Last Saturday night, I had the privilege of seeing Ben Rector perform with the Nashville Symphony. Rector, a strong songwriter in his own right, reaches his peak as an artist when an orchestra brings depth and grandeur beyond his typical guitar accompaniment.

Sitting in the audience and enjoying the beauty being created in front of us, made me reflect on the facsimiles of beauty all around us. We don’t encounter real art, but a curated Instagram post. We don’t experience storytelling, but a TikTok or YouTube short.

Much of our day to day existence takes things that are transcendent and expansive, and reduces them to miniscule versions presented on a 5” piece of glass.

A Quote

“We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

― C.S. Lewis

A book I’m reading

I’ll give you two

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Maybe you’ve seen the movie (which is excellent BTW), but if you haven’t yet - read the book first. It’s absolutely wonderful.

and

The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema. The behind the scenes story of how these three (and Martin Scorsese) made the modern cinematic world.

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Without further ado - this week, I want to introduce you to the Service Profit Chain. This idea is deceptively simple, but one of its creators took it seriously enough that he left being a professor at HBS to become CEO of Harrah’s in order to help bring the ideas to life.

We’ve talked for the last couple of weeks about why a service orientation is good for you personally. But it’s more than that, it’s actually good business.

The key insight of this article (and a book of the same name) is that great service originates in how businesses serve their employees. James Heckert and others introduced in the 1990s a model known as the Service Profit Chain.

What their research indicated was that the best way to provide excellent service to your customers (and thereby drive repeat purchase, brand loyalty, brand recommendations, etc.) was the internal service you provided to your employees. If you take care of your employees, they will be more engaged and better positioned to take better care of your customers.

The concept is deceptively simple (and maybe even sounds self-obvious). But it has critical implications. Considered thoughtfully, it should push you, whatever your role, to consider how you are taking care of your internal people as well as your external ones. This is true whether you are a supervisor, executive, or board member.

If you want to learn more - these two pieces are great and go into a lot more detail.

• Putting the Service Profit Chain to Work (1994)

• Service-profit chain: How Quality Drives Profit

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Today I’d like to offer a few additional benefits from a service focus, and a few practical ways we can work on shifting our mindset.

4 benefits from focusing on service:

1. Positive feelings from helping someone

2. It’s more in your control - You can help someone every day - vs. extrinsic rewards like compensation which may only be paid biweekly or change annually

3. Easier to get feedback - You can ask directly or observe your performance, allowing you the satisfaction of improving your performance in something

4. Pathways to growth - solving one problem may lead you to solve other problems for your client.

If those benefits sound appealing - how do you work to make the mental shift required? Especially if your work is busy..

4 ways to shift your mindset:

1. Do you clearly know what problem your clients approach you to solve? Is this the problem you think you solve? Do you find this problem compelling enough to care about it?

2. Do you know when you have solved the problem? Is there a sense of the service being finished/accomplished/complete? If not, can you structure some sort of a completion ritual into your workflow?

3. If you are super busy, can you slow your mind enough to recognize the human that you are helping? Can you build in a moment, even if brief, to see others in their need?

4. Can you get good enough at accomplishing your specific tasks so you can think about the overall experience? Once you can become unconsciously competent at something, you will often have the cognitive capacity to consider how to improve it.

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“Money comes naturally as the result of service. And it is absolutely necessary to have money. But we do not want to forget that the end of money is not ease but the opportunity to perform more service.”

Henry Ford

How do you handle your bad days at work?

As a younger man, I’d get frustrated or angry, but a workout and a couple of hours was more than enough to clear the fog.

The older I get, I have a lot less certainty about the world and my life. And if you knew me in my 20s, that’s not a bad thing.

Even a great job has its tough days. But sitting in mid-life, with both the benefit of perspective and a sense of the brevity of life. My anger turns a lot more quickly to existential questions. Questions like am I in the right spot? Do I have what it takes to be successful? And if I’m in the middle of an intractable problem, why do I keep trying to solve this?

These sorts of questions can be helpful, but not in the way that I thought originally. The point is not to answer them, time has a way of proving out the answers.

Instead, what I have found is that underlying those questions are often deep seated beliefs about what I expect my work to be like and what I expect my job to provide to me. What I’ve learned in sitting with and analyzing those beliefs is that most of the time, I’m approaching work with the wrong goal in mind.

What I really need then is not the answer to some deep existential question, it’s a reframe of the whole thing.

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So why do we keep showing up to work?

The need to make money makes this question irrelevant for most. Why does it matter why I show up, if I have to be there?

This is a lazy answer. Necessity might make it true, but it doesn’t have to be the final answer.

I have found it to be helpful to invert the question - and consider, how do people who don’t have to work for money feel about work?

Spend time on the high net worth Reddit channels (/rich, /fatfire /fattravel) and you’d be surprised what and how much people are willing to share. Reading these posts is a favorite distraction of mine.

One of the most common types of post is someone describing how they achieved their wildest financial dreams, and how they still feel lost in the world. There is probably one of these a week.

It seems that outcomes do not really matter to work satisfaction. Those who have to work can feel lost in what they are doing. Those who don’t have to work, feel the same way.

The root cause of the problem is not the absence or presence of money. Instead, it’s a flawed understanding of the purpose of work. For most, our labor has been about us - about our life and financial goals. It is about the effort expended in exchanged for the output received.

But there is an alternate motivation, a different fuel source, that I have found to be a lot more impactful.

Most of us are not actively choosing our vocations by considering whom and how we wish to serve our fellow man. But maybe we should.

Here’s how it’s looked in my own career.

While I hated my first job, I really liked my second. For ~6 years, I wrote and published roughly 2 articles a week of investment research. It was fascinating work to follow companies and markets that closely.

While the work was interesting, I was one of many analysts writing research on these companies. Trying to convince an institutional investor that we were the best was tough simply because the average potential client received hundreds of emails a day of similar product on similar companies.

The intellectual part of the work was compelling, but it was really tough to get to the place where someone would utilize the work we had done.

Over time, I moved into the advisory side of finance. Similar content, but I remember my first week on the job, we met with a family, who expressed a real need, that we were able to ultimately solve. It was exceptionally gratifying and I enjoyed helping someone with a real problem.

The ability to meet a need and solve a problem, doesn’t require you to have made your fortune. We can reframe our work from the perspective of service today.

Why service?

To answer that, we need to ask an orthogonal question. How do you become a person? An actual adult. A person of substance and depth. Someone who is left childhood behind and firmly moved into life.

Martin Shaw in his Liturgies of the Wild answers that question by looking at the great myths and finds that lives well lived follow a similar pattern. This pattern, like that of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a thousand faces, involved a departure from the status quo, a wrestling / facing of struggles, and a return.

Shaw characterizes those who return well, returns with both a limp and a blessing. A limp because of the cost of the lessons they have learned and a blessing they have ready to give to others. Shaw shows that the arc of life is to move towards the service of others.

The Pre-IPO Goldman Sachs was a great example of this. The partners of the firm were well compensated and certainly did not need to do anything else. But their had been a long history established of public service and many of those found places where they could take their smarts and relationships to Washington.

Or even consider retirees. The WSJ just had an interesting piece on retirement. “What these retirees were describing wasn’t just disappointment in a lack of opportunities. It was an erosion in something far more fundamental—their sense of mattering, the deep human need to feel valued and to have a chance to add value to the world. “

The author, Jennifer Breheny Wallace, went on to note that in her study of retirees, “the people who regained that sense of being needed tended to follow a simple, repeatable pattern: They identified a genuine need and met it with 3Ts—time, talent or treasure.” or said more simply, they were of service to others.

A clear interpretation here is that while their work was providing financial resources necessary to live (and prepare for their eventual retirement), it was at the same time providing tremendous psycho-social benefits. When the work went away, so did those benefits. As Wallace highlights, there are way to be useful to others, even if full-time, 40 hour a week work is not an option.

There seems to be something innate that points to wanting to help others as deeply orientating to our psyche.

How are we then of service to others?

To be a service, we have to address a real, actual need. Often we have ideas of needs people have. The question is - do those people actual want that problem solved right now, by you. There can easily be a mismatch between what we perceive and what people want.

Often, the needs we want to address are often things we really want to do. Using our imaginations, we easily envision that people might actually want us to help them in that way. And so because we can envision this, we assume the need is there.

For example, you go to the beach on vacation and one sunny afternoon on the board walk, you decide that a fresh squeezed, frozen lemonade would be the perfect refreshment. You look around at the local stores and no one is offering what you have in mind.

Should you start a frozen lemonade stand there?

You had a demand for the product. It doesn’t appear there is any competition. People love going to the beach and they love a frozen treat. Homerun - a can’t miss opportunity.

The problem? This entire analysis has occurred in your head, based off your personal experience, intuition and imagination. You may be 100% correct. But there is more data to gather to determine whether the idea is real and the need is actual.

There is a dialogue that must occur between us and the real world to understand where people are and what they are looking for. We cannot be of actual value to others if we are not in dialogue with them about their needs.

Service should solve the problem

When we work to address a need, our work should come as close as possible to actually addressing it. Like a motivational infomercial which promises “10 easy ways,” without ever revealing the answer, we must be careful to ensure that the service performed actually solves the problem.

It may take a few attempts to determine whether you have done so. For emerging types of problems, knowing you have arrived at the finish line may be an act of co-creation between you and the client.

There is tremendous satisfaction that comes from a job well done. Moreover there is a degree of madness that comes from having a project close, but not all the way complete.

Help your customer out and finish the job properly.

Service should feel like it did the job

Why do car dealerships wash your car? Sure it is is nice. But if you went in for maintenance or had a fan belt replaced, it all happens under the hood. Sure the problem is fixed, but does it feel like anything was actually done.

But a car wash returns your car with some degree of transformation - an outward sign of something that may have been hidden.

Don’t neglect the psychological feeling of the client when the act of service is complete. You may need to build in a moment or a ritual of some sort to help indicate the completion of / resolution of the task. To draw attention to the fact that the job was done and done well.

Service has boundaries

A common challenge with service is that if you have found a real need, people may need your service all the time. And because you are legitimately helping, saying no, putting boundaries on your service, can feel a lot like disappointing or abandoning someone.

But , service is always co-created between two people.

As a result, your limits are a key input to whether the service is successful. If you are too tired, run down, or no longer able to be fully present in the act, the service delivered will be greatly diminished.

You must know where the line is for where you are able to serve, and where you will stretch too far and be unable to continue.

Conclusion

Life knew better, and she was starting to guide me away from myself through service to others

Michael A Singer

Work does not have to be soley about the paycheck. If we will take a step back and connect to the service we are providing for another, we have a tremendous opportunity to see a higher purpose for our work.

This higher purpose can inspire us. It can provide fuel for creativity to find new ways to improve our work.

But moreover, this purpose can survive the bad days in our jobs that leave us scratching our heads or the good days in which we experience success.

Several years ago I was at an event for the leadership team, members and most engaged volunteers of a Nashville non-profit. During his address, the keynote speaker asked the audience to share the mission/vision statement of the organization.

The statement listed four or five priorities that the organization wanted to address. After hearing it, the speaker took a minute to reflect on each of the priorities and offer some thoughts that would be worth considering.

But, the most interesting part was not his reflection on each of the items. Rather, it was a quip he made as he reached the fourth and fifth items. He simply stopped speaking and said ‘these are actually not that important to you and you probably will do very little towards reaching them.’

His point was that if they were of greater importance they would have been listed higher in the order. But it felt bad to leave them out entirely, so they were relegated to the end of the list.

Whether in an organization or our own lives, there are a limitless of things we can possibly be doing. Far too often, there are too many key priorities, too many core values, and too many initiatives. When that happens, the extras get dropped off or the overwhelm factor (think Cheesecake Factory menu here) is so large that effort gets diluted across the massive list - meaning none actually get done.

This mirrors our basic biology. The human brain can only focus on a handful of things at a time. In his 2010 paper, “The Magical Mystery Four: How is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?” Nelson Cowan notes that our working memory can only keep three to five items in mind.

From personal experience, five feels like too many. Three, with a maybe four, is a reasonable number.

The most critical thing is the curation of the three things that matter the most at the current moment. There is an old saying that if you have four hours to cut down a tree, you are best served by spending the first three sharpening your axe. Narrowing the list of priorities is the analogous form of axe sharpening.

Doing so may feel overly simplistic or reductionist. Yet, I’ve seen it first hand. The first 10 years of my career, I spent analyzing companies as an investor. No matter the business or industry, all businesses really only have 1-2 key things that really matter.

The same is true with our priorities. This is the 80/20 rule applied in yet another context.

This does not mean that other things may not be important for tomorrow. It is the sequencing of when they are addressed that matters. An apple picked early is bitter, but one picked at the right time tastes sweet.

But for today, pick what is most critical now. And the rest can wait.

For this month’s field notes, I thought I’d share a list of what I read in Q1, and offer a few thoughts on each.

Here we go...

Non-fiction

• The Molecule of More – Daniel Z. Lieberman & Michael E. Long - This is a fascinating deep dive on how dopamine works inside the brain

• The Art of Spending Money – Morgan Housel - This was really enjoyable. Housel offers some a lot of reflections backed by research about how we should think about money and its use in our lives.

• Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert - Not one that would have been usually on my list, but a strong recommendation by a trusted friend put this on my radar. This is a poignant reflection on the role and power of creativity in our lives. I really enjoyed it.

• Liturgies of the Wild – Martin Shaw - I’ve mentioned this one in a prior newsletter - excellent

• Little Chapel on the River – Gwendolyn Bounds - A beautiful memoir on the power of consistent presence in a community

• Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver Burkeman - A best seller, I didn’t love it but more because I felt like I had encountered a lot of the ideas in other sources before.

• Runnin’ Down a Dream – Bill Gurley - I skimmed through this quickly - Would be a great resource for a college student / new grad. Honest thoughts and wisdom about how to find a life’s work.

• The Art of Learning – Josh Waitzkin - This was a re-read for me. Josh is an exceptionally deep thinker, so I find it worthwhile to wade in to his idea periodically because you need to encounter them several times to fully appreciate the wisdom therein.

Fiction

• Stone Yard Devotional – Charlotte Wood - Still scratching my head over this one. I enjoyed it, haven’t wrestled what I think about it down yet

• Savage Son – Jack Carr - Another in the Terminal List series (source for the TV show) - intense

• The Dream Hotel – Laila Lalami- Good concept but lacked the big plot twist to make it exceptionally gripping

• 4 of Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series - always entertaining

A quote

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker

A book I’m reading

The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema

“The untold, intimate story of how three young visionaries―Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg―revolutionized American cinema, creating the most iconic films in history while risking everything, redefining friendship, and shaping Hollywood as we know it.”

But that’s part of the tension of any human organization. The board has its ideal state—how it should function. Then there is the actual state. Both can be true at the same time.

To explain further, I’d like to walk through a simple 2x2 matrix I use to consider boards.

The matrix compares the board’s purpose with its power structure. The dimensions are the stated (aka ideal) and the actual. In my experience, boards have stated dimensions for each, and at the same time, there is the actual reality.

The key to being effective as a board member is to understand the difference between stated and actual for each dimension, and then position yourself to be effective when a circumstance calls for it.

A board may have:

Stated strategic purpose – the headline purpose of what the board is supposed to be addressing

Actual strategic purpose – the actual, critical strategic question that the organization should be wrestling with. It may be obvious, but it often can be hard to discuss because it risks rubbing an ego the wrong way.

Similarly, boards have two power structures:

The stated power structure – maybe there are committees and a board chair

The actual power structure – where and how decisions are made. It may not even be in the boardroom.

Which of these boxes you are operating in will tell you a lot about how to behave most effectively.

If you are operating in a place where the stated purpose of the board is on display, within the context of its stated power structure, these are places with high symbolic value. This is the pomp and circumstance, but maybe of questionable utility or pragmatism. Little of long-term strategic importance may be decided.

If you are in the zone where the board is considering its actual purpose within the stated power structure, these often are board meetings with a lot of cordiality, but board members may be exceptionally hesitant to share their actual opinions. Group cohesion is very important and often is self-reinforcing.

If you are considering the stated strategic purpose of the board but within the context of the actual power structure, the risk here is egotism and peacocking on one hand, or whining on the other. While the decision-makers are here, they aren’t focused on the right thing, for whatever reason.

If the actual power structure is focused on the actual board purpose, this is the zone of leverage. A board operating in this way can get a ton done.

So, to maximize your effectiveness on a board, you should understand these dimensions. Moreover, you need to be aware of which box you are sitting in during a given meeting or interaction. The box you are in will dictate your actions and shape your behavior.

Moving from quiet dissatisfaction to purposeful alignment

Join nearly 2,000 readers moving from ambition to excellence through the pursuit of service, craft, and time stewardship.

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I’m David Wells, a strategic thinker and author based in Nashville, TN. Over two decades, I have worked as an investor, entrepreneur, and board member blending philosophical depth with practical judgment.

I’m the author of two books, When Anything Is Possible and The Family Enterprise Playbook. I started Aspirations of Excellence, a weekly newsletter about how we find alignment in life.

Professionally, I serve as President of Greycourt & Co., advising some of the world’s wealthiest families on investment management, governance, and preparing rising generations. Previously, I co-founded a hedge fund, launched a strategy consultancy for single-family offices, and spent years in investment research.

A Wake Forest graduate with a business degree and a philosophy minor, I write about navigating midlife through the lenses of service, craft, and the wise stewardship of time. I’m an avid reader and lover of the arts, and live in Nashville with my wife, three children, and one very patient goldendoodle.

The best of Aspirations of Excellence

Excellence

• How to build a meaningful life Who we are becoming matters. It offers hope to those sad about who they are. It offers direction and purpose

• Why it’s so hard to be intentional

Craft

• Embracing mundanity through focus and practice “The little moments of life are profoundly important precisely because they are the little moments that we live in and that form us.” Paul David Tripp

• The Quiet War Between Now and Not-Yet When we narrow our focus on craft, on the steady pursuit of improvement each day, we remove the tyranny of the past or speculation about the future.

• The business of re-work. Whatever your creative act may be - whether in the arts or the office - get your repetitions up. Do more of it.

Service

• It may take 20 years to start your vocation. Not that anyone has asked (yet), here’s the college graduation speech I’d give today

Time

• You don’t know anything until you’ve had 100 meetings The first time I looked for a job I accidentally learned one of the most important lessons of my entire career.

• The pain of delay A problem avoided today accrues interest like a payday loan. Avoidance is never free.

I’m focusing in March on boards of directors and the high likelihood that you may choose to serve on one at some point.

Last week, we looked at the 'when’ of board service. Today, today, we are going to look at the ‘where.’ Specifically, how you can determine whether a board may be a good fit for you.

Here are a few questions that I have found to be helpful in your evaluation.

1. Is the company/organization/cause something you are actually interested in and do you have the time for it?

   1. For a for-profit, the rule of thumb is 100 hours / year time commitment per board

   2. You will be introduced to a community of others who do care about this organization / issue. You should actually be interested in it

   3. How does the board, the term length, committee meetings fit within your overall bandwidth?

2. Is your spouse ‘on board’ with adding something else to your agenda? If they were not super enthusiastic at the outset, they will be downright hostile if something arises that takes even more of your time.

3. How is board organized? Committees? Where does work actually get done? For some boards, the real work happens in the executive committee. What actually are you signing up for and are you ok with that?

4. What gap in the board matrix are you filling? Do you want to fill that gap? Maybe you are a lawyer and then board needs a lawyer, so you will be expected to serve in that way. But maybe you are a lawyer and want to work on fundraising - get clear on where you want to fit and where you are expected to perform.

5. Who is the CEO? How are they doing? Supporting a high performer is different from triaging the weaknesses of someone struggling.

6. Who is the board chair and how effective are they? How do they run meetings? Are they supporting an effective board culture or is dissent not something that occurs?

7. Do you understand where the organization is in its lifecycle? A startup will ask different things from a board vs. a mature organization that needs re-invigoration.

8. What is the culture of the organization like? How do they make decisions? How much/little bureaucracy? what is their approach to risk taking and management.

9. What is the financial condition of the organization? I’d recommend seeing 3 years worth of audits, the current year’s budget, and actual to date financial reports at a bare minimum. You need to know what you are stepping into.

10. What are the big issues the board is wrestling with? Also, Are there any quasi-political issues/stances - are you ok with being affiliated with? In this day and age, everything seems to have political or PR risk.

Years ago, an emergency all hands meeting was called by my then employer. The firm’s star employee, a gentleman with a tremendous reputation, not to mention an uncanny ability to generate revenues, had decided to leave the firm.

The CEO of the business announced the departure to the quiet room. A few gasps and gulps as the room digested the news. The CEO asked for questions, so I cautiously raised my hand and asked “what did the company’s board think of the departure?”

The CEO paused and then said that he hadn’t informed the board yet, nor did he know their point of view…

Maybe you want to serve on a board?

There are a lot of motivations for doing so - a chance to support a favorite cause (for non-profits), a chance to share your expertise, a chance to grow, potential compensation, prestige, etc.

It all sounds good and noble. But sometimes board’s have hard business - having to make decisions to terminate underperforming leaders, navigate crises, and more. Sometimes boards are functionally impotent, as in the case above.

For the month of March, we are going to look at boards and governance. Whether you are actively looking for a board role or like a stray cat, one finds you, odds are high that at some point, board service will be on offer.

I have been serving in governance roles for 20+ years - 9 non-profits, multiple industry organizations, and 4 corporate boards. I’d like to share a few things i’ve learned over that time.

You may have your ‘why’ for serving on a board. Today, I want to consider when. When are you ready to serve? When do you have the right mix of skills, wisdom, and enthusiasm to be impactful as a board member.

It’s a matter of perspective

First, the best time to join a board concerns your perspective as a leader. Careers follow a common ladder of perspective. Early on, your job is to manage yourself to achieve functional excellence. You were hired to do a thing, your job is to get quite good at it.

After that, you may be promoted to the Manager/Director level - depending on the corporate hierarchy. Managers are able to capably oversee doers of a function. The Managers perspective gets a bit broader, but is still highly focused on a single functional area.

Manager/directors typically then become vice-presidents. VPs are executives who know how to run something. They can consider multiple competing priorities and weigh their implications across functional groups. They may also have some degree of strategic input into the shape of what they are doing - aka bringing in an outside perspective regarding the competitive environment.

As VPs grow into “Chiefs” - CFO, COO, and CEOs - their perspective gets more and more broad. It begins to include regulatory concerns, priorities of shareholders regarding returns, etc.

This progression matters because at the Board level, your the perspective shifts even further. Board members sit at the nexus of the organization, the competitive environment, the regulatory climate.

But unlike VP and “chiefs”, board members do not have operating responsibility. I have seen time and again that some board members have a very hard time turning off the ‘operator’ skill set. It’s an honest mistake - the remainder of their careers they have been in the business of getting things done.

But the work of a Board member is different - it certainly involves goal setting and accountability - but is does not include the ‘how’ of getting things done - even if the how is compelling.

Many board members get caught discussing the how and can’t escape the trap. That’s not their job - it’s the job of management to determine the how.

A good board member is in the ‘so what’ business. What are the implications of the choices being made and how does that align with the longer-term goals of the business?

You might be ready to serve on a board when you are ready and capable of making this shift in perspective.

Building a strong network

The next critical determinate of ‘when” is the strength of your professional network. Board members bring more than just expertise - they bring relationships. These relationships might be with vendors, suppliers, customers, any of the key constituencies of the organization.

You may be ready for board service when you have a network that is of some actual value. A portion of your day should be spent getting to know others.

The more you can get to know others and be helpful to them, the more valuable you will be in the marketplace. Sometimes a business or organization needs a fast way to make a new contact - board members can be invaluable in that process.

Managing your calendar

The final ‘when’ is ‘when in your calendar’ will this fit. There is a rule of thumb to budget ~100 hours of time for each board. In my experience, the time commitment can be quite variable.

Regardless of the absolute amount, you should have enough space in your calendar for the meetings to fit. If you cannot attend, especially the in-person ones, you are missing out on a large portion of the relationship building that makes board work enjoyable.

Next week - we will consider where board service might be a fit….

Life’s greatest challenge may be endurance. Some times we must endure suffering. Some times, instead of suffering, it is delay. Endurance then looks a lot like patience.

So often we don’t recognize that a moment calls for endurance.

We know the proverb about the frog in the kettle. Dropped into a kettle of hot water, the frog wants to jump out. Put into a lukewarm kettle that is gradually warmed, the frog will stay put.

So often, when things happen - we want to just jump out. Something is hard, it isn’t going our way. We want to get away from it as quickly as possible.

For those of us with high self-agency, we may just attempt to bull doze our way through it and get to the other side.

But sometimes, that is not going to work. There are times where the path forward is the path through. And, we do not know how long it will be, what waits along the way, and what it will require of us.

If you aren’t scared by that, you should be.

These are places where we must be patient. We wait, but we don’t stop and waste away. It is not a place for idleness.

We persist. We encounter the ‘thorns and thistles’ of the ground. The failed harvest, the bad weather. The lost client. We see those as part of it.

We work to learn the lessons being offered.

We also don’t fall for the head fake. Some times there is nothing to learn. Luck can just be bad.

In all - we must guard our self talk - knowing how powerful negative language is.

A quote

“No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all of your decisions are about the future.”

-Ian Wilson quote, former GE executive.

A book I’m reading

Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us by Martin Shaw

“There’s an old Irish belief that if you aren’t wrapped in a cloak of story you will be unprepared for what the world will hurl at you. You remain adolescent at just the moment a culture worth its salt requires you to become a real, grown, human being.”

The article’s thesis was this - “Ambition must be powered by the right motivation, for it to be durable and sustainable over time.”

Here are the main points from the essay and a few questions that can help you consider the implications for your own life.

Point 1: You need to understand why you want to achieve your goal(s)

• What are you actually pursuing right now? Is it the thing you are working on or something deeper?

• How do you respond when things work in your favor?

• If you never achieve this, what will that mean in your life?

Point 2: Outcomes won’t be determined by ability

• Where are you telling yourself that you aren’t good enough yet?

• How are you exploring the limits of your capability?

• Where are you pushing yourself? Do you need someone to help push you?

Point 3: Learning to be patient and impatient

• Where can you simply go faster?

• How do you chose each day’s/week’s priorities? Are these priorities aligned with the most important thing?

• Where are you not seeing results? How will you continue to be disciplined where results have not materialized yet?

Point 4: The destination is uncertain and progress will be slow

• For destinations with a clear path, have you set the right goals to get there?

• For uncertain destinations, how are you feeding your curiosity? What are you reading? Who are you meeting?

• Where are you finding ways to experiment within the mundane of the day to day grind?

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Recently, I was having lunch with someone earlier in his career. He was trying to decide whether it was worth staying at his current job or if it was time to make a change.

Knowing when to quit is really hard.

We grow up in a culture that rightfully teaches us to honor our commitments. “We don’t quit sports teams in the middle of the season” or something similar.

At the same time, overstaying your welcome is fraught with its own challenges and long-term implications.

So how should you think about when to stay and when to go?

Here are a few thoughts of when it might make sense to quit -

• When something illegal and /or unethical is required of you. Obvious - If you have to violate your deepest principles, probably a good reason to bail
  

• Your boss is a jerk. My summer internship after my junior year of college was at a large financial services firm in FL. The guy who ran our department would call me into his office and yell at me for an hour - as a summer intern. He would regularly bring in members of his team to mock and shame their performance. Just an all around bad person - life’s too short.
  
  But please note - there is a difference between getting tough feedback and working for a jerk. Good bosses will push you and it may not feel great in the moment.
  

• When you are no longer learning and you are limited out. When you are earlier in your career, optimizing for learning is worthwhile. But you’ve got to give yourself at least 2 years in a job (generally), and longer as you get more senior.
  
  The key here is that you may be at a developmental plateau and with some patience, a next layer of learning may open up.
  

• When your boss does not see what you are capable of. Just as a prophet may be despised in his home town, sometimes the fact that you started at a junior level will limit your ability to grow at a firm.
  

• Knowing what you know now, you wouldn’t take the job / go down this path. Sometimes you go down a path, but what you learn tells you it’s the wrong one.

Here are a few indicators you may be on the right path - even with the normal ups and downs of a job?

• Do you like/respect the people you work with? The people you spend time with matter deeply.
  

• Do you get to spend the majority of your time in alignment with what you enjoy doing/are good at? Hopefully you can get as high as 75-80% within your zone of competence/enjoyment.
  

• Is your compensation within a reasonable range of what is a market rate for the role? If you aren’t drastically underpaid, don’t be too quick to make a change.
  

• Can what you feel is missing in your job be addressed in other ways? No job is going to bat 1,000 in leveraging everything you like doing, want to do, feel capable to do, etc. It can be exceptionally helpful to think of your career as a portfolio. Starting a side hustle. Volunteering. Finding a board to serve on.
  
  Assuming your core job is not taking 100 percent of your waking hours - you have time to engage in other things in your life. The blend of everything you are involved in can be a powerful contributor to feelings of career alignment.

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams…

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.

Arthur O’Shaughnessy

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Teddy Roosevelt

January 26, 2016 was a gut punch. At 9:18 that morning, I/we told the world we were closing the business we started 4 years ago. 9:18 that morning was when I had to tell about a thousand people that I was a failure. And it sucked.

Maybe you’ve lost the state championship game in front of a sellout crowd, this was my first bout with a big, public failure.

I have thought about that day almost every day since. And a decade later, I’ve only started to think I understand.

So to start 2026 off, I want to share what I’ve learned – what I wish I knew beforehand and what I think you should know now.

This is not some feel good b.s. about how failure really is a blessing in disguise. There’s no toxic positivity here.

Instead, I want to write honestly about ambition, about attempting to do big things, and what we all should know about reaching for greatness. I want to unpack what I’ve learned, what I wish I knew, that it might spare you some heartache along the way.

You need to understand why you want to achieve something

You need to understand that I really needed to be successful.

It’s not that I wanted the money, I needed the love.

Up to that point, I had seen that a decent dose of smarts + a high capacity for hard work opened the doors to almost everything that I wanted in life. I could see my own potential…

But riding alongside academic achievement was a strong sense of loneliness, of feeling different. How would I fill this sense of loneliness? I had a work ethic, a creative mind, and a dog with a bone level of determination/obstinance/refusal to take no for an answer.

So entrepreneurship felt like the best choice.

The gamble I made was simple - I would create something. That act of creation would allow me to be seen and valued in the way I felt I was lacking. At least that’s what I’ve been able to unpack with my therapist.

These were my motivations for reaching for greatness. You have yours. It’s just really important that you know what they actually are.

I didn’t understand any of this at the time. Instead, I was running towards something with a whole lot of my psyche riding on an outcome.

“Anything in life worth doing is worth overdoing. Moderation is for cowards”

- Shane Patton

Ambition is powered far too often by a selfish motivation, a need to do a specific thing in order to think/feel/be a certain way. The late pastor Tim Keller referred to this as “the work beneath the work.”

In Ancient Rome, ambition was the literal ‘going around’ required to attain political office. Even to this day, the word’s meaning includes this desire for “rank, fame, or power.” Ambition so often requires others to fall, so that we can rise.

Why do you want to achieve?

To attain power over others? To receive status in someway? How about to achieve something that will outlive you and attain some sort of immortality.

Whatever your reasons - they won’t work.

We know that because it never does. How many quotes from how many successful people do we have to read? Here are 3 of countless others.

“Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there’s something greater out there for me?” - Tom Brady

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” ― Jim Carrey

“the life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.’ - Aristotle

Even consider something as fickle as fame. As Scott Galloway noted in his recent book Notes on Being a Man, people may know your name, but they don’t know the real you. You may desire fame so you aren’t forgotten. But the crowd moves on quickly and moreover, the you they know is 2-dimensional, not the you that desperately wants to not be forgotten.

These common motivations for achievement are about delivering psychological or spiritual rewards. Why should we think that the answer to those sorts of problems would be found outside of the psychological or spiritual realms?

We quickly fall for the head fake – something that looks like it may give us what we were looking for. But is using the wrong tool to solve the problem.

There is both an honorable and dishonorable type ambition. Sure ambition can be about proving oneself.

But the other form is an ambition that is an aspiration, the seeking of a goal. There is an implied lightness to this. Certainly there is work and a strong pursuit, but it is not competitive with others.

We shouldn’t avoid ambition then at all costs. Instead, we should get the inputs, our reasons for it right. It is good to have big dreams, to want to do big things. These dreams are what propel the world forward.

But we should focus first on becoming the people that can survive our dreams - whether they come true or not.

Outcomes won’t be determined by ability

“There is no man living who isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.” - Henry Ford

Whether doors open or close for you will have little to do with your ability, in an absolute sense. Most things do not require you to be the best in the world. Better than most yes, but not Michael Phelps.

I believe and have been convinced from my own experiments that it is possible to move into the top 10% of nearly any domain based on effort and practice alone.

Now, of course, there are a select few domains in life that require 1% talent - professional sports comes to mind. But if you are 99.9% of people, that’s not going to be your path. For most, the top 10% of your field will be enough to provide you with the opportunities that you desire.

At the same time, you simply do not know what you are capable of.

It is widely known that Steve Jobs was a jerk to work for. Beyond demanding, at times cruel, and yet, those who worked for him exhibited tremendous loyalty. Most jerks have massive turnover, not mass accolades.

What made Jobs different?

His ability to get people to do things beyond what they believed they are capable of.

Far too often, our internal beliefs of our own capability are massively limited.

We do not see the possibility, nor believe we are capable of what is required. We see/hear an analogous message out of the US Special Forces, who repeatedly emphasize that when you think you have hit your limit physically, you are really nowhere near it.

Bottom line - ability won’t be what limits the outcomes of life, which is good because we do not really know what we are truly capable of.

Learning to be patient and impatient

“Why does he write like he’s running out of time?”

Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda

Ambition is a function of both motivation and intensity. If we want to get somewhere, we generally want to get there as quickly as possible. Or as Elon Musk’s stated, “Stop being patient and start asking yourself, how do I accomplish my 10-year plan in 6 months?”

Urgency can be an asset and a liability. It is a powerful fuel that can burn brightly to push achievement. And in fact, many things can move a lot more quickly than we realize. Urgency can also lead to impatience and the risk of making choices too soon.

Knowing when to quit and when to persist is one of life’s true mysteries. The risk is we choose to stop doing something right before the breakthrough of success.

Time is a great paradox. It is both quite short and limited, but also long. We perpetually feel rushed and short on time. But across the entirety of a lifetime of 80+ years, it is undeniably long.

Consider a story that Jensen Huang (founder of Nvidia) shared.

When his kids were still at home, they spent a summer in Japan. While visiting a famous temple, Huang came across a gardener who was using bamboo tweezer to tend to the moss of the garden.

“I walked up to him and I said, ‘What are you doing?’” said Huang. “He said, ‘I’m picking dead moss. I’m taking care of my garden.’ And I said, ‘But your garden is so big.’ And he responded, ‘I have cared for my garden for 25 years. I have plenty of time.’

The gardener knew something important - the push of urgency is often based in a scarcity mentality.

We have to do these things at these speeds b/c we do not have time to delay. If we do not get to our desired destination now, we may never get there at all.

And yet, some things will take far longer than we imagined. And still others, will never come to pass.

Hence the paradox of time.

Life is long [hopefully] and we have plenty of time. And yet, much can be accomplished quickly if we will push. We should be both patient and impatient

What then is the path of wisdom?

Taking one step forward each day.

My executive coach pushes me to each day write down the 2 (maybe 3 things) I want to accomplish. While not seemingly large in number, the daily push forward repeated with great frequency makes for a tremendous amount of progress.

They say part of Elon Musk’s managerial genius is that each week he picks the most glaring problem in his businesses and he spends the week trying to solve that. If each week you are solving the biggest issue (and you have a great team to keep everything else in motion), you cannot help by to see a tremendous amount of progress.

Steve Martin once told an interviewer about learning to play the banjo, “if I stay with it, then one day I will have been playing for forty years, and anyone who sticks with something for forty years will be pretty good at it.” That interview happened in 2007, and in 2012, Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers, were nominated for a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. Martin started playing banjo at the age of 17, the Grammy came at the age of 67 - a full 50 years later.

The destination is uncertain and progress will be slow

16 years ago, I began an annual process each December of setting goals for the year ahead. I built a list of goals across 10 categories. Now years later, I’ve been able to accomplish 90%+ of those goals.

We know from the success literature that goal setting is motivating and clarifying. People who set goals are in fact more likely to achieve them.

And yet, many longer-term dreams and ideas simply are too far out of reach to set a goal to attain them.

Professors Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman in their intriguing Why Greatness Cannot be Planned highlight that goal setting as a process works best for incremental improvements. In these situations, there is a clear relationship between current state and the desired future state. A goal provides a clear and understandable bridge between the present and the future.

The problem Stanley and Lehman call out is that the “the challenge of ambitious problems is that their solutions are more than one stepping stone away.” Sometimes, we have dreams of doing things that have never been done before. When that is the case, it is not always clear what the next logical step is.

Consider the invention of the vacuum tube. Vacuum tubes became integral to the design of the earliest computers such as ENIAC in 1946. But the vacuum tube itself was invented in 1904. It was not obvious in 1904 that this technology was going to assist in the development of computing.

So let’s call this the first problem of goal setting - we may not know where we want to go and if we do, we may have no idea how to get there. In fact, getting there may not even be possible.

The second problem of goal setting is the problem of developmental plateaus.

We all know of the concept of a learning curve - the idea that something is hard to learn at the beginning. Once you master some basic skills, you begin to be able to enjoy the activity. So while, it may take you a day or two to learn to snow ski - you are a long way from being Mikaela Shiffrin.

But let’s say you wanted to ski at her level. If you wanted to progress to that level of expertise, your progress will not be linear. You cannot chart out when you will reach that milestone on a table or calendar.

Instead, with any complex skill, we learn new skills and then may see a long period of time before we are actually able to advance to the next level. I shot golf rounds in the 80s for decades before I was able to card my first round in the high 70s.

These plateaus make goal setting a challenge. We do not know when we may run into a plateau that slows our progress. While we are on the plateau, we may worry that we have hit the limits of our ability and that our goal may ultimately be unachievable.

Plateaus can persist for a long time. Some times, it is our skills that must change for us to move to the next level. Sometimes, it is ourselves who must change to be ready for the next level. Who knows how long it can take to become the type of person who is ready for the next level.

Goals then are a two-sided sword. On the one hand, goal setting is really important. If you aren’t doing it regularly, you are missing out on achieving what all you are capable of.

At the same time, the big goals - the dreams you may have of changing the world, making a new invention, reaching new heights of art - these goals don’t have a linear path from today to achieving them.

Stanley and Lehman offer that the right response to his reality is that our focus should be on learning. If we are pursuing creativity and learning, and persist in doing so, we create the conditions for serendipity. And serendipity is what opens the path to the big goals, or reveals entirely new dreams we never would have come up with.

One of my favorite movies is Jiro Dreams of Sushi. This documentary is a beautiful and inspiring profile of a master sushi chef in Tokyo. There is a scene in the film that discusses how the chef, Jiro Ono, is the only one allowed to purchase a particular type of rice from his rice vendor. Ono spent an untold amount of time mastering what is required to optimize the cooking of this particular type of rice. Anyone else cooking with the same rice would be unable to have as good a final product.

I have to imagine that along the way, Ono had no idea what he was after. He just kept iterating and trying new ways to further improve and refine the production of the rice.

There is such an inspiring degree of persistence in the face of the mundane in this example. And yet, also tremendous creativity to keep developing new and better ways to improve the rice. As the documentary portrays, this level of rigor was incorporated across the entirety of the sushi making process.

Along the way, he no doubt discovered new things about making sushi, so much so that he is regarded as a master chef.

But at the outset, he focused on learning in the minutia. Then he just kept learning.

Conclusion

"The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both."

Lao-Tzu

There is a quirky little book written called Finite and Infinite Games written by a professor named James Carse. The core idea of the book is that in life there are some games we play where the whole point is the chance to win. Sports easily comes to mind. But, there are a lot of games in life where the whole point is the chance to keep playing the game. These are what Carse calls Infinite Games. Simon Sinek popularized this idea in his own book called The Infinite Game.

Most of life is not a finite game. We may play sports while we are growing up or even into adulthood. Or you may have an intense game of Settlers of Catan over the holidays with your family. These sorts of games with clear rules and clear winners/losers are welcome amusements and diversions from our everyday life.

Everyday life for nearly all is more likely to be an Infinite Game.

No one thinks of winning the game of golf. In the same way, there is no finish line in a career. There is a choice to begin doing something and keep doing it, and then maybe stop. Classic infinite games.

And so, we must be cautious when we bring a desire for a certain outcome to an infinite game. Outcomes based thinking can be toxic and set you up for heartache and disappointment.

And at the same time, we should not let the lack of a specific outcome spurn us from valiant effort. The over and under-achiever commit the same fundamental error.

We should attempt great feats, make notable quests, dream big dreams because we can. There is nobility in the attempt. The pursuit itself reveals something of who we are, but more over molds us into who we might be.

Those who don’t even try are less than they might be as people. Their lives will be less full as a result. Moreover, as those who share bonds of common humanity, we all will be worse off by their lack of ambition.

There is a hotel where I stay regularly for business travel, nothing fancy, a generic Marriott property. But the star of the hotel is the man who runs the breakfast buffet.

We all know a hotel breakfast can be hit or miss. But this gentleman opens his doors promptly each morning at 6. The buffet is spotless. He has great music playing in the kitchen. And he greets guests as they comes in. The hotel is fine, but watching him work is one of my favorite parts of the trip.

Its so easy to imagine the opposite. This is not a high prestige job, and I’m sure it’s not the most high paying. But here is a guy who is doing great things in common places.

Ambition must be powered by the right motivation, for it to be durable and sustainable over time. This gives us the mental framework then to both be urgent in working towards change, but patient to know that some things take an inordinately long time. As we go, we focus on learning, on creativity, attuned to the fact that sometimes where we think we are heading is not where we end up. And in fact, that destination may be even better than what we were capable of dreaming when we set out along the way.

A thought

What you “nerd out” about is not what / why you get hired.

Growing up, the pest control guy would come and treat our home. We called him “Steve the bug dork.” He did a great job keeping our house spider and ant free. When he finished his treatment, Steve wanted to talk at length about the chemicals he used, why they were effective, and all about the species he was targeting.

For Steve, it was the source of endless fascination. For us, while we admired his passion - we just wanted a bug free house.

Maybe you love investments and became a financial advisor. Or maybe you love theology, so you became a pastor, or you love the “game” of tax law….wherever you find yourself, you probably have something you love to nerd out about.

Occasionally, you may find someone who wants to nerd out with you. But don’t forget, the people that pay the bills - they didn’t hire you to nerd out with you, they hired you because of what your knowledge can do. for them.

They don’t care about the latest technique you used, they just want to know will the medical procedure fix the problem? Will their investments allow them to achieve the goals? adapt accordingly.

By all means, nerd out on things you love. But unless you meet a fellow nerd, figure out why the person is there, what they care about most.

Then use your knowledge to address that.

A quote

“[Emerson read] like a hawk sliding on the wind over a marsh, alert for what he could use.”

A book I’m reading

A Guide for the Perplexed: A Classic Philosophy on the Meaning of Life and Our Place in the World by E.F. Schumacher

During December, I read Schumacher’s economic classic - Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. While some of that book was technical and not immediately relevant to me. Schumacher’s interwoven commentary on life was quite poignant. So I thought I’d pick up this little book.

Schumacher was a professor of Economics at Oxford with Keynes

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For as long as I remember, I have loved penguins. I’m pretty sure my love affair began after reading Mr Popper’s Penguins - the delightful kids book by Richard and Florence Atwater.

In 1996, I was given the photograph below by my grandfather’s partner in his medical practice. It has set above my desk every day since.

Since then it has been a long-term dream to be able to go on my own trip to Antarctica - a trip from which I just returned.

I’m still digesting an incredible experience for which there may be more to share later. But en lieu of something more reflective, I wanted to share 10 things I learned during my trip.

1. Some albatross can spend as long as 5 years at sea without ever returning to land

2. Glacial ice makes a popping sound as it melts. Some areas sound almost like a big bowl of Rice Krispies

3. Weddell seals will use an air hole to live in the water during the winter. They will use their teeth to scrape out the hole

4. Whaling removed almost 3 million whales from the ocean with the greatest percentage coming from the Southern Ocean

5. Steve the Dog at Detaille island

6. Whales poop before they dive deep. Whale poop brings vital nutrients to the upper layers of the water

7. The scale of Antarctica is deceiving. Everything is massive and panoramic making it hard to distinguish what is large or small

8. Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. “The AMOC is a system of ocean currents that circulates water within the Atlantic Ocean, bringing warm water north and cold water south.”

9. You can turn on a level on your iPhone camera so you know that your photos have a correctly horizontal horizon line

10. Seawater can go below 0 degrees Celsius without freezing because of the salt content

In the 1960s and 1970s, UCLA won 10 of 12 national championships in basketball – 7 consecutively. All this under the leadership of the now legendary coach, John Wooden.

You can’t read or think much about the topic of excellence without running into Wooden.

If you haven’t already, it is worth reading Wooden: A lifetime of observations and reflections on and off the court. This wonderful little book captures the Coach’s clear thinking on a wide range of topics.

Here are just a few ideas jumped out at me.

• If you have it within your power to work twice as hard why aren’t you doing it now? If you sincerely try to do your best to make each day a masterpiece, angels can do no better.

• There is a wonderful almost mystical law of nature that says 3 of the things we want most –happiness, freedom, and peace of mind - are always attained when we give them to others

• The person you are is the person your child will become

• Too often fathers...get so caught up in making a living they forget to make a life

• There is something wrong if you fail to measure up to your ability because you haven’t prepared

• You always win when you make the full effort to do the best of which you are capable. I know that only one person on earth knows if you made your best effort: not your coach, not your employer, not your husband or wife, or boyfriend or girlfriend, brother or sister. The only person who knows is you. You can fool everyone else

• I believe in the basics, attention to imperfection of tiny details that might be overlooked

• If UCLA had never won a national championship while I was coaching there I would have still considered myself very successful because I was judging myself on other things things I had some control over

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To start off 2026,

I wanted to share an email I sent to our team recently. Hopefully it sparks a few ideas for you as your year begins.

Best,

David

Happy New Years!

It’s been a heck of a year for the firm and there’s a lot to look forward to for 2026.

I don’t know how you approach the end of a year and the beginning of the next. Maybe you make resolutions, maybe you just want to relax and put ‘25 in the rear view.

I’d like to challenge you to think about goals.

Rather than come to you with data about the power of goal setting, I’ll just share my story. 15 years ago, I got serious about goal setting for the first time.

Each year since, I have set clear, measurable goals for life, work, and family. With the benefit of a personal ‘track record,’ I can say definitively that this has been transformative in my life. I’ve been able to learn new things, build deeper relationships, and grow professionally all because I took the time to write something down.

I’d encourage you to do the same.

Here’s how I’d start.

First, begin with a review and diagnostic. I’ve found this rubric to be helpful:

Next - develop goals across each of those domains.

Write them down and put them where you can see them. Mine live in a spreadsheet that I have a reminder on my calendar to review at least 1x a month.

Third - decide on your metrics

Goals are best when they are SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time Bound. Don’t dismiss the measurable part. Give yourself something you can monitor your progress on. Even if the goal is qualitative - you can find something to monitor along the way.

I’ve found outcomes focused metrics aren’t really helpful because outcomes are often non-controllable. Instead, focus on an input metric - something you can clearly do, an action that is yours.

Fourth - build habits.

There is a reason why James Clear’s Atomic Habits has been on the NY Times bestseller list for 86 consecutive weeks and has 144,678 reviews on Amazon.

Learning how to regularly build habits for new things I want to do has unlocked a tremendous amount for me.

Fifth - tell a friend.

Public accountability is powerfully motivating to us all. Find a friend, a loved one, strangers on the Internet - put it out there and let someone know. They can push you when you want to give up, and celebrate with you along the way.

What will 2026 hold for you?

“There is no [person] living who isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.”

    - Henry Ford

We don’t have a ‘rah-rah’ culture here at the firm. But don’t let your inner skeptic miss what i’m trying to say.

You are all a talented and accomplished group.

Great things are in store for the firm. Moreover, I’m confident that great things are in store for each of you personally.

If you will push in on how you set your goals, the first domino will fall.

Let me know how it goes.

Best,

David

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Aspirations of Excellence is reaching the end of its 2nd full year, and in 2025, I published 50 posts.

Here’s what I’ve learned this year in the process

1. Getting clear on what I want to write about. I’m grateful to you readers as the focus and purpose of this newsletter has emerged and evolved. I’ve spent the fall working closely with Dan Blank, a wonderful marketing yoda to further refine and focus this newsletter.
   
   Aspirations of Excellence is about how we move towards purposeful alignment by anchoring our lives in service, elevate our efforts through craft, and refocusing our days through wise stewardship of time.
   
   I’m working to focus further each post on this - and welcome your thoughts and feedback along the way

2. Finding my voice. The act of writing is not necessarily hard. Pen to paper, and words come out. But, learning how to say something worth writing, is a whole different animal.
   

3. Creating out of fullness rather than absence. So often the actions we take are a result of perceived lack in our lives. Learning to rest, practice gratitude, and then engage from a perspective of fullness is a practice that I’m seeing a lot of blessing in.

Here are the top 5 posts of the year:

• The pain of delay - A problem avoided today accrues interest like a payday loan. Avoidance is never free.

• 10 thoughts on time - “Time is a storm in which we are all lost.” ― William Carlos Williams

• The assessment of worthiness When a beloved leader is gone, the eventual successor will inevitably hear about having ‘big shoes to fill.’

• 10 thoughts on communication

• It may take 20 years to start your vocation. Regardless of where you think you are heading, here is the reality: None of you know what is coming.

Here were a few others favorites of mine in case you missed one

• Making space In filling emptiness, we miss a deeper truth. Space can be deeply soothing and therapeutic.

• You don’t know anything until you’ve had 100 meetings The first time I looked for a job I accidentally learned one of the most important lessons of my entire career.

• The lost art of waiting “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.” — Leo Tolstoy

• Embracing mundanity through focus and practice “The little moments of life are profoundly important precisely because they are the little moments that we live in and that form us.” Paul David Tripp

• How to build a meaningful life Who we are becoming matters. It offers hope to those sad about who they are. It offers direction and purpose for those whose delight in themselves rivals that of Dorian Gray.

Best wishes for your 2026,

David

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You may be reading this in the full chaos of the holidays. The to-do list remains long and family is on the way. But at some point in the next 10 days, I’m optimistic we will all find a quiet moment. A chance to put the phone aside and to simply observe a heartbeat of silence and stillness.

A chance to reflect on the year behind - the good, the bad, perhaps the breathtakingly painful. I pray that you will savor that moment, however fleeting, and observe the simple profundity of the classic refrain, “silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.”

A quote

We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors—walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.

—Nietzsche

A book I’m reading

The Year of Less by Cait Flanders

Flanders takes a year off from consumption - only purchasing things that have worn out or that need replacing. The book is a great reflection on her journey to find what matters most in life.

Flanders reminds me of this quote from Lost Connections - “What you really need is connection. But what you are told you need, in our culture, is stuff and a superior status, and in the gap between those two signals - from yourself and from society - depression and anxiety will grow as your real needs go unmet.”

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