But in reality, this is what’s happening:

And so on.

We equate conversation with the words that are spoken, but much of the dialogue is actually happening in your own mind. When you listen to someone in this way, you’re scanning for the most compelling thing to respond to, knowing that your chance to speak will be coming up soon.

And once you’ve identified that interesting point, you begin to formulate your response to it, effectively tuning out whatever the person says after that.

This is what I call Impulsive Listening, where your desire to listen is driven by the impulse to reply. It’s when the volume of your own thoughts is louder than the words that may be spoken by the other, which puts you at the center of the conversation the whole way through.

Impulsive Listening is what causes anxiety throughout any given conversation. When you’re so focused on what you’re going to say next, you feel like the spotlight is always on you, regardless of who’s talking. You’re often processing the person’s current point while formulating your reply to their previous point, and this deluge of thought nullifies your ability to be present.

So the key is to tame this impulse to reply. But how do we go about doing that? After all, isn’t the very nature of conversation to respond to what another person has said? Isn’t the game of ping-pong the most apt way to describe the flow of a good conversation?

There is truth to this analogy, but one thing that’s worth asking is the following:

What makes a great conversation?

If you sit with this question long enough, you’ll find that it’s not necessarily the back-and-forth nature of a conversation that makes it great. It’s not the sustained rally of point-after-point that makes it compelling.

Rather, what makes a conversation feel worthwhile is if it expanded your mind. It’s when you learned something interesting, felt something deep, or laughed heartily throughout. In other words, a great conversation materializes when you give yourself the space to receive what the other has said, and your reaction happens then and there. You’re not mentally bookmarking a statement to address for later, and you’re not trying to craft an intelligible remark to sound smart.

We may understand this in theory, but it’s difficult to put into practice because we find silence discomforting. One of the immediate triggers of social anxiety is the “awkward silence,” and our desire to avoid it is perhaps the leading cause of Impulsive Listening. We desperately want to have a response ready so that we don’t have to deal with the elevated heart rate that can accompany the absence of sound.

But another thing worth asking is the following:

What makes silence uncomfortable?

Well, the first thing you’ll realize when you sit with this question is that it depends on context. Silence on a meditation retreat isn’t just a requisite, it’s desired. The same goes for when you take a walk in nature. By giving yourself the space to still your mind, you allow clarity to seep in, one light ray at a time.

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Expectations shift, however, when you’re in a social setting.

When you seek clarity within the scope of a conversation, you don’t expect it to be found in the absence of words. Rather, you look for them within the arrangement of the words themselves. It’s through the stream of dialogue that you expect clarity to flow its way through you.

And because we place so much value on what is spoken, we judge the value of our contribution by the words we speak. The question of self-worth is at the center of all this, even if it’s subtle. If you have nothing to say in a conversation, you feel tense because a narrative of disapproval starts filling your mind.

Anxiety is most noticeable in the person that can’t allow silence to persist. Even a second of silence can be unbearable to some, and they’ll need to say something to alleviate the discomfort that may be arising in their mind and body. For this person, real listening is an impossibility.

In order to truly listen, we need to reframe our interpretation of silence. Instead of viewing it as a marker of a flat conversation, we need to see it as a signal of a point that is being internalized. As a way of communicating that you were truly listening to their point, which is why you now need a moment to process and formulate a response.

But of course, it’s nuanced.

When you’re meeting someone for the first time (or when you don’t know the other person that well), silence will likely have the opposite effect. Oftentimes, the other person may interpret your silence as an indicator that you weren’t listening to what they were saying. That’s because when you don’t know someone well, you’re reliant upon dialogue to make up for that gap in shared experience. And when the dialogue isn’t flowing back-and-forth, it feels like there’s not much in common between you after all.

That’s why anxiety tends to be higher when you’re with people you don’t know. The words you speak hold more weight, and the absence of them makes you feel like you’re dropping the ball on this interaction. Given this dynamic, it’s hard to truly listen to what the other is saying, and to override the impulse to latch onto a statement and formulate a response right away.

In these situations, it’s important to ease into the silence. You want to be fully present and listen to everything they’re saying, but to also let them know that you’re processing things shortly afterward. That way your silence isn’t misinterpreted as indifference.

One way I do this is to simply let the other person know that I need a moment to think through what was said. I could either be explicit about it:

Or I could be brief to signal that I need a moment:

It’s remarkable how something so simple changes the texture of silence. By prefacing that you need a moment, you’re indicating that (1) you were really listening, and that (2) this silent period shouldn’t be awkward. This makes the silence feel welcome, and opens up the breathing room required to process the dialogue in a mindful manner.

All right. So what about people you do know well? How can you ensure that you’re listening to them with full presence of mind?

What I find most interesting about close relationships is how we tend to take them for granted. That the more comfortable you are with someone, the more permission you give yourself to put your brain on auto-pilot and tune out at any given moment.

Think of the quintessential image of a family having dinner at a restaurant, where everyone is on their phones:

Or how it becomes okay to zone out during a conversation you’re having with your partner:

And so on.

Things that we’d never do when we meet someone for the first time become commonplace for the people we see all the time. I get it though. In one sense, that’s why close relationships are so precious. You can let your guard down and occupy a rare space where mannerisms and norms don’t govern it.

But on the other hand, it’s easy to get complacent and miss every opportunity to get to know one another better. Just because you know someone well doesn’t mean that you’ve uncovered everything there is to know. Every human being possesses an incredibly nuanced and fascinating mind, and even if you’ve known one another for decades, there is always more terrain to cover.

So when it comes to the people you know well, the art of listening is to reinvigorate your interest in learning more about them. To not take the silence for granted, and to view it as an indicator for you to ask questions and to allow dialogue to take center stage once again.

For example, I’ve known my wife for close to a decade now. We’ve shared thousands of meals together, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you that each one was full of mind-blowing dialogue that uncovered some core element of who we are. There were plenty of unremarkable meals where we just watched TV together or sat in silence while we were thinking our own thoughts.

But there have also been many, many meals where we asked each other a bunch of questions, spoke about our greatest fears, and celebrated our small triumphs. With each of these conversations, we learned a bit more about one another, and understood that one life contains multitudes. Neither me nor my wife are the same person we were 10 years ago, and it’s only through consistent dialogue where we realize how much our worldviews have changed, and how we’re attempting to align ours together over time.

The art of listening isn’t just about taking in what the other person is saying. It’s also about reassuring the other person that you haven’t extinguished the flame of curiosity when it comes to your bond. That you’re not going to be complacent. That you’re not going to be okay with treating silence as a given, despite the privilege you have of being comfortable with it.

Listening is the silencing of the mind, but it’s also being aware of when it’s time to speak again. It’s about listening without the desire to respond, but giving space to process those words so you can respond in a thoughtful manner.

Ultimately, to listen is to be compassionate. And when conversation becomes a vehicle for kindness, you will notice just how powerful each one can be.

Or you may be here:

Or here:

But most likely, you’re probably here:

It’s just another day… and you’re just doing what you need to do.

You’re getting things done, and the day moves forward in this continuous sequence of checklists, actions, and respites.

But at various moments of your routine, you pause and take a good look at your surroundings.

The scenes of your everyday life. The blur of this all-too-familiar film.

And you can’t help but to wonder…

If there is more to it all.

For some reason — this country, this city, this neighborhood, this particular street — is the place you are living a majority of your life in.

And it is this thought that allows a daydream to seep in.

You start thinking of all the other places you could be in this world.

Or more accurately, all the places you’d rather be in.

Somewhere more exciting. Somewhere new. Somewhere that can provide experiences that are foreign to you.

You dream of going to the beautiful beaches of Thailand:

Or to Paris, where you can eat French food, enjoy delicious wine, and walk around the illuminated streets that you’ve heard so much about:

Or to Peru, where you can finally go to Machu Picchu and see the architectural wonder that an inexplicably high percentage of your friends have in their Facebook profile pictures:

Or to Alaska, where you can witness the glory of the aurora borealis in all its splendor:

The world is your playground, and you are certain that these unexplored areas will become sources of adventure, wonderment, and ultimately, happiness.

Travel is the answer much of us look to when we feel the automation of life. The routine of waking up, getting ready, going to work, eating the same lunch, sitting in meetings, getting off work, going home, eating dinner, relaxing, going to sleep, and then doing it all over again can feel like a never-ending road that is housed within the confines of a mundane box.

This is The Box of Daily Experience, and it is the space we occupy on any given day of the week/month/year in which we live our lives. It is what we consider “normal” in the context of an everyday experience, and is the operating system we run ourselves on when we require a sequence of events to default to.

The boundaries of our box define our present-day situation, so when we dreamingly gaze toward the prospects of an exciting future, we look outside of it to experience emotions like wonderment, amazement, and inspiration. Our current box is okay and livable, but the world outside of its boundaries is where our hope really resides.

Since much of what we desire lives on the outside (i.e. in the future), we make it the mission of our Box of Daily Experience to make contact with the outer world as much as possible. This touch represents the achievement of our goals and validates our aspirations. We hope that this brief contact will change the architecture of our box, but ultimately, the result is fleeting.

For example, let’s say that a friend introduces you to the existence of an awesome new car. You are immediately intrigued by it, and as you read review after review of its astonishing performance, the car quickly becomes an object of intense excitement and desire for you.

The outer world has given you a tangible goal to work towards, and your box will do whatever it can to give you the resources you need to reach it.

So you churn and churn through the cycle of the daily experience.

Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, months into years.

And one day, your hard work pays off. You receive that fat promotion you’ve been working towards, and now you can finally afford that beautiful car!

Excitement froths at the brim of your mind as you purchase it and drive it off the lot. This is what you’ve been working so hard for! Now that you have this car, the structure of your box has fundamentally changed, and your box as you know it will no longer be the same!

You start driving it to and from work, to and from your hang out sessions with friends, to and from everywhere.

But here’s the thing.

While you’re still happy to have the new car, you notice that your excitement about owning it just isn’t as high as that day you drove it off the lot.

Then some months pass, with fewer and fewer people commenting on the novelty of your car.

And even more time passes. You get into your car, drive it to and from work, get stuck in traffic, park it in the same old spot, etc.

Your car is starting to look a little dirty, but you don’t care about washing it too much anymore because your car is just… a car now.

It’s been years since you’ve purchased it, and now it’s simply a vehicle that takes you from Point A to Point B with unremarkable regularity.

And then one day, your box is simply The Box of Daily Experience again, with the same mundane texture and familiar color it possessed in the past.

The interesting thing is that you can replace the object of desire (car) with any other noun (a new house, a new job, a new relationship, etc.), and the same pattern will emerge. Shifting and swapping the contents of your box may briefly alter the shape of it in the form of excitement, but in the end, these things will become just another part of normal life.

So if moving around the contents of the box doesn’t work, you look to the supposed root of the problem:

The box itself.

You decide that the box known as your environment needs to be left behind because it is the source of perpetual discontentment to begin with. You need to rip open the box and jettison yourself into an unfamiliar territory that holds the key to true novelty and sustained wonderment.

And you determine that the best way to do this is through the avenue of travel.

So you save up some money, take some time off work, pack up your bags, and head off to a country you’ve never been to. You can now revel in the beauty of the unfamiliar and immerse yourself in a boundless expanse of culture, cuisine, and life that your box has never known.

The drawback to this is that for most of us, traveling happens in the form of vacations. A vacation is designed to be an exciting respite we take to keep us incentivized to return back to The Box of Daily Experience upon its conclusion. In a way, it’s absurdly paradoxical — churning the gears of the box is what provides us with the fiscal resources to break out of it, but the wonderful memories of our vacations are what brings us squarely back to the box once again.

As a result, if you’re traveling as a form of vacation, you know you will be back in your box very, very shortly. This tends to provoke the behavior of “experience maximization,” in which you’re running around in a flurry of fatiguing excitement to experience every moment possible in your travels.

And inevitably, you’re back in the box, counting down the days in which you can do it again.

It’s times like these when you begin to dream of getting out of The Box of Daily Experience for good. You realize that a vacation only serves as a dopamine hit of cultural experience, as the built-in time constraints don’t allow you to truly understand the tapestry of a foreign place.

And one day, you firmly decide that the answer does not reside in the box you live in now.

It’s elsewhere, in a faraway place that you once visited and enjoyed.

But this time, you’ll be gone for a really, really long time.

Surely, what you’re looking for must be there. Not here.

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Once you arrive in your new environment, the excitement is palpable. Not only have you have immersed yourself in a completely new part of the world, but you also have the time to explore every crevice of it.

You are introduced to some new friends that live in this foreign land, and you guys make your way downtown to check out all that awesome food you’ve heard about.

Next thing you know, you have a new crew of people to hang out with! They are fun, entertaining, and exciting, which were some elements that were missing from the people back home. These new folks have a deep understanding of a culture you’re eager to learn more about, so every hang out session with them is an opportunity to do things you’ve never done before.

You can also see things you’ve never seen before too, and it’s fantastic.

Wow.

If someone asks you how life is going, you can emphatically say that it’s simply amazing.

But remember, since you are going to be staying here for a while, having fun with interesting people and seeing new sights are not reliable roadmaps for financial sustainability. And plus, all of your friends are busy in the daytime with work, and being a lone wanderer in the early afternoon is only fun for so long.

So yup, it’s time to get yourself a job.

The nature of the work is pretty similar to what you were doing in the past — it’s not ideal, but it supports your dream of traveling and breaking out of the old box, so it’s good enough.

All right. Everything is set. You now have a resource-producing engine that can power your stay in your new home, and you can continue having great experiences in this land as time progresses.

But here’s the thing about time. No matter where you are, it moves in one direction.

Forward.

And this linear movement of time is nature’s way of testing what we have labeled as meaningful. Only time can reveal whether a certain pursuit is driven by fleeting novelty, or if it is motivated by a strong sense of enduring purpose.

And when it comes to travel, the test of time reveals a pursuit driven by novelty very, very quickly.

As the days in this foreign country turn into weeks, the experiences begin to occur with a familiar sense of regularity.

The food that you excitedly ate when you first arrived has now become your weekday dinner spot:

The friends that showed you all those cool cultural things when you first arrived are now people you see every week. On top of that, you often hang out at the same places all the time as well:

The sights you initially paid to go see simply become buildings you pass by on the way to work:

The job you have here feels just like your job back home again. And speaking of home, you begin to wonder how your friends are doing, as these are the folks that have been with you through years of shared experiences, and not through weeks of short-lived moments.

And without consciously realizing it yet, your life events are sequencing themselves into a familiar order… One that you tried so desperately to escape not too long ago.

And as the weeks turn into months, the stark reality of it all hits you. The boundaries of an all-too-familiar shape have taken hold.

Uh-oh.

The Box of Daily Experience has contained you once again.

Oh no! What the hell is this box doing here again?! How has it followed you all the way over here?!

Perhaps it’s time to find another place to go to?! Somewhere even further away?! A whole other continent maybe? Since The Box of Daily Experience has returned, the subsequent urge to break out of it has come back as well.

But here’s the thing. Regardless of what you do to break out of the box, it won’t work. You can change your external environment all you want, but you will continue to travel with the one box that will always accompany you.

The box known as your mind.

When we are obsessed with travel, we are intently focused on changing and revising our external venue while neglecting the one constant we all travel with: our minds.

If your mind is not at ease, then the same angst and restlessness you feel today will inevitably make itself known as you travel. That point can be delayed through novel experiences, but regardless of where you are, an uneasy mind will always unveil itself in the end.

That feeling of restlessness underlying all the unresolved issues you have at home will follow you wherever you go. A strained relationship with your family, a sense of purposelessness in work, a low self-worth, a strong tension with your partner, a lurking depression — the answer to any of these things does not lie in a one-way ticket to a faraway place.

Socrates said it best:

We tend to grossly overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones. While travel is a fantastic way to gain insight into unfamiliar cultures and illuminating ways of life, it is not a cure for discontentment of the mind.

Who we are inside a venue matters far more than the venue itself. Instead of having the wanderlust of travel guide our search for meaning, we have to look within and embrace the only thing that is present now. The only thing that actually exists today.

The Box of Daily Experience.

Instead of viewing this box as a problem to escape, we have to realize that it is indeed the only thing that we can truly hold onto.

When you view life as a continuous cycle in this box, it can be easy to take its components for granted and view everything as a mundane blur of familiar events. However, when you take the time to actually inspect the box with mindful awareness of its contents, you will discover the true amazement that lives within them. And the best tool one can use to magnify these great discoveries is the practice of gratitude.

Gratitude is what allows you to feel that same sense of wonderment about your day-to-day life as you would if you were walking the streets of a faraway city.

Gratitude is what illuminates the fact that you are a collection of (billions of) atoms that have come together to create this amazing combination of cells, neurons, and organs that allow you to touch things, taste delicious food, go hiking, laugh at funny jokes, and view the stars in a nighttime sky.

Gratitude is what allows you to realize that everyone you know and love also happens to be this collection of atoms that have assembled themselves at this precise point in time, when they could have been born thousands of years earlier or hundreds of years later. The alignment of our personal ancestries, the fact that all our forebears were healthy (and attractive) enough to reproduce, and the crazy timing of us being birthed into this world at roughly the same time is an astounding coincidence that we can’t help but to be utterly amazed about and grateful for.

Being grateful about our existence and its relation to others allows for a blossoming of meaning and purpose in our exploration of this life. It is the starting point for an endless list of awesome things we have going for us, and we don’t need to change our physical location one bit to witness this list grow.

If gratitude is the tool we use to highlight the innate beauty existing within our boxes, then practices such as mindfulness meditation allows these realizations to actually become a part of our daily outlook. One of the difficult things about the routines embedded in our daily experience is that they tend to congeal into one giant, uniform blob that we label as “life.” And this blob can harden over time to create an impenetrable barrier that prevents us from absorbing helpful advice and realizations that come to light.

What meditation helps to do is soften the texture of this blob by removing our hardened egos and neurotic thoughts from the inner core of our consciousness. What we are left with is clarity and openness to see The Box of Daily Experience for what it really is: a reflection of life that can be eased into fluidity with the proper attention and care.

While clarity of experience is a direct path to the calming of the mind, there is another beautiful quality to our consciousness that is often overlooked.

The ability to find fascination in the minds of others.

One source of constant wonderment and adventure comes in the form of books. Instead of searching for inspiring experiences in faraway places, these awesome things are abundantly available to us at all times.

I particularly enjoy reading works of non-fiction, but any form of good literature is utterly captivating. Keep in mind that whenever you pick up a good book to read, you are taking an extensive journey into the mind of the author. It’s amazing to me that as an ordinary person, I have immediate access to the greatest minds of the past and present, and can absorb years and years of their toiling research in just a matter of days or weeks.

I can place myself in the mind of a renowned philosopher pondering the mystery of consciousness, or I can take a seat in the mind of a historian detailing the Mongol conquest under Genghis Khan. I can learn about anything I so desire, and that is an adventure that can always be brought to where I am now.

This ability to be captivated by the minds of others is also widely available in the form of our loved ones and friends. However, it’s the people closest to us that we often take for granted. We tend to think we know everything there is to know about them, and our inquisitive nature is often reserved for strangers and small talk.

But when we genuinely become curious about our relationships, we discover that we have only touched the surface with many of the people we hold dear to us. I find this to be a recurring pattern with many of my own friends. Simply asking a question at the right moment has often led to interesting stories and perspectives that were previously veiled from my view.

This sharing of stories is one of the great joys I’ve experienced over and over again with people. There is always an interesting story behind every mind — and hearing it widens the health of our own.

While travel does expand and stretch the horizons of what we know about the world, it is not the answer we’re looking for in times of unrest. To strengthen the health of the mind, the venue to do that in is the one we are in now.

It is location-independent, and always will be.

The key is not to discard The Box of Daily Experience and find a new one — it’s to warmly embrace the one that we have now — with its joys, its flaws, and everything in between.

Note: This post is my adaptation of Seneca’s awesome letter to Lucilius on the subject of travel. I highly recommend that you check it out—along with all of Seneca’s other wonderful letters as well.

I had never won any type of trophy in my life, so I was excited to tell my dad that there was a good chance I could finally win something that wasn’t made of paper. Needless to say, I hyped up this ceremony quite a bit, so my father proudly agreed to accompany me that evening.

The school auditorium was bustling with pimply-faced teenagers in ill-fitting dress shirts, and nervous energy bubbled around all the attending families. My dad and I found some seats in the middle of it all, with a clear view of the stage that I was sure I’d be standing on later that night. After all, I was nominated in three categories, so I was bound to win something, right?

About half an hour into the ceremony, the first category I was nominated in was announced, and the award went to…

Someone else.

I recall glancing over at my dad briefly to get an idea of his emotional situation.

He seemed stoic, which was a good sign. He was probably holding out on some hope, just like I was, but was containing it within the bounds of his expressionless face.

The next category I was nominated in came up shortly after, and the award went to…

You got it.

Not this guy’s son.

A slight eye twitch was all I got from that news. It was probably the physical onset of an inevitable disappointment that was quickly dawning upon him.

It wasn’t long until the third category was announced, and you guessed it… the winner’s name wasn’t the one my dad gave me.

I briefly shifted my eyeballs over to his face again.

I recall looking at the time and seeing that there was still a whole hour left to go in this damn ceremony. Many more teachers had awards to hand out, and despite knowing that my chances were over, my dad continued to sit still and watch the rest of it.

The whole time, his face was the same.

After the ceremony mercifully ended, my dad got up and we silently walked over to the car. Thinking that the hell was over, I gleefully asked him if we were going to Dairy Queen for some ice cream.

It was as if that question never entered his ear canals. It just bonked off the side of his head and floated into the heavens, never to be heard by any creature in the cosmos.

We drove straight home, and that was how the evening concluded.

An extended period of silent treatment ensued, and after a while, I started getting annoyed that he was disappointed to this degree. Who cares if I didn’t win a stupid trophy? It’s just a physical thing that you can buy at any store, so what’s the big deal? People get trophies all the time for all kinds of silly things anyway.

Eventually he got over it, and cheery ol’ dad returned. But those questions still confused me, and it was only years later where I understood why getting this physical award was so important for my parents.

Fast forward to my sophomore year of high school, and I was invited to yet another awards ceremony. But this time, to make a short story even shorter, I actually won.

If there’s anything I remember from that night, it wasn’t my own happiness, but my mom’s. She held no reservations about using up her film that evening (yes, film, I’m old), taking many pictures of me holding that silly award in different ways throughout the night. She was so proud of the fact that I would be taking my one-and-only, oddly-shaped trophy back home with me.

When she got back home, she excitedly called my dad (who was in Korea) about the news. Needless to say, he was really happy as well.

In retrospect, it makes sense why this physical award meant so much to them. It wasn’t about an accumulation of a material good, or the desire to boast to their friends about how well their children were doing.

It was more so a tangible manifestation of relief – an affirmation amongst themselves that everything was going to be okay with their son. As immigrant parents, their marriage was defined by the nature of sacrifice, to work tirelessly to make the move worth it, and to overcome the battles that come with living in a foreign country together.

This trophy was the initial signs of their journey starting to pay off. The plant that was being watered by their happy and sad tears was finally sprouting, and they had a small yet poignant reminder of the things their children were able to accomplish.

To this day, that trophy means something special to them. If you walk into my parents’ place, you will see this plastic thing displayed prominently on top of my dad’s set of cherished speakers, reminding my household of how well I did in Algebra II class back in 2001:

It’s the only trophy I’ve ever won, and to them, probably the only one I’ll ever need. Whenever we look at it now, the first instinct is to laugh as I give my dad shit about how mad he was that one night. But underneath the jokes is a soft current of joy that still runs today – one that reminds my parents of all the struggles they’ve faced, and the difficult times they were capable of overcoming.

At first glance, this story may seem like a feel-good tale about familial disappointment and eventual redemption. A series of inside jokes that happen to have some kind of moral at the end.

However, I’ve come to realize that this story yields a deep insight into another key area of my life. In fact, this area is so key that without it, you wouldn’t be here today, wondering what I have to say about anything in the first place.

This thing I’m referring to is my writing practice, which has given me so much over the last few years. But of all the things I’ve gained, the greatest is the realization that a kinder and wiser version of myself can be accessible at any moment.

Because with each post I write, I’m creating a lasting reminder to myself of what I’m capable of thinking.

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The Trophies of the Mind

To illustrate my point about writing, we’re going to envision a world where everyone is a miner, including you.

In this world, you have one primary job that you tend to each day. Your role is to enter this large mine and extract everything you need to carry on for the next day.

This is the Mine of Everyday Events, and in it are all the habits and routines you partake in on a daily basis. Each of these elements make up large portions of the mine, and each day you crack through them as much as possible.

In this mine, everything you engage with has some sort of resource you want to extract. For example, the “work” section yields money or purpose, the “exercise” section yields well-being, and the “reading” section yields knowledge. These precious resources are the main underlying reasons for why you do the things you do.

All the respective extractions are then collected on a daily basis, which are stored away and used to build the life you want to live.

The doors to the Mine of Everyday Events are always open, and you can come and go as you wish. This process of living out your day-to-day life is largely automated, as the habits you engage in and the places you visit have become engrained in the mind.

But there’s something else here we haven’t revealed yet, and this detail makes all the difference.

Off to the side is a smaller mine that often has its doors shut. We tend to forget that it’s there, but it certainly exists for all of us.

This is the Gold Mine of Wisdom, and as its name indicates, it holds a wealth of knowledge and foresight that can be used to lead a life well-lived. But given that it’s hidden from plain sight much of the time, how did all that gold/wisdom end up in there in the first place?

Well, there’s a cool thing that happens in our default mine (the Mine of Everyday Events) that explains this phenomenon. Each time we interact with a particular block of life experience in there, two things happen.

The first is what you’d expect, and what we’ve already detailed. You successfully extract the resource you want from that experience, whether it’s a paycheck from your job or respect from your peers. This is an intentional extraction, and one you take away with you purposefully at the end of the day.

The second is a more invisible phenomenon. With certain interactions, there’s a brief moment where an opportunity for wisdom presents itself. Perhaps while you were at work someone said something mean to you, and instead of snapping back, you took a deep breath and responded with kindness. Or instead of your usual habit of watching Netflix in the evening, you made an effort to sit down and work on your passion project for a few hours.

Most of the things we do in life aren’t done in the pursuit of wisdom, but wisdom may be an accidental byproduct of some events. When this happens, a gold nugget may be released from the block you were chipping away at, and it falls onto the ground.

Over time, the nuggets begin to accumulate, and this is when something interesting happens.

In between the two mines is an underground funneling network that sucks up all the gold nuggets from the Mine of Everyday Events and places them in the Gold Mine of Wisdom:

This is the process of consolidating all the loose bits of wisdom and organizing them into a cohesive unit that you can access directly. Instead of wisdom being a passing whim that you tap into randomly, you now have a concrete place you can point to as the source of that clarity.

The most common funneling mechanisms are works of creativity, primarily in literature and art. The bits of wisdom you pick up from everyday life may be scattered and disjointed, but an insightful book can act as a structured source of wisdom you can point to for reference. This is why all major religions are founded upon a book that people can point to for their life principles.

Art is another huge funneling mechanism. Whether it’s an impactful movie, a jaw-dropping painting, or an insightful podcast, these are all things that help to glue together your view of the world into something concrete. The more creativity you absorb and resonate with, the more your gold nuggets consolidate and find their way inside the small yet impactful Gold Mine of Wisdom.

However, having a lot of gold stashed away doesn’t mean that it’s accessible. For example, logically understanding how to overcome the fear of disapproval is one thing, but actually overcoming it in the midst of mounting criticism against you is another.

By default, the door to the Gold Mine of Wisdom remains closed. Most of the time, we’re too focused on fulfilling our daily responsibilities in the Mine of Everyday Events, and they tend to take precedence over our desire for clarity.

In order to open these doors, we must press pause on the incessant motion of daily life through the avenue of reflection.

Reflection is the act of seeking mental clarity, and it can only be done with intention. If you’re caught up in a haze of back-to-back meetings, to-do lists, and urgent requests, reflection isn’t possible because the necessary space hasn’t been carved out for it.

Reflection must be purposeful – you have to set aside time to take a solo walk, you must block out your schedule to meditate, etc. Since it must be done with intention, it comes from a higher plane of rationality that can override the angst pervading an automated day.

It is here where the act of writing truly shines.

Whenever you sit down to write, you are making a commitment to reflect on the nature of things. You may not know what you’re going to write about yet, but the very fact that you’re sitting on a chair and taking the requisite time to think is what allows the Gold Mine of Wisdom to open its doors and become accessible to you.

But as is the case with any gold mine, there is a catch.

The doors to this mine do not stay open long. The force that is keeping them open is your capacity for reflection, but since this exercise is so cognitively demanding, it is perishable at a moment’s notice.

So when the doors are open, your goal is to reach into the mine and take some raw nuggets of wisdom that are momentarily available. Perhaps you’ll grab a fantastic quote you read from a book, a memory of a kind act you personally experienced, or an insight you picked up from a podcast. When you sit down to write, all these individual sources of wisdom are collected, and you’re left with a small pile of gold that consists of scattered pieces.

The only thing left for you to do now is to put them all together.

Structuring your thoughts into the written word is like assembling these gold nuggets into a cohesive shape.

Writing anything feels sluggish at first – you’re dusting off the cobwebs on your nuggets and realizing how difficult it is to piece them together. The ideas feel disjointed, and the mixing of personal experience with other peoples’ observations of the world can be confusing and puzzling.

However, if you stay committed to the practice, the once-scattered pieces start melding into something concrete. You realize that the insight you gleaned from that one author aligns well with something you’ve personally observed in life, and this observation can be framed using an analogy that’s been tucked away in your subconscious for quite some time.

As you continue writing and refining your thoughts, your gold nuggets start taking the shape of an impressive structure:

Until one day it’s finished, and the result is a beautiful Trophy of the Mind.

This Trophy of the Mind is the blog post that you finally completed, the book you wrote that is now ready for publication. It’s a personal manifestation of all the wisdom you’ve had access to, but never consolidated into a concrete and recognizable shape.

The primary purpose of this trophy is not to look pretty, but to remind you of what you are capable of thinking. It’s a reminder that you’ve thought through some difficult problems, and that you’ve taken the time to create a reference guide you can point to whenever you have to face them.

Because when the doors to the Gold Mine of Wisdom close and you make your way to the Mine of Everyday Events again, the problems you were addressing in your writing will inevitably arise. However, now you have a shiny trophy that stands as a small beacon of light, reminding you that you’ve thought your way through this before, and that you are fully capable of solving these challenges ahead.

More To That is my personal example of these trophies in action.

The topics I touch with this blog range from the “pretty silly” all the way to “okay, that’s really serious, why are you writing about that shit”:

I’ve done posts on serious things like overcoming self-doubt and uncertainty, but that doesn’t mean that I have it all figured out. In fact, I wrestle with self-doubt quite frequently, especially when I think about the future of my work.

However, I have a post that acts as a Trophy of the Mind in this regard, reminding me that I wrote an entire game plan on effectively combating self-doubt before. Given that I created the damn thing, it’s an indicator to me that I’m capable of accessing a higher plane of clarity whenever I doubt myself again. The same goes for any fear around making money, or a battle I may have with a strong bout of anxiety.

More To That is my intellectual journal, a way of cataloging and reminding myself of the wisdom I’m capable of accessing. The more time I spend thinking and writing about the problems that matter, the more trophies I build, all of which illuminate a path back toward the Gold Mine of Wisdom. It is this virtuous cycle that allows me to go about my day with more intention, less haze, and grounded rationality.

When viewing my writing practice through this lens, it makes sense why my parents were so happy that I won that plastic trophy back in high school.

Sometimes you just need little reminders of why certain sacrifices are worthwhile, as they encourage you to weather the storms that lie ahead. Telling my parents that I love them is more than enough, but having a polygonal reminder of a minor accomplishment from 2001 is nice too.

Similarly, creating your own Trophies of the Mind is a reminder that your sacrifice in time is worthwhile. Writing is a demanding process, and sometimes it might feel pointless when you’re creating work that may not be read or shared.

But the real utility of the practice is revealed when you face the problems that you’re already addressed in your work. When you realize that you already know how to handle the difficult challenges that await you.

The power of writing is not about the praise you receive from others. It’s about the realization that a kinder and wiser version of yourself is accessible whenever you need that person the most.

I begrudgingly took them too, although I didn’t understand the hype. Precisely none of my friends were excited to take these lessons, and I often wondered why our parents were forcing us to learn this craft.

After thinking through this problem with my 10-year-old mind, I came to this conclusion:

At the time, it made complete sense. Why else were we spending hours each week practicing Fur Elise for the annual recital? Why else did our parents get angry when we begged them to cancel lessons for the week? Well, I figured that our parents desperately wanted us to be pianists, and that these lessons were the only way for us to actualize that grand vision.

Of course, the truth was far from that.

Over time, I learned that the real reason they wanted us to take piano lessons was for developmental purposes. If we learned the piano, that would be helpful for our cognitive development, which in turn would better position us toward the actual careers they’d prefer us to have.

To be fair, my parents never told me to pursue any one career path, and rarely discouraged any of my curiosities either. However, I do know that if given a choice between stability and serendipity, they would choose the former. In their minds, being a pharmacist was preferable to being an artist not because of the money, but because of the certainty that would accompany a well-traveled path.

It’s not just my parents who thought this way either.

Unsurprisingly, none of my childhood friends who took those piano lessons are professional pianists today. Nor was that ever the goal for the parents who enrolled them. That’s because creative expression is often used as a gateway to something more practical, and is rarely accepted as something practical in itself.

This is why parents will rush to place their kids on long waitlists for art and music programs, but won’t encourage them to become artists or musicians as they age. It’s as if creative expression is useful for its ability to create connections between young neurons, and once that purpose has been fulfilled, it becomes an obstacle that gets in the way of viable career paths. With this view, the arts are utilitarian at best, burdensome at worst.

If I were to illustrate this perceived tradeoff between creative expression and practical application, it would look like this:

You can define practicality in any number of ways, but the most common measurement is in its capacity to build wealth. After all, there’s a long-standing belief that if you’re committed to a creative endeavor, then you’re giving up the expectation of a regular paycheck landing in your bank account. This is the inverse relationship that is represented in the above graph.

So if you’re a painter, writer, ceramicist, or musician, then money may be a sensitive (and lacking) subject:

But if you’re someone that’s followed a tried-and-true career path (pharmacist, lawyer, banker, doctor), then regular deposits of money come with that territory:

While this seems intuitive, a good argument against this view is that creativity is subjective. A physician may regard her role as a deeply creative endeavor in the same way that a painter would for his. In addition, there are many creative jobs where high salaries are expected (software engineers and product designers, for example). With that said, is there a good way to categorize what’s an act of creative expression, and what is not?

The answer is yes, and it has everything to do with agency.

Creativity has more to do with the authentic desire to express, and less to do with the art form itself. For example, it’s tempting to call a painter a “creative person,” but it all depends on why he paints. If he does so because his mother is a famous painter that expects him to carry on the family name, then painting is not a form of creative expression for him. It’s a job. An act of expression can only be deemed creative when it is aligned with one’s true curiosities and interests.

Similarly, an engineer’s role is to build things, but if she’s only there because of the great pay and benefits, then she won’t view her job as a creative endeavor. When practicality is of the utmost importance, one’s sense of agency is low. And for the most part, the practical career paths are well-traveled and apparent, whereas the creative ones are unpaved and uncertain. This makes sense, given that one’s unique blend of interests are a 1-of-1 phenomenon, whereas social value is determined through the vast lens of millions.

However, something came along in the late-20th century that would go on to change everything.

You guessed it:

The internet.

With the advent of blogs, social media, YouTube channels, and other distribution platforms, you no longer had to rely on gatekeepers to attract people to your curiosities. Your uniqueness became an asset, not a liability. And as more creator-friendly tools were introduced into the landscape, it expanded your ability to make money doing something you truly cared about.

In other words, the internet enabled a vision where creativity and practicality were directly correlated. The more effort you put into your creative output, the greater the practical benefits would be. This represented a big flip in the way things traditionally worked, as illustrated below:

We’re often reminded of this dynamic by successful online creators. Just hop onto your social media platform of choice, and it’ll only take a minute before you see a tweet or post about how you just need to keep going to succeed. While there is truth to this, it doesn’t address an important problem:

What if you’re in the lower-left hand part of the graph, which is where everyone starts off?

Here’s the harsh reality of any creative endeavor: in the beginning, no one cares. Every creator requires a balance of intrinsic motivation and external validation, but you’ll have to accept that the external piece will be missing at first. But even if you can embrace that, you face yet another conundrum:

How will you manage the fact that you won’t be making any money from this? And without money, how will you cultivate the resilience to keep going?

This is the part that many successful creators conveniently leave out. While it’s sexy to attribute your success to patience, it’s not as sexy to admit that you had a financial safety net could buffer you against failure. Money affords you the privilege of having a big leap feel like a small hop, which lessens the anxiety that may surround your entry into any creative endeavor. Patience is only possible when you have the requisite headspace to cultivate it, and having your financial needs covered is absolutely critical for this.

So far, both the curves I’ve shown on the Practicality / Creativity graph aren’t nuanced enough. They favor one extreme over the other, and are not wise roadmaps to reference when thinking through your own creative journey. After reflecting on this, I’ve come to realize that the optimal curve is the one I’ve illustrated below:

This is the Arc of the Practical Creator. It balances the passion of creativity with the practicality of money, and encourages you to consider both to make your endeavor sustainable. While patience is still the primary virtue, you can cultivate it without the anxiety that typically accompanies financial pressures. By lessening the survival instinct of money, you provide yourself with the clarity of mind required to create your best work.

The arc itself is divided into three main stages:

A Practical Creator understands the importance of each stage, and realizes that the texture of patience shifts with each one. With that said, let’s delve into them.

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Stage #1: Prioritize money

The Renaissance gave birth to some of the greatest artists humankind has ever known: Leonardo Da Vinci, Titian, Michelangelo, the list goes on. While their talent and skill was undeniable, what was equally important was that they had the mental capacity to explore their work in great depth. In order to do this, their attention needed to be free from any worldly burden that may distract them, the biggest of which was money.

To resolve this problem, the model of patronage was adopted. The Medici family famously backed Leonardo da Vinci, the Gonzaga family backed Titian, and so forth. These patrons gave these brilliant artists the focus and freedom required to create their best work.

When we think of the patronage model today, we think of platforms and services that allow fans to directly support their favorite creators. As long as you have an audience, you don’t need to rely on large institutions or wealthy families to help you, which is great.

However, a Practical Creator doesn’t find comfort in that. Because when you’re starting out, by definition, you have no audience. Crowdsourcing only works if there’s a crowd that cares in the first place, which is a luxury that’s not afforded to you in the beginning.

That’s why in the first stage of the arc, you need to focus on building wealth. You’ll need to put practicality ahead of creativity, and have a job that reliably puts money into your bank account, which you can then save or invest.

In rare cases, this might be completely aligned with your creative aspirations. Perhaps you’ve always wanted to be a writer, and you got a job writing interesting articles for a national newspaper. That’s the best case scenario. But more often than not, the nature of your job will be divorced from your true interests and curiosities. That was certainly the case for me, where I was spending many hours a day making boring forecasts in Excel when I really wanted to be drawing silly characters in Illustrator.

But this is where the power of reframing comes in. A Practical Creator doesn’t view a boring job as a dead-end endeavor, but as an active patron of their creativity. In the same way that wealthy families support the financial needs of their favorite artists, the same could be said about you and your employer. You exchange your time for money, which is then used to purchase the clarity of attention you can invest into your creative work.

The key to viewing your employer as a patron of your art, however, is contingent upon one important thing: When you’re in this first stage, you must rigorously work on your creative endeavors after your day job responsibilities. This is an absolute must. If every day consists of coming back home after work and then relaxing until you sleep, then you’re deluding yourself into thinking that this job funds your creative aspirations. The truth is that you don’t want it enough, and this boring job is not a patron for your art - it’s your actual career.

While you’re in the process of building wealth, you also want to build yourself as a creator. That means developing your skill sets, iterating on your abilities, and attracting an audience as a result. If you know that your ideal career is one that’s defined by what excites you most, then now is the time to hop on the on-ramp towards it. Your time may be limited to the nights and weekends, but if used to their fullest extent, it’s only inevitable that tangible results will follow.

In the first stage, to be patient is to accept this tradeoff: You are exchanging a majority of your workday for money, which buys you the freedom required to spend the minority of your day on your creative endeavor. A Practical Creator understands this dynamic, and by accepting its reality, will view money as the tool that affords them this precious sliver of time.

As a result, a Practical Creator doesn’t use the day job salary to buy everything they want, but saves as much of it as possible. They understand that every dollar saved today represents the freedom to create tomorrow. Patience is about learning to live with less, as this allows you to build up a bank account balance that could be later exchanged for agency. The great news is that if you find fulfillment in your creative work, it’s much easier to be satisfied with a minimal lifestyle.

With this mindset in place, two interesting things will happen over time:

(1) You’ll have a decent amount of money saved up, and

(2) You’ll gain some confidence in your abilities as a creator.

It is here where the phenomenon of “taking a leap” develops. On one hand, you have fiscal certainty in the form of your savings, but on the other, you have fiscal uncertainty in the form of your creative endeavors. You’re probably not making much money (if at all) from your side gig as a creator, but what makes up for that is your commitment to making it work.

And now we arrive at a critical juncture in your creative journey.

If you believe that leaving your job will result in overwhelming anxiety (regardless of how much you have saved), then perhaps the wise move would be to continue doing what you’re doing. Spend most of your day building wealth, and just some of it on your craft. However, if you’re in a position where you hate your job, you must accept this harsh truth: You are trading away your creative potential for fiscal security. There’s no nice way to put it. Anyone who spends a majority of their working life in an unchallenging environment cannot cultivate the clarity of mind required to bring out the best in themselves.

Now let’s look at the other side of the leap.

If you believe that your success as a creator will depend on a wholehearted investment of attention, then the logical next step is to say goodbye to your day job. Keep in mind that this is contingent upon having a healthy amount of money saved up, which is what this first stage is all about. Your patron has fulfilled its duty as a source of funding, and has given you a nice nest egg that you can now convert to freedom-in-work.

Toward the tail end of Stage 1, you descend down the curve and into “impractical” territory. This leap can take many forms: Perhaps you quit your job to grow yourself as a solo creator. You take a huge pay cut to switch to an industry that better suits your curiosities. Regardless of what the situation is, you’ve made a conscious choice to go against the grain of social expectations. From an external perspective, it may seem like an illogical move, but internally, you know this is exactly the right decision to make.

At this point, you will feel the conflicting feelings of relief and tension. Relief from making a difficult decision, and tension from having to navigate the consequences of that decision. And when it comes to Stage 2, there will be a lot of tension you must sort through, as this is when the current of doubt is at its strongest.

Stage #2: Endure the Great Plateau

In an interview with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, he thought back to the time when his company was a fledgling startup. He was home for Christmas, and his family members were asking him what he was doing for work. This is how he described it:

I didn’t want to tell my family I was unemployed, so I said that I’m an entrepreneur.

My mom then said, “No, you’re actually unemployed.”

And then I said, “No, I’m actually an entrepreneur.”

That’s when I learned that when you’re starting out, the difference between being an entrepreneur and being unemployed is in your head. It’s usually a mindset.

And I was - in my head - an entrepreneur.

This highlights something interesting about the nature of self-actualization.

When you’re pursuing something that is entirely aligned with your creative ambitions, it will largely be perceived as irrational. Your pursuit will be viewed through the lens of what is already known, which in Chesky’s family’s view was stable employment with regular pay. Anything that doesn’t fit in with that mental model will seem foreign, and in some cases, even silly.

And you know what?

They’re right.

It is impractical to choose uncertainty over certainty. It does boggle the mind to opt for volatility over stability. Any move that goes against the current of expectations is alarming, and the tricky thing is that you know it too. You understand the risk associated with choosing intuition over rationality, and the opportunity cost that comes with it.

This is because you’re now on the Great Plateau. It’s the flat place in the arc where you’re actualizing your creative potential, but are not seeing the practical results of that effort. The customers aren’t pouring in, the audience isn’t growing, people don’t seem to care. The energy invested doesn’t align with expected outcomes, and this situation is rightfully concerning.

But here’s the good news:

This is perfectly normal.

Yup, I’m sure. The reason why it feels concerning, however, is that it goes against the current of our own, conditioned expectations.

Let me explain.

Throughout our upbringing and our time in the educational system, we are taught that an expenditure of effort leads to an immediate reward. If you clean your room, you’ll get to have pizza for dinner. If you study hard for an exam, you’ll get a good grade. If you have a great interview, you’ll get that great job. And so on. The causal chain linking effort and reward is perpetually reinforced in our most formative years, which carries with us well into adulthood.

The issue is that this chain breaks down when we want to walk our own paths.

When you direct your attention to your personal curiosities, there’s no immediate reason for society to value that. Society only values what it already knows and wants. Companies offer salaries because they know exactly what to expect from their employees, even if it takes a while for them to contribute that value. But as a creator following your own interests, you alone are responsible for cultivating the value of your pursuit, and then convincing others of it through the delivery of your work.

This means that a significant time delay must be introduced between the expenditure of effort and the arrival of rewards. This goes against everything we’ve been conditioned to experience, so we often give up on our creative pursuits well before they’ve had the required time to catch people’s attention.

The key is to remember that silence is normal, especially in the early stages. And the more you can internalize its normalcy, the greater your resilience will be in pushing ahead without looking back.

This is why I found Brian Chesky’s response so insightful. If he thought of himself as someone that was unemployed, then he was viewing his predicament through the lens of others, which would make his situation seem abnormal. But instead, he reframed it by responding that he was an entrepreneur. This meant that he could internalize the silence as a normal part of the journey, which acted as a cue to experiment with different strategies. It represented a keen understanding of the delay in effort and outcomes, and the total acceptance of this dynamic.

But there is one important caveat I must issue here.

Success stories like Chesky’s tend to suffer from survivorship bias, where one exceptional case is made out to be a law instead of an outlier. The truth is, it wasn’t just his perseverance that made Airbnb a success. It was an amazing idea that came to fruition through brilliant execution, and it certainly helped that he never thought about quitting.

But in the context of a non-billionaire, everyday creator, the question here is: Just how much of this delay between effort and results can you handle? How do you know that silence is indicative of unrealized good outcomes, or if it’s actually a reliable signal that you should quit?

There’s no clear answer here, but the way I parse through this conundrum is through two lenses:

(1) Your pool of resources, and

(2) Your sense of progress.

Your resource pool is the money you’ve saved up (or the safety net you’ve set up) in Stage 1. Essentially, it represents the hard limit of your patience. You may want to press forward with your endeavor and wait it out longer, but if you’ve run out of money, then patience is a luxury you can no longer afford. In this case, you’ll have to trade in your creative freedom for practical security, which translates to getting a job you’d rather not have in order to make money.

This represents a move back up the lefthand side of the arc, placing you in Stage 1 again.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean you’ve quit, nor does it imply reversion. It just means that you can no longer dedicate your full attention to your creative endeavor. If anything, your commitment to it may even be stronger because now you have an imposed limitation on your freedom.

What matters is whether you interpret this change as empowering or demoralizing. And whichever one you choose will determine your chances of future success.

Now let’s look at the second lens, which is your sense of progress.

The tricky thing about patience is that you often don’t know if it’s a wise or foolish thing. It’s wise if it eventually pays off, and foolish if it doesn’t. After all, it’s better to quit the wrong thing early than to refuse doing so in the name of patience.

This is why you must conduct an honest audit of progress as you slog through the Great Plateau. Even if the external validation piece is low, you have to use your inner judgment to determine if you’re improving. Read something you wrote a while ago, and compare it to something you published recently. Does that old piece make you cringe a bit? Good. That’s a clear sign of progression. Keep going.

The other thing to consider is the texture of silence while on the Great Plateau. By definition, this part of the arc feels impractical since you’re not seeing results, but you can still sense progress in the form of small signals in external validation. For example, if the silence you’re experiencing is total (meaning that no one engages with your work), and it has been for an entire year, then that’s a reliable sign that this path isn’t for you. If you can’t get 20 people (outside of your loved ones) to care after a year, it’s hard to see how that will change in the subsequent one.

But if you’re experiencing periodic breakthroughs in silence, that’s a different story. Perhaps you sent your stuff to a creator you respect, and she encouraged you to keep going. Or you notice that a small but loyal following is developing with every piece you publish. This is a different kind of silence. It’s silence in the sense that your efforts still don’t align with the results, but it’s a signal that you’re headed in the right direction.

In this case, patience is your greatest asset. If you stay determined and stay honest about progress, then the only remaining variable is time. Time is the force that allows serendipity to materialize, and this is something you can’t will into existence. The only thing you can control is the quality of what you produce and the cadence in which you publish. The rest must be left up to how others internalize and share your work, which is something neither you nor I should seek to control.

But when determination, patience, and progress blend together, something amazing happens. The shape of the Great Plateau begins to change, and what was previously the flatness of despair shifts into an incline of hope. People really start to care, your audience regularly reaches out, and a viable career path emerges.

Well, take a brief moment to pat yourself on the back.

Because you’re finally in that magical area where everything starts to click.

Stage #3: Navigate the Creative Career

Last year, I told my wife that one of my goals was to make More To That my career. The moment I finished that sentence, she replied, “What do you mean? It already is your career.”

I paused.

Damn.

She realized it well before I did.

The interesting thing about any creative endeavor is that it usually starts out as a hobby. It starts off being done for its own sake, and is somehow shielded from things like money or incentives. This runs counter to the way we generally view work, where a salary is promised well before our first day in the office.

So when we think of the word “career,” we naturally frame it in the context of tradition. We think of predictable cadences of work with predictable deposits of money, following a path that culminates in a predictable position of high standing. And most importantly, all this is determined by the culture and structure set by our employers.

But when it comes to your creative endeavor, you set the tempo to everything. You determine when it’s the best time of day to work, you choose when to respond to emails, and you decide how you want to build your audience. This sense of total agency bears little resemblance to what a career is supposed to look like, so it could instead feel like a serious hobby.

But if you’re in Stage 3, here’s the reality: Your craft is en route to practicality, which by definition, makes it a career path.

At the start of this upward curve, the notion of a career will feel subtle. You’re not making the same amount of money from your old job, nor do you think that may happen anytime soon. But what makes this a career path is that you have all the momentum required to transform this into a practical (and potentially lucrative) endeavor.

More people are finding out about your work everyday. More creators you admire are personally reaching out. You’re making products or services that are profitable. And most importantly, you’re working on your craft with a rigor and commitment that accentuates the best of your abilities. All of these things are strong indicators that you’re not just in hobby territory anymore; this is now a career that you’re actively working on.

When my wife pointed out that More To That is my career, she was pointing to the fulfillment of the above parameters. But for me, I couldn’t recognize it because my work here didn’t resemble any job I’ve had before. It was only through her prompt reframing of it that allowed me to see the reality of the situation.

We often think that you have to be an established creator to justify a creative career. But no one thinks that you have to be the CEO of a company to justify your career there. No, a career begins at the entry-level, from the moment you get compensated and recognized for your capacity to solve problems. If those conditions are satisfied (at whatever scale) and you are serious about improving yourself as a creator, then you have a career.

Once you accept this, you’ll feel deeply empowered. The leap in commitment that occurs when you refer to a hobby as your career is the same as when a love interest becomes your life partner. In the same way that a marriage consolidates your networks into a united whole, every node of your creative life will be assimilated into your identity. There’s no choice but to take your creative endeavor more seriously, and you will invest the focus and rigor required to proudly refer to it as your career.

If you can cultivate this mindset while progressing forward, it’s only inevitable that the results will one day pour in. You’ll be able to convert the attention you attract into a flow of money, which allows you to invest more of your energy into this craft. A flywheel effect begins to form, and once it’s in motion, the practicality of your endeavor will become readily apparent.

In this final portion of the arc, the great gift you are given isn’t necessarily money, but confidence. Money is a surrogate for trust. So when you’re paid for your creative work, you’re effectively being told, “Hey, I trust that the unique way you view the world will help me lead a better life.”

This is why money is the ultimate form of external validation. Whereas any casual observer can appreciate your work, only a believer will invest her hard-earned resources into it. And when you see that there are many people who believe in you this way, then you’ll be empowered to bring out the best in yourself.

But even here, there is a big pitfall to be aware of.

Confidence is a close cousin of arrogance. Confidence is when you believe that your potential can be actualized, whereas arrogance is when you believe that your potential has already been actualized. That difference is subtle, but the implications are far-reaching.

A big part of the creative journey is understanding that there is no finish line. Even if you reach the heights of success, you know that there is still more room to grow. That’s because your potential is not actualized through people telling you that it is. It can only be actualized through an internal commitment to improvement, which is perpetual because we humans have the ability to recognize our inherent flaws.

Schopenhauer once said that humanity is defined by our tendency to restlessly strive, but I think he was only partially right. Striving is in our nature, but it doesn’t mean that it’s restless. In fact, wanting to diversify our interests, to create wonderful things, and to be more compassionate are fundamental to peace and longevity. Without anything to strive for, we are just as lost as the person striving for the wrong thing.

Arrogance is embodied in the person that thinks his potential has been fully realized, and that this makes him superior to others. This confusion is further compounded by his constant receipt of praise, which can accompany creators that are in this final part of the arc.

The key is to divorce the allure of external validation from the commitment to internal growth. That no amount of money or praise is a signal that you’ve reached the promised land. That so much of what makes the creative journey fulfilling is humility, and that embracing uncertainty is what allows you to forge onward.

This leads to a final paradox that a successful Practical Creator must navigate. On one hand, you must continuously view your endeavor through the mind of a beginner. But on the other, you want to leverage the hard-earned wisdom you’ve picked up through years of experience.

So which is it? Are you a malleable beginner, or a hardened veteran? In other words, do you optimize for growth or for preservation?

It’s often said that successful creators hustle hard at first, and then slow down later. That’s because growth requires you to open up many decision trees to see what works, whereas preservation closes them to cultivate clear judgment. This is a helpful framework to use, but I’ll revise it slightly to clarify the picture.

In this final stage of the arc, grow your curiosities, but preserve your attention. Cultivate a beginner’s mind for the things you want to learn about, and the things that expand your intellectual horizons. Let your inner child roam free. Learn things for their own sake, and not for their utility.

But when it comes to actually creating and making decisions, take your time. Use your hard-earned wisdom to your advantage, and slow down to give yourself the space to think. Remove everything that acts as a roadblock to your greatest asset, which is the attention you dedicate to creating.

This is where money acts as a useful tool. You can hire people to help manage the decisions that you no longer want to make. You can purchase the services required to automate the logistics you don’t want to think about. A Practical Creator understands that money’s great gift is to give you freedom over your attention, which is why they always reinvest their earnings back into their endeavors or businesses.

It’s this winning combination of intellectual growth and attentional preservation that allows you to remain on the right side of the arc. You continue expanding your desire to learn, while also reducing the many pulls of your creative focus. Your intellectual inputs increase, while your attentional demands decrease.

And by keeping this balance, your creative endeavor will retain its practicality for a long, long time.

The Shifting Textures of Patience

We went over a lot, so let’s take a look at the arc in its entirety again:

When you look at these three stages, it’s clear that the unifying virtue is patience. You have to invest incredible effort into your endeavor, but be willing to endure the inevitable delay in outcomes. This is applicable not just for the beginner, but also for the veteran that’s been doing this for years.

This strain of advice, however, isn’t nuanced enough.

Patience has various textures, and a Practical Creator must be able to decipher them from one another. What you’re enduring in Stage 1 is very different from the problem you’re solving in Stage 3, which requires you to cultivate different mindsets. You have to be specific about the type of patience that is required to power through each stage, as identification is the first step to awareness.

With that said, the three textures of patience to embody (in order) are tolerance, resilience, and balance:

Let’s start with tolerance.

In Stage #1, you prioritize practicality over creativity. You make money doing something you dislike so you don’t need to make money doing something you love. This means having a day job that acts as a patron of your art. It helps to fund that precious minority of your day where you can work on your craft without the anxiety of money worries. In addition, you also save the money required to potentially take a leap into doing it full-time.

In this stage, patience takes the form of tolerance. You’d rather not spend 8 hours at a job you don’t care for, but you realize what it enables you to do. It gives you the financial breathing room required to work on your craft on the evenings and weekends, and allows you to endure the delay in outcomes. So instead of despising the job, you can embrace it as your patron and tolerate the shortcomings that accompany it. As long as you’re diligently working on your craft in your free time (which is an absolute must), you can be thankful for the fact that you have a job that affords you that creative headspace.

Gratitude for the undesirable is what defines patience here.

The next is resilience.

In Stage #2, you prioritize creativity over practicality. You’ve taken a leap of some kind, and are now committed to pursuing your endeavor ahead of other considerations. You’ve chosen to give up financial certainty in favor of creative progress, which is made possible by the money you’ve saved up in the prior stage.

In this stage, patience takes the form of resilience. The reality is that the pace of your effort will not be aligned with the delivery of results. There will be silence, disappointment, broken expectations, and other variations of those unpleasant things. But the key is to remember that they are normal parts of the Great Plateau - not anomalies. As long as you’re monitoring progress and are attuned to small signals of external validation, you can accept that the fruits of your labor will arrive long after the seeds are sown.

The reframing of silence is what defines patience here.

The last is balance.

In Stage #3, creativity and practicality are finally aligned. The winds of time are now your ally, guiding people toward your work. This receipt of attention is leading to tangible outcomes, as you are getting paid to work on things that feel like play. You now proudly refer to your endeavor as your career, and are figuring out how to position yourself for the long-run.

In this stage, patience takes the form of balance. You have confidence in your abilities, but realize how quickly that could transition into arrogance. You want to freely explore your curiosities, but also understand how important it is to slow down and cultivate clear judgment. You finally have money to spend, but know that the sustainable move is to reinvest it back into your endeavor. As long as you’re aware of the equally poignant truth that rests on the other side, you can cultivate the wisdom required to make your creativity an infinite game.

The acceptance of contradictions is what defines patience here.

When looking at the Arc of the Practical Creator, you might assume that things get easier the more you progress through it. That Stages 1 and 2 are difficult, but Stage 3 is a breeze. After all, many creators believe that once you make a living doing something you love, you’ve made it to the promised land.

But the punchline here is that every stage will be challenging, and that’s the point.

Creative endeavors are inspiring because the scope of the problem often feels bigger than your capacity to solve it. But because you find that problem so worthwhile, you’re willing to put in the effort required to provide the best solution possible. Through this process, you become a more capable person, which allows you to address more worthwhile problems in turn. It’s this beautiful cycle that gives you a sense of purpose and meaning in how you spend your time and energy.

So regardless of which stage you’re in, understand that there is no easier or harder. There is just challenge. And the only way to cultivate a healthy relationship with challenge is to develop the patience required to manage it properly.

Where are you on the arc, and what’s the texture of patience you need to embody? Can you commit to that for however long it takes? Are you prepared to adapt to whatever stage comes next?

Ask yourself these questions whenever you’re feeling a bit lost, or you just need a reminder of what it means to endure. Your answers will determine just how practical your creative endeavor can be.

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This means that for the first time ever, you can now interact with my posts. I will be opening up the comment section so I can publicly interact with readers, which will be a (hopefully) welcome change. So far, all interaction has been done privately in my inbox, and to be clear, you can still do that by hitting reply to any email. But if you want to share your thoughts publicly, you can now do so in the comments section at the end of every post.

In addition to a bunch of new posts I have lined up, I will also be re-sharing some of my older posts here as well. Putting my work on Substack will expose it to a broader audience, many of whom have never seen my work before. So when you get an email of an older post, you can see it as an opportunity to revisit a timeless topic and also comment on it as well.

While thinking through this move, I’ve also been reflecting on what exactly More To That is, and what I want it to be. Ever since I started it back in 2018, it’s operated under the tagline of “illustrated stories on the human condition.” Surprisingly, that vague description was enough to garner the attention of millions of readers, some of which have subscribed to this very newsletter. And for that, I’m so grateful.

But as the years have passed, I’ve realized that there were a few themes that kept coming up in my work. While my interests are very broad, it turns out that the lenses I filter them through are quite defined. Despite the philosophical tone I take in my work, I have an entrepreneurial spirit that drives much of how I approach life. This is how I’ve been able to build More To That into what it is now, and how I’ll continue to build it based on what I learn about myself and the ever-changing landscape we live in.

So in an effort to distill what More To That is, I set out to create a new About page to accompany this Substack launch. I tried to make things as simple as possible without overlooking the nuances, and it took me a while to get it right. The rest of this newsletter will be the result of my efforts.

With that said, everything below is a work-in-progress and things may shift as my vision comes into contact with reality. But as of now, it’s a good place to start.

Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments, or as always, you can hit reply to this email to reach out. I love hearing from you, and thanks for being here with me.

-Lawrence Yeo

About More To That

“What does it mean to live a good life?”

For a question so simple, the answer is not. More To That is my attempt to parse through this timeless inquiry by exploring 3 main areas:

The goal is to dive deeply into each category so you understand what it means to reside at their intersection. Because in the end, this is where contentment can be found.

Let’s start with meaning.

Meaning is cultivated through two things: (1) introspection and (2) agency.

Every day you’re bombarded by opinions of how you should think and act, which distorts your perceptions of what it means to live a good life. Introspection is about removing these expectations that have been layered onto your mind, which reveals a deep understanding of who you are and what you truly want.

If introspection reveals who you really are, then agency is how you convert that revelation into action. Agency is the act of moving towards what you’re meant to be. It’s a kinetic force that recognizes your unique perspective and then aims to connect it with others. And once you see how your ideas can positively impact others, you’ll feel empowered to continue showing up for both yourself and your community.

I view the creation of meaning through the metaphor of an inner compass, which is the title of my book that I self-published in mid-2025. It has since gone on to reach (many) thousands of readers, and is being translated into Spanish, French, Hindi, Arabic, and more.

The next domain is money.

Unless you are a monk, the creation of meaning must also coincide with the creation of wealth. That’s because money represents the boundaries of your independence. You may want to press forward with your meaningful endeavors, but if you’ve run out of money, then those boundaries will feel so tight that the resulting anxiety will make you quit.

With that said, there are two skills to cultivate when it comes to money: (1) knowing how to make more of it doing purposeful work, and (2) knowing how to make the most of what you already have.

I will help you with both.

When it comes to #1, I will teach you how to build a writing-based business that gives you meaning and independence. I only teach what I’ve experienced firsthand, and I’ve built More To That into a business that earns more than any corporate job I’ve ever had. The key is to broaden your understanding of writing so that it goes beyond articles. It also encompasses product creation, technological adoption, marketing, book publishing, networking, and the ability to build a world around your interests.

Writing is the connective tissue that bridges all aspects of an online business together, and I will show you how to integrate it into your work.

When it comes to #2, I’ve written a few influential posts on how to rethink money so you can make the most of what you already have. Because as it turns out, shifting your relationship with money is much easier than striving to make more of it. All it takes is some guidance and a commitment to reframing the connection between money and self-worth.

In fact, I believe so strongly about this topic that my next big project will be dedicated to it. I have an announcement to make about this soon, so stay tuned.

The final domain is creativity.

Creativity is cultivated through two things: (1) self-confidence and (2) storytelling.

You’re the great vessel for your creative spirit, but you’re also the great bottleneck. So much of creativity is about mastering the inner game of self-confidence, and to understand that all creative blocks come down to self-doubt and fear. The beautiful thing, however, is that these obstacles only exist because you care about the endeavor so much.

The trick is in knowing how to convert these fears into a source of energy that’ll fuel and sustain your creative growth.

If self-confidence rules the inner game, then storytelling rules the outer one. The most reliable way to derive meaning from your creative endeavor is to see how it connects with others, and this will be contingent on your ability to tell great stories.

Given the importance of this skill, I’ve built an entire curriculum around it. It’s called Thinking In Stories, and hundreds of students across 22 countries have taken it. Join the waitlist to know when the next cohort begins.

So there you have it. More To That will explore the intersection of meaning, money, and creativity because that’s where lasting contentment is found. Sometimes I’ll discuss all 3 domains at once, and other times I’ll discuss them separately. But as you’ll see, they’re all interconnected in some way, and my goal is to make this whole journey both insightful and fun.

Thanks for being here. See you in your inbox soon.

-Lawrence Yeo

P.S. In case you’re wondering what I look like, it’s not this:

But this:

Eh, close enough.