An Excellent Wknd [26.12]
Some thoughts on systems-thinking
Happy Saturday, my friends!
Before jumping in, a quick note about something you might be interested in:
My good buddy Jon Gilson — someone I’ve known for over 20 years, going all the way back to the days of Again Faster — recently started working at a Boston-based startup called Nocturnal.
They’re making a sleep mask that uses vestibular stimulation (the same mechanism as being rocked) to help you fall asleep faster and get more deep sleep — no pills, no supplements, no overhauling your routine. The science behind it is legit, and there’s nothing else like it out there.
They’re currently running a small beta test and looking for a handful of people to try it first. I told him I knew of a few thousand people who understand the importance of sleep that might be curious.
If you’ve struggled to fall asleep, wake up too often, or just feel like your sleep is never quite deep enough, the beta might be worth a look. Same if you love being first in line for something genuinely new.
Ok, let’s get into it.
YOUR HEALTH IS A SYSTEM, NOT A CHECKLIST
When we talked with him, Spencer Nix introduced a useful concept about how we approach health: your body is a system, not a collection of isolated variables. And systems are complicated. They have multiple parts that all work together. When one thing doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter how great everything else is.
This is why you can do everything right with your training for six weeks and see no results. It’s not that the training isn’t working. It’s that there are delays in effect. Your body needs time to recalibrate across all the other parts of the system — nutrition, sleep, stress, recovery, psychology. It’s the same way that bumping up your thermostat a couple degrees doesn’t immediately change the temperature of every room in your house. Each part of the system takes time to acclimate.
Spencer uses the term “wicked problem” to describe this. It’s wicked because there’s a delay between action and result. You could be doing everything right, but because all these other parts of the system are affected by it, you won’t see the change immediately. And then you stop, only to realize later that it just took time for everything to adjust.
This is why so many people say they’ve tried every gym in town and nothing seems to stick. It’s not the gym. It’s that there’s something else going on in their life that’s actually limiting their progress. You don’t have the physical capacity to show up consistently not because you lack willpower or motivation, but because sleep is broken. Or stress is unmanaged. Or relationships are suffering. Or nutrition is a mess.
The mistake we make is treating health like an information deficit problem. If we just know more, do more, try harder, surely we’ll get there. But real life doesn’t work like that. If there are things you’re not addressing, you actually have to address those things. You can’t out-train a broken system. You can’t out-supplement poor sleep. You can’t out-discipline chronic stress.
What Spencer is saying is both more complex and more liberating than the standard fitness advice. More complex because you have to look at the whole system. More liberating because once you identify the real bottleneck, everything else gets easier.
[ Note: Spencer is also on Substack now! ]
🎧 Stop Letting Tech Do the Work: The Old-School Method That Actually Makes Diet Changes Stick
EC Synkowski joins us to explore why the calorie trackers, wearables, and AI-powered diet tools promising to fix your nutrition are all solving the wrong problem — and why the solution has been sitting right in front of you the whole time.
🎧 Chase Club Q&A: When Is It Time to Make a Change?
Tackling the hardest question in growth: when do you push through, and when do you walk away — and the three-year test that cuts through the noise.
❤️🔥 The Daily Chase
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Two fun ones for you:
On Monday, NOBULL co-founder Marcus Wilson joins us to challenge the whole idea of the bucket list. We dig into two powerful takes — from Arthur Brooks and Simon Sinek — on why the checklist of things you most want might be quietly working against your happiness.
And on Thursday, author and mindfulness teacher Margaret Cullen joins us to explore equanimity — the ability to fully feel the range of human experience without being hijacked by it. Her new book, Quiet Strength, makes the case that this is the one quality we need most right now, and she brings the science, the practices, and the philosophy to back it up.
Until then, keep on chasing.
🤙🏼 Patrick
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