. The goal is to recognize the limits of their perspective. Nobody can give you a map they’ve never seen. And sometimes the most resourceful thing you can do is stop demanding directions from people who have never traveled the road. This applies far beyond first-generation stories. It applies anytime someone is building a future they haven’t seen before.

One thing many of these experiences have in common is that the people around you may not know how to help. And when that happens, it can feel incredibly lonely. But being unsupported and loneliness are not the same thing. You may be the only person in your immediate environment who understands what you’re trying to do. But somewhere, someone has walked that road before. Part of resourcefulness is learning how to find them. Maybe that’s a therapist. A coach. A support group. A Reddit thread. A book.

The resource changes but the principle stays the same. Find the people who have traveled a similar road. Become increasingly selective about whose opinions you take seriously.

Nobody would think it makes sense to ask a swim coach how to prepare an SEC filing. Yet we often treat all opinions as equally relevant. When you’re trying to build a life you’ve never lived before, the most useful opinions usually come from people who have already lived some version of it.

The people who have actually done difficult things tend to be remarkably generous. The athlete understands how hard training is. The entrepreneur understands uncertainty. The person who has rebuilt their life understands reinvention. Even when they disagree with you, their feedback tends to be specific, useful, and grounded. Experience creates empathy.

The loudest criticism often comes from people who have never stepped into the arena at all. Why listen at all?

Which brings me back to the underdog. Being underestimated gives you something valuable. Freedom. When nobody expects much from you, you are free to focus on the work. Free to improve in private, make mistakes, learn and surprise people.

Some of the most transformative periods of my life happened before there was any evidence: before the acceptance letter, diploma, medal, or award.

The underdog has a choice. They can spend their energy proving people wrong. Or they can spend their energy proving themselves right. The second option is usually more productive because it’s directly in your control to answer the question of whether you lived up to the promise you made yourself. And support often follows proof.

We may think confidence comes from certainty. But many of the biggest decisions in my life were made before I had proof they would work. It was trusting that if I didn’t know the answer yet, I could find it. If I got stuck, I could learn. Or, if I needed help, I could find a teacher.

Every major pivot makes us first-generation versions of ourselves. I’ve been the teacher who became a law student. I was the injured athlete who had to learn how to trust my body again. Think about the person leaving a life that no longer serves them and building a new one from scratch. In all of these moments, we’re trying to become someone we’ve never been before.

And of course it’s scary! There is no personal evidence yet. No guarantee or map.

For a long time, I thought being first was a disadvantage. Now I see something different. Being first taught me how to seek, ask and learn. How to become comfortable not knowing and sitting with uncertainty. Life keeps requiring these skills. Every new challenge makes us beginners again.

Maybe that’s the real gift of being first. You learn that when the map doesn’t exist in your immediate environment, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It means you may need to go find someone who has drawn part of it already.

And if you keep going long enough, one day you’ll become part of that map for someone else. Out there, someone is rebuilding, attempting something that feels impossible, looking for proof that it can be done. The journey that once felt lonely becomes useful. (And this is why representation matters)

Maybe being first is about leaving behind a path that makes the journey a little easier for the people who come after you. And sometimes the price of being first is that the proof comes last.

I’m so interested in the stories people tell themselves about what’s possible.

Who taught you what was possible? Who showed you part of the map?

And if you’re walking a road that few people around you understand, where did you find the people who helped you keep going?

I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Subscribe now

There are two broad categories of pain in my life:

1. Voluntary Pain

This is the discomfort we choose. The pain of a race. The challenging parts of a hard workout. The pain that accompanies pursuing something meaningful.

2. Involuntary Pain

This is the discomfort we don’t choose. Injury. Chronic pain. Loss. Uncertainty. The consequences of decisions made by other people. The moments when life imposes discomfort regardless of our preferences.

I’ve found that many of the mental models I learned managing voluntary pain eventually became useful for managing involuntary pain.

Pain, Why?

It’s worth asking why pain exists in the first place.

Pain is a feature in our system with a job to protect us. The brain constantly receives information from the body and decides what deserves attention. Pain is one of the ways the brain signals that something may require action. Sometimes that signal is accurate, while other times it’s overly sensitive. But its purpose is protective. Pain is not always an enemy. Sometimes it is a warning (i.e., get your hand away from the hot plate). Sometimes it is information.

Stress (the predictable, controllable and temporary kind) and adaptation are inseparable. Muscles become stronger because they are challenged beyond their current capacity and then allowed to recover. Endurance improves because we repeatedly expose ourselves to manageable amounts of discomfort. The body adapts to this kind of stress. But distress (the unpredictable, uncontrollable kind) can make your pain perception worse. Ask yourself, is the stress acting as a challenge (growth) or a threat (harm)?

The goal is to learn which discomfort is helping us adapt and which discomfort is telling us something needs to change. One of the most important skills athletes in endurance sports should develop is learning that not all pain deserves the same response. Some pain is asking for acknowledgment. Some pain is asking you to stop immediately. Learning the difference is a skill that improves with experience.

Part I: Voluntary Pain

Rowing was my first real education in discomfort.

I rowed lightweight crew in high school and my first year at West Point. Before college, I raced both sweep and sculling boats, rowing doubles, quads, fours, and eights, competed in Canada, trained year-round, and spent winters in a warehouse that hummed to the sound of ergs.

What made rowing unique was the nature of the pain itself. A 2k race is long enough that your aerobic system is working at its limits and short enough that your anaerobic system is contributing heavily as well. Your legs, core, back, and lungs are all working at a pace they cannot sustain for long. You hit a wall in the first three minutes and need to maintain that for the back half of the race.

Training was an exercise in learning to sit with discomfort. Winter training meant the erg, staring at a monitor where you could not hide. The smallest dip in power was reflected on the screen, each stroke measured and compared to the last.

I learned how to manage pain by watching more experienced rowers respond to it.

The veterans settled into the pain. More than just being stronger or fitter, they expected the pain to come. The pain was familiar. They were athletes who could handle difficult things. By doing this, they had developed confidence in a place they had been before. It allowed them to skip the step where they stressed about the impending discomfort. They just had better ways of directing their attention.

Presence

One of the first things I learned was how to stay present.

As one of my coxswains used to shout through the headset:

“BE PRESENT.”

A 2,000-meter race can feel impossibly long when you’re hurting. If I thought about how much the entire race hurt, or how much farther I had to go, I would become overwhelmed. Instead, I learned to focus on the next few strokes. The coxswain would call out ten strokes. Then twenty more. She’d tell us to focus on how the boat was sending beneath us. Then our legs. Then our swing. Then where our bow sat relative to another team’s. A race became a series of small, manageable tasks.

I still do this today. During a run, I count the steps in the next quarter mile. During a swim, I count my strokes down the length of the pool. And on the bike, I count distance markers. Towards the end, I count each .01 mile.

Instead of asking myself to tolerate discomfort for another hour, I ask myself to focus on the next ten strokes, or to bring my shoulders down, or the rhythm of my breathing in 8-count. Most pain becomes more manageable when the time horizon shrinks.

Distraction

Other times, the answer was distraction.

When you sit in stroke seat, everyone behind you follows your rhythm. If I sped up a stroke, they sped up a stroke. My job was to give seven other rowers the consistency they could trust.

During races, when the pain started building, I would often picture the rowers behind me moving together as one unit. I watched the waves off the stern. I listened to the sound of oars feathering. I focused on timing.

Pain becomes louder when it is the only thing in the room. And loneliness increases the perception of pain. But when our attention expands beyond ourselves to the support around us, pain often loses some of its power. In other words, connect to the entire orchestra. Sometimes the most effective way to manage discomfort is to direct your attention toward something larger than your own experience.

Rehearse Before It Arrives

Another lesson from racing was that pain doesn’t have to be a surprise. Before difficult races, workouts, or training sessions, I often visualize the hard parts. As my swim coach used to say, the third quarter is the hardest quarter. I imagine the predictable hill, burning legs, and negotiation I’ll want to have with myself, and I decide in advance how I will respond. When the discomfort eventually arrives, I’ve already practiced the conversation.

Pain is an expected visitor, welcome in my house.

After my elbow fracture, physical therapy required me to repeatedly enter discomfort without re-injuring myself. Recovery wasn't about avoiding pain. It was about learning which pain represented adaptation and which pain represented harm.

Part II: Involuntary Pain

The harder lessons came later. My back injury taught me that not all pain has a finish line. There is no guarantee that discomfort will end on a predictable timeline.

Find Your Own Times Square

One of the most useful things I learned from my therapist came from Pain Gate Theory. The basic idea is that pain signals compete with other information for our attention. The brain is not simply receiving pain. It is constantly deciding what deserves attention.

My therapist used the example of Times Square. There are thousands of lights, sounds, conversations, and advertisements competing for your attention. The theory stipulates that pain works the same way. When pain becomes the only thing we focus on, it can consume the entire landscape.

When we intentionally introduce other stimuli, like a song, food, conversation, something funny, scenery, curiosity, or problem-solving, we give the brain other things to process. I am not trying to deny the pain. I am just refusing to give it the entire stage.

Pain Is Information

For a long time, I approached pain as something to fight, ignore, or push through. That mindset worked until it didn’t. What changed was realizing that pain is information. Information is easier to work with than an enemy. The moment I stop arguing with the existence of pain, I free up energy to decide what to do next.

I asked, “What is this trying to tell me?” That question is often more productive. My back pain was different from the discomfort I had experienced in sports. It wasn’t the predictable burning sensation of a hard workout or the temporary soreness that follows a difficult race. It was nerve pain, the loud, sharp, electric kind. I spent years trying to solve it. I used TENS units. I experimented with heat and cold therapy. I took all the medication, went to physical therapy, and saw surgeons. It took up a lot of my brain space.

What made the experience difficult was that the pain didn’t always respond to the strategies that had worked for me in the past. One of the hardest things about nerve pain was learning that the intensity of the pain and the severity of the injury were not always perfectly correlated. The intensity and unpredictability of nerve pain makes it feel like a threat at times. As a result, the alarm system becomes more sensitive than the underlying threat.

That realization fundamentally changed how I thought about pain. I could continue looking for solutions, but I could not spend every waking moment waiting for the pain to disappear before allowing myself to live my life. At some point, I had to learn how to coexist with uncertainty. Pain was still information, but not all information required the same response.

Acceptance Is Not Surrender

One of the most important things I learned from chronic back pain is that not all discomfort can be eliminated. When pain first appeared, I treated it like a problem that needed to be solved before I could continue living my life. If I could just find the right doctor, the right exercise, or the right treatment, then everything could resume as normal.

What eventually changed was realizing that acceptance and resignation are not the same thing. Acceptance means acknowledging reality as it exists right now. Pain is here. This hurts, and it probably will later. And while I continue looking for solutions, I can still decide how I want to respond today. That shift freed up an enormous amount of mental energy. I became empowered by the reality that I could do hard things and go on with my life while the situation was not great (while I was in pain).

Managing Pain Is Work

One thing I underestimated about chronic pain was how exhausting it is. Pain demands attention. It creates uncertainty. It forces decisions. Am I making it worse? What does this sensation mean? For years, I thought I was tired because I was in pain. In reality, I was often tired because I had spent hours managing pain. I had to learn to respect that effort.

If I spent an afternoon navigating significant discomfort, I often needed to recover afterward, like going to bed at 8pm, even if I hadn’t done anything physically demanding. Pain management is work. And like any other form of work, it consumes energy.

Looking back, the mental models I learned from rowing, endurance sports, injury, therapy, and chronic pain all point to the same lesson.

Voluntary pain taught me how to endure. Involuntary pain taught me how to coexist.

Both taught me that while I cannot always control what I feel, I can often control where I place my attention. I can choose thoughts that empower me, that turn down the pain knob, and remind me of my advantages. I know this pain. This pain is welcome in my house. I do not fear this pain.

One question I still think about is how we learn the difference between pain that is asking us to grow and pain that is asking us to change course. Growth pain expands our world, whereas harm pain shrinks our world. Growth pain feels proportional. Harm pain feels disproportionate or progressive. How much pain tolerance is enough?

How do you tell the difference?

Subscribe now

A few years ago, I found myself getting loaded into a second ambulance, this time to a larger hospital where a trauma surgeon could operate on me within the next 24 hours.

I had just learned that I had shattered my elbow in five places. The trauma surgeon explained that the longer the pieces remained displaced, the less likely it would be to restore full elbow function.

The elbow is a unique joint. It both hinges and rotates. When the joint surface is damaged, surgeons often try to accomplish two competing goals: restore the anatomy as accurately as possible while minimizing the scar tissue that can permanently limit motion.

My five-hour surgery went well, and afterward, my surgeon was very honest with me.

He explained that the elbow is one of the most unforgiving joints to rehabilitate. If I wanted the best chance of regaining full range of motion, I needed to start moving it immediately and push through pain.

He explained that many patients never regain full range of motion after injuries like mine. He wasn’t exaggerating. One recent study found that nearly half of patients who underwent surgical fixation of distal humerus fractures developed clinically significant elbow stiffness afterward, with loss of range of motion being the most common symptom.

In other words, if I wanted to be able to do things like swim fast again, I would have to endure discomfort long enough to become an outlier compared to the cases in the literature.

This began a season of my life where I forged my relationship with pain, confronting it instead of avoiding or numbing it. Pain became something I had to study and understand. I learned to approach it with curiosity rather than fear because I wanted physical therapy to produce the best possible outcome. My arm would never be exactly the same again, and to this day it isn't. But I was determined to maximize every opportunity for recovery and give myself the best chance at the life I wanted to live afterward.

What made recovery complicated was that not all pain was productive. About nine months after my second surgery, I needed a third procedure to re-transpose a nerve that had previously been moved during surgery. Some of the pain I experienced in occupational therapy wasn’t adaptation. It was a problem that needed to be addressed.

I’ve come to think that many of the most important things in life work this way. We often assume that discomfort, setbacks, or failure are evidence that something is wrong. Sometimes they are. But sometimes discomfort is simply evidence that adaptation is taking place.

Psychologists have a term for a particular kind of stress: eustress. Unlike distress, which overwhelms our ability to cope, eustress occurs when we are challenged in ways that stretch us without breaking us. Research has found that this kind of pressure can improve focus, learning, motivation, creativity, and performance.

Not all stress is harmful, and some stress helps us grow. In fact, we all need a certain level of energy activation to perform at our best. The challenge is that while we’re experiencing stress, we often can’t tell the difference.

One of my favorite stories comes from Nicole Meline -

A farmer’s horse runs away.

His neighbors tell him how unfortunate he is.

“I can’t yet tell,” the farmer replies.

A few days later, the horse returns with several wild horses.

His neighbors tell him how fortunate he is.

“I can’t yet tell.”

The farmer’s son breaks his leg while trying to tame one of the horses.

“What terrible luck.”

“I can’t yet tell.”

Soon afterward, a war begins and every able-bodied young man is drafted except the son with the broken leg.

“What incredible luck.”

“I can’t yet tell.”

I love this story because it captures something I think most of us forget. We are constantly trying to assign meaning to events before they are finished unfolding. A setback occurs and we immediately label it bad. An opportunity appears and we immediately label it good. We want certainty.

We want to know what the experience means while we’re still living through it. But life rarely works that way. When I was sitting in physical therapy trying to gain a few degrees of motion, I couldn’t yet tell. I didn’t know that years later I would regain the ability to fully straighten my arm. I didn’t know that the thing I was experiencing as pain in the moment was part of the process that would allow me to not only recover, but also would become a focal point for daily movement, in that I would return to it whenever I needed to think about resilience. In other words, I accepted the pain and let it change me, and I am better for it. At the time, all I knew was that avoiding discomfort would not get me where I wanted to go.

I also learned something about optimism. Optimism isn’t certainty that things will work out. It’s the willingness to withhold judgment long enough to find out. It’s preserving the possibility that today’s setback might mean something different tomorrow.

I think about that lesson often, not because every painful experience leads somewhere good, or because every setback is secretly a gift, but because some of the experiences that have shaped me the most looked nothing like opportunities when they first arrived.

Pressure has a way of feeling negative while we’re inside it. The elevated heart rate before a race, or the anxiety before an interview, and the uncertainty that comes with pursuing something difficult. We interpret those feelings as warning signs. Sometimes they are! Other times, they’re evidence that we’re doing something that matters. They could be evidence that we’re growing and that the story is still unfolding.

We spend too much time trying to decide whether something is good or bad before the story is finished. It's ironic, because some of the changes I'm most grateful for only happened because a situation became uncomfortable enough that staying the same was no longer an option.

The older I get, the more I find myself returning to the farmer’s answer:

I can’t yet tell.

So for this week, what is a chapter of your life that only made sense in hindsight? In what ways could the story still be unfolding for you?

I graduated from West Point in 2014 while the country was still at war.

Many of our instructors had advanced through deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and we were trained accordingly. We were taught to identify failure points, think through contingencies, and prepare for worst-case scenarios before they happened. In other words, we were trained to prepare for the worst.

That mindset is a useful tool. Preparation, discipline, and calmness under pressure matter most when the stakes are high. But over time, if you spend enough years scanning constantly for risk, eventually your mind can start treating possibility itself like a threat.

I see this in Big Law, too. Pessimism is framed as realism. Cynicism gets mistaken for intelligence. I’d be lying if I said I never lowered my expectations to emotionally protect myself before disappointment arrived. So, I understand the instinct.

But I also think it quietly changes performance long before the outcome arrives. In other words, you are sabotaging the habit required for something great to occur.

One of the strongest performance strategies I have ever developed is optimism.

Optimism changes behavior. It is the fuel that keeps people engaged with possibility. Without it, grit (the passion and perseverance for long-term goals) eventually starts feeling meaningless because people stop investing deeply in outcomes they no longer believe are possible.

Psychologists have studied this for years through concepts like expectancy effects and explanatory style. The brain gets faster at finding whatever it repeatedly rehearses. Someone who constantly anticipates failure begins interpreting difficulty differently than someone who believes, regularly, that improvement is still possible. That interpretation changes behavior.

People who believe effort still matters stay engaged longer. They continue adjusting after setbacks. They recover faster mentally. They keep looking for opportunities after other people have emotionally checked out. That compounds over time.

I think optimism, self-belief, and self-trust all reinforce each other.

Optimism is your relationship with the future.
Self-belief is confidence in your ability to improve.
Self-trust is the belief that you can handle reality even when things do not go your way.

And self-trust is what allows people to remain optimistic longer. People who trust themselves do not need certainty before they continue moving forward.

I see this clearly in endurance sports.

At some point during a hard race, everyone starts negotiating with discomfort. Some people mentally detach much earlier than their body actually requires them to. It has happened to me, and you can feel it happen around you. Meanwhile, the athletes who stay psychologically engaged continue moving differently.

That matters, especially over long periods of time. Meaningful outcomes in life are delayed. Improvement, momentum and results are delayed.

Most people never stay optimistic long enough to see the compounding effect of their effort become visible.

If you have ever been part of the statistical minority (the 10% instead of the 90%, the 1% instead of the 99%), you understand this instinct deeply. Once you realize something improbable is still possible, it becomes irrational not to stack the odds in your favor as aggressively as you can.

This is my lived experience. Belief changes behavior.

I think this is also why manifestation resonates so deeply. At its core, manifestation is often optimism paired with sustained attention and repeated action. When people genuinely believe something is possible, they start organizing their behavior around that belief. They notice different opportunities. They persist through discomfort longer. They continue moving toward the outcome instead of emotionally withdrawing from it.

That does not mean every outcome becomes guaranteed. But people dramatically underestimate how much success is shaped by whether someone remains psychologically engaged long enough for effort to compound.

That is part of why Stockdale’s Paradox has stayed with me for years. Admiral James Stockdale survived over seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam under brutal conditions. What allowed him to survive was his ability to maintain faith that he would prevail in the end while fully confronting the reality of his situation in the present. That distinction matters. Grounded optimism requires honesty about reality, otherwise it becomes fantasy.

But when optimism is paired with discipline, self-trust, and sustained effort, it becomes one of the most powerful performance strategies a person can develop.

So for the next 10 weeks leading into Nationals, I want to lean into making optimism a habit more intentionally.

I want to pay closer attention to the stories I repeat in my head, notice whether I’m feeding momentum or interrupting it, and see what changes if I direct more energy and curiosity toward execution instead of preemptive disappointment.

I’m curious how other people experience this, too.

Have there been moments where belief changed your performance long before the outcome itself changed? Months? Years?

Or moments where you realized you mentally detached from something before you had actually exhausted your potential within it?

Subscribe now

During my first semester of law school, I was going to occupational therapy for my left elbow after two surgeries following a distal humerus fracture and nerve transposition surgery. In simple terms, I had shattered my elbow, developed significant scar tissue, and eventually needed one of my nerves moved because I was losing functionality in my hand and forearm.

I had the surgeries nine months apart, and I wanted to believe that chapter of my life was over.

But about a month into law school, I began noticing the same symptoms that had preceded my second surgery: numbness, tingling, weakness, and sharp electrical sensations running through my wrist and forearm.

I knew something was wrong. I also did not want to know how wrong.

The timing felt catastrophic. Law school had just started. My life revolved around reading, typing, writing, and trying to function at a high level. The possibility of another surgery and another long recovery felt at complete odds with the future I was trying to build.

So I oscillated between obsession and denial. I spent hours trying to figure out what could be happening internally. Had the sling supporting the nerve torn? Why was the nerve snapping over the epicondyle again? Would I lose more function? How long would recovery take this time?

Eventually, I scheduled the EMG and met with my surgeon. He confirmed what I already suspected: I needed revision surgery. This time it would be a submuscular transposition, a more durable procedure, but with a longer recovery.

I remember feeling two things simultaneously: relief and grief. Relief that there was finally an explanation. Grief because I understood exactly what recovery would demand of me.

And this time, I wept. When I first broke my arm, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. This time, I knew the road of recovery well.

I remember sitting there thinking less about the surgery itself and more about how exhausting it felt to begin again. The physical therapy appointments. The weakness. The loss of independence. The uncertainty of whether my arm would ever feel normal again while simultaneously trying to survive one of the most academically demanding periods of my life.

I had the surgery the day after my last final exam of the first semester. Five years later, I’ve graduated law school, passed the bar, gotten back on the bike and completed an Ironman.

Looking back, the hardest part was not actually the surgery itself. It was the period beforehand. The uncertainty. The anticipation. Slowly driving myself insane oscillating between intuition and denial.

Part of me already knew what the answer would be, but as long as I avoided confirmation, there was still room for a different reality to exist.

I think many people experience this dynamic far outside of medicine: in careers, relationships, creative pursuits and rebuilding after failure.

Sometimes we are not actually afraid of pain or hard work.

We are afraid of finding out.

Finding out whether we are capable. Whether the work was enough. Whether the identity we built around ourselves survives contact with reality. Whether we are as resilient, talented, disciplined or strong as we hoped.

I think highly ambitious people are especially vulnerable to this dynamic because identity becomes intertwined with capability. Failure stops feeling informational and starts feeling existential.

As long as we never fully test ourselves, our potential remains hypothetical. Schrödinger’s cat. And there is a strange emotional safety in that because uncertainty protects ego.

Hypothetical potential is seductive because it cannot fail. As long as your dream remains abstract, it remains untouched by reality. This is why so many people remain partially hidden from their own lives. We delay. Procrastinate. Underprepare. Avoid vulnerability. Leave dreams in abstract form instead of concrete action. We keep one foot emotionally outside the door, because possibility feels safer than proof.

But over time, avoidance carries its own psychological consequences.

The long-term cost of never finding out is the gradual erosion of self-trust.

The brain notices when we repeatedly retreat from things we claim matter to us. At first, avoidance feels like relief. You skip the race. Delay the conversation. Choose the familiar path. Tell yourself there will be another time.

But eventually, people begin building lives optimized for emotional protection instead of growth. In other words, the world becomes smaller. Risk tolerance shrinks. Confidence weakens. Anxiety grows. We stop collecting evidence that they can survive uncertainty.

But self-trust is not built through certainty. It is built through experience.

You try. You adapt. You survive disappointment. You learn that failure is rarely as catastrophic as the imagination predicts. Avoidance does not eliminate fear. It often just converts it into chronic wondering. I think many people can survive failure more easily than they can survive the suspicion that fear quietly dictated the direction of their life. That is the hidden cost of avoidance. There is a different kind of suffering that comes from never knowing who you could have become had you tolerated the uncertainty long enough to find out.

And ironically, courage rarely feels like confidence in real time.

Usually it feels like exposure. Standing on the start line. Scheduling the surgery. Publishing the work. Trying again after disappointment anyway.

I think many people spend years unconsciously protecting themselves from definitive answers. About their talent. Their resilience. Their relationships. Their potential.

But eventually, the possibility that fear quietly dictated the direction of your life becomes heavier than the discomfort of finding out.

Eventually the peace that comes from knowing becomes more valuable than the comfort of wondering, even when the answer initially hurts.

If there is something you keep avoiding because you are afraid of what the answer might reveal, maybe that is also the thing most worth confronting.

Because eventually, wondering starts to take up more space than the fear itself.

And there are few things heavier than carrying unrealized potential through your life simply because you never allowed yourself to find out.

At a work dinner recently, toward the end of the meal, I asked the table a completely unserious question:

“What Hogwarts house do you think you’d be sorted into?”

People laughed. We went around the table answering. And when it got to me, the person across from me said, “Slytherin.”

Then he added, “You’re ambitious.”

Everyone laughed, including me. But the comment stayed with me longer than I expected. Not because I was offended. To be clear, I think he was right. But because ambition is such an interesting thing socially. People claim to admire it. Institutions reward it. Entire industries are built around it.

But the moment someone openly possesses it, especially a woman, people become uneasy around it. And before anyone accuses me of pretending men don’t experience criticism for ambition too, they absolutely do.

Timothée Chalamet recently spoke openly about pursuing greatness, with respect to acting, and people called him arrogant.

AOC, when asked about political ambition, responded:
“What’s funny is they assume my ambition is positional… is a title or a seat. My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.”

And that framing was received much more warmly in many circles.

The reactions fascinated me because both statements require an immense amount of self-belief. Both people are essentially saying: I think I am capable of something extraordinary. So why does one feel inspiring while the other feels self-important?

I don’t actually think people are reacting to ambition itself. I think people are reacting to what they believe the ambition serves. When ambition sounds self-focused, people hear ego. When ambition sounds tied to service, contribution, or mission, people hear leadership. And before I go further, I should acknowledge that my perception of ambition is probably heavily shaped by where I live and the environments I’ve spent time in.

I live in New York City. I work in corporate law. I came from West Point. I am surrounded by ambitious people constantly. People here openly optimize their lives around achievement. Careers. Status. Fitness. Influence. Money. Prestige. Intellectual performance. Proximity to power. In many ways, ambition feels normalized here to a degree that it might not in other parts of the world. And more broadly, I think Western culture, particularly American culture, is deeply organized around the individual and individual achievement. We celebrate exceptionalism. We romanticize self-made success stories. We are taught very early to build identities around accomplishment, differentiation, performance, and personal ambition.

Which is partly why I think we simultaneously admire ambition and feel suspicious of it. We want extraordinary people. We just become uncomfortable when someone openly identifies themselves as wanting to become one.

But I also think women experience an additional layer of scrutiny around ambition that men are often less burdened by. Women are expected to be ambitious, but carefully.

Competent, but not threatening.
Confident, but still warm.
Driven, but still self-deprecating enough to make everyone else comfortable.

There is still something socially disruptive about a woman who openly says:
I want influence.
I want greatness.
I want power.
I want to matter.

Especially if she says it plainly. And honestly, I think that’s part of why the Slytherin comment lingered with me. Because Slytherin is culturally coded as ambition without apology. Resourceful. Strategic. Competitive. Power-seeking. Traits people often admire in practice but become morally uncomfortable with when stated explicitly. Particularly in women.

And honestly, I think I’ve spent most of my life inside institutions built around this exact tension. At West Point, cadets are required to play sports. Not because the Army cares whether we can throw a ball or swim fast enough. The purpose was never athletics themselves.

Douglas MacArthur said:
“Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that upon other days, on other fields, will bear the fruits of victory.”

The point was pressure. Can you perform while exhausted? Can you continue when uncomfortable? Can you fail publicly and recover? Can you subordinate yourself to a team? Can you function under scrutiny, chaos, fatigue, and competition?

The sports were simply controlled environments to reveal character before the stakes became real. And I think, ambition works similarly. It reveals people. It especially reveals how uncomfortable we are with someone believing in themselves before the world collectively agrees they should.

Humans are deeply conditioned to accept confidence after validation, not before it. Most people wait for permission before they publicly believe in themselves. Some people decide first.

And I think what those people are really saying is:
“I believe in my capacity before the world confirms it.”

That unsettles people because it bypasses social permission structures. And interestingly, the people who decide first are often described very differently depending on whether they succeed.

Before success:
arrogant
delusional

After success:
visionary
driven
confident

The behavior is often the same. What changes is whether the world eventually validates it. But I think we are more forgiving of ambition when it appears sacrificial. When it sounds like service. When it includes other people.

Which is why AOC’s statement landed differently than Timothée’s.

One sounded like personal greatness. The other sounded like collective purpose.

Same level of self-belief. Different perceived beneficiary. And this has become increasingly personal for me because I do feel a call to service.

One that being an M&A lawyer does not fully satisfy. That’s difficult for me to admit because becoming a lawyer required an enormous amount of sacrifice and discipline. I achieved something I once deeply wanted. Something younger versions of myself would have been proud of. But achievement and purpose are not always the same thing.

Sometimes you can climb the mountain and still feel restless standing at the top of it. Sometimes you realize the thing you worked toward was never supposed to be the final destination. I think a lot of high-achieving people quietly experience this tension. They become successful and then discover they were not actually searching for status. They were searching for meaning.

And maybe that’s why ambition rooted in service resonates so deeply with people. Because it transforms ambition from self-expansion into contribution. I don’t think ambition is inherently arrogant. Arrogance is believing you are owed greatness. Ambition is believing you are capable of pursuing it. And maybe the ambitions that endure the longest are the ones that eventually stop being about yourself entirely.

I suspect reasonable people will disagree with parts of this, which is honestly part of why I wanted to write it. I’d love to hear how other people experience ambition socially. Especially women in competitive environments.

When does ambition feel inspiring?
When does it feel uncomfortable?
And why do you think that is?

Subscribe now

I spent the last few parts of my twenties and first few years of my thirties trying to adapt and surrender to my back pain. I went through the five stages of grief, mourning the movements I could no longer do and the peace I once knew as a pain-free person. I missed the levity and ease my brain used to operate with, without pain signals constantly bogging down my thought process, medications that turned everything into fog, and the bandwidth I had to do everyday things like an everyday person. I missed my identity as an active person. I missed my independence as an Army officer. My idea of my future did not include what felt like a revolt led by my body. I didn’t need to be who I was before my injury, but I really wanted and hoped for peace.

I personified my pain and befriended it because I knew in the long run, I could not live with pain as my enemy, a weight to tow without any handles. I was surgical with my thoughts, in that I would not let myself spiral uncontrollably because I knew this type of chronic pain meant I was more susceptible to anxiety and depression if left unchecked. Female veterans are already a vulnerable population. I could not let this be the end of my story; pain was not going to win, it had already taken too much. I timeboxed scrolling the internet and WebMD to 30 minutes. I became a student of my pain, clinging to the instructions of my doctors, psychologist and family like I was the last one on a life raft as my ship sank in the night.

As more time passed, and I had space to live a life without the intensity of constant appointments, scans, medication and random ER visits, I had more space to examine how I’ve been changed, not by pain, but by grief. I remember sitting with a neurosurgeon during a consult, and being told that I should make lifestyle changes because running would be too painful. The flare-ups were unpredictable and debilitating. The pain was omnipresent, and I was constantly in survival mode, sweating through my clothes, so I immediately accepted this reality. Only later did I process what that actually meant: I’d spend the majority of my life (assuming I’d live a long life) not running, and that the running chapter, like a bad breakup, was over abruptly.

My friends who have known me for over half my life will say that I am an angry person. I am comfortable expressing anger, which was only rewarded in the military. Anger is an action-oriented emotion. So at West Point, when we sang the alma mater numerous times, every time alumni were killed, I felt angry: the dissonance between something completely out of my control and the intense feeling that we should be doing something, anything, about a situation we could not change.

I learned that you needed resilience to continue to fight, for an indefinite period of time, without any guarantee of winning. And the purpose was not to win, but to not give up, on yourself and the people around you.

Relatedly, I am also very stubborn. So with my injured back, I kept running anyway. First, it was walking, and it was very heartbreaking (e.g., pathetic), and painful, and unpredictable. My runs would inevitably end in my back locking up, or having to walk home, or get picked up. Sometimes it was too painful to lean over the sink to brush my teeth. I could not pick up the twenty-pound family dog. These experiences initially would ruin my day, and when I think back to these times, I’m extremely grateful for my parents because I was unpleasant to be around and also dependent on them.

Long story short, my anger and stubbornness probably prolonged my pain symptoms, but they also ignited the fight in me that I would not back down in this indefinite limbo. I learned the hard way through all this that the dipstick to my pain tank does not hit the bottom. As Ruth Langmore famously says in Season 4 of Ozark, “If You Wanna Stop Me You’re Gonna Have To F**king Kill Me.”

To be in the minority of positive outcomes when the majority are not great, you need to hang on. Or to put it plainly, if you hang on long enough, you will survive this, like you have survived everything else in your life, even the things that you thought would kill you. It might be ugly, or unpopular, and you might laugh from how crazy it is, but you will get through it if you commit to yourself. Human beings are extremely durable. My parents didn’t survive famine and poverty, and move to the states so I could settle, here, in perpetual haze of lyrica, gabapentin and steroids.

Wrapping this up, I’ll put on my officer and teacher hat and give you the takeaways (write these down):

1. Grief slows time down enough for you to notice it finally.

2. Mourning is what happens when grief permanently changes the way you measure a life.

3. Being present is a gift. If you are in the good old days, relish it.

4. If you get a second lease on life, be grateful and really live it this time.

5. When you examine the depth of your pain tank, ordinary life starts feeling like a gift again.

6. You’ll never be ready, so if you have the opportunity, run with it as if you stole it.

If someone comes to mind who you think will enjoy this read, please send this to them.

Cheers,

Alyssa

PS. When you ask me what motivates me to exercise, I will point you to this post.

Subscribe now

If you’re reading this, and there’s something that you’d like to make happen in your life (that seems impossible in some respects), you’ve come to the right place.

In 2024, my life completely changed. Things I had worked on for four years came to fruition in a span of four months. I graduated from both business and law schools at the University of Pennsylvania, completed an Ironman in Cairns, passed the New York bar exam, moved to New York to start my career as a corporate lawyer in M&A and competed in the USA Triathlon National Championships at the Olympic distance. When I started this journey, I was an unemployed veteran with a broken arm, among other health concerns, living with my parents at the height of the pandemic.

This is the goal-setting framework I used to make my dreams a reality. It’s the framework from the Army’s Master Resiliency Training program, developed in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania.

To get started, you’ll need a pencil and paper. We are getting into the nitty-gritty.

1. What is your goal? Be specific and set a deadline.

   1. Example: Complete an Olympic distance triathlon in less than 2:21:00 by September, 2026.

   2. Name five values that have the most impact on your life and your daily decisions:

      1. Example: Gratitude, Learning, Perseverance, Purpose, Self-regulation

   3. How do the five values help you accomplish your goal?

      1. Example:

         1. Gratitude: I’m grateful for the opportunity I have in this life to usher this body home. We don’t know how much time we have and I plan to make the most of it.

         2. Learning: On this path I’ll face myself and my insecurities will surface. I will secure them. Learning about my strengths and weaknesses will make me a stronger athlete.

         3. Perseverance: I have made it this far, and trying to accomplish something that seems unlikely is the through-line of my life. I will be the exception.

         4. Purpose: I think JFK said it best, but I choose this goal (my moonshot) “because th[is] goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win”

         5. Self-regulation: I plan to get the training in as reasonably as I can, without injury, which means managing recovery (fuel and sleep) so I can perform the best any corporate lawyer can.
            

2. Where are you Right Now:

   1. Are there benefits to making your goal a reality (list as many as possible):

      1. Example: I’ll be really healthy woman competing in the 35-39 age bracket

      2. Lifting is good for bone density

      3. Triathlon is a nice hobby for my mental health and my quality of life

   2. Name obstacles you foresee:

      1. Example: I tend to have to pick between getting more than 5 hours of sleep or going to practice in the AM

      2. I need a better routine for lifting that doesn’t take away from my threshold efforts

      3. I need to fuel for performance

      4. Race anxiety
         

3. What is the development plan? Based on the obstacles, create four areas of priority that must be accomplished to make your goal a reality:

   1. Example: 1. Recovery 2. Real threshold efforts 3. Nutrition 4. Mental health
      

4. Create the Plan for consistent progress: for each of the priorities above, create three action statements (specific, measureable, action-oriented, realistic, time-bound) and three power statements (purposeful, productive and possibility)

   1. Example: I complete one weekly threshold session on the bike at 195-205W for 40-60min. I complete one weekly threshold session for my run with HR 176-182 without blowing up. I maintain a weekly distance of 5000 yd minimum and one upper-body lift after my swim set. (Note: these will change and should be revisited as you make progress)

   2. Example: I am building a well-moving chassis. My body will adapt and absorb hard efforts as long as I recover. In the competition of preparation, I will win.
      

5. Pursue Consistent Action: What will you accomplish in the next 24 hours? How do you plan to implement your plan consistently? Where are you keeping track of your action items?

   1. Example: Tomorrow I’ll have an easy day on the bike because I banged up my foot and want to take it easy. I plan on implementing my plan on a daily basis and keep a weekly training log (garmin and strava) to make sure I am staying on track. (Note: this plan may also change as you get more information and experience, as you see what works for you)
      

6. Commit yourself completely. How can you change your environment and the people in your life to remind you of the goal and keep you accountable? When you encounter each of the obstacles above, what will you do instead?

   1. Example: moodboard, notes app, notes on a mirror, daily reflections, meditation. When I’m not hitting one of my priority areas, I’m going to be reasonable and see where I can make smart adjustments, given how unpredictable work can be and what is in my control. I’ll leverage my healthcare resources, including therapy, as well. I’ll lean on my relationships for support and share my goals and why they are important. (Note: this is where the topic of setbacks lives! More on this soon)
      

7. Monitor your progress consistently: How often will you check in, and when is the first check-in date? When you face an unexpected obstacle, which of your values will you leverage?

   1. I’ll check in daily for workouts (and stay flexible for work), weekly to monitor recovery and adaptation, and every month for overall progress as I approach the September deadline. My first check-in is April 30. I’ll focus on my values of perseverance, learning and gratitude as I face any setbacks or unexpected events.

Expect to revisit this plan and make changes as you get more information along your journey. These are the bare bones of the goal-setting framework. I’d love for you to give it a try and let me know in the comments what goals you are cooking up (and the deadline).

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

This February, I started a series called This Crisis Changes Everything.

Truthfully, I finally felt ready to talk about some of the harder seasons of my adult life. I wanted to share some of the conversations I had in therapy and lessons learned in hopes that it could help others and lighten the load.

The series gave me structure. It gave me a disciplined way to revisit heavy chapters without being swallowed by them. It helped me recognize how much I have changed and how much I have to be grateful for. And your responses have meant more than I can explain. They have been thoughtful, honest and generous. The feedback has been a salve in a way I did not anticipate. Thank you.

I’m excited to start this Substack to go deeper. This feels very much like a homecoming for me to the written word and to conversations that cannot fit into sixty seconds.

If you have resonated with This Crisis Changes Everything, I hope you join me! It’s time to get our hands dirty.

Here, we’ll examine in more depth the structure of crisis, resilience, ambition, reflection, identity, and what it actually means to bet on yourself when things feel unstable.

If you’ve ever felt muted by the chaos, I invite you to join me.

Subscribe now