An Excellent Wknd [25.48]
Some thoughts on defining the finish line
Hello, hi, 👋
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. A few days removed now, but I’m incredibly grateful for you and this little corner of the internet we’ve etched out for ourselves.
A quick call-out before we jump in: After years of conversations on the podcast about parenting, health, and raising resilient kids, we’ve synthesized it all into our first long-form article: Your Ceiling Becomes Their Starting Point: A Guide to Building Healthy Family Habits.
It’s a complete framework for how the same principles that make you strong in the gym can make your family strong at home.
If you’re a parent (or thinking about becoming one), I think you’ll find it valuable.
Let’s get into the week.
STOP MOVING THE GOALPOSTS
The most dangerous trap in building a career isn’t failure - it’s never defining what success actually looks like.
We spend years chasing an undefined target. We think we’ll know when we get there. We assume the feeling of arrival will be obvious. But without a clear definition of “made it,” we just keep moving the goalposts.
You hit your income target, but then you see someone earning twice that. You build the client list you wanted, but now you’re comparing yourself to someone with a bigger following. You achieve the work-life balance you dreamed about, but social media shows you someone doing more with less effort.
This isn’t about lowering your standards or abandoning ambition. It’s about being intentional. Define what “made it” means before you’re constantly measuring yourself against other people’s highlight reels.
Do you wake up excited on Monday morning? Can you say no to work that doesn’t fit? Are you earning enough to live the life you want without constant stress? Do people seek out your expertise? Does your work have the capacity to fit into your life without overwhelming everything else?
These questions matter more than arbitrary comparisons to strangers on the internet.
Here’s the hard truth: if you don’t decide what the finish line looks like, you’ll spend your entire life running toward a target that keeps moving further away. The goalpost shifts every time you get close because you’re letting external voices define what matters.
Write down what “made it” means to you. Be specific. Then protect that definition from the noise telling you it’s not enough.
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🎧 Why You Should Treat Triumph & Disaster as the Imposters That They Are
Exploring Rudyard Kipling’s timeless poem “If” and what it reveals about resilience, emotional intelligence, and building character that can weather both success and failure.
📚 Your Ceiling Becomes Their Starting Point: A Guide to Building Healthy Family Habits
Transforming from personal fitness to family wellness by understanding that modeling health beats managing behavior — and how to actually do it.
📊 ChaseTracker Weekly Report: From 10-Year Vision to Tomorrow’s Action
The lowest completion rates we see are always in the Vision category. Here’s the reverse engineering process that works: Start with your 3-Year Goals, create a Challenge that serves ONE of them, then identify the daily action that makes it real.
❤️🔥 The Daily Chase
Brief, focused essays delivered each weekday morning to Chase Club members.
On Tuesday, we’re releasing something special: a parenting supercut that brings together six of our most powerful conversations on raising resilient kids while maintaining your own health.
It’s the raw material behind this week’s essay — years of thinking distilled into frameworks, tactics, and daily practices that transform abstract principles into real family culture.
Until then, keep on chasing.
🤙🏼 Patrick
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