There’s a parable worth keeping close:

A man is out on the water when another vessel appears in the fog, bearing straight down on him. He has the right of way. He starts yelling. Gets angrier with every second it keeps coming. Finally, as it’s nearly on top of him, he sees it: the boat is empty. No one is steering it …

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When training is a cornerstone of your life and something forces you to stop — surgery, injury, forced rest — the temptation is to drop everything. Cancel the routine. Sleep in. Tell yourself you’ll restart when you’re cleared.

That’s the mistake.

The body can rest. The identity doesn’t have to.

Instead, keep the sched…

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Every Monday, we send out a short Daily Chase essay built off an idea we’ve explored inside our most recent episode — a single thought or idea worth starting your day with.

If you’d like to read more of these, you can find them here.

Nearly every destructive choice traces back to the same starting point: an unhealthy relationship with fear.

The drinking. The drift. The series of jobs someone can’t stand. The relationships that keep falling apart. At the bottom of all of it is often a person who never learned how to sit with fear without letting it drive.

But fear might not be the most precise word for it. Look closer, and the real culprit is usually ego.

The ego is fear’s operator. It protects against shame, against failure, against the exposure of not being enough. And it does this in ways that look, from the outside, like self-destruction — because the ego would rather burn the house down than admit it’s scared.

Drugs quiet it. Anger redirects it. Avoidance satisfies it. Blame gives it an exit.

The antidote isn’t willpower. It’s unconditional love — the kind that removes the ego’s reason to protect itself in the first place. When worth isn’t tied to performance, the ego relaxes. When the people closest to you aren’t keeping score, you stop keeping score too.

Decisions start coming from abundance instead of self-protection.

That shift doesn’t happen overnight. But it starts with one person — a parent, a coach, a partner — making it safe to fail.

More about unconditional love, fear, and parenting in this week’s episode →

🎧 In This Episode

We explore one of the most loaded questions a parent can sit with: how much of our kids’ path is actually up to us?

Drawing on a listener question from David, we break down the six factors that shape whether a teenager moves toward resilience or self-destruction — and identify the three levers parents genuinely hold: modeling, connection, and agency.

You’ll also discover why unconditional love isn’t a soft idea but the most performance-psychology-aligned move a parent can make, and how the ego — not the environment — may be the real root of every destructive choice.

Listen Now

• Chase Club (Ad Free)

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. Control Fades. Influence Doesn’t Have To.

At age 5, a parent controls almost everything — bedtime, diet, friends, environment. At 15, that control has dropped sharply, even if the teen still lives under your roof. At 25, it’s effectively zero. But influence doesn’t follow the same curve. A parent who builds genuine connection can still shape a 25-year-old’s decisions even without any formal authority.

The mistake is fighting the dial. Trying to maintain control past its natural expiration date doesn’t preserve it — it destroys influence. The child who’s being controlled and influenced at the same time can’t fully receive either. The goal isn’t control; it’s building a relationship strong enough that your perspective still matters when you’re not in the room.

2. The 6 Ps: What Actually Shapes a Teenager

Patrick named the six factors that determine whether a teenager drifts toward resilience or self-destruction: Personality (how they came into the world), Peers (the tribe that sets the norm), Parenting (the family dynamic), Place (the physical environment), Privilege (circumstances of birth), and Personal Choices (the decisions they make regardless of everything else).

Of these six, a parent has meaningful influence over maybe two or three. Peers and personality are largely outside that circle. That’s not a reason for fatalism — it’s a call to pour everything into the levers that are reachable, rather than wasting energy on what can’t be touched.

3. Modeling Masculinity Is the First Job

Children don’t do what their parents say. They do what their parents are. If a father manages stress with alcohol, the message isn’t a cautionary tale — it’s a template. If a father explodes when things go wrong, the child learns that anger is the correct response to difficulty. The inverse is equally true.

Ben adds one specific: how a father treats their children’s mother. Not just in her presence, but when she’s out of the room. Does he speak about her with admiration? Is he her biggest fan in private? That behavior — quiet, consistent, unperformed — may be one of the most powerful things a parent can model.

4. Connection Lives in the Nothings

Real connection isn’t built at Disney World or on vacation. It’s built in the nothing moments — walking a kid to the door before school and making sure you’re the last to let go of the hug. Sitting at a breakfast table in silence and actually being present.

As teenagers pull away from surveillance (they’re supposed to), they lean harder into genuine interest. The parents who stay curious — not interrogating, genuinely curious — maintain access. The ones who try to hold on through control lose the relationship they were trying to protect.

5. Unconditional Love Is the Performance Psychology Move

Ben reframes the final question: the enemy isn’t fear, it’s ego. The ego is trying to protect something — to feel important, to avoid shame. When children grow up uncertain whether love is conditional on their performance, the ego goes into overdrive. Every test, every team, every social moment becomes a referendum on whether they’re worthy.

The antidote is explicit unconditional love — not just felt, but stated. “You could fail out of school, get suspended, end up in prison, and I couldn’t love you any less.” That statement doesn’t remove accountability. It removes the ego’s reason to self-protect through destruction. Like competing without the weight of needing to win, children who feel safe make better decisions — not worse ones.

🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Where are you trying to maintain control past its expiration date — and what is it costing you in influence?

Think about a relationship in your life where you’ve been pushing for compliance. It might be a teenager, a partner, or a colleague. Is the push for control actually producing the behavior you want, or is it quietly eroding the connection that would have gotten you there anyway? What would you gain if you let go of the control and invested that energy into the relationship instead?

2. What does your modeling actually teach — not what you intend it to teach, but what a child watching you closely would actually learn?

Put yourself in the position of a kid who sees everything. How do you handle stress? How do you talk about the people you love when they’re not around? Do you do hard things? Do you apologize when you’re wrong? The gap between who we think we are and who we demonstrate ourselves to be is where this question lives.

3. Is the love you’re expressing to the people closest to you landing as conditional or unconditional — and how would you know?

Most parents feel unconditional love. Fewer consistently communicate it unconditionally. Think about the last month: when did you express pride in someone close to you? Was it tied to a performance or an outcome — a grade, a goal, a win? What would it look like to explicitly separate your love from their results?

🎯 1 PRACTICE

Say the unconditional thing out loud.

The idea behind unconditional love isn’t new. But most people assume it’s being communicated when it isn’t. Kids don’t absorb the implicit version — they track the feedback they actually receive. And most feedback in households is tied to outcomes: the A on the test, making the team, finishing the workout.

This week, find one moment to say it directly and explicitly to someone close to you — a child, a partner, a friend. Not “I love you” as a goodbye at the door. Something more specific: “I want you to know that nothing you do or don’t do changes how I feel about you. You don’t have to earn this.” Say it when there’s nothing to celebrate and nothing to apologize for. Say it into ordinary time.

This isn’t softness, it’s performance psychology. The people who feel safest take the biggest swings. The ones who need the outcome to feel worthy tend to protect the ego instead of risking it. One sentence — said clearly, at the right moment — can shift the whole operating system.

In this episode, we dig into a powerful listener question from David about parental influence, the six factors that shape teenagers, and the three things fathers can genuinely control: modeling, connection, and agency.

We explore why cont…

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One quick thing before we dive in: we just launched our Instagram — @chasingexcellencepod. It only took me 10 years to get it started. Come give us a follow and tell our algorithm overlords that we’re legit.

Beyond that, two new conversations dropped this week, plus a couple vids on YouTube.

Let’s jump!

🎧 20 Simple Ways to Fight Drift — That Invisible Shift Away from Your Best Self

We’re pulling one of our most-requested episodes back into rotation: a rapid tour through the 20 highest-leverage habits across Move, Sleep, Eat, Think, and Connect.

We talk about why the slow lifts matter more than cardio, what a real “sleep opportunity” actually looks like, and why the fight against ultra-processed food is won in your kitchen — not your willpower. Less a conversation, more a checklist you can start running today.

This episode’s for you if:

• You’re ready to stop treating your health as an abstraction and want an actual, concrete checklist — four moves each across five areas — to build for yourself.

• You’ve been telling yourself you’re “basically fine” on sleep, food, or movement for a while now, without ever really auditing whether that’s true.

→ Read the full 5-3-1 Listener Guide

🎧 When “Did You Work Out?” Feels Like an Attack

A Chase Club member — 31 weeks pregnant and stretched thinner than she’s ever been — wrote in about how much it stings every time her husband asks if she’s worked out.

We use her question to dig into why we misunderstand the people closest to us far more than we’d like to admit, why different seasons of life call for different standards, and the exact script for saying the real thing instead of hoping someone reads between the lines.

This episode’s for you if:

• You want to get better at saying the actual thing to the people you love, instead of hoping they’ll pick up on the hint.

• You’ve been quietly building a story around something someone said to you — and treating that story as fact instead of checking it.

→ Read the full 5-3-1 Listener Guide

Supporting our sponsors is one of the best ways to support the show — thanks to these brands for helping us chase: Monarch · Quo · BetterHelp · Momentous · Decagon · MUDWTR · Ultra · Shopify · Function Health · Forkful · OneSkin

📹 Also on YouTube This Week

Kim John Payne: The “Anxious Generation” Almost Got It Right — Kim explains why he’s seen this same anxiety pattern in kids since the early 1980s, and why screens are only one of five root causes behind it.

From the episode: Raise | Screens Are Only 1 of 5 Causes of Anxious Kids (w/ Kim John Payne)

Why Telling Kids They’re Smart Backfires (Do This Instead) — Ben breaks down how a growth mindset gets built through the specific language coaches and parents use — not speeches, not willpower.

From the episode: 5x5 | Reading for Recall Over Ego & Letting Flow Happen at Home

Thanks as always for being here. If one of these episodes resonates with you, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Next week, we’re answering a listener question about how much control fathers actually have over whether their teenagers drift toward a destructive path — and landing on the one input that matters more than any other: making sure your kids know your love was never conditional on their performance.

Until then!

🤙🏼 Patrick

Chase Club | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

🎧 In This Episode

We answer a question from a Chase Club member who’s 31 weeks pregnant and feeling shame every time her husband asks if she’s worked out.

We explore the gap between what someone actually says and the story we build around it, why different seasons of life call for entirely different standards, and how to say the true thing instead of hoping someone reads between the lines.

You’ll walk away with a specific script for naming your needs out loud — plus a research-backed number that will change how you interpret every hard conversation you have: even in your closest relationships, you’re probably only understanding about 35% of what’s actually being said.

Listen Now

• Chase Club (Ad Free)

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. You’re Not Too Sensitive — You’re Human

Being 31 weeks pregnant while carrying the demands of work, parenting, and a second pregnancy that’s harder than the first leaves very little margin. When someone we love bumps up against that margin — even unintentionally — we feel it.

The guiding principle: do what you can with what you’ve got, for where you are. The friction here isn’t sensitivity — it’s misalignment between an internal reality and an external expectation. Naming that gap is the fix, not toughening up.

2. The Story We Tell Ourselves May Not Be True

When we hear a question like “Did you work out this morning?” we don’t just process the words — we process everything we’ve been privately thinking about ourselves: the self-judgment, the comparison to who we used to be, the fear of falling behind.

The first move is checking whether the story we’re building is actually true. The other person might be asking out of curiosity, or expressing care in the only language available to them. Before responding to the story, it’s worth confirming the story matches reality.

3. We Misunderstand Each Other More Than We Think

Research cited in David Brooks’s How to Know a Person found that even the most skilled, most intentional listeners misunderstand what the other person is saying about half the time. In our own closest relationships, we’re often only grasping around 35% of what’s actually being communicated.

That’s not a failure — it’s the human condition. Once you internalize it, you stop treating every moment of misalignment as betrayal and start treating it as information. The practical tool: “It seems like you’re saying…” — say it back, let them correct it, and start from there.

4. Seasons Require Different Things From Us

Wearing a t-shirt on the beach in August makes perfect sense. Doing the same in February in New England gets you strange looks. The activity hasn’t changed — the season has, and we instinctively understand that different seasons call for different things.

The same logic applies to fitness during pregnancy, a hard quarter at work, or any stretch of life that demands more than usual. The standard isn’t lower, it’s different — and appropriately so. Naming that season out loud, clearly, to the people around you, is what closes the gap between their expectations and your reality.

5. When Life Gets Hard, Double Down on Your Non-Negotiables

When things get hardest is exactly when to double down on your protocol — not by pushing harder into what isn’t available, but by anchoring into what consistently works: sleep, walks, journaling, breath work, reading.

The risk in hard seasons is what we call the sewer cycle: we don’t feel our best, so we reach for pacifying behaviors — the ice cream, the scrolling — which make us feel worse, which pulls us toward more pacifying behaviors. The antidote isn’t willpower. It’s naming your non-negotiables and sharing them with the people who love you, so you can pursue them together.

🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. When someone close to you says something that stings, are you responding to what they said — or to the story you built around it?

Think of a recent moment when a comment from a partner, parent, or friend landed harder than it probably should have. What story did you construct in the gap? How different was that story from the actual words spoken? And what would it look like to respond to the words, not the story?

2. What season are you in right now — and are you treating yourself like you’re in it?

The idea of “seasons” isn’t an excuse to lower your standards — it’s an invitation to be honest about what this particular chapter of life actually requires. What does your current season genuinely call for? And where are you still operating under a different season’s rules?

3. What are your non-negotiables — and have you named them out loud to the people around you?

Non-negotiables work best when the people closest to you know what they are. It’s hard to support something you don’t know exists. What are the 2–3 things that most reliably help you be the person you want to be? And does the person you share your life with know what those things are?

🎯 1 PRACTICE

Say the actual thing.

Most miscommunication in close relationships isn’t malicious — it’s incomplete. We feel the weight, we carry the emotion, but we don’t say the full thing. We hope they’ll figure it out. They don’t. The tension compounds.

This week’s practice: say the actual thing. Not a hint of it. Not a subtle signal. The actual thing. When you ask if I’ve worked out, I hear pressure, even though I know you don’t mean it that way. This season is harder than the last one. What I need right now is sleep, walks, and someone to celebrate those things with me.

It’s a few sentences. It will feel vulnerable. It will almost certainly be more effective than carrying it alone — because the people who love you can’t support something they don’t know you need. The most important relationships in your life aren’t better served by your ability to hint. They’re better served by your willingness to be honest.

Picture a tug of war. On one side: what you want. On the other: reality. Every time we get triggered — by traffic, a difficult conversation, a situation that didn’t go the way we hoped — we’re on the side of our desires, pulling as hard as we can to drag reality closer to what we want.

And sometimes that’s the right move. Wan…

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The writer Arthur Brooks has a practice he does on his birthday: he writes down all his desires — money, power, admiration, ambition — and then crosses them out. Not to eliminate them, but to detach from them.

His formula: satisfaction equals what you have divided by what you want. You can increase it temporarily by having …

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Our buddy Jamison introduced us to a principle we keep coming back to: anything above zero compounds. The small good decisions — the workout you showed up for, the meal you chose well, the extra hour of sleep — they add up. Stack enough of them, and the effect becomes undeniable.

But there’s a flip side that doesn’t …

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There is no amount of willpower that can outlast a well-stocked pantry.

The food companies have spent trillions of dollars finding the exact ratio of crunch, salt, and sweetness that will make you take one more bite. They are very, very good at their jobs. And what they’ve built is sitting in your kitchen right now.

Here’s an insight that’s simple but uncomfortable: we don’t fail at eating well because we have weak character. We fail because we’ve built an environment that makes failure the default. When the Goldfish crackers are on the counter, you’ll eat the Goldfish. When the frozen pizza is in the freezer, you’ll eat the frozen pizza. Not because you’re bad at this — because you’re human.

The fix isn’t a stricter protocol. The fix is the environment.

Get it out of the house. Get it out of the office. Remove ultra-processed foods from the places where you live and work, and make the inconvenient choice the only available option. If you want ice cream, walk to town and get it. On your birthday, have the cake.

Don’t deprive yourself for the sake of deprivation - just make healthy, intentional choices the easiest kind to make.

You don’t win the nutrition game through discipline. You win it through design.

More on how to fight back against drift every day in this week’s episode ↗

🎧 In This Episode

We pull a fan-favorite from the archives: a rapid tour through 20 of the highest-leverage health tactics we’ve ever covered, organized across the five factors that actually move the needle — Move, Sleep, Eat, Think, and Connect.

You’ll learn why an eight-hour sleep window rarely adds up to eight hours of real sleep, why the slow lifts matter more for longevity than any amount of cardio, and why willpower is the wrong tool for fixing your diet.

Listen Now

• Chase Club (Ad Free)

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. Train for Capacity, Not Performance

The goal of movement isn’t to run a sub-2:30 marathon or back-squat 800 pounds. It’s to be ready for any conceivable challenge — voluntary or involuntary. The framework: compound movements (squat, deadlift, pull-up, push-up), combined with bodyweight and cardio at intentional intensities, five to six days a week.

The training that builds this capacity most efficiently combines all three — and makes you breathless. Not a walk around the gym between sets, but air squats into bench into a mile with no rest.

2. Strength Is Your Longevity Policy

Stronger people live longer — not just in lifespan but in health span. Mechanical tension from the slow lifts (squats, deadlifts, overhead presses) creates bone mineral density in ways that impact and cardio simply can’t match.

The sobering number: all-cause mortality rises 30% for people who break a hip over 65, and one in three of those people will be dead within a year. Lifting heavy isn’t vanity — it’s survival planning.

3. Sleep Is Infrastructure, Not Luxury

A sleep opportunity of eight to nine hours isn’t indulgent — it’s math. Most people lose an hour to tossing and turning, meaning an eight-hour window produces closer to seven hours of actual sleep, and the research shows real costs below that line.

Add a consistent wake time, avoid screens and caffeine after noon, sleep in complete darkness, and keep the bedroom between 62–68°F. One glass of wine will wreck your HRV — your wearable already knows this.

4. Your Environment Is Your Food Policy

The rule isn’t “have willpower.” It’s “don’t keep ultra-processed food within arm’s reach.” Food companies have spent trillions finding the perfect ratio of crunch, salt, and sweetness to override your better judgment — you won’t win that fight on discipline alone.

The strategy: crowd out bad choices with vegetables, fruit, and adequate clean protein — about three-quarters of a gram per pound of body weight. Then treat birthday cake as what it’s meant to be: rare and intentional.

5. Every Trigger Is a Workout Opportunity

There are two kinds of inconveniences: small ones (traffic, temperature, waiting) and bigger ones that knock you off center. For the small ones, let them go — practice noticing before they take your attention hostage.

For the bigger ones, view each as a walk into the mind gym. You don’t have to pick up the barbell. Just walk through the door. Recognizing that your character is being worked on is, itself, the rep — and it’s how you catch drift before it becomes decrepitude.

🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Which of the five factors are you most systematically neglecting — and what’s the story you tell yourself about why?

Move, Eat, Sleep, Think, and Connect each require intentional action. Most of us have one or two we tell ourselves we’re “basically fine” at — but haven’t actually audited. Pick the one you’re most avoiding and ask: if someone tracked your behavior for the last 30 days, what would they see?

2. What would it look like to treat your sleep as seriously as your training?

Most people who train consistently have a protocol — they don’t skip workouts randomly, they track their effort, they protect their time. But those same people often treat sleep as whatever’s left after the day is done. What would it mean to give sleep the same non-negotiable status as a training session? What would you have to stop doing after 9 PM to make that true?

3. Where is your environment quietly working against your goals — and what’s one thing you could remove or restructure this week?

We don’t fail because of weak character. We fail because ultra-processed food is on the counter at work and in every cabinet at home. We fail because we’re scrolling our phones at 11 PM in a room that’s 74 degrees. Environment design isn’t optional — it’s the leverage. Where is your environment currently set up against you?

🎯 1 PRACTICE

Do the 20-tactic audit.

Write out all 20 tactics from this episode — four each across Move, Sleep, Eat, Think, and Connect. Rate yourself on each one: doing it consistently, occasionally, or not at all. Don’t try to fix everything at once — over-optimizing is its own kind of drift. The goal of the audit is clarity, not panic.

Once you’ve gone through all 20, identify the one tactic where you’re furthest from where you want to be and where the gap has the highest cost. That’s your next 30 days. Pick that one thing. Build the system. Make it non-negotiable. Then come back to the other 19.

Ben said it best: “Every single day, 365, I go — what are the 20 things I want to be doing?” This episode is that list. Your job is to make it yours.

In this replay, we walk through the four highest-leverage actions you can take in each of the five key areas of life — Move, Sleep, Eat, Think, and Connect — and unpack the why behind each one.

Drift is the enemy of excellence, and this episode is one of the sharpest tools we’…

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I didn’t get this sent out last week, so this one’s a little fuller than usual — three new conversations to catch you up on, plus a look at what’s been dropping on YouTube.

Real quick, though, before we jump into it, something for the many independent coaches we have in the community here: If you’ve wanted a great website without shelling out a bunch of money or spending countless hours moving pixels around, I might be able to help. Check out BackSquatWebsites.com and let me know if you have any questions.

Okay, let’s jump!

🎧 Building Real Friendships After 40 & Asking Questions That Connect

Ben’s back with a new 5x5 — five listener questions on the CONNECT factor.

This one gets into why kids become what they repeatedly experience rather than what we tell them, how to tell a values divergence from a hard season, and the truth that adult friendships are built, not found.

It closes with maybe the most useful two-minute skill in the whole show: how to ask a question so good it makes you the most interesting person in the room.

This episode’s for you if:

• You’re ready to stop waiting for connection to happen the way it did in school and start building it on purpose — one small, proactive invitation at a time.

• You’ve been quietly assuming your friendships, your marriage, or your relationship with your kids will hold together without much ongoing investment from you.

→ Read the full 5-3-1 Listener Guide

→ Get a question into a future episode

🎧 You Don’t Need Anyone’s Permission to Be a High Performer

I go solo to close out our recent 21-day high-performance challenge with four lessons on what actually separates high performers from everyone else — and none of them have to do with a title, a trophy, or a number on a scoreboard.

It’s about turning your shoulds into musts, getting disciplined about where your limited time and energy actually go, and realizing performance is never really about us in the first place.

This episode’s for you if:

• You’re ready to stop treating your biggest goals as nice-to-haves and start treating them like musts you’ll find a way to accomplish.

• You’ve been telling yourself some version of “I’m not really a high performer” — and quietly using that story as permission not to push.

→ Get the full 21-Day High Performance Challenge

🎧 Screens Are Only 1 of 5 Causes of Anxious Kids (w/ Kim John Payne)

Kim John Payne — author of Simplicity Parenting and one of the clearest voices on what he calls the undeclared war on childhood — joins me for this episode in our Raise series to ask a question that predates smartphones: why are so many kids showing the same nervous-system responses we associate with combat veterans?

Screens turn out to be the accelerant, not the root cause — and the conversation lands on a new word worth sitting with: enoughness.

This episode’s for you if:

• You’re ready to get specific about what “enough” actually looks like for your family — before you add one more activity, opportunity, or thing to the calendar.

• You’ve noticed the “provide” instinct quietly winning out over the “protect” instinct in your house, and you’re not totally sure when that started.

→ Read the full 5-3-1 Listener Guide

Supporting our sponsors is one of the best ways to support the show — thanks to these brands for helping us chase: Monarch · Quo · Shopify · BetterHelp · Momentous · Decagon · MUDWTR · Ultra Pouches · Function Health · Forkful

📹 Also on YouTube This Week

When You Care Less, You Perform Better— Ben breaks down the Fragmented → Focused → Flow framework and why the grip you bring to something — not the difficulty — is what determines whether you find flow.

From the full episode: 5x5 | THINK

Why You Can’t Get Away With It Anymore After 40 — Why power becomes the single most important training variable to protect after 40, and why the real threat isn’t the decline itself — it’s the drift.

From the full episode: How Do We Adjust the 5 Factors As We Age?

Your Ego Will Hate These 2 Training Rules (Which is Too Bad) — The two non-negotiable training rules — never fail a lift, and every round should look the same — and why ego fights you on both.

From the full episode: 6 Training Principles for a Yes-to-Anything Life

Do Coaches Need Coaches? (The Honest Answer) — What real mentorship requires from both sides of the relationship, and why even coaches can’t see their own blind spots alone.

From the full episode: Coaches Aren’t Essential. Here’s Why You Need One Anyway.

Thanks as always for being here. If one of these resonates with you, please consider sharing it with a friend — and if you haven’t, we’d love it if you left us a review and a rating wherever you listen.

🤙🏼 Patrick

Chase Club | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

There’s a version of this we’ve all lived: something used to work. We know it worked because we felt it working. And then, quietly, it stopped — but we kept doing it anyway.

Not out of stubbornness, exactly. More like habit. The tool was so familiar, so proven, we couldn’t imagine reaching for a different one.

Maslow’s Hammer…

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There’s a gap between where someone actually is and where the internal reward lives. The workout doesn’t feel good yet. The skill isn’t there yet. The progress isn’t visible yet. On this side of the gap, there’s nothing pulling them forward — just friction.

That’s where external motivation comes in. Not as a bribe. As a b…

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Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor made a discovery worth remembering: the physiological response to an emotion lasts about 90 seconds. That’s how long the neurochemical loop takes to move through the body and clear out.

Ninety seconds.

Everything after that — the continued anger, the lingering anxiety, the replayed argument …

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In this episode, Patrick sits down with Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting, to explore why children today are exhibiting what used to be considered trauma responses, and what parents can actually do about it.

We explore the five causes of childhood overwhelm, …

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Aristotle called it telos — the spirit seed inside a living thing. The telos of an acorn is to become an oak tree. It doesn’t need to be told. It doesn’t need to be scheduled. It needs soil.

Kim John Payne thinks about children this way. Every child arrives with their own intent — their own character, their own direction. The proof is obvious to any parent who’s raised more than one: they come out of the same situation and are somehow completely different people.

Our job is not to produce what they’re meant to become. Our job is to provide the conditions in which what they’re meant to become can actually grow.

This sounds passive. It isn’t. Providing the soil means removing what prevents growth. Too much stuff. Too much noise. Too many choices. Too little predictability. Too little of a safe base — an adult in the room who is actually present and actually leading.

When we talked with him, Kim said his highest praise for a child these days is that they’re just normal. Not trying to copy a screen character. Not performing someone else’s idea of what they should be. Just themselves — curious, present, capable of beginning and ending a sentence.

Normal, in the current environment, is a remarkable achievement. The path to it isn’t ever-more soil, but less of everything else.

More from Kim in this week’s episode of the podcast →

🎧 In This Episode

We sit down with Kim John Payne — author of Simplicity Parenting and one of the leading voices on the undeclared war on childhood — to ask a question that predates smartphones: why are so many kids displaying the nervous system responses we once associated with combat veterans?

Kim identifies five causes of childhood overwhelm (screens are just one of them), explains why marketers see parents as “purchasing friction,” and makes the case that simplifying a child’s life is not about opting out of society — it’s about returning to what the original dream actually asked for.

You’ll leave with a new word — enoughness — and a clearer sense of what it means to provide the soil, not the outcomes.

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🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. Screens Are the Accelerant, Not the Cause

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation makes the case that a screen-based childhood produced the mental health crisis we’re living through. Kim doesn’t disagree — but he’s been doing this work since the early 1980s, long before smartphones existed.

Back then, kids were already displaying what he recognized as trauma-like responses: nervous and jumpy, hypervigilant, emotionally reactive.

The five causes he identified were too much stuff, too many choices, too much information, too much speed, and too little safe base — adult leadership children could rely on. Screens accelerated all five.

But treating screens as the only cause means we’ll only heal a modest part of the problem. The roots run deeper.

2. The Undeclared War on Childhood

Kim went undercover at a marketers’ conference and discovered that parents have a new name: “purchasing friction.”

Sixteen billion dollars a year is spent studying how to remove parental values from a child’s purchasing decisions.

The tactics are three: supersize the dream (buy this and your hope will be satisfied), flatter the parent (this purchase will get you admitted to your nine-year-old’s friend group), and discredit adults (make parents look stupid, negligent, and unnecessary).

This is not accidental. It is systematic. Understanding this isn’t paranoia — it’s strategic clarity. Coming back to your core values is, as Kim puts it, an act of social activism.

3. Enoughness Is The Missing Ingredient in Every Dream

Patrick introduced a word in this conversation that Kim embraced: enoughness.

We are very good at adding to our dreams — more activities, more opportunities, more stuff. We are very bad at subtracting. A dream without a constraint isn’t guidance; it’s accumulation with good intentions.

The provide instinct has eclipsed the protect instinct.

We spend tens of thousands chasing sports scholarships with a .001% chance of materializing. The antidote isn’t lowered ambition — it’s a clearly defined vision of what enough actually looks like for your family, arrived at before you start making changes.

4. Mirror Neurons and the Parent Who Goes First

While a toddler sits motionless watching a parent do the dishes, their mirror neurons are firing — they are doing the dishes. The inner mirroring happens first; the outer action follows. This is the neurological basis for the modeling that Patrick argues is the only real way to teach: children don’t adopt what parents say about simplicity, they adopt what parents live.

The micro abandonment — glancing at the phone while a child is speaking — signals to that child that the screen is more important.

The simplification regime that doesn’t reach the parent won’t hold. The work starts with us.

5. The Telos of an Acorn

Aristotle called it telos — the spirit seed inside a living thing that drives it toward what it’s meant to become. An acorn’s telos is to become an oak tree.

A child comes into the world with their own intent. Our job is not to produce that intent, manage its direction, or schedule it into existence. Our job is to provide the soil: predictability, rhythm, a reduced environment, filtered adult conversation, and an adult who leads with confidence.

What grows in that soil will be theirs. Not Minecraft’s. Not Fortnite’s. Not the travel soccer schedule’s. Theirs.

🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Where in your family’s life has “providing” eclipsed “protecting”?

Kim describes these two instincts as having been thrown out of balance — we now live on a superhighway of providing and a footpath of protecting.

Think about your last month: how many decisions were about adding something (an activity, a device, an opportunity) versus protecting something (time, quiet, presence, a rhythm)?

What’s one thing currently on the calendar that the original dream — the one you had before life got complicated — never asked for?

2. What was your original dream for your family — before life started adding to it?

Kim begins every family engagement by asking parents to dream their way back to the vision they held before the chaos arrived. What did you imagine when you first thought about the family you wanted to build? Not the outcomes — the feeling. The pace. The texture of daily life.

How far is your current reality from that original image — and what’s in the gap that wasn’t part of the plan?

3. Where are you modeling the opposite of the simplicity you want for your kids?

Every notification you answer in your child’s presence is a micro abandonment — a signal that the screen is more important. But beyond the phone, where does your own relationship with “too much” leak into family life?

The overloaded schedule, the inability to be bored, the constant reaching for stimulation — kids don’t hear the lesson about simplicity; they absorb the life you’re actually living.

What’s one area where your behavior and your stated values are out of alignment?

🎯 1 PRACTICE

Define your family’s enoughness.

This week, pick one area of family life — activities, stuff, screen time, or social commitments — and write down what “enough” actually looks like. Not as an aspiration. As a definition with a limit.

Kim’s insight is that this kind of clarity is harder to arrive at than it sounds, because our dreams almost never come with constraints. We keep adding without ever asking: what does this cost? What would I have to remove to make room for this? The moment you put a number or a ceiling on one domain, everything downstream becomes a choice instead of an accumulation.

Start small. One domain. Write it down. Then, for one week, let that definition make decisions for you. You don’t need to overhaul the house. You just need to know what enough looks like — once — and then trust that the knowing will spread.