I was functioning. Working, building, mentoring. Nobody would have called me a coward. But underneath that, avoidance was my default response to anything that carried fear. What my father‘s death gave me was not courage. It gave me a break in the loop, and a reason to look at what the loop had been doing to me. Courage came afterward, slowly, through repetition. It is still not finished.

I say this at the beginning because the model I want to describe in this article rests on it. The model is not “how to feel better.“ It is closer to a question I ask myself and the people I mentor almost every week:

How do I become a person whose habitual responses stay useful and deliberate when things get difficult?

Procrastination is where that question becomes visible first.

Procrastination is a signal, not a productivity problem

We usually talk about procrastination in operational terms. Calendars, task managers, timers, reminders. Those tools help, and I use some of them. But they treat the symptom as the disease.

This is important.

When I look at what actually happens in the moment I push something from Friday to Monday, it is not a scheduling failure. It is avoidance. There is something I should do, could do today, and I do not, because doing it would bring me into contact with something I would rather not feel.

Fear of doing it wrong. Fear of a reaction.

Discomfort. Uncertainty. Sometimes the fear of finding out something about myself.

The dangerous part is not the single delay; it will happen, and you can fix it.

It is the loop. Monday becomes Tuesday, because Friday to Monday was apparently fine. And with every repetition, I am not only delaying a task. I am training something. I am teaching myself that giving in is acceptable. That lesson sticks better than any resolution.

So I have stopped asking “how do I make myself do this?“ The more useful question is: what is happening inside me that makes avoidance preferable to action? Procrastination answers that question if you let it. It points at the exact place where fear, ego, or an unexamined story is running the show.

The chain from impulse to character

To make that useful, I need a model of how behavior forms. Mine is a mix of classical Stoicism, Steven Pressfield‘s idea of Resistance, and about a decade of watching myself and my mentees fail in the same ways.

It starts with the human condition. Human beings are not rational actors who occasionally have feelings. We are emotional systems that occasionally reason. Fear, avoidance, ego, learned reactions, social conditioning: all of this produces signals before deliberate thought can participate. That is not a defect. It is the base layer. It is also what everything drifts back to when no intention is applied. In my leadership work, I call this homeostasis: the baseline is what the system returns to when nobody is trying.

From that layer, a signal appears.

The signal is real. It is data. But it is not yet a decision.

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Then comes judgment. This is the step the Stoics cared about most, and the step I think modern self-help mostly skips. Judgment is active. Sensation happens, emotion happens, thoughts appear, but judgment is the moment I examine what appeared and decide what to do with it. “I want to avoid this conversation“ is a signal. “I want to avoid this conversation, therefore I should“ is already a judgment, and usually a bad one.

Then action. Then reflection on what actually happened, as fact, not story. Then practice: doing it again tomorrow, slightly better. Enough practice and the response becomes habitus, the deep pattern through which I perceive and react without deciding to. Enough habitus and it is my baseline. And baseline, repeated under pressure over years, is what other people experience as character.

Human condition, signal, judgment, action, reflection, practice, habitus, baseline, character. That is the whole chain. Procrastination is what happens when the signal skips judgment and goes straight to action.

Habitus: the tendency does not disappear

One thing I had to learn the hard way, and that I now say to every mentee in the first weeks, is that the goal is not to stop having the impulse.

My avoidance tendency is still there. Ten years of daily practice and I still feel the pull toward “later“ almost every day. What changed is not the presence of the impulse. It is that the impulse no longer automatically decides. I notice it, I name it, and most days I act against it. Some days I do not. The struggle today is not that I fail to do the necessary thing. The struggle is how much energy it still costs me to intervene in the moment. I am regularly astonished at how easily my ego drags me back to the exact position where I have to make that decision again.

This distinction matters because people quit when they measure themselves against the wrong goal. “I no longer feel fear“ is not the goal. “I recognize the fear and have trained myself not to obey it“ is much closer. Development does not require erasing the human condition. It requires changing your relationship to it.

The Stoics organized this training around four virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. I do not read them as ideals or personality labels. I read them as the four things you have to practice for the chain above to work. Each one addresses a specific way the chain breaks.

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Courage: facing what you would rather avoid

Courage is where the chain breaks first for most of the people I work with, and where it broke for me.

The mechanism is simple and uncomfortable. The brighter the signal about what you should do, the stronger the resistance. Your ego has unlimited disguises for this: embarrassment, “what will they think,“ “I am not ready yet,“ “this is not the right moment.“ All of them serve the same function. Courage is the trained response to that signal. Not the absence of fear. The fear stays. Courage is that the fear does not get to decide.

It is binary in the moment. You feel the fear and you act, or you feel the fear and you do not. There is not much room in between. But one act is not courage. If you push through once and avoid the next three times, you had a courageous moment. A courageous person is someone for whom acting despite fear has become habitus.

I see the leadership version of this constantly. A mentee had moved into a larger technical leadership role and knew he needed to communicate expectations more clearly. He also knew exactly why he was not doing it: he had a very good relationship with his team and was afraid of becoming “the bad guy.“ Every week the conversation was postponed, and every week the postponement felt reasonable. That is procrastination in a suit. The work was not to give him a script. The work was to name what he was protecting, his identity as everybody‘s colleague, and to practice being clear while keeping the trust. Neither authority nor friendliness would have solved it. Only repeated, slightly frightening clarity did.

The same mentee later faced a situation where an employee was visibly considering leaving. Both sides could see something had changed. Both sides were tempted to stay indefinitely between decisions, because deciding was uncomfortable. Resistance is strongest right before the decision. Leaving an acknowledged problem unresolved does not make it neutral. It just moves the cost to later and adds interest.

And there is one form of courage that I think is harder than any external confrontation: the courage to look at yourself. Everyone happily calls themselves an introvert these days. Introspection is a different thing. It means being honest about who you actually are, and that threatens the stories you maintain about yourself. When I start with a new mentee, I do not give them a transformation program. I give them a reflection book and one instruction for the first week: observe. Find out who you actually are and where you stand. Even failing to write for three days is evidence about workload, fatigue, or avoidance. Reflection produces data before intervention. But you have to be willing to read the data.

Discipline: making the useful action repeat

Discipline is the virtue I see misunderstood most often. Almost daily.

When I ask someone what discipline means, I hear “I must.“ I must go to the gym, I must get up early, I must be consistent. And almost always the “must“ is anchored in someone else: society, a promise, a coach, a partner. The classical virtue here is usually translated as temperance or self-control, and I deliberately call it discipline, but with the Latin meaning of disciplina in mind: learning, training, practice. Not punishment. Not compliance.

If you have to force yourself every single time to do something you fundamentally resist, you are showing willpower. Willpower is real and it is finite. But it is not discipline as identity. Discipline is when “I must force myself to do this“ has become “this is simply what I do.“ The progression is deliberate action, repetition, identity, habitus, baseline. External obligation is fragile. Internalized practice is stable, and it requires progressively less negotiation with yourself.

This is why I correct mentees every time they say “I need to start journaling, you told me to.“ I never told anyone they need to. I recommended it. Their own reasoning heard the recommendation and agreed. And then, between that conversation and the next morning, the ego converted it into an external dependency, because “Adrian said“ is negotiable in a way that “I decided“ is not.

A concrete example. A mentee had started delegating real operational responsibility to his team. It was working. People were learning. And yet, nearly every week, the same thought came back: am I demanding too much, should I be doing this myself? He had the authority to decide, he had evaluated the situation, he had deliberately delegated. Reopening the decision every evening was not control. It was an emotional after-effect looking for a job. So the instruction was: write the decision into your reflection book, explicitly. “This has been decided.“ And then write it again the next week, because one conscious statement does not overwrite an established emotional pattern. Repetition does. That is disciplina in its original sense.

Where does rest fit into this? After. Rest is what you do once the thing is done. Recreation is what you do after you have pushed through the piece you needed to push through. Skipping the work today, skipping it tomorrow, and then doing it in a panic when the deadline arrives is not recovery. It is procrastination that borrowed the vocabulary of self-care.

Justice: judging your own conduct first

Justice is the virtue where even experienced practitioners disagree, so what follows is my working interpretation, not a definition from a book.

Justice, as I practice it, is inward first. It is how I judge my own actions toward others. The usual reading is the opposite: justice as the mechanism for deciding who else was wrong. And that is exactly the trap, because as soon as attention goes to the other person, you are in finger-pointing mode, and the search for their mistakes will always succeed.

The practical question is different. Something happened. Someone did something, maybe something genuinely wrong. Their behavior belongs to them. How I reacted belongs to me. If someone is aggressive and I respond with aggression, their behavior does not remove my responsibility for mine. “It is not about the other person, it is about me“ does not mean their behavior was acceptable. It means their wrongdoing cannot become my excuse for abandoning my own standards.

I have to admit something here. For a long time I was an extremely aggressive person when someone crossed a line. Not in daily life, I am calm and I avoid most people. But when a line was crossed, something primal came up fast and hard, and my family knows what that looked like. It is still in me. What changed is that I studied the pattern. I know how it disguises itself as righteousness: “you have to do this right now, this is the right thing.“ And I have trained a response that has to happen in a blink: no, Adrian, this is the pattern, this is not about them. If you need ten seconds of deliberation, you are not there yet. Keep practicing until the recognition is faster than the reaction.

For leaders, justice means examining your own contribution to a problem before assigning blame downward. A mentee once complained that his engineers were not acting independently. They waited, they did not unblock themselves, they asked questions whose answers were already in the ticket. His instinct was to take them more closely by the hand and tell them what to do. I asked him directly: if your objective is independence, why are you responding by removing independence? He was not wrong about the symptom. But the just question was not “what is wrong with them.“ It was “what am I doing that makes dependence the path of least resistance?“ That reframe is uncomfortable. It is also the only one that leads anywhere, because it is the only part he could actually change.

And there is a practical reason to care about how you behave in emotionally loaded moments. People forget what you said. They forget the details. They do not forget how you made them feel. The emotion is the last thing that fades. Whatever you do in the moment when someone provokes you is the thing that gets remembered.

Wisdom: recognizing the pattern

Wisdom is the hardest of the four, because it depends on reading patterns correctly, and patterns only become visible through repetition.

Knowledge is not wisdom. Reading philosophy is not wisdom. Quoting Marcus Aurelius on LinkedIn is very definitely not wisdom, and I say that as someone who sees a great deal of it. Wisdom develops through a cycle: experience, observation, judgment, reflection, changed behavior, new experience. Over time you begin to recognize what reliably triggers you, what produces your avoidance, what you keep trying to control that cannot be controlled, and which behaviors repeatedly produce better outcomes.

The classical tool here is the dichotomy of control. In practice I extend it into three categories, because the middle one is where most real leadership work happens. Control is what I can act on directly: my words, my preparation, my boundaries. Influence is what I cannot command but can affect through repeated action, environment, credibility, relationships. No-Control is what is simply not mine to determine: other people‘s judgments, the past, outcomes that depend on factors outside me. The purpose is not acceptance for its own sake. It is correct allocation of agency. Control: act. Influence: design actions that compound. No-Control: stop spending emotional energy trying to command it.

The employee who was considering leaving is a good example. She was worrying about what would happen to the team and the company if she left. Those consequences were not hers to control, and they should not have dominated a decision about her own future. For the leader, the mirror lesson was equally hard: another person‘s motivation and development cannot be controlled back into a previous state. You can create conditions. You cannot command a person to want what they wanted a year ago. Wisdom is recognizing that quickly enough to deal with reality instead of insisting on the old one.

I want to be honest about how this feels from inside. I have practiced for years and I experience wisdom as a wave. The more I practice, the less I seem to understand. Then it gets clearer. Then it gets worse again. I have stopped expecting it to feel like arrival.

Marcus wrote a workbook, not a diary

I keep the Meditations near my desk, and I hold it up in the video for a reason. It is not a diary. A man responsible for an empire wrote notes to himself, for himself, with no audience in mind, and if you read it that way, you notice what it mostly is: correction. He is not describing how wise he has become. He is catching himself. In various forms, again and again: you did this again, remember what matters, do better tomorrow.

The lesson from Marcus is therefore not “look how wise this man was.“ It is “look how often even this man needed to remind himself how he intended to behave.“ Knowing a principle once was insufficient for him. He needed repetition. So do I. So does everyone I have ever mentored.

That is why my own practice is small and daily rather than occasional and deep. In the morning I write who I intend to be today, especially under pressure, and one thing I will not do. In the evening I write what actually happened, as fact, and classify what is still open: control, influence, or no control. Then the smallest next action. The page is a mirror, not an artifact. I am not producing anything. I let a thought exist long enough for my mind to work with it, then let it go.

One clarification, because I have written elsewhere that the evening review is “not self-judgment.“ That is a warning against condemnation and rumination, not against judgment in the sense I have used throughout this article. Rumination re-experiences the problem. Reflection extracts information from it. The point is active judgment of your own conduct. Beating yourself up is not.

What this is not

Because this can easily slide into generic motivation, let me draw the lines.

This is not “believe in yourself.“ It is: observe yourself accurately enough to train better responses.

This is not “ignore your emotions.“
It is: emotions are information, and information does not automatically deserve authority over action.

This is not “never care what others do.“
It is: do not confuse another person‘s behavior with something you control.

This is not “be hard on yourself.“
It is: judge your actions honestly enough to improve them, without turning reflection into punishment.

And this is not “Stoicism makes problems disappear.“
It is: practice changes how reliably you can meet problems.

It is also not about heritage. We do not choose how we grew up or which habits we absorbed before we could evaluate them. But a habit built at fifteen and still carried at thirty-five is not a sentence. If you can see it, you can correct it, today, and the convenient story that it cannot be changed is usually the ego protecting the loop.

Baseline, not peaks

If I compress everything above into one principle, it is this: do not optimize for exceptional days. Raise the baseline.

One courageous conversation matters less than becoming someone who habitually has them. One brilliant week of discipline matters less than a practice that survives a bad month. One calm reaction under attack matters less than becoming predictably calm. The same is true for teams. Leadership is not demonstrated through heroic interventions. It becomes visible through the behavioral baseline other people repeatedly experience from you.

Procrastination is the daily test of that baseline. Every “later“ is a small vote for the old one. Every push through fear is a small vote for the new one. The virtues are not four separate lessons. They are one system: wisdom recognizes the pattern, justice judges my own reaction honestly, courage acts despite the fear, and discipline does it again tomorrow. Miss any of the four, and the loop closes again.

I still fight this every morning and check it every evening. Ten years in, the fight is quieter. It is not gone. I no longer expect it to be.

What did you move from Friday to Monday this week, and what is it protecting you from?

—Adrian

We often describe it as the ability to force ourselves to do something we do not want to do: go to the gym, wake up early, work on the business, push through resistance. Sometimes this kind of discipline is necessary. Some mornings I do not want to run, and some work needs to be done regardless of whether I feel like doing it.

But if this is your normal state, something is probably wrong. If maintaining a certain behavior requires enormous amounts of willpower every single day, the problem may not be a lack of discipline. It may be that the identity and baseline underneath the behavior have never really changed.

The goal is not to make difficult things easy. The more interesting goal is to reduce how much internal negotiation is required before doing them. The external challenge can increase while the internal argument decreases.

Why I carry unnecessary weight through the mountains

The kettlebell is useful precisely because it feels out of place. A heavier backpack would simply make the run harder. Carrying a kettlebell creates a stronger cognitive contradiction: this does not look like something you should be able to trail run with.

That contradiction is part of the training. I am not only increasing physical load; I am deliberately confronting the mind with something it initially classifies as unreasonable and then giving it evidence that the classification was incomplete.

I wasn't doing it to prove I could carry more weight. I was deliberately creating resistance. The physical load produces a specific cognitive experience. At first, the mind reacts almost with disbelief: surely this cannot be something we are going to run with. Then the body starts moving, the first climb arrives, then another, and eventually something that initially seemed unreasonable becomes part of the environment.

That interests me more than the weight itself.

The mind presents a boundary, but that boundary is not automatically the boundary that exists. By creating controlled resistance, I can observe where the resistance appears, how quickly it changes, and how something unusual gradually becomes normal.

Mountain endurance has become one of my disciplines. That changes my relationship with difficulty because I am no longer trying to convince myself that I should become someone who does this. The practice has already started to become part of how I understand myself.

👉 Interestingly, that exact challenge will shape my resilience a lot in the coming days. It’s hard to top that sensation, so the subconscious mind doesn’t bombard me with other emotions all day long.

Modern discipline is often built around resistance

A lot of contemporary discipline culture is built around overcoming yourself. The stronger the resistance, the more admirable the action seems. This fits naturally into hustle culture because suffering becomes evidence of commitment: if the action was miserable but you did it anyway, it appears more valuable.

That can be useful in exceptional situations, but I think it is a poor operating system for everyday life.

Relying on willpower is cognitively expensive because the same internal negotiation keeps reopening. One part tries to execute the behavior while another part attempts to avoid it. Occasionally that is unavoidable, but when the conflict happens every day, the more interesting question is not how to become tougher. It is why the state you consciously want to create remains so far away from the state your system naturally returns to.

That is where the idea of baseline becomes useful.

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Baseline matters more than peak performance

I use the term baseline to describe the state we tend to return to under ordinary conditions, especially when tired, stressed, or distracted. It is not the best version of ourselves on a highly motivated day. It is closer to the default.

Many discipline systems focus on increasing the peak instead of moving that default. A person who barely exercises decides to train six days per week. Someone struggling with a business creates a twelve-hour entrepreneurial routine. Another person who has never journaled decides to write ten pages every morning.

For a while, motivation and novelty can keep the system away from its previous state. Then pressure decreases, attention moves elsewhere, and the old pattern returns. This is why dramatic self-improvement attempts can feel extraordinary for three weeks and disappear three months later.

Behavior changed temporarily, but the baseline did not.

Disciplina: from practice to habitus to baseline

We still hear an echo of that meaning when we speak about an academic discipline or a sporting discipline. Someone dedicates themselves to a particular field and is gradually shaped by the practice.

I think of the process in a simple sequence.

Identity gives direction.

Disciplina provides repeated practice. Repeated practice shapes habitus, meaning the way a person characteristically behaves. Habitus gradually shifts the baseline.

At some point, the behavior no longer needs to be renegotiated every day because it has become part of how the person operates. That is where identity starts shaping character in a practical sense: not because declaring an identity magically changes behavior, but because repeated evidence slowly changes what feels normal.

Identity changes the direction of resistance

Once a practice becomes part of identity, resistance can reverse direction. The difficult part may no longer be convincing yourself to do the activity. Sometimes the difficult part becomes convincing yourself not to do it.

I know this problem well. Some days, recovery is the sensible decision. Family obligations, business responsibilities, and other things deserve attention. Yet the activity that once required discipline has become the thing I naturally want to do.

Traditional willpower then returns in the opposite direction. I may need discipline to stay home, recover, deal with administrative work, or spend time on obligations that are less attractive than disappearing into the forest for another few hours.

You could call this reverse procrastination: avoiding one responsibility by doing something objectively difficult that happens to be more aligned with your identity.

That distinction matters because behavior alone tells us very little about discipline. A hard activity can become psychologically comfortable once it is deeply congruent with identity. What matters more is the baseline underneath the behavior.

At first, resistance appears when doing the practice. Later, resistance may appear when not doing it. The activity has stopped requiring constant justification.

Persistent resistance is information

This creates a more uncomfortable question. What if the activity you are constantly forcing into your life is not actually well aligned with the person you are trying to become?

That does not mean that disliking something proves it is the wrong discipline. Competence develops slowly, difficult practices often feel unpleasant at first, and almost every meaningful path contains parts we would rather avoid. Persistent resistance is not proof, but it is information worth examining instead of automatically treating it as a character defect.

Someone may force themselves to run because running has become culturally associated with discipline, while another form of training would fit them far better. Entrepreneurship presents a similar example. There is a strong cultural narrative around independence, freedom and building something of your own, but entrepreneurship also involves uncertainty, sales, financial risk, repetitive work and decisions without sufficient information. Some people thrive in that environment; others would be much better served by becoming exceptionally good inside an organization.

Neither is inherently superior.

The relevant question is whether the discipline fits the direction in which you genuinely want to develop. Forcing yourself into an identity primarily because society currently admires it can become identity conflict disguised as ambition.

The eternal learner

The identity I try to build around is not primarily runner, entrepreneur, CTO, mentor, or athlete. Those identities are useful, but they are too narrow. The deeper identity is closer to eternal learner.

That changes the interpretation of difficulty. Carrying additional weight is not mainly about proving strength. It is about discovering what happens. How does movement change? Where does resistance appear? Which assumption turns out to be wrong? At what point does something difficult become normal?

The run becomes an experiment. Business becomes an experiment. Leadership becomes an experiment. Even failure becomes useful because the learner can convert information into adjustment instead of interpreting every failure as an attack on identity.

This is one reason I think identity belongs underneath discipline. An identity that requires constant proof of excellence makes difficulty threatening. An identity built around learning turns difficulty into material.

Stoicism is not about making life miserable

Stoicism is frequently pulled into modern hustle culture as philosophical justification for suffering: harder workouts, cold showers, early mornings, fewer excuses. Some Stoic practices involve voluntary discomfort, but suffering itself is not the objective.

The objective is reducing unnecessary dependence.

Voluntary discomfort can teach that comfort is not a prerequisite for action. Physical resistance can show that an initial reaction does not automatically represent reality. Reflection can help distinguish an impression from the judgment we build around it.

But there is no Stoic virtue in making life arbitrarily miserable.

If carrying additional weight teaches me something, it can be useful. If I carry it because I need strangers to think I am disciplined, I have simply replaced one dependency with another. The visible action may look identical, while the underlying purpose is completely different.

Metacognition turns resistance into information

Another layer lies beneath this: the ability to observe resistance instead of immediately obeying it.

Perhaps the body is genuinely approaching a limit. Perhaps the sensation is simply discomfort. Boredom, fear of failure, uncertainty or familiarity with an older pattern can all produce resistance. The purpose of observation is not to dismiss those signals but to understand them before treating them as instructions.

That is why deliberately increasing difficulty can sometimes be cognitively useful. Resistance becomes visible and therefore examinable.

The goal is not to ignore warning signals. That would be stupidity dressed as toughness. The goal is to stop treating every signal as an order.

Homeostasis and the evidence of repetition

I use the term homeostasis for the tendency of a system to return toward a familiar state. The old baseline has one enormous advantage over the new one: it is already known.

This helps explain why teams return to old communication patterns after an offsite, why productivity resets fade, and why someone can train consistently for a month before gradually returning to inactivity. The system is not necessarily sabotaging itself. It is moving back toward the lowest-friction state it recognizes.

Identity therefore cannot simply be declared. It needs evidence.

A person runs, then runs again. The practice happens in good conditions and mediocre ones, on highly motivated days and ordinary ones. Eventually enough evidence accumulates that “I run” becomes more accurate than “I am trying to become someone who runs.”

The interesting part is that this evidence should eventually become boring. One of the clearest signs that a baseline is forming is that the behavior stops feeling heroic.

Hustle culture loves peaks because peaks create stories: look how early I woke up, how hard I trained, how long I worked. Baseline culture is much less impressive. The thing happened again, as part of an ordinary week.

That boring repetition is exactly what creates capacity.

Willpower should become the exception

None of this makes willpower unnecessary. Bad nights, difficult days, stress, illness, terrible weather, business pressure, and simple lack of enthusiasm will always exist. Sometimes conscious intervention is necessary: I do not want to do this today, but I am doing it anyway.

That capacity matters enormously. I simply do not think it should remain the primary mechanism.

If every day requires a heroic act of self-control, it is worth inspecting the system. The baseline may be too ambitious, the environment may constantly work against the behavior, the practice may not yet have existed long enough, or the chosen discipline may not fit the direction of development particularly well.

Those questions are more useful than endlessly asking how to become tougher.

A discipline that is actually becoming established should gradually require less internal negotiation. That does not mean less physical effort, lower standards or reduced difficulty. Mountain endurance can become physically harder while psychologically becoming more normal. Entrepreneurship can become more complex while the decision to continue on that path becomes simpler. Leadership can involve increasingly difficult conversations while avoiding those conversations becomes less compatible with character.

Build the floor before increasing the ceiling

This is why I am skeptical of dramatic transformation plans. When someone wants to become physically active, I am more interested in the minimum that can be sustained than the maximum that can be survived. If reflection is the goal, five minutes every day may be more valuable than one extraordinary ninety-minute session. If leadership communication needs to improve, one real difficult conversation each week can matter more than another book about courageous leadership.

The floor comes first.

This is also how I think about physical training. The purpose of repeatedly carrying eight kilograms is not eight kilograms. The purpose is making eight kilograms ordinary. Once that becomes part of the baseline, ten becomes realistic, and eventually another level becomes realistic.

The peak moves because the floor moved first.

Choose something worth becoming

Before asking how to force yourself to become something, there is a more important question: is that thing actually worth becoming for you?

Not because it looks impressive, because somebody online says successful people behave that way, or because another entrepreneur, athlete or productivity expert has turned their own identity into a universal prescription.

The more useful question is what kind of person makes sense given your interests, abilities, responsibilities and potential. From there, practices can provide repeated evidence for that identity. They should begin small enough to survive ordinary days and continue long enough to become unremarkable.

That, to me, is a much more interesting form of discipline.

—Adrian

My head starts filling up with work, people, conversations, decisions, and problems that do not even exist yet. There may be something I have to solve next Thursday, something a client might ask me next week, something that could go wrong with the business, something I should remember for my family. None of those things is necessarily a problem right now, but my mind has already invited all of them into the room.

I have been mentoring people for roughly ten years now. In the beginning, most conversations were about technology, careers, products, and how to become better at something. Over the years, I started noticing something different. More and more conversations eventually arrive at the same underlying problem: people are carrying too much. They are functioning, often at a very high level, but they have lost the ability to distinguish between what actually requires their attention and what is simply demanding it.

This is one of the reasons I journal, and one of the reasons Stoicism became much more than philosophy to me. It became a practical system for protecting my own mind.

We have become very good at saying yes

There is a strange contradiction in modern high-performance culture. We talk constantly about discipline, ambition and doing difficult things, but very rarely about the ability to stop. We admire the person who can carry more, work longer, build another company, take another client, train harder and optimize another part of life. Yet almost nobody defines the point at which enough is actually enough.

What is a high performer?

Is it someone who gets more done than everybody else? Someone who answers every message quickly? Someone who works twelve hours a day? Someone who never disappoints anyone? Someone who can absorb enormous amounts of stress without visibly falling apart?

If we do not define the term ourselves, somebody else will define it for us. Usually the definition becomes very simple: more.

Do more. Produce more. Earn more. Become more visible. Be more disciplined. Wake up earlier. Build something on the side. Create more content. Train more. Improve yourself.

Even self-development can become another external agenda.

I believe strongly in discipline, but I do not believe discipline means becoming exceptionally good at obeying external pressure. Discipline should make you better at governing yourself. If your discipline only increases how much other people can load onto you, something has gone wrong.

The ability to say no therefore becomes much more important than it initially appears. A no is not simply a rejection. It is evidence that you can distinguish between somebody else’s agenda and your own judgment.

Your mind needs a gatekeeper

I increasingly think about my own mind as something that requires a gatekeeper. Not everything that arrives deserves entry.

A request can arrive without becoming an obligation. A criticism can arrive without becoming an internal crisis. A future problem can exist without becoming today’s problem. Someone can be disappointed without requiring me to immediately repair their disappointment. An emotion can appear without automatically becoming an action.

That distinction is very close to the beginning of Epictetus’ Enchiridion:

“Of things some are in our power, and others are not.”

— Epictetus, Enchiridion, Chapter 1, George Long translation.

The sentence is almost absurdly simple. The practice behind it is not.

Epictetus continues by placing our judgments, impulses, desires and aversions among the things that concern our own agency, while reputation, property, status and other external conditions do not belong to us in the same way. The entire practical problem begins when we confuse these categories. We start trying to control somebody else’s opinion while allowing somebody else’s opinion to control our behavior.

This is where saying no becomes a Stoic practice.

Someone asks something of me. The request itself is external. Their disappointment if I refuse is external. Their opinion about me afterward is external. What I say, how I say it, which responsibility I accept and what trade-off I make are mine.

That does not tell me automatically whether the correct answer is yes or no. Stoicism is not a machine that generates simple answers. It gives me the space to actually make the decision.

The first reaction is not necessarily your decision

This is where the metacognitive aspect becomes important to me.

Imagine somebody comes to you and says, “I really need this today. Can you please do it?”

You immediately feel something. Perhaps tension. Perhaps guilt. Perhaps the fear that the person will be disappointed. Perhaps you simply dislike conflict. There can be an almost physical urge to say yes before you have actually considered whether you want to do it.

That reaction is real, but it is not necessarily a decision.

There is a substantial difference between saying:

and:

The second statement creates distance. It turns the internal reaction into something I can observe.

That is what metacognition means for me in practice. I am not only thinking; I can sometimes observe the process of thinking while it happens. I can notice that I am constructing a story. I can notice that an emotion is pushing toward a behavior. I can notice that I am about to answer primarily to remove discomfort rather than because I believe the answer is correct.

That creates the possibility of intervention.

Something happens. I experience an automatic reaction. I recognize the reaction. I examine it. Then I choose what to do.

Without that observation layer, stimulus and response can become almost indistinguishable. The person asks, I feel pressure, and I say yes. Five hours later, I am angry about something I technically agreed to myself.

The interesting part is that the other person may no longer be the real problem. My inability to tolerate the discomfort of saying no was the problem.

Control, influence and no-control

In my own practical framework, I extend the traditional Stoic distinction into three categories: Control, Influence, and No-Control.

The dichotomy remains the foundation. Epictetus is making a philosophical distinction about what is genuinely “up to us.” But in everyday life, especially for people who are not spending their days studying Stoic philosophy, there is a useful middle category.

Some things are not directly controllable but can clearly be influenced.

I cannot simply command my emotional system to stop reacting. I cannot say, “From now on I will never feel anxiety when somebody challenges me,” and expect the instruction to work. I cannot directly decide that criticism will no longer hurt, that I will never become angry, or that I will never again feel the urge to please somebody.

Those reactions are not entirely under conscious command.

But I can influence them.

I can repeatedly practice boundaries. I can expose myself to discomfort. I can prepare for predictable situations. I can change my environment. I can observe recurring patterns. I can change what I repeatedly reinforce through my behavior. I can become more familiar with the sensation of saying no and discovering that the world did not end afterward.

That gives me three operational categories.

The point of the model is not philosophical perfection. It is better allocation of attention. If something belongs to No-Control, I need to stop emotionally negotiating with it. If something belongs to Influence, I need patience and repeated action. If something belongs to Control, I need to act. This Control / Influence / No-Control model is the practical core of the Stoic operating system I use in mentoring as well.

Morning: decide before the world starts deciding for you

This is why my day starts with reflection.

I do not write ten pages. I do not create an enormous list of everything I should accomplish. The purpose is not productivity. The purpose is orientation.

I write down who I want to be during the coming day. That could be something as simple as:

Then I define a very small number of signals. I deliberately call them signals rather than goals because I am not always trying to produce a binary achievement. Sometimes the signal is behavioral. I want to recognize pressure before responding. I want to have the difficult conversation instead of carrying it around for another day. I want to protect a block of time. I want to finish one thing that has been creating mental noise.

Then comes something equally important: what I will not do.

Most planning systems are built almost entirely around addition. We decide what else we will accomplish. Eventually every day contains fifteen priorities, which means it contains no priorities at all. A boundary makes the cost visible.

The Mirror-Book practice I use is intentionally small for exactly this reason. Morning intention, a few signals and explicit protection are supposed to create a baseline that survives messy days, rather than another perfect routine that collapses as soon as life becomes difficult.

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Preparation does not remove stress; it changes recognition

Writing something in the morning does not magically change the world.

Clients still call. People still push. Children still need something. Projects still go wrong. Other people still arrive with their own stress and sometimes attempt to transfer that stress directly to you.

Preparation changes something else: recognition.

If I wrote in the morning that I will not accept urgency without understanding the tradeoff, then I am more likely to recognize urgency when it arrives. Instead of simply absorbing it, there is a small chance that my conscious mind says: There it is.

That moment matters.

Stoic practices such as premeditatio malorum serve a similar function. You mentally anticipate difficulty before it arrives, not because you want to spend the morning catastrophizing, but because surprise reduces your ability to respond deliberately. Something familiar is easier to observe than something that seems to appear from nowhere.

Voluntary discomfort works in a related way for me. I deliberately do things that are uncomfortable because I want to train the association that discomfort does not automatically require escape. This can happen physically through training, but it can also be a difficult conversation, a deliberate boundary, a period without distraction, or simply saying no when saying yes would be easier.

The goal is not suffering. The goal is familiarity with discomfort.

If discomfort becomes familiar, it loses some of its authority.

The day is the practice

The morning is preparation. The actual work happens during the day.

Something triggers me. Someone asks too much. A message irritates me. I notice anxiety. I become defensive. A new idea appears and suddenly everything I planned in the morning seems less interesting. I want to escape into something easier.

This is the practice phase.

I try to run a very small internal sequence. What is actually happening? Which part is Control, Influence or No-Control? What reaction am I experiencing? What is that reaction trying to make me do? Does that response match the person I decided to be this morning?

Then I intervene.

Sometimes the intervention is surprisingly small. I wait thirty seconds before answering. I leave a message unanswered for an hour. I say, “Let me think about that.” I ask what would need to be deprioritized if this new task is truly urgent. I write something down instead of carrying it around mentally. I tell somebody no.

None of this looks particularly heroic from the outside.

That is exactly the point.

The goal is to raise the baseline, not to create dramatic peaks of self-control. My wider Stoic framework follows the same loop: name the situation, classify it, choose the smallest action inside Control or Influence, act, and review what actually changed.

Sometimes the correct answer is yes

I want to emphasize this because “boundaries” can become another shallow piece of self-help advice.

The goal is not to say no to everybody.

Sometimes I should help somebody even if it is inconvenient. Sometimes my responsibility as a father, husband, entrepreneur, mentor or business partner requires me to accept discomfort. Sometimes justice requires more from me than I would voluntarily choose for my own convenience.

The question is whether I am choosing that responsibility consciously.

There is a profound difference between

Externally, the two situations can look identical.

Internally, one is agency and the other is avoidance.

This is why I increasingly think the ability to say no gives value back to yes. If you cannot say no, your yes is not entirely voluntary.

Every yes contains a tradeoff

This principle appears everywhere in my work, including leadership.

Every yes costs something.

If a team accepts another priority, something else receives less attention. If I add another client call, the time comes from somewhere. If I start another project, I do not receive additional hours in the day because the project is important.

Sometimes the tradeoff is another piece of work. Sometimes it is sleep. Sometimes it is training. Sometimes it is family. Sometimes it is simply mental emptiness.

That last one is often underestimated.

You can technically fit another obligation into your calendar while having absolutely no space left in your head.

The dangerous commitments are therefore often not the obviously impossible ones. They are the small agreements whose costs remain invisible. You say yes now and pay for the decision later, usually when everything becomes quiet, and your mind finally has time to present the invoice.

That is why I insist on explicit tradeoffs in leadership as well. Every additional commitment taxes the outcomes that already matter. If the tradeoff remains hidden, the system eventually pays it through stress, lower quality, or broken promises.

Evening: close the loops

In the evening, I examine what actually happened.

This part matters because memory is unreliable when it comes to our own behavior. We remember intentions very well. We are less precise about what we actually did.

I ask myself what went well, where I failed to intervene, where I said yes when I wanted to say no, what still bothers me, and what remains unresolved.

This is not supposed to become self-punishment. I am collecting evidence.

If I did something well, I write it down. If I held a boundary I usually would have abandoned, that matters. If I recognized an emotional reaction before acting on it, that matters. If I made a mistake, I want the fact, not a two-page story about what sort of person that makes me.

Then I classify unresolved issues again. Control. Influence. No-Control. What is the smallest next action? What needs to be carried into tomorrow, and what can be left here?

My Mirror-Book evening practice is built around exactly that principle: evidence, factual friction, control classification and the smallest next action. The objective is closure, not endless introspection.

Sometimes there is simply too much in my head. Then I use a very uncomplicated method: I sit down and write for ten minutes. Everything that is occupying mental space goes onto paper. I don't try to solve all of it. When the time is over, I stop.

Then I sit in silence.

No podcast. No video. No music. No phone. Nothing else enters.

The point is not mystical. My mind has been receiving input all day. At some point I need to stop adding material.

You need somewhere inside yourself to retreat

Marcus Aurelius wrote about almost exactly this problem nearly two thousand years ago:

“For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4, §3, George Long translation. (Lexundria)

The context matters. Marcus begins the passage by talking about people seeking retreats in the countryside, at the seaside and in the mountains. He then reminds himself that he can retreat into himself at any moment. He does not mean escaping reality. In the same passage he tells himself to return to life afterward.

That is how I understand reflection.

It is not withdrawal from life. It is maintenance for returning to life without carrying every external demand directly into my internal state.

Marcus even describes tranquility there as “the good ordering of the mind.” (classics.mit.edu)

That phrasing is much closer to what I mean by peace of mind than the modern idea of constantly trying to feel happy.

Peace of mind is not necessarily an emotional high. It is order.

The things that matter have a place. The things that do not belong to me are not occupying the center. Decisions have been made. Open loops have either been closed or deliberately carried forward. I know what I am doing next.

Peace of mind is something you maintain

I do not think happiness is something waiting somewhere outside that I eventually discover when enough circumstances become favorable.

Neither do I think peace of mind is a permanent state that I can achieve once and then keep forever.

It requires maintenance.

If I stop doing the practices that keep me oriented, I notice the drift. More things enter. More external agendas become internal obligations. More unresolved thoughts stack up. I become more reactive. Eventually I can find myself carrying stress that I never consciously agreed to carry.

This is what I mean by baseline.

Your baseline is not how calm, focused or disciplined you can be on your best day. It is where you return when nobody is trying particularly hard. Systems tend to return to familiar states, and human behavior does the same. The practical task is therefore not to generate occasional extraordinary days. It is to gradually change what you return to.

That is also why one good evening of reflection will not solve months of accumulated pressure.

You work it down.

One decision. One boundary. One conversation. One problem. One thing released because it was never yours to control in the first place.

Then you come back tomorrow.

Do not confuse judgment with reality

There is another line from Marcus Aurelius that belongs here:

This can easily be misunderstood.

It does not mean that external events are irrelevant, that suffering is imaginary, or that everything bad in life disappears if you simply “think positively.” That would be nonsense.

It means there is a distinction between the event and the judgment my mind constructs around it.

Someone declining my proposal is one thing. This proves that nobody values my work is another.

Someone asking me to do more is one thing. I have to agree, or they will think badly of me is another.

A project failing is one thing. I am a failure is another.

The event can require action. The second layer requires examination.

That is one of the most valuable things metacognition gives me: the ability to ask whether I am currently dealing with reality or with a model my mind produced about reality.

Sometimes the model is correct.

Sometimes it is wildly wrong.

But unless I can observe it, I cannot tell the difference.

The external agenda

I use the term external agenda for the accumulation of priorities, expectations, and judgments that originate outside you but gradually become indistinguishable from your own priorities.

There is nothing inherently wrong with external agendas. Civilization would collapse if everybody ignored everybody else. A family is partly a shared agenda. A company is a shared agenda. Leadership requires taking responsibility for things that are not merely personal preferences.

The problem begins when the gate disappears.

Every demand becomes important because somebody said it was important. Every urgency becomes your urgency. Every expectation becomes an obligation. Every criticism becomes something you must repair. Every opportunity must be taken because declining it feels like loss.

Eventually you can live a life that looks extremely productive from the outside while having remarkably little authorship over it.

That is the condition I am trying to prevent.

Not by withdrawing from responsibility, but by choosing responsibility deliberately.

Taking care of yourself is not withdrawal from others

There is a reason I connect the ability to say no with the ability to care for yourself.

If I continuously abandon my own boundaries to prevent discomfort in other people, I eventually become less useful to everyone.

I become resentful. Distracted. Tired. Reactive. I start saying yes and then failing to deliver. I am physically present somewhere while mentally solving five other problems.

That is not generosity.

Taking care of yourself should not mean building a comfortable little fortress around your life where nobody can ask anything difficult of you. That is simply another form of avoidance.

The Stoic standard is harder.

Take responsibility. Help people. Fulfill your roles. Practice justice. Accept discomfort when the right action requires it.

But remain the person making the decision.

That is the boundary I care about.

A simple practice for tomorrow

You do not need to adopt my entire system to start experimenting with this.

Tomorrow morning, before the world has had much opportunity to tell you who you should be, take a piece of paper and write three things.

First, write one sentence describing who you intend to be today. Not what you want to achieve. Who you want to be when pressure arrives.

Second, write one or two signals that would tell you that you lived according to that intention.

Third, write one boundary. Something you will not automatically accept.

Then go into the day.

At some point something will push against that intention. That is not failure. That is the practice.

Notice the reaction before you obey it. Ask what is actually in your control. Decide whether the situation deserves a yes, a no, or simply more time before you answer.

Then return to the page in the evening and examine what happened.

Do not judge the entire person you are based on one day. Look for the pattern.

Then do it again tomorrow.

The question is still the same

At the beginning of the podcast, I asked when you last genuinely took care of your own mind.

For me, the answer is very concrete.

This morning.

This evening.

And during the interventions in between.

I do not do this perfectly. That is precisely why it is a practice. I can see the difference on the days when I neglect it.

The objective is not to become invulnerable to stress. It is not to eliminate emotion. It is not to say no to everyone, become perfectly productive, or create some permanently tranquil philosophical state.

The objective is much simpler.

When something enters your life, you should still be there to decide what happens next.

You should be able to experience pressure without automatically serving it. You should be able to feel an emotion without immediately obeying it. You should be able to care about another person without surrendering your judgment to them.

And you should be able to say yes because you mean yes.

Which requires that you can also say no.

That, to me, is one of the most practical forms of taking care of your own mind.

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—Adrian

There is a reason why the worst thoughts often arrive at two in the morning. Your world becomes quiet, your conscious mind grows tired, and suddenly one thought appears. A mistake you made. A conversation you regret. A fear about tomorrow. Within minutes, that single thought has taken over your entire attention. Nothing outside has changed, yet your body reacts as if the danger were real.

The mistake most people make is believing that the thought itself is the problem. It isn’t. Thoughts arise on their own. Emotions arise on their own. What determines whether they become anxiety is the relationship you build with them. As soon as you believe, “This is me. This is what I truly think,” you stop questioning it. Your mind begins defending the story because it now feels like part of your identity.

The Stoics understood this long before psychology gave it modern language. Epictetus reminds us that we are disturbed not by events themselves but by our judgments about them. The same principle applies inside your own mind. The first thought may arrive without permission, but the second thought—your judgment about the first—is where your freedom begins.

“It’s not things themselves that disturb us, but our judgments about them.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion 5

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Reality vs. Story Journaling technique

One practice I recommend to almost everyone is surprisingly simple. Take a piece of paper and divide it into two columns. On the left, write Reality. On the right, write Story. Under Reality, write only what can be objectively verified. Under Story, write everything your mind has added. “I haven’t received a reply yet” belongs in Reality. “They must be angry with me, I’ve ruined everything, tomorrow will be a disaster” belongs in Story. The moment you write both down, you begin separating observation from interpretation. You stop living inside the thought and start observing it.

That is the real purpose of journaling. It is not about recording your feelings. It is about creating enough distance to see that a thought is something happening within you, not something that defines you. Once you can name it, you can recognize it. Once you recognize it, you can decide whether it deserves your attention. Without that separation, every intrusive thought feels like truth.

This is not a skill you master overnight. Even after years of practice, there are evenings when I still catch myself following a story much further than I should. The difference is that I usually notice it sooner. The spiral becomes shorter because the observer becomes stronger. Every time you catch yourself before the story takes over, you strengthen the part of your mind that chooses rather than reacts.

You are not trying to eliminate difficult thoughts. You are training yourself to stop mistaking them for reality. That may be one of the most valuable disciplines Stoicism has to offer.

Adrian Stanek – Stoic Mentor

Volunatry Discomfort – Prepare yourself for the day | S2E03

Voluntary Discomfort Is a Daily Decision…

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2 months ago · 1 like · Adrian Stanek

Yep, most people wait for life to challenge them – Externally driven, like a deadline, the boss, the spouse etc.

Stoicism suggests the opposite: challenge yourself first.

Voluntary discomfort isn’t about suffering for its own sake. It’s about deliberately choosing a small discomfort every day so your mind learns to respond based on your choices, not your emotions.

For me, that often means running mountain trails with a weighted backpack. For someone else, it might be taking the difficult conversation, skipping a comfort, or doing the task they’ve been avoiding. The specific challenge matters less than the fact that you chose it.

Over time, these small choices change your baseline. Difficult situations stop feeling like emergencies because your nervous system has already practiced staying calm under controlled stress.

One practice that reinforces this is the Mirror Book. Every morning, define your intention, your key signals for the day, and one voluntary discomfort. Every evening, review what happened, collect evidence of your actions, and identify the next step. It turns discipline into something observable instead of something you merely hope to have.

As Epictetus wrote:

“Difficulties show what men are.”

You don’t become resilient when life is easy. You become resilient by repeatedly choosing the harder path while you still have the freedom to choose it. That choice compounds over months and years until it becomes your character.

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A discussion begins with a disagreement, but somewhere along the way the subject changes. We are no longer examining an idea. We are defending our competence, status, judgment, or self-image. The argument becomes personal even when neither person openly admits it. At that point, the desire to understand is gradually replaced by the desire to win.

This is where being right becomes wasteful. You may win the argument while losing trust. You may prove the technical point while making future cooperation more difficult. You may force another person to concede without helping them understand anything. Correctness alone does not guarantee progress.

For leaders, mentors, founders, and engineers, that distinction matters. Your responsibility is not merely to possess the better answer. Your responsibility is to create the conditions under which better thinking, better decisions, and better behavior become possible.

The argument beneath the argument

When a person resists an idea, we often assume that the idea has not been explained clearly enough. We repeat it, sharpen it, add evidence, or increase the pressure. Sometimes this is appropriate. More often, however, the resistance is not caused by missing information.

The resistance may protect something.

Perhaps accepting the idea would mean admitting a mistake. Perhaps it would undermine the person’s sense of competence. Perhaps the proposed change threatens a role, routine, belief, or identity that has been stable for years. The visible argument concerns the facts, but the underlying conflict concerns what those facts would require the person to change.

This also applies to ourselves. We rarely experience our own resistance as ego. It usually appears to us as logic. We construct reasonable explanations for why the other person is wrong, why the timing is bad, why the proposal cannot work, or why our behavior was justified.

The reasoning may even be partially correct. That is what makes the pattern difficult to recognize. Ego does not need to invent a complete lie. It only needs to select the facts that allow us to remain unchanged.

From statement to question

One of the most effective ways to interrupt this pattern is to replace the next statement with a genuine question.

Statements tend to establish positions. Questions can create movement. A statement gives the other person something to defend themselves against. A good question invites them to examine the structure of their own thinking.

This does not mean turning questions into concealed accusations. “Do you not understand the problem?” is not a question in any meaningful mentoring sense. It is a judgment with a question mark attached.

A useful question must contain real openness. It should be asked with the willingness to hear an answer you did not expect. Questions such as these can change the direction of a conversation:

• What makes this point especially important to you?

• What would accepting the alternative mean?

• Which part of the proposal are you actually resisting?

• What evidence would cause you to reconsider your position?

• Are we trying to establish who is right, or decide what should happen next?

The final question is particularly important in leadership. Many discussions continue long after the decision-relevant information has been discovered. The remaining conversation serves only the emotional need for one side to receive recognition.

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Applying SOS-TL to conflict

The SOS-TL framework can be used not only to communicate an insight, but also to diagnose a conflict while it is happening.

Situation

Begin with the observable situation. What was said? What decision is required? What concrete disagreement exists? Remove assumptions about intention, personality, and motive.

A useful description might be: “We disagree about whether this feature should be released now or delayed for another round of testing.”

A distorted description would be: “He does not care about quality.” The second statement is no longer a situation. It is an interpretation.

Observation

Observe what happens within the conversation and within yourself. Which arguments repeat? When does the tone change? Which words trigger defensiveness? What are you trying to protect?

This is the point at which self-leadership begins. It is easy to diagnose the ego of the other person. It is far more useful to notice the moment your own mind stops investigating and starts defending.

Ask yourself whether you are still trying to improve the decision, or whether you are now trying to establish your superiority. The difference can be subtle externally while being decisive internally.

Solution

The solution is not necessarily agreement. Some disagreements remain after both sides have reflected honestly. Leadership does not require endless consensus.

The solution is to restore the purpose of the conversation. Define the decision, identify the relevant evidence, clarify responsibility, and agree on the next action. Where possible, use questions to expose assumptions before imposing conclusions.

The objective is not to remove tension. It is to ensure that tension serves the mission rather than the ego of the participants.

Thesis

The thesis should state the principle that can be transferred beyond the immediate conflict:

Being correct is valuable only when it contributes to understanding, decision, or action. When correctness becomes a form of self-protection, it obstructs all three.

Learning

The learning is personal and operational. What will you do differently during the next disagreement? Perhaps you will ask one question before presenting your counterargument. Perhaps you will define the decision before discussing opinions. Perhaps you will pause when you notice that your need to respond has become stronger than your desire to understand.

Without a behavioral consequence, reflection becomes another sophisticated form of avoidance.

The Otrovert position

I use the term Otrovert for a person who has developed the capacity to observe themselves as though they were also another person.

This is not extroversion. It is not simply introversion, either. The introvert may spend a great deal of time inside their own thoughts without necessarily gaining distance from them. They can remain deeply immersed in their feelings, narratives, and internal arguments.

The Otrovert develops a different relationship with the self. They are still themselves, but they are also able to observe the person who is reacting, defending, avoiding, or seeking approval.

During an argument, this means noticing not only the subject of the disagreement but also the internal character who desperately wants to win it. You begin to ask: Why is this so important to me? What part of me feels threatened? What would remain if I did not receive recognition for being correct?

That distance does not make you passive. It makes deliberate action possible. You can still disagree strongly, establish boundaries, make decisions, and reject poor reasoning. The difference is that you no longer have to obey every defensive impulse simply because it emerged inside you.

A Mirror Book practice

The next time you experience a serious disagreement, write about it later without preparing a defense. The purpose of the exercise is not to reconstruct the argument and prove that your position was justified. The purpose is to investigate the part of the conflict that belonged to you.

Use the following questions:

1. What was the actual decision or issue?

2. At what point did the conversation become personal for me?

3. What did I feel I needed to protect?

4. Was I seeking truth, progress, recognition, or victory?

5. Which question could I have asked instead of making another statement?

6. Did my behavior strengthen or weaken the relationship required for future work?

7. What will I do differently in the next comparable situation?

The most valuable answer may be uncomfortable. You may conclude that you were factually correct and still handled the situation poorly. Those two realities can exist together.

That is not a contradiction. It is leadership maturity.

Beyond winning

Marcus Aurelius repeatedly reminded himself that people act according to what appears reasonable or necessary to them. This does not mean that every judgment is equally valid or that error should be tolerated indefinitely. It means that human beings do not normally experience themselves as irrational villains. They act from within a structure of assumptions, fears, experiences, and incentives that makes their behavior appear justified.

Understanding that structure is often more useful than attacking the conclusion it produces.

The goal of a difficult conversation is therefore not always to make the other person admit that you are right. The more valuable outcome may be a clearer decision, a revealed assumption, a better question, a changed behavior, or a deeper understanding of your own resistance.

Being right can solve a problem. Needing to be right often creates a second one.

The next time an argument begins to repeat itself, stop adding force. Observe the person you become when your position is challenged. Then decide whether the conversation still serves the mission, or whether it has become another stage on which the ego demands to be seen.

🎓 Practical Takeaway: The “One Better Question” Practice

For the next seven days, make yourself one promise: before responding with your opinion in an important conversation, ask one genuine question first.

Not a rhetorical question. Not a question designed to trap the other person. A question whose answer you genuinely don’t know.

Examples include:

• What makes you think that?

• What problem are you trying to solve?

• What would change your mind?

• What am I missing from your perspective?

After the conversation, spend two minutes journaling. Write down three things:

1. What was I trying to achieve?

2. At which moment did I feel the need to defend myself?

3. Did my question improve understanding, or was I still trying to be right?

Repeat this exercise for a week. You will quickly discover that the greatest resistance in difficult conversations rarely comes from the other person. More often, it comes from your own impulse to defend your identity before you have fully understood theirs.

Reflection question

Think about your most recent argument: at what point did the search for a good outcome become a need to defend yourself?

—Adrian

There is truth in this, but it is incomplete. A mind cannot remain narrowed forever without consequence. The ability to focus matters, but so does the ability to intentionally leave focus. A person who cannot defocus will not become more disciplined over time. He will become tense, tired, reactive, and eventually less capable of the very focus he is trying to force.

This is why the question is not only

“Can you focus?”

The better question is,

“Can you defocus on purpose?”

Defocus is not a distraction. It is not avoidance, collapse, or laziness. Defocus is the deliberate widening of attention. It is the moment when the mind stops gripping one point and regains proportion. We need it because a mind that only narrows eventually exhausts itself.

The False Opposite of Focus

The opposite of focus is not defocus. In ordinary life, what most people call “not focused” is actually distraction. And distraction is not the absence of focus. This distinction matters.

When you are distracted, your mind is still focused. It is simply focused too often, too briefly, and without command. It turns toward a message, then a worry, then a half-remembered task, then a thought about tomorrow, then a small fear, then a notification, then back to the original work, but now with less force and more inner noise.

This is not rest. It is neither openness nor recovery. It is uncontrolled refocusing.

That is why distraction is so exhausting. The mind is forced to begin again and again without completing the movement. It opens loops, switches targets, loses the thread, then tries to regain it. After enough repetitions, the suffering is no longer caused only by the work itself. The suffering comes from the backlog that has formed inside the mind.

People often say they are tired because they have so much to do. Sometimes that is true. But often they are tired because they are carrying too many unfinished things at the same time. They are not only working. They are holding unresolved decisions, avoided conversations, unfinished tasks, vague promises, and unclear next actions in the background of their attention.

A distracted mind is not empty. It is commanded by everything except itself.

Attention as a Stoic Practice

Epictetus begins with the most important distinction in Stoic practice: some things are up to us, and some things are not. This is not a motivational slogan. It is a discipline of classification.

The world will interrupt you. A client will need something. Your child will call you. A message will arrive, another thought will appear.

Or, a cute deer may step into view while you are filming a video about focus. Distraction here happens to the best 😀

These things are not fully up to you. The mind moves because life moves.

But what happens next is the field of practice.

Do you follow every impulse as if it were an order?
Do you allow every open loop to become a master?
Do you turn every external stimulus into an internal command?
… Or can you notice, classify, and return?

In the Stoic operating system I use for mentoring, we work with three fields: control, influence, and no control. Your attention is not always fully controllable in the crude sense. Anyone who has lived under pressure knows this. The body reacts. Emotions rise.

The world intrudes. But the training is in how quickly and cleanly you return to what is yours.

You name what happened. You classify it, then you choose the next action inside control or influence. Then you return.

This is not productivity theater. It is self-command under pressure.

The Deer Is Not the Problem

In the video, there is a small moment that explains the whole idea better than a clean theoretical lecture could. While speaking about focus, I notice a deer. My attention moves. For a moment, the topic is no longer the center of the mind. The deer is.

That is not a failure.

The failure would be to pretend it did not happen, to get annoyed that it happened, or to let the whole movement of thought collapse because something entered the field of attention. The practice is not to never see the deer. The practice is to notice the deer, smile, and return.

This is closer to real focus than the fantasy version many people carry in their heads. Focus is not a frozen state. It is not the perfect elimination of all movement in the mind. The mind will move. The world will call. Something will enter the frame.

The question is whether you can return without drama.

This is especially important for leaders, engineers, founders, and people who live under cognitive load. If you cannot return, you become reactive. If you cannot return, every interruption becomes a wound. If you cannot return, your calendar, inbox, team, clients, and emotions begin to decide where your mind lives.

The mature person is not the person who never gets pulled away. The mature person is the one who notices the pull and does not hand over command.

Why Journaling Is Not a Diary

Many people tell me they do not need journaling. They say they can focus when necessary. Usually, that is not true. Or more precisely, they can focus under favorable conditions: when the day is calm, when the emotional weather is good, when the backlog is small, when the work is interesting, when nobody interrupts them, and when there are no difficult decisions waiting in the background.

That is not a baseline. That is luck.

A method exists for the days when luck is absent.

This is why I teach journaling, not as a diary, not as therapy, and not as a romantic relationship with paper. Journaling, in this context, is an instrument of command. It gives attention a structure before the day becomes chaotic, and it gives the mind a way to close the day before it carries everything into the night.

In the morning, you do not write ten tasks. You write the signal. A signal is not a to-do. A signal is the meaningful outcome that tells you where to direct your attention. It answers the question: what would make this day true? What must be protected? What must not be allowed to steal the day?

In the evening, you do not write pages of emotional fog. You reflect with discipline. What did I actually do? Where did I drift? What remained open? What is the smallest next action? What can be closed before sleep?

These two points create a frame around the day. Morning gives direction. Evening gives closure. Between them, the day can breathe.

The Backlog in the Mind

Much of modern stress comes from open loops. Not everything is large. In fact, many of the most exhausting loops are small. An unanswered message. A decision that has not been made. A conversation postponed because it feels uncomfortable. A project that is almost clear but not quite. A task that has been touched several times but never finished. A promise remembered only vaguely enough to create discomfort.

None of these may be dramatic by itself. But together they create a mental backlog. And the mind, especially under pressure, keeps checking that backlog. It returns to it at strange times. During work. During rest. During family time. During sleep.

This is one reason people feel stressed even when nothing urgent is happening in the present moment. They are living under the pressure of what remains unresolved.

When I built the idea of “Close Thought” into Voicekeeper*, it came from this exact practice. A thought does not always need to be solved immediately, but it does need a form. It needs to be named, placed, and given a next action or a boundary. Otherwise, the subconscious keeps circling it.

Closing a thought does not mean pretending reality is finished. It means the mind no longer has to keep carrying an undefined loop. The next action is known. The category is clear. The thought has a place.

That is not a small thing. It is a form of mercy toward your own nervous system.

* voicekeeper is a thought iterator made for the practicing phase, in between commitment (stoic morning) and the evening reflection. It’s about getting thoughts caught, evolving them, and operating with them – in the end, I am a practitioner, not a theoretical philosopher.

Defocus Is Not Escape

Marcus Aurelius writes that nowhere can a person find a quieter retreat than in his own soul. This is often read softly, as if Marcus were recommending a pleasant inner vacation. But Marcus was not writing as a relaxed man with nothing to do. He was an emperor under pressure, surrounded by conflict, duty, illness, decay, and the endless difficulties of others.

His retreat was not an escape. It was a return.

That distinction matters. Defocus is not running away from responsibility. It is not calling avoidance “self-care.” It is not disappearing from the work that must be done. Defocus is the widening of attention so the mind can regain proportion and return to a better state.

A narrow mind under pressure begins to confuse tension with strength. It grips harder, reacts faster, and sees less. A widened mind can see the whole field again: the issue, the person, the tradeoff, the body, the limit, and the next move.

This is why defocus belongs inside discipline, not outside of it.

The undisciplined person is not the one who rests. The undisciplined person is the one who cannot choose the state he is in. He is distracted when he should focus. He procrastinates when he should act. He keeps working when he should close. He scrolls when he should recover. He calls exhaustion “discipline” and avoidance “rest.”

The disciplined person learns the difference.

Why I Do Not Try to Focus All Day

I do not try to focus for hours in a row. That is not my model of discipline. My day is divided into states because different kinds of work require different kinds of attention.

There is a focused state where no one should interrupt me. This is the state for writing, building, engineering, deciding, and doing work that requires a clear line of thought. There is a defocused state where I let the mind widen again: walking, reading, looking around, playing something light, or simply allowing the system to cool down. There is also a noise-handling state, especially in leadership and client work, where people bring issues, emotions, urgency, and unclear problems. That state is not deep focus, and it should not be confused with it.

This matters because many people destroy themselves by treating every hour as if it required the same kind of attention. They expect deep work, emotional availability, meetings, problem-solving, creativity, decision-making, and recovery to come from the same mental posture.

That is not discipline. That is poor system design.

In Stoic tech leadership (SOS-TL framework) language, the goal is not hero mode. The goal is baseline. A baseline is what you can repeat under normal pressure. If your focus system only works on perfect days, it is not a system. It is a peak. Peaks are useful, but they are not reliable. A life cannot be built on peaks.

The Evening Problem

Evening focus has a special danger for entrepreneurs, engineers, and creators. When the house becomes quiet, when the children are asleep, when no one interrupts, it is tempting to go deep again. This can be a beautiful time. I know that state well. It is often when the tools are built, the systems are refined, and the work finally feels like it belongs to you again.

This specific section reminds me of what mentees are most afraid of: the time of day when you actually need to introspect your own mind. Quote: “… that’s terrifying.”

But the mind does not always accept a sudden command to stop. If you work intensely too late, the body may be tired, but the mind is still running. It continues to compile, solve, rehearse, and arrange. Then you lie in bed and wonder why sleep does not come.

The problem is not only sleep hygiene. Often, the problem is an unclosed focus loop.

This is why the evening reflection belongs before the final defocus. First, you close. Then you widen. You do not drag the whole day into bed and call that rest.

For me, the final defocus may be reading, watching something, reading philosophy, or playing on the Steam Deck.

That may sound strange to people who treat all screens as equal, but they are not equal in function. What matters is what the action does inside your system. If a simple game gives the mind just enough structure that it does not drift back into work, but not so much pressure that it becomes another battlefield, then it can serve as a defocuser. Not always, not for everyone, and not without boundaries. But the principle matters: sometimes a small, contained focus helps release a larger one.

A person must learn their own states honestly. Otherwise, he will misuse every tool he touches.

Procrastination Is Not Rest

This is where modern self-help language becomes dangerous. More and more, people defend procrastination as if it were a form of rest. They say people need to procrastinate in order to recover. I think this is wrong, and not only slightly wrong.

What people often mean is recreation, incubation, recovery, or defocus. Those are real. Those are necessary. But procrastination is different. Procrastination is avoidance. It is the ego’s quiet strategy to delay contact with reality.

It feels like relief because the pressure is postponed. But postponed pressure does not disappear. It compounds. The work stacks up, the decision waits, the conversation grows heavier, the inbox grows louder, and the self-image weakens. Later, people say they are burned out from the workload. Sometimes that is true. But often, a large part of the suffering comes from the work that is avoided, carried out, reopened, and feared.

The mind burns energy maintaining the backlog.

That is why procrastination is not rest. Rest restores you. Recreation renews you. Defocus widens you. Procrastination taxes you later with interest.

Seneca writes that while we postpone, life speeds by. This is not only about death in the abstract. It is also about the day in front of us. While we postpone the decision, the day speeds by. While we postpone the hard sentence, the relationship decays. While we postpone the signal, the tasks multiply. While we postpone evening closure, the night becomes restless.

The Stoic answer is not harshness. Harshness is often fear-wearing armor. The Stoic answer is cleaner: name the thing while it is still small, choose the next action, and do it before the pile becomes a mountain.

The Practice

The practice is simple enough to understand and difficult enough to require repetition.

In the morning, write down who you intend to be and which signal matters. Do not confuse this with a to-do list. A to-do list can become another source of noise if it is not governed by a signal. The signal tells the mind what the day is about.

During the day, work with rhythm. Focus when focus is required. Defocus when recovery is required. Handle noise when necessary. Return when you drift. Do not turn every distraction into an identity crisis. The deer is allowed to appear. You are allowed to notice it. Then you return.

In the evening, close the day. Ask what was done, what remained open, where you drifted, and what the smallest next action is. Close what can be closed. Place what cannot be closed. Do not let undefined loops follow you into sleep.

This is not glamorous work. That is why it works. Baseline is built by repeated, unspectacular acts of command.

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Focus, Defocus, Return

A good day is not one long demand for focus. It has rhythm. Focus, defocus, noise, focus, closure, defocus, sleep. The order matters because the mind is not a machine that can be forced endlessly without consequence.

If you only narrow, you become tense. If you only widen, you drift. If you never close, you carry. If you avoid, you procrastinate. If you practice, you return.

That is the discipline of defocus.

It is not an escape. It is not a weakness. It is not laziness. It is the deliberate widening of attention to return to command.

Do not let the world decide where your mind lives. Choose the signal. Close the loop. Notice the deer. Smile. Return.

—Adrian

Your journey is always worth starting; your journey literally represents your life. In that sense, we have already started it.

The point is, more, that if we actually walk this journey with intention, and not driven by externals we have no control over.

We don’t really quit our lives if we talk about quitting as an issue. We talk about failing to pursue our own intention, and by that, we don’t really create any potential reality, nor are we in any sort of progress.

The result is a life that was not meant for us, far from who we could be, but exactly where our own Ego wants us to be.

Ego is my declared enemy, not only my personal one. This is the reason why I embarked on the journey to understand the human condition, and its patterns deeply, in order to help others as well as myself, to recognize it and eventually get into control of one's own mind.

What is success?

When we talk about a journey, we assume we must be successful. At best, it’s defined in a goal or desired state. But is this success? We aren’t a business, so we cannot be measured by the same standards.

Success is something you need to define for yourself. But it should never, ever depend on your emotions, or the confirmation of others, or worldly goods, which would be a dependency.

If you ask me, you need to look into yourself. Beneath the habits and thoughts, into your deeper, inner Self. By honest introspection and reflection in discipline.

There, you actually can control everything; no one can stop you from becoming successful on this level – no one, no matter your circumstances.

The question is, are you willing to?

Discipline Is Intent Put Into Practice

If you do something every day because you promised it to someone, or because someone is in some way expecting it, it’s not discipline. At best, it’s a form of commitment, but moreover ends up being obedience and dependency.

Your intentional act of repeating the daily practice to become better and learn is what we would call disciplina – the original meaning of what we call today discipline.

Yet, we have culturally defined it as an “I-must” obligation. Not our own intention, but that of society or the people around us.

The most famous example is if we commit ourselves to something in front of other people, like a gym membership as a New Year’s resolution. We keep the “discipline” up, since we obligated ourselves to. It wasn’t really our intention to actually become the changed person; it was a much lower intent driven by our own Ego.

Personal Growth Has No Definition of Done

Did you define goals for yourself?
How many personal goals do you define, in which periods?

Because that is what you would need to do in order to keep improving.

There is no done, there will never be a state like this. You will never be in a specific state and stay there.

Forget about goals, that is an I-must hustle mentality, but without actual substance.

Who do I want to be today?
Who am I today?
What do I want to change tomorrow?

And what is my potential?

These questions and this loop lead you towards your potential, show you the signals you need to follow, and make you aware of the distractions.

Without that pattern recognition, you will stay an unfinished project, a process never really started, and not shaped in your own intention.

Identity Drives Behavior

Who are you?

You know you should go and practice today.

What does the inner voice tell you?

Are you happy to skip today? Or do you hate skipping it?
Do you feel positive or negative about it?

Well, you can shape this as well.

If you don’t know yet who you are, I rephrase the question:

Reflection Creates Self-Knowledge

Learn the patterns of yourself and the people around you. It’s possible and less complicated than you might think. Study the nature of humans and things; it’s in its core very similar and comparable, in that it’s recognizable.

You can sense other humans trying to trigger you. And you can spot specific habitual behavior in yourself that you might want to intervene in.

• Reflection reveals patterns.

• Patterns reveal strengths and weaknesses.

• Awareness creates intervention points.

• Journaling accelerates self-understanding.

How can you actually navigate your own life and actions if you don’t know these patterns well?

You Are Both the Marble and the Sculptor

And the last set for today. If you aren’t willing to hit yourself to change something, you don’t seek transformation. It’s just decoration. Exactly what your Ego wants.

You know the other name that people call Ego?

Resistance to Change – your most personal enemy, you might not know, yet.

Steven Pressfield put it well: Resistance is so smart, it lets you think it was your idea.

• You shape yourself every day.

• Growth requires discomfort.

• Small improvements compound.

• Character is built intentionally.

—Adrian

A commitment reveals intention.
Practice reveals character.
Reflection reveals truth.

And here we can learn to become honest with ourselves. Even today, I realize how easily I get tricked by my own mind sometimes.

The difficult part is not the commitment itself. Many people can decide something in the morning. The difficult part is looking honestly at the result in the evening. Did I do what I said I would do? Did I act the way I wanted to? Did I become more useful to the people around me, or did I create more noise, more pressure, more confusion?

If the result was good, you have evidence. You learned something about yourself that is worth repeating. If the result was bad, you have a signal. Not a reason for shame, not a reason for self-hate, but a reason to change something. In both cases, the day gives you material for the next day.

That is why this cannot be a once-in-a-while exercise. It has to become daily. Not because every day needs to be dramatic, disciplined, optimized, or heroic. You do not need to run every morning, take cold showers, or copy someone else’s routine. But you do need some form of honest contact with yourself. Without that, you slowly lose the ability to see your own patterns.

And when you cannot see your patterns, other people have to live with them.

That is where self-reflection becomes more than personal development. It becomes a moral responsibility. If you do not know how your actions affect your mind, your emotions, your decisions, and the people around you, then you are moving through life half-blind. You may still be productive. You may still be intelligent. You may still be successful from the outside. But you are not necessarily becoming someone worth following.

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That question matters to me: am I a person worth following?

Not in the cheap social media sense. In the human sense. Am I someone who makes the room clearer? Am I someone who contributes? Am I someone who can be trusted under pressure? Or am I someone others need to manage, tolerate, or recover from?

This is why I use my Mirror-Book. It is a simple journaling technique I use in the morning and in the evening. Sometimes I use it outside, after running or walking, because movement often brings thoughts to the surface. But the important part is not where I write. The important part is that I write honestly.

The book is only for me, and because of that, I can be brutally honest in it. I can write down where I acted badly. I can write down where I was unfair, reactive, arrogant, avoidant, or weak. Not to punish myself, but to recognize the pattern. Once the pattern is visible, it becomes possible to intervene earlier the next time.

That is the real value of reflection. It turns vague discomfort into language. It turns language into recognition. It turns recognition into a different action.

Digital tools can help with this. I have built apps for this myself. But writing by hand still has a different weight for me. A 2024 EEG study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that handwriting produces stronger brain connectivity than typing, particularly within networks associated with learning and memory. That does not make handwriting magic, but it supports something practical: when we write by hand, we process differently. The thought slows down. The body is involved. The sentence becomes harder to escape.

And that is what good reflection does. It removes the hiding places.

“Know thyself” is an ancient phrase, but it is not decorative. It is not something to put on a wall and admire. It is a practice. You know yourself by committing, practicing, reflecting, accepting, and adapting. Again and again.

Because if you do not understand yourself, you will never truly understand others. And if you never look at what you are becoming, you may become the problem without noticing it.

—Adrian

I have stayed too long in places that were clearly broken. I have also left too early in situations that may have been mine to fix. And when I look back honestly, the difference was not always visible in the moment, because everything had a good explanation. My ego had one; my fear had one. My discipline had one. Even my avoidance had one.

From my evening reflections.

That is why I distrust so much of the modern leadership conversation.

Don’t tolerate disrespect.

Set better boundaries.

Lead with empathy.

Create clarity.

All of that can be true, but it often becomes too clean, too comfortable, too detached from the reality of building, leading, losing, deciding, and carrying consequences.

Is disrespect anything of relevance in an SHTF situation?
Will empathy save me in that moment?
How to actually create clarity out of nothing in the midst of chaos, sleepless nights, and pure exhaustion – Is that already a sign that I should leave my post? Do I need to endure, or run away? Aim for change, or leave it to the indifference?

What happens when the situation is not clean? When happens when the pressure is real, the budget changes overnight, the CEO overrules decisions, the most important client interferes, the team is afraid, and I am still expected to lead? Do I leave because I feel disrespected, or do I stay because this is exactly where my character is being tested?

I don’t ask this from theory.

I ask it as someone who has failed here.

I have failed in leadership.

I have made bad decisions.

I have reacted from ego and later called it principle.

I have endured things too long and called it discipline.

I have resisted discomfort and dressed it up as wisdom.

And the painful part is that all of these can feel noble while they are happening. Leaving can feel like self-respect. Staying can feel like strength. But what if both are sometimes just different ways to avoid reality? What if the real question is not whether I was disrespected? Or, what if the real question is:

Did I stand my ground long enough to understand what was actually happening?

Not silently, nor heroically; and not as the suffering entrepreneur who carries everything alone, as I liked to see myself in calm moments. But as someone willing to stay in contact with reality.

Did I speak the truth clearly?

Did I make the tradeoff visible?

Did I push where the real constraint was, upward, sideways, not only downward toward my own people?

Did I try to change the system, or did I only manage the symptoms closest to me?

Be honest with yourself here, Adrian.

That distinction matters. A lot of leaders manage their teams because the teams are reachable. But the real obstacle may sit above them. The CEO, CFO, and the client. The budget decision nobody wants to name, or just the missing budget itself. The interference everyone has normalized. And then we call it people management. But is it? Or is it avoidance with a professional title?

Who was I? —Who am I?

Let’s be honest: we need to spend less time on “managing” others and more time on actually improving ourselves.

I think this is where ownership becomes real. Not when everything is calm. Not when everyone is respectful. Not when the company gives me clean authority and clean constraints. That’s wishful thinking anyway. Ownership becomes real when the system pushes back, and I still refuse to collapse into blame, ego, or silent tolerance.

So the synthesis I keep coming back to is this:

I don’t leave because my ego is hit. I stay, stand my ground, and try to change things. If I’ve done that fully and the system still doesn’t move, I leave without regret.

So, I did 8 years ago. But it took 8 years to get there, and not as clean as my synthesis, but let’s treat it as an MVP back then. Things have changed a lot since then.

That sounds simple, but it is not. Because the first enemy is usually not the system. It is me. My need to be respected, the need to be seen as right, or the wish to be the strong one. My temptation to confuse endurance with wisdom. My temptation to confuse leaving with clarity. Before I can read the system, I need to read myself. And that is uncomfortable, because sometimes the system is not the issue yet. Sometimes my reaction is. Or is it most often?

But there is another danger. If I am disciplined, I can endure a lot. Maybe too much. I can tell myself, I am learning. I am growing. I just need more time. And maybe that is true. But at some point, the honest question becomes: Is anything moving? Not in my head and not in my intention – In the system.

Do people respond differently? Do decisions become clearer? Does ownership increase? Does truth create movement, or only silence? Because if nothing moves, maybe staying is no longer courageous. Maybe it has become an identity. And that is hard to admit, especially for people who built their lives around not giving up.

The first 10,000 hours of mastery (M. Gladwell) for me were to fool myself masterfully.

So I don’t believe in the simple version anymore.

Leaving when disrespected feels too shallow. Endure everything feels too blind. Maybe the harder path is to stay long enough to understand, stand your ground long enough to test reality, push hard enough to see whether change is possible, and then accept the result without drama.

Because I take myself into the next business, the next project, the next room. The same ego. The same fears. The same avoidance patterns. The same needs to be respected. The same temptation to leave when the mirror becomes uncomfortable. The same me.

So maybe the question is not "Should I stay or leave?"

Maybe the better question is:

Have I become honest enough to know why I am doing either?

—Adrian

“What am I actually supposed to do today?”

That is the moment where people often say they need clarity. But I think clarity is often misunderstood. Clarity is not a permanent mental state. It is not the absence of uncertainty. It is not the magical moment where your whole future becomes visible and every next step feels safe. That version of clarity is mostly fantasy.

For me, clarity is more operational. It is the point where you can see the next right action clearly enough to commit to it. Not forever. Not perfectly. Just enough to move.

That distinction matters.

Because if you expect clarity to remove uncertainty, you will wait too long. You will keep thinking, planning, consuming, asking, comparing, and preparing. But life does not become clear before you act. Often, it becomes clearer because you act.

The Stoics understood this very well. Epictetus said:

“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”

Simple, yet challenging... That is a very easy sentence, but it contains a whole operating system. Identity first. Action second. Not mood first. Not certain first. Not external permission first.

Your energy is limited; use it wisely

This is why I bring mentoring back to the day so often. Your mission matters. Your vision matters. Your potential matters. But none of these things are completed today. They are direction, not a daily workload. Today you only have today’s energy, today’s attention, today’s discipline, today’s resistance, and today’s opportunity to act.

So the better question is not: “Where will I be in the future?”

The better question is: “Who must I be today, and what is the next action that proves it?”

That is where the Mirror-Book idea comes in for me. The page becomes a mirror. Not a place to perform, not a place to write endless thoughts, not a place to drown in emotion. A mirror.

• What is true?

• What is in my control?

• What is in my influence?

• What is not mine at all?

• What is the signal for today?

• What will I not do, so that the important thing has room to happen?

This is not productivity theater. It is baseline work.

Because clarity without a baseline does not hold. You can have one inspired evening, one strong conversation, one great insight, and by Wednesday, the old pattern returns. That is homeostasis. The system pulls you back to what is normal. Your old habits, old avoidance, old distractions, old emotional reactions, and old level of self-trust.

So the work is not to chase peak clarity. The work is to raise the baseline.

In the morning, you define the signal. In the day, you practice. In the evening, you review. What did I actually do? Where did I drift? What was a fact, and what was only a story? What did I learn from today’s action? What is the smallest next action for tomorrow?

That loop is where clarity is rebuilt. Not once. Daily.

And this is also why clarity is connected to courage. A vague day is easy to escape from. A clear signal creates responsibility. When you write down what you commit to, you remove some of your own hiding places. You can no longer pretend that the problem was only confusion. Sometimes the problem was that you saw the next step, but did not want to take it.

That is not a moral failure. That is resistance. And resistance loses power when it is made concrete. So clarity is not knowing everything. Clarity is reducing the day to something you can actually own. One signal. One boundary. One next action. One honest evening review.

Before you demand clarity for your whole life, get it clear today.

Because today is where your character is practiced.

And tomorrow will not become clearer by avoiding today.

—Adrian

That is true, but it is not the full problem. The deeper problem is not only the time you lose. It is the inner noise you collect.

Every post asks for something: your attention, your emotion, your opinion, your reaction. And the more you move through the feed without discipline, the more you allow other people to decide what your mind will carry for the rest of the day.

You read one post about the economy, another one about politics, another one about a broken industry, another one about someone else’s success, another one about a conflict you are not part of, a problem you cannot solve, a fear you cannot act on. And suddenly your mind is full.

• AI will replace XYZ …

• The war will spread …

• In 5 years from now, you cannot afford…

• Oh, a funny cat video …

Your mind gets fragmented; you get distracted. Opinions you did not need, fears you cannot process, biases you did not consciously choose, emotional reactions that now follow you into your real work, your conversations, your leadership, your family, your body.

Is that actually a good idea?

An opinion is not free

This is where stoic practice becomes very practical. Stoicism is often reduced to the dichotomy of control, and yes, that is one of the most useful starting points. There are things that are up to us, and things that are not. But the practice is not only to know this intellectually. The practice is to notice the moment when your attention begins to attach itself to something outside your control, and then choose differently.

Because an opinion is not free. An opinion costs attention. It costs emotional energy. It creates a small internal commitment. Once you form it, you start defending it, feeding it, filtering the world through it.

The next time a similar topic appears, you will be easier to hook. The reaction comes faster. The judgment feels more natural. The bias becomes smoother.

This matters because clarity is not a mindset quote; it is operational capacity. For leaders, coaches, mentors, founders, and anyone carrying responsibility, this becomes expensive very quickly. You cannot spend the morning being emotionally pulled through ten topics outside your control and then expect to enter a hard conversation with calm precision. You cannot allow your nervous system to be trained by the feed and then expect to lead from reason.

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion

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The feed is not neutral

The feed is designed to create engagement. Engagement often means emotional activation.

Anger works.
Fear works.
Envy works.
Outrage works.

Even cuteness works because it still pulls you away from the signal you chose for the day.

This does not mean every video, every post, or every piece of news is bad. That would be too simple. Some content sharpens you. Some ideas help you think better. Some conversations bring you closer to your own mission. Some posts create useful reflection. Some perspectives can improve your leadership, your craft, or your character.

The question is not whether content is good or bad. The question is whether this specific input deserves a place in your mind today.

Before you form the next opinion, ask three questions:

Can I control this?

Do I have the ability and capacity to influence this?

Will this improve me or others?

If the answer is no, the disciplined move may not be to think harder. It may be to walk away.

Walking away is a leadership practice

That sounds simple, but it is not easy. Walking away feels like losing. It feels like leaving something unresolved. The mind wants closure. The ego wants a position. The feed wants a reaction.

But leadership starts with self-command. If I cannot decide what gets access to my attention, then I am not leading myself. I am being led by whatever is most emotionally effective in front of me.

That is uncomfortable to admit. I have those days too. Days when I drift. Days when I knew what the signal was, but I followed the red signal instead. Days when I check something quickly and then realize that I gave away more than time. I gave away mood, clarity, and momentum.

The point is not to hate yourself for that. That is also just another emotional spiral. The point is to see it.

“It is not things themselves that disturb us, but our opinions about things.”
— Epictetus

The page becomes a mirror

This is why reflection matters. A daily mirror, whether in a journal, a notebook, or a simple evening review, helps you ask: What did I actually do today? Where did my attention go? Which signals did I follow? Which opinions did I collect that had nothing to do with my path?

The page becomes a mirror. Not to shame you, but to restore your agency.

Because the real danger is not one wasted scroll. The real danger is building a habitus of reaction, a default posture in which your mind is open to every external trigger and closed to your chosen direction.

That is how people slowly lose themselves. Not in one dramatic failure, but in small daily permissions. A little outrage here, a little comparison there, a little fear in the morning, a little distraction before the hard thing, a little opinion about something far away from your real sphere of action.

And then, at the end of the day, you feel tired, but not fulfilled. You were active, but not aligned. You consumed, reacted, judged, maybe even argued internally. But did you move toward your potential? Did you act within your control? Did you improve something real? Did you become more worth following?

Return to what is yours

That is the stoic mentoring question. Not: Did you feel calm all day? But: Did you return to what is yours?

Your attention is yours. Your judgment is yours. Your next action is yours. Your preparation is yours. Your standards are yours. Your ability to pause before reacting is yours. Everything else must earn its place.

So today, maybe the practice is not as disciplined in the abstract. Maybe it is much smaller. Notice the next hook. Pause before you form an opinion. Ask whether it belongs to your control, your influence, or neither.

And when it belongs to neither, do something very difficult and very simple: walk away.

—Adrian

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And I think this is where it gets uncomfortable.

Because many of us already know enough to take the next step. We have seen enough patterns. We have had enough conversations. We have lived through enough things. We are not empty. We are not without value.

But still, there is this strange waiting. That was, and sometimes is still, an issue for me.

Waiting for more clarity, more confidence, more proof. Waiting for the timing to feel right. Waiting for the message to be sharper. Waiting for the moment where it suddenly feels safe to be visible, direct, committed, or responsible.

But maybe this moment does not come – Okay, it’s very unlikely that this one ever comes. We actually need to get there instead.

Maybe the next level is not asking for more preparation. Maybe it is asking for more honesty?

And that honesty can be simple, but not easy.

I can take the first step already.
I can say the thing more clearly.
I can start the conversation.
I can publish the thought.
I can make the offer.
I can decide.

Not as the finished version of myself. But as the version that is willing to move, willing to fail, willing to get up again. Because potential is a strange thing. It feels inspiring when it is far away, but it becomes threatening when it asks for action.

As long as it stays in the future, nobody can judge it. Nobody can reject it. No one can see where it is still rough. But the moment you take the first real step, the dream becomes visible, and with visibility comes friction.

Maybe that is why we sometimes hide behind improvement.

We call it strategy or positioning. We call it research. Sometimes it is. But mostly it is just fear wearing better clothes.

And I know this from myself as well.

I can think endlessly about the next version of something. The better structure. The clearer message. The stronger system. And there is value in that, but only up to the point where thinking still serves movement.

After that, it becomes a very polished way of standing still.

Most professional growth is built on the belief that people can change. That someone can see themselves more clearly, take responsibility, and act differently. But then the uncomfortable question is obvious:

Do we still believe that for ourselves?

Or do we only believe it when we are observing someone else from the outside?

“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”
—Epictetus

Maybe your potential did not disappear. Maybe life just got louder. More responsibilities. More opinions. More comparison. More proof that things can fail.

But still, you can see the next step in you.
So the Sunday question is not:

Am I ready?

Maybe the better question is:
What is still in my control today?

And where am I already capable, but still acting like I need permission?

—Adrian

PS: This is also why I use the Mirror-Book technique.

Not as normal journaling.
More as a daily mirror.

In the morning, I write down who I want to be today, what actually matters, and what I will not do.

In the evening, I look back at what I did, where I got stuck, what was in my control, and what the next honest step is.

It helps me stop turning potential into a fantasy. And start turning it into evidence.

Give it a try for yourself:

Is it an intention?

Or is it whatever reaches you first?
Because something always does.

A message. A mood. A thought you didn’t question. A sentence that felt right…
Before you checked it.

And once that first layer is in place, something subtle happens. Everything that follows starts to align with it. You don’t notice it as an influence.

It just feels like:

“that makes sense”

So maybe the question is not:
Can the mind be programmed?
It clearly can.

The better question is:
Who sets the direction first?

You?
Or whatever gets there before you do?

The Stoics treated the beginning of the day as a control point. Not a ritual for motivation, but a moment for orientation; the “before” regarding input, pressure, and reaction.

Why does that matter so much?
Once the day is underway, how often do people really choose?

When the first Slack messages hit, when a bug gets labeled urgent, when a stakeholder says “just quickly,” when a senior engineer opens five tabs and loses the original problem after ten minutes, what is actually leading then?

Usually not judgment → It’s momentum.

“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”
Epictetus, Discourses, Book 3, Chapter 23.
💪

What is deciding who you will be today?

That is the point of the Stoic morning. Decide in advance what kind of person you will be that day, how you want to respond when pressure rises, which shortcuts you refuse to take, and what matters enough to ignore the rest.

A Tech Lead sees this quickly in real life. If the morning starts without a frame, what happens? Slack fills the gap. The most anxious person in the room sets the tone. An urgent label quietly becomes a priority. A meeting with no owner becomes your problem. By noon, are you leading the day, or has the day already recruited you into its chaos?

The same thing happens to developers. A ticket looks easy. Then another message comes in. Then a browser tab opens “just to check one thing.” Then AI generates code faster than you can review it. Then the day ends with a lot of motion and very little clarity. Was the problem complexity, or was it that no standard was set before the speed arrived?

“The mind of a wise man is not disturbed by events.”
Hierocles

Who is setting your frame?

These are simple questions, but they do important work. They set a frame.

And once a frame is set, the day starts to organize itself around it.

If you do nothing, a different frame is set for you. Urgency decides. Noise decides. Other people’s priorities decide.

Someone always decides this for you.

You will still act, of course. But from what? From whatever reached you first. That is why many capable people feel reactive, even when disciplined. They are disciplined inside a frame they did not choose.

How often does that happen in developer work? A senior starts the morning wanting to do deep work, then a production question arrives, then a teammate asks for review, then an AI-generated diff looks “almost done,” and suddenly the whole day is being lived as a sequence of responses. Was there a lack of discipline, or just no chosen orientation strong enough to survive first contact with the day?

A practical way to take back that first move is simple. Three lines. Written, not just thought. Why written? Because a thought stays negotiable. Writing starts to harden the standard.

Today I am … When X happens, I will … I will not …

This is not journaling for reflection. It is pre-alignment.

Before the day starts, you define:

• identity

• response

• boundary

What changes once those are defined?

You notice different signals, hesitate less in moments that used to pull you off track. You recover faster when you drift; You are no longer deciding from scratch each time; you are returning to a decision already made.

Is that not what most people actually want when they say they want more discipline? Not more intensity, but fewer useless negotiations with themselves?

“We should not trust many people to tell us what we ought to do, but rather train ourselves to judge rightly.”

Musonius Rufus

Consider a Tech Lead.

Without a defined frame, the day fills itself:

• Slack messages pull attention

• Urgent bugs redefine priorities

• meetings dictate the narrative

By noon, everything feels important.
So everything gets partial attention.

How often does this happen? A delivery issue appears, two people escalate at once, a product manager asks for an estimate, and now the Tech Lead is half in incident mode, half in planning mode, and fully in reaction mode. At that point, what exactly is being led?

Now compare that to a defined morning orientation:

Today I am focused on clarity over speed.
When urgency appears, I slow the conversation and define the scope.
I will not accept vague work or unclear ownership.

Same environment.Different behavior.
Not because the situation changed. Because the filter did.

Or take a Senior Developer working with AI-assisted coding.

Without a frame:

• output increases

• decisions accelerate

• understanding quietly decreases

It feels like progress.
Until complexity accumulates.

Is that not one of the easiest traps right now? The code appears fast, the diff looks plausible, the test passes, and the merge feels justified. But if nobody paused to ask, “Do I actually understand what this changed?” where does the future confusion come from?

With a defined frame:

Today, I am responsible for understanding, not just output.
When code is generated, I review the structure before accepting speed.
I will not merge what I cannot explain.

Again, nothing external changed.
But the standard is different.

And standards shape outcomes more than tools do.

What is happening underneath this is not mystical.

Defining identity early makes behavior more likely to align with it. Specifying a response in advance reduces hesitation. Setting a boundary lowers the number of decisions you need to make later. Orienting attention changes what you even notice during the day.

In simple terms, you are making it easier to be consistent with yourself.

And what is inconsistency, in many cases, if not acting from whichever frame won the morning?

This also explains why the practice fails for some people.

• If the statement is vague, nothing anchors.

• If the identity is unrealistic, it is ignored.

• If there is no review, the signal fades.

• If it becomes performance, it loses contact with reality.

The point is not to declare something impressive; it’s to define something you can actually live through the next few hours.

A simple daily structure can look like this:

Today I am the person who… (one trait that matters today)

When X happens… (one predictable pressure point)

I will… (one concrete response)

I will not… (one boundary that removes drift)

At the end of the day:
- Did I act as defined?
- Where did I drift?
- What needs to be adjusted for tomorrow?

This is the purpose behind a Mirror-Book style practice.

The purpose is not to collect thoughts, but to create a stable baseline: a way to separate signal from noise before the day fragments it, and a way to return to a chosen direction when pressure builds.

If you do not set that baseline, something else will. It will not announce itself; it will simply feel like your own thinking. And that is the part worth noticing.

So the question is not whether your mind is being shaped.

It is whether you are doing it on purpose.

—Adrian

Either AI replaces engineers in a few months, or it turns every company into some kind of magical high-output machine.

From where I stand, neither description is honest. What I see is something else.

AI often makes work faster, yes. But in many teams, it also makes work more toxic. Not because the tool is evil, but because speed changes pressure, and pressure changes people.

That is the part I think many people are missing.

I am not even basing this mainly on studies (examples: 1 2 3 ), although some of them point in a similar direction. I am basing it on the pattern itself, on what I have seen in software work, leadership dynamics, and the way organizations behave as soon as they believe something should now be possible faster. That is the real shift. The moment a company believes work can move faster, deadlines do not stay where they are. They move.

And they do not just move a little. They compress.

What could previously be discussed becomes expected. What used to be a reasonable turnaround becomes hesitation. What used to count as responsiveness becomes slowness.

That is what AI changes first in many environments. Not reality; expectations.

And once expectations are moved, they are very hard to move back.

You might know my personal stance on deadline-driven development; current trends in companies adopting AI seem to amplify the issue rather than provide possible relief.

Faster work does not feel like relief

A lot of people still talk about AI as if speed automatically creates spaciousness. As if faster output should naturally give people more time, more calm, more margin. Show me the organisation in which the sudden removal of a “bottleneck” leads to a general change of mind that things can be tackled.

That is not how organizations usually work.

If a team can create drafts faster, more drafts get requested. If engineers can prototype faster, more ideas get pushed into motion. If the product can produce specs faster, more specs arrive half-cooked. If non-specialists can suddenly generate something that looks plausible, more low-quality work enters the system disguised as progress.

So the work does not simply shrink. It expands.

And because it expands under the illusion of efficiency, leadership often notices the visible acceleration but misses the invisible cost.

That cost lands somewhere.

• Usually on the people who still have to think.

• Usually on the people who still have to review.

• Usually on the people who are accountable when the machine-generated speed meets real-world complexity.

That is why I do not think the AI story is mainly about replacement. I think it is about expansion, pressure transfer, and the concentration of accountability.

The bottleneck does not disappear. It moves upward.

Deadlines become faster

If nobody dies when the deadline slips, it was probably never an emergency, only pressure dressed up as one.

This is one of the clearest patterns.

AI does not just affect how fast something can be produced. It changes the social meaning of time inside the company. A deadline is never just a neutral date on a calendar. A deadline is a cultural signal. It tells people what pace is normal, what urgency is acceptable, and how much room there is for thought.

No one dies if a natural person sets an artificial date for an artificial, badly defined “goal”; often not even connected to any outcome.

Tech Leaders and AI

Once AI enters the system, many leaders quietly reinterpret time itself. They do not always say it openly. Sometimes they do not even realize they are doing it. But suddenly, the same amount of work is expected sooner. Or more work is expected in the same time. Or the planning stays sloppy because “the team has AI now.”

That last part is especially dangerous.

Instead of becoming more precise, organizations become more careless. They assume the tool can absorb the mess. They assume ambiguity is cheaper now. They assume bad upstream decisions can be compensated for downstream with speed.

But ambiguity does not vanish because generation is faster. A bad strategy does not become good just because drafts appear in ten seconds. Weak leadership does not become strong because someone can prompt out a prototype.

So what happens?

The deadline becomes faster on paper, while the cognitive burden becomes heavier in practice.

People have to validate more. Reject more. Clarify more. Repair more. Review more. Defend more. The calendar says acceleration. The nervous system says overload.

And then the usual cultural lie enters the room:
“If this is faster now, why are you still under pressure?”

That question is poison. Because it assumes typing was the work. It assumes the hard part was producing visible artifacts. It assumes software engineering was mostly transcription. It assumes that leadership was mostly about coordinating tasks. But the hard part was never mainly typing. The hard part was judgment. Trade-offs. Sequencing. Responsibility. Restraint. Integration. Human alignment.

AI can absolutely accelerate parts of the process. But when that acceleration is interpreted naively, it does not create peace. It creates deadline inflation.

This is where the toxicity starts

I do not mean toxicity in the cheap internet sense. I mean something more structural.

• Work becomes more toxic when pressure rises faster than clarity.

• Work becomes more toxic when expectations rise faster than system quality.

• Work becomes more toxic when visible speed becomes the moral standard and thoughtful resistance starts looking like underperformance.

Or in simpler terms, it becomes toxic when we lose our own ethics.

And that is exactly the kind of atmosphere AI can intensify. Not always. But very easily. Suddenly, there is more subtle suspicion in the room.

Why is this taking so long?
Why is review such a bottleneck?
Why is engineering pushing back?
Why do we still need that specialist?
Why can’t we just ship the AI draft and clean it up later?

And beneath those questions sits a more corrosive one:

🔴 What exactly are these people doing all day, if the machine is already doing so much?

That is where a team begins to rot.

Because once the visible output becomes disconnected from the invisible responsibility, the people carrying the real responsibility start being measured by the wrong thing.

Then, senior engineers become cleanup crews.
Then tech leads become emotional shock absorbers.
Then, principals become permanent reviewers of work they did not initiate and do not fully endorse.
And then everyone starts working in a low-level defensive mode.

More checking. More proving. More justification. More surface activity. Less calm thinking. Less deep work. Less patience.

And then comes the interpersonal toxicity.

Impatience rises. Respect falls. People become shorter with each other. Work gets handed over too early. The line between “draft” and “done” gets blurred. People stop owning quality fully because the whole system is already subtly signaling that speed matters more than completeness.

That is how culture degrades. Not through one dramatic event, but through repeated compression.

What is your opinion here? Let me know 👇

Leave a comment

AI exposes the company’s character

I do not think AI creates these problems from nothing. It reveals what kind of company was already there.

If a company has strong thinking, clear ownership, real technical standards, and leaders who understand the difference between speed and haste, AI can be useful. It can remove friction. It can help with exploration. It can support experienced people.

But if a company already confuses activity with value, AI becomes an accelerant. It accelerates bad planning. It accelerates premature execution. It accelerates the fantasy that every problem is now mainly a throughput problem.

And once that fantasy takes hold, the whole organization becomes harsher. Because now there is a permanent comparison in the air. Not just between one employee and another, but between a human pace and an imagined machine pace.

That comparison is usually stupid. But it is emotionally powerful.

It changes how people speak. It changes how quickly they get frustrated. It changes what they classify as acceptable delay. It changes how much empathy they have for careful work.

That is why I keep coming back to culture. Not as a soft topic, but as the operating environment in which tools either help or hurt.

If we don’t develop our culture deliberately and intentionally, it cannot become a culture worth living in; instead of taking ownership, people will silently quit.

If AI replaces developers by making them quit, it wasn’t AI’s fault, my good management friend.

The CEO-CTO gap gets wider

This is another pattern I keep noticing.

The higher up you go, the easier it is to mistake visible acceleration for genuine leverage.

A CEO sees that more can be produced.
A CTO sees that more now has to be governed.

A CEO sees compressed cycle times.
A CTO sees review burden, architecture drift, security risk, maintenance cost, and coordination overhead.

A CEO sees a possibility.
A CTO sees surface area.

Both are looking at something real. But they are not looking at the same layer.

That is where the internal story starts to split. A split is not alignment. I simply wanted to point that out once more, since it seems to be a major difficulty to understand that simple fact.

One side says, “We can move much faster now.” The other side says, “Only if you are comfortable lowering standards, increasing risk, or burning people out.”

If that gap is not handled honestly, toxicity grows very quickly.

Because then engineering starts feeling gaslit. They are told the work is easier now, while their lived experience is that the work has become noisier, more fragmented, and more difficult to defend – more and more a source of ever-compounding anxiety.

And leadership starts feeling resisted. They think the team is being conservative, slow, maybe territorial. But often the team is simply seeing the second-order effects earlier. This is why mature AI adoption is not mainly a tooling question.

It is a leadership maturity question.

Some older companies can actually be healthier here

This is one reason I sometimes think old-school SMBs can be healthier than modern, highly performative tech environments.

Not because they are more advanced. Often, they are much less advanced. But they are sometimes closer to reality.

A customer problem is more concrete. A bad process hurts faster. A useless feature is harder to justify for long. A relationship is more visible. Trust matters more openly. The company cannot hide behind dashboards and internal theater as easily.

In some modern software cultures, there is too much abstraction between action and consequence. Too much room for performative productivity. Too much room for people to confuse visible motion with value.

AI fits perfectly into that kind of environment. It produces a lot of motion. And if the culture was already addicted to motion, the addiction gets worse.

“Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.”
—Epictetus

My own conclusion

I am not anti-AI. I use AI. I see the value. I think it can absolutely make strong people stronger.

But I also think many companies are telling themselves a flattering story.

They say AI is removing friction…
Often, what it is really doing is removing hesitation at the point of creation while increasing toxicity at the point of responsibility.

They say AI makes teams faster…
Often what it really does is make deadlines more aggressive, management more impatient, and the invisible work of good engineers even less legible.

They say AI boosts productivity…
Often what it really boosts is the amount of work entering the system, the amount of review required, and the amount of emotional pressure carried by the people who still have to make reality hold together.

That is the part I would watch very closely.
Not just output. Not just adoption. Not just speed.

Watch tone. Be aware of impatience. Obserce review load. Look for how often thoughtful people feel rushed. Realize whether the company is becoming more precise or just more hurried. Stay in control of whether deadlines are becoming smarter or simply shorter – that is absolutely in the power of the humans working together.

Because once speed becomes a cultural weapon, the damage is much larger than a missed estimate.

It changes how people relate to one another. It changes whether good people can still do good work without becoming cynical. It changes whether leadership is building an actual system or just driving everyone harder with a newer excuse.

That is why I think the real AI question for leaders is not whether the tool makes work faster.

It obviously can.

The real question is this:
What kind of culture does that new speed create?

And if the honest answer is more pressure, less thought, more suspicion, and faster deadlines with blurrier standards, then the problem is not that AI failed.

The problem is that the company used acceleration without wisdom.

A few external pieces have begun to describe adjacent patterns, which is worth noting. But I would not base the argument on them. The argument stands for me even without them, because the mechanism is visible in practice: once organizations believe output can be produced faster, they rarely convert that gain into calm; they convert it into expectation.

And expectation, unmanaged, becomes pressure.
Pressure, without clarity, becomes toxicity.

“If you seek tranquillity, do less. Or, more accurately, do what’s essential.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.24, paraphrased from a common translation

—Adrian

I see the same mistake again and again in tech leadership, and because it is dressed up as diligence, people rarely question it.

Someone has a difficult meeting coming up. A conflict. A presentation. A pitch. A decision with political weight. So they prepare harder. More notes, more arguments, more details, more slides, more possible answers for every possible objection. They keep drilling on the technical side because that feels measurable, and because technical preparation gives the comforting illusion of control.

Then the moment comes, and they still fail.

Not because they lacked intelligence.
Not because they lacked expertise.
Not even because their idea was wrong.

They fail because pressure hits them at the human level, and they do not have enough reserves left to intervene between impulse and action.

That is the part I learned late in my life, and I would like to help others understand that one earlier – it saves so much hassle.

Self-control is depletable.

You cannot stay composed, patient, clear, and emotionally regulated all day just because you decided in the morning to be disciplined. That is not how it works. There will always be weak moments. There will always be hours when your system is thinner, your ego louder, your reaction faster.

And when you enter an important situation already exhausted, you are vulnerable from the start – you get to a starting line of a race refreshed as well, right?

This is why I lost so many leadership moments when I was technically prepared for it. I knew the topic, but I could not hold myself. I knew the argument, but I could not carry it with calm. I knew the right answer, but I reacted defensively, even aggressively at times, when challenged or became smaller when pressure entered the room.

Roy Baumeister popularized the idea that self-control behaves like a finite resource1. In his early ego-depletion research, the core claim was simple: after one act of self-control, people often perform worse on the next one.

That model became influential because it matched lived experience so well; anyone who has spent a full day regulating stress, suppressing irritation, and carrying responsibility knows that composure gets more expensive over time. At the same time, the research around ego depletion became contested, and later replication work did not always find the effect reliably. So I would not use Baumeister as proof that willpower works like a battery in a literal mechanical sense.

I would use him for the broader and still useful insight:
self-control is not something you should assume is endlessly available on demand.

Leadership gets harder when you are mentally and emotionally spent, and that is exactly why reserves matter.

In practice, leadership rarely breaks in the technical layer first.
It breaks in the human moment.

Someone questions your judgment. Someone pushes back in front of others. Someone gives feedback in a tone you do not like. Someone stronger, louder, or more dominant enters the room, and your body reacts before your reason does. You want to defend, interrupt, explain too much, justify yourself, retreat, or attack.

And the tragedy is this: you can be correct and still lose credibility in that exact moment.

Because credibility is not only built by correctness. It is built on how you handle pressure. That is why I care so much about reserves. The more reserves you have, the easier it becomes to intervene when something hits you. The more regulated you are, the more space exists between stimulus and response. And inside that space is leadership.

This is not a soft idea. It is an operational one.

It was about inner readiness. You do not wait for the hard moment to discover whether you can govern yourself. You practice beforehand.

A lot of people think preparation means accumulating more content. I think preparation begins earlier than that. Preparation means becoming someone who can remain usable under pressure. Someone who can think while challenged. Someone who can notice emotion without surrendering authority to it. Someone who can be hit by friction and still choose a response instead of merely having one.

The Stoics understood this better than many modern professionals do. They did not train calmness as decoration. They trained it because life would test them, and they wanted to remain sovereign when it did. Preparation, in the Stoic sense, was never just about plans. It was about inner readiness. You do not wait for the hard moment to discover whether you can govern yourself. You practice beforehand.

This is why practices like reflection, journaling, solitude, walking, or voluntary discomfort matter. Not because they sound wise. Not because they make a nice morning routine post. They matter because they build a stronger baseline. They help you process what would otherwise accumulate. They reduce internal noise. They make you less reactive, less brittle, less easily thrown off course.

That is also why I often say discipline is not only for output. It is also for recovery.

Angela Duckworth’s work2 is useful here, not because it proves that people can grind forever, but because it sharpens the difference between short-term intensity and long-term steadiness.

Her definition of grit, “passion and perseverance for long-term goals,” points to something many leaders miss: sustainable performance is not built from constant emotional strain, but from staying oriented, returning to the path, and continuing the work over time. In that sense, reserves matter because they protect continuity. If you are constantly depleted, you may still win isolated moments, but you become less capable of showing up with consistency, especially when leadership asks for repeated calm under pressure.

That is where grit becomes practical; not as macho endurance, but as the disciplined ability to keep going without constantly being knocked off course.

You Need Discipline To Calm Down Sometimes!

Many disciplined people misunderstand this. They use discipline to force themselves through work, but not to restore themselves for work. They spend all of their strength on execution and then wonder why they become fragile in meetings, impatient with people, or emotionally chaotic when something small goes wrong. They think the solution is even more pushing. Usually, it is not. Usually, the problem is that they are living on too little reserve.

You do not need discipline only to work. You need discipline to restore your ability to work well.

For me, one part of that is going outside. Running, walking, being away from screens, away from artificial urgency, away from all the manmade problem space we keep building around ourselves in tech. Another part is writing. My mirror-book practice is exactly for that reason. I do not use it as some decorative journaling habit. I use it to process the day, to surface reactions, to sort thoughts, to clean up what would otherwise remain unresolved inside me.

If I was irritated, I want to know why. If I felt envy, defensiveness, fear, anger, pride, hesitation, I want to see it clearly. If something wounded my ego, I want it on the page before it governs me in the next room. That is the point. Reflection is not self-expression. Reflection is self-regulation.

That is why the mirror-book helps so much. It gives me a way to notice patterns before they become identity. It helps me reduce residue. And residue matters. Because what people call burnout, chronic stress, leadership insecurity, or loss of confidence is often not just one dramatic event. Often, it is an accumulation. Unprocessed days. Unspoken fears. Repeated small humiliations. Suppressed reactions. Avoided truth. Compounding noise.

If you do not process your experience, it begins to process you.

And once that happens, technical preparation becomes less and less effective. You can keep compensating with knowledge for a while. Many smart people do. But at some point, the compensation fails, because what is missing is not information, it is inner order.

I see this often in senior people. Engineers, leads, even CTOs. They are highly competent but unstable in confrontation. They hesitate to challenge difficult personalities. And so did I.

I avoided the necessary conflict.
I became too political, too defensive, too eager to be liked, or too eager to dominate.

Not because we are weak by nature, but because they are underprepared in the deeper sense. We have not built enough reserves to meet the human difficulty of leadership.

That is why I think this topic matters more than yet another argument about tools, frameworks, or migration strategies.

Yes, those things matter.
Yes, architecture matters.
Yes, methodologies matter.

But we solve technical problems much more effectively once they are no longer blocked by fear, ego, emotional fatigue, and self-protective behavior.

The real bottleneck is often not capability. It is interference.

So, what do you do with this practically?

First, let us stop confusing more technical rehearsal with total preparation. You can know your topic and still be unprepared if you are exhausted, reactive, and thin-skinned.

Second, build a reserve on purpose. Not randomly, not when life allows it, but as a discipline. Sleep better. Walk more. Train. Journal. Reflect. Reduce unnecessary chaos. Accept that recovery is not indulgence when it serves responsibility.

Third, practice the intervention. When emotion rises, do not worship the first reaction. Notice it. Delay it. Name it if needed. Then act. Not perfectly, but consciously. This is where credibility grows. Not when you impress people with flawless knowledge, but when you remain steady in an imperfect moment.

Because that is what people remember. They remember whether you became smaller under pressure. They remember whether you rushed to defend yourself. They remember whether you stayed calm enough to think. They remember whether your presence stabilized the room or destabilized it further.

This is why reserves matter so much. They do not make you invincible. They make you more available to your better self when it counts.

And that is what leadership is in practice, again and again, not a title, not a theory, but the repeated ability to meet a difficult moment without handing yourself over to it.

So if you have an important meeting, a conflict, a hard conversation, a pitch, a presentation, then yes, prepare technically. Know your material. Clarify your thoughts. Do the work.

Marcus Aurelius opens one passage with a practical form of preparation:

“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.”

The point is not pessimism.
The point is rehearsal.

If you prepare for friction, you are less likely to be controlled by it when it arrives. That is stoic leadership in practice.

But do not stop there.

Ask the more uncomfortable question: Do I have enough reserve to stay in control when the room pushes back?

Because if the answer is no, then you are not underprepared.

You are depleted.

And depleted people do not lead well.

—Adrian

My way to cope with it was computer games and online communities, which I created and maintained since I was 16, starting with Ultima Online shards and moving on to larger communities, playing daily into the night with hundreds of players. I was basically building a big hideout for myself to run away from a specific potential.

I was running away from becoming a responsible leader in the real world, someone who faces every challenge and is willing and capable of doing what it takes to lead their own people to their potential.

I have done something relatable in online worlds, while I wasn’t actually achieving anything that mattered to who I needed to become. For me, it became clear: “unless you become a professional gaming YouTuber, streamer, journalist, or pro gamer, these activities are procrastination disguised as progress, decoration.” And it felt good; important. It looked like meaning.

Since gaming is very common among fellow developers:
I still play games today, but I don’t use them as a hideout anymore. Sometimes I even play together with my children. The difference is the boundary: it’s recreation, not escape. And I’m determined that they won’t lose themselves in it the way I did.

About 8 years ago, things changed for me. I became a father, moved to live near the Black Forest, and we basically shifted everything to run a family well. Sounds cool, right? It was extremely stressful and life-changing for me. I suddenly had no time to lose myself in the old ways.

My inner Resistance was raging and throwing everything against me. It was a time of sleepless nights, exhaustion, and anxiety.

But this was the first time in my life in which I actually started to have deep discussions with a real human being on a regular basis, my wife Jennifer. That was the first time I really thought about what was, is, and will be. Reflection. Not really acceptance, but I started to understand.

This was around the time I got into two philosophies that work very well together and actually have the same thought models.

Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art” with the idea of the Turning Pro moment; do your work and fight Resistance (capital “R”, he always made it an entity), and follow the Muses.

“The amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps.” – Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

The ancient Stoics, or Stoicism: control what you can, become indifferent about what you cannot control, and build the wisdom to understand the difference. This was so touching for me, since it was close to the Serenity Prayer, while my childhood was tainted by alcoholism, an old burden I started to address in this moment as well.

So these three components, Jennifer, Steven, and the Stoics, were life-changing for me.

In my early streams and articles, I referred to Steven Pressfield a lot, but over time, Stoicism became the real practical philosophy I adopted.

The Stoic morning and evening reflection became my daily routine. I created my content there, many articles and many more videos. Those were a representation of what I was dealing with during that time: the challenges, the problems, and the experiences with people.

“No man is free who is not master of himself.” – Epictetus

Many things never made it into my articles or videos, since virtues are important to me. I have many negative, even disturbing thoughts about many people, but I keep them to myself and use them to practise indifference, the state of tranquility, or what I would actually call happiness.

By doing that, Stoicism became my new daily structure. I wasn’t playing computer games at all anymore by that time. I was totally focused on making progress. That was also the time I intensified mentorings and tech fellowships, especially for CTOs. I was known as “snackable CTO”, and this is how YouTube and Substack started back then as well.

About a year ago, after years of reflection, failure, and learning, I began to gain clarity about my own purpose. After having my own Turning Pro moment, or the rebirth as the Stoics say, I finally understood my actual purpose. I had clarity. I was certain. I saw the same signals every day for months.

“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
Seneca – From Letters to Lucilius.

I wasn’t the lower-self gaming introvert hiding himself, living a half-true life of entrepreneurship as a software developer.

I was learning discipline, failing often, trying again.

I was practicing virtue, imperfectly, but consistently.

I was becoming worth being amongst others, on the days I did the work.

For the most part, I was in control of my emotions. I was steering the ship and constantly following the same potential.

I was becoming aligned.

I was finding who I was supposed to be.

I was being reborn—slowly, daily, imperfectly.

That’s when I started to talk slowly but steadily about philosophy and, later, Stoicism.

I integrated Stoic ideas into mentorships and CTO fellowships. Insecure at first about whether people would actually accept it, since the world doesn’t seem prepared for it, an ancient practice and philosophy in the modern tech world. But I was wrong.

It turned out to be exactly what they needed.

In a world full of stress, noise, haste, and built-up anxieties, tech people tend to lose themselves in a unique grinder between tensions we cannot control.

Many of the tech leads I was working with were running away from something, building their safe spaces, and actively developing coping mechanisms, instead of taking control of their own actions and reactions, accepting that there are things they cannot change but can control what they do about it.

To my surprise, people started to journal, reflect, and accept who they are, and what kind of situation they might be in: the staff engineer who is afraid of losing their job, the CTO being totally alone and stressed out in a large migration between two big US companies, or the newly promoted engineering manager who is supposed to build a government app in a year as their first project with real responsibility.

Many focused on things outside their control—the same trap I’d been in. Many were distracted by the many things they were afraid of, or by the coming months, when something bad could happen.

We turned that into: let it happen. Focus on today, because we can change something about the future today. By doing so, we got back to controlling ourselves today, and by doing so, we influenced the people around us in a way that made the future much better than anticipated.

From snackableCTO to Stoic Tech Lead, why I use “Stoic” today

Stoics never called themselves Stoics. I did not for most of the time. The battlefield is your own mind. The enemy sits in yourself, disguised as the friendly supportive voice, the force that generates the most disturbing thoughts; the voice we need to accept is part of us, the voice our job is to control. I was too busy fighting that war.

But the changes in the last three years, by practising Stoicism with high discipline, were so magnificent for me, and the results of adopting its ideas were so real, that I decided to start speaking about it as a Stoic person.

Instead of just referring to it, I aligned it with the four leadership traits:

I. Credibility

II. Role Model

III. Mission & Vision

IV. Challenge

Using “Stoic” in your name makes it easier to align with each of them, refer to them, and explain them. I’ve found that most tech leadership challenges I’ve encountered can be addressed through self-discipline, commitment, and virtuous reflection.

The term “Stoic” helps explain what it’s about and, in a credible way, refers to a practical philosophy that has existed for centuries and is practised more than ever before. I want to be a role model for others. That is part of my found purpose and of being a leader, anyway. Being a possible role model for people willing to take up Stoicism to practise self-discipline became logical to me in a world with social media, something the ancients did not have.

In fact, the “Stoa”, the name-giving place where ancient Greek philosophers met to debate how to become better and live virtuous lives, isn’t much different from mentoring or public debates on Substack, LinkedIn, or on streams.

Even though I would fit more into the category of a “Neo-Stoic”, I pretty much like the old ways of “disciplina”, the idea of the “discipulus”; the way of phrasing that we are the pupil who wants to learn and is looking for learning, debates, and advice. That is what discipline is actually about, and I couldn’t reach my potential without it. I haven’t seen others reach theirs without something similar.

What’s next?

So, I continue my journey amongst so many fine souls in the tech industry, creating software and apps, fixing bugs, and living the weird, tedious, yet fascinating, fast-paced life of a developer. But I will do whatever I can to become a beacon for the people who struggle there and have lost the joy they once had.

Let’s debate and take the challenge together to make this world a better one, not only ourselves.

Thanks for reading. Appreciate your patience.

—Adrian

And still, something feels off.

They are not in danger. Nothing has gone wrong. But their body is slightly tense. Their breathing is shallower. Their thoughts begin to orbit around tomorrow.

You might still be physically at home, but internally, you have already stepped into next week. The sprint board exists in your imagination. Slack messages not yet written, replay in your head. Conversations you postponed during the week quietly return.

Nothing has happened yet.

And still, your nervous system reacts.

This reaction is rarely about the work itself. Most engineers do not hate solving problems. Most tech leads do not wake up thinking, “I despise building systems.” The discomfort is more subtle. It lives in ambiguity, in unfinished emotional threads, in the quiet backlog of unresolved internal friction.

Throughout the week, you override small signals. A stakeholder shifts scope again, and you feel irritation. A meeting leaves you uncertain about expectations. You postpone a difficult conversation with a colleague. You sense that something in the architecture is fragile, but decide to handle it later. Each of these moments is small enough to ignore.

… so you ignore them.

Professionalism often means suppression.
But suppression does not mean deletion.

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Emotional Debt – Very similar to technical debt.

What accumulates is not just technical debt. It is emotional debt. And emotional debt, like its technical counterpart, compounds when left untreated.

By Sunday, the calendar is not what creates anxiety. It is the interpretation of the calendar. It is the story layered over reality.

Reality might look simple: a handful of tickets, a planning session, a demo at the end of the week. On paper, this is manageable.

But the story whispers something else.

This sprint will derail.

They expect more than I can deliver.

That conversation will go badly.

I am not fully prepared.

Psychologically, this is predictable. The human brain is biased toward threat detection. The amygdala reacts faster than the rational cortex. When uncertainty rises, the brain fills the gaps with worst-case simulations. Research in cognitive psychology shows that ambiguity increases stress responses even more than known negative outcomes. The body prefers a defined problem over an undefined one.

In tech, ambiguity is everywhere.

• Unclear scope.

• Unspoken expectations.

• Invisible power dynamics.

• Social evaluation.

The nervous system does not distinguish well between physical threat and social uncertainty. Both activate similar stress pathways. Cortisol rises. Heart rate shifts. Attention narrows. You experience this as tension, restlessness, or dread.

When variables feel undefined, control feels abstract. And when control feels abstract, anxiety rises.

This is where avoidance begins. You delay opening the document. You tell yourself you will prepare for the conversation tomorrow. You distract yourself with something easier. Avoidance offers short-term relief. Behavioral psychology calls this negative reinforcement: removing discomfort strengthens the avoidance behavior.

We can get out of this anxiety

“thoughts are not facts”

The loop becomes self-sustaining.

By the time Sunday evening arrives, you are not afraid of Monday.
You are carrying an unprocessed internal load.

The turning point is rarely dramatic. It does not require quitting your job or redesigning your entire life. It requires differentiation.

You must learn to separate what is happening from what your mind is projecting.

Reality is concrete. It can be written down. It has boundaries. It consists of tasks, meetings, constraints, and deadlines. The story is interpretive. It consists of imagined failure, assumed judgment, and predicted conflict.

Most of the emotional intensity surrounding Monday belongs to the second category.

When you externalize these projections, something shifts. The mind is no longer an unquestioned narrator. It becomes an object of observation. The moment a thought is written down, it becomes examinable. Once examinable, it becomes adjustable.

👉 This is not about positive thinking. It is about precision.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is built on this principle: thoughts are not facts. When you identify distortions, you reduce their emotional impact. Naming a fear activates different neural networks than being submerged in it. Language creates distance. Distance restores choice.

In tech culture, we are trained to debug systems, optimize processes, and refactor code. We rarely apply the same rigor to our internal operating system. We pride ourselves on rationality while ignoring the emotional layer that drives many of our decisions. Unprocessed emotions do not disappear simply because we are analytical. They settle into the background and manifest as tension, procrastination, or Sunday dread.

Regaining control does not mean eliminating uncertainty. It means increasing clarity where possible and consciously accepting what cannot be controlled. Some conversations need to be finished. Some expectations need to be clarified. Some commitments need to be renegotiated. Often, the dread of Monday signals that a boundary was not set or a decision was delayed.

Agency returns when you act on what you have been avoiding.

Sometimes this action is small: sending a message, scheduling a discussion, defining ownership explicitly. Sometimes it is internal: admitting that you are afraid of being judged, acknowledging that you care more about a project than you allow yourself to say.

Clarity reduces imagined threat. Completion reduces cognitive load. The deeper realization is this: if you consistently dread Monday, it is rarely because you chose the wrong profession. It is more often because you are allowing unexamined narratives to shape your emotional state.

The mind tells stories automatically. That is its function. But you are not required to believe every story it produces.

The Stoics understood this long before neuroscience. Epictetus wrote:

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.”

The event is neutral. The interpretation creates disturbance. This does not mean the event is irrelevant. It means your interpretation is decisive.

Enjoying Monday does not mean loving every task. It means entering the week without being dragged by unresolved internal tension. It means accepting where you currently stand, including your limitations, and choosing deliberate action instead of passive avoidance.

Acceptance is not resignation. It is the starting point for change.

When you accept the reality of your situation, you stop wasting energy arguing with it. That energy becomes available for movement. And movement, even small and imperfect, restores a sense of control.

The horror intro exaggerates a feeling many know too well. But Monday is not a monster.

It is a mirror.

It reflects what was left unfinished, unspoken, or unexamined during the week before.

If you want Monday to feel lighter, do not focus on motivation. Focus on clarity. Separate reality from story. Finish what you postponed. Name what you fear. Reduce ambiguity where you can. Consciously accept what you cannot change.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

Control is not the absence of uncertainty.

It is the presence of a deliberate response.

Your chance to change something about yourself: Reality vs Story

When Sunday pressure builds, don’t try to “motivate” yourself.

Differentiate.

Take a sheet of paper and draw two columns.

Column 1: Reality

Write down only what is objectively true about next week.

Meetings. Deadlines. Conversations. Deliverables. Constraints.

No interpretation. No adjectives. Just facts.

Example:

• Sprint planning at 10:00

• Architecture review on Wednesday

• Demo on Friday

• One unresolved 1:1 conversation

Column 2: Story

Now write what your mind is adding on top.

Fears. Predictions. Interpretations. Catastrophic thinking.

Example:

• “This sprint will fail.”

• “They expect more than I can deliver.”

• “I’m not fully prepared.”

• “That conversation will go badly.”

This separation is powerful.

Most anxiety lives in the second column.

Why Journaling Helps

When thoughts stay in your head, they feel like reality.

When you write them down, they become objects.

Psychologically, this creates cognitive distance. You shift from being inside the thought to observing it. That activates more rational processing and reduces emotional intensity. Research on cognitive-behavioral therapy shows that labeling and externalizing thoughts can weaken their grip.

Journaling does three things:

1. It exposes patterns.

   The same 2–3 fears repeat every week.

2. It reduces ambiguity.

   Vague dread becomes specific and manageable.

3. It restores agency.

   Once written, you can act: clarify, prepare, renegotiate, accept.

You don’t need pages.

Five minutes is enough.

Clarity reduces imagined threat.

And control begins the moment you separate reality from story.

📍Question of the day: What do you personally do to reduce the pressure that builds up before a new sprint or workweek begins?

— Adrian

The point is to stay balanced while life tries to pull you out of balance.

Hello Fellow, this was a tough week, and I want to talk about it because it is exactly the kind of week where stoicism stops being a nice idea and becomes a practice.

I use stoicism in a very practical way, not as a vibe, not as a quote collection, but as a tool to get through stress without losing myself. This week was not well planned on my side. Appointments moved, new obligations showed up out of nowhere, the schedule kept reshuffling, and at some point, you hit that familiar wall. You feel like you are running from one thing to the next, and still, nothing is truly finished.

That moment is the moment to intervene.

Not with “try harder”, not with self-pity, not with grinding another hour out of spite, but with clarity. The core Stoic move is simple: it is the three circles: what you control, what you can influence, and what is not in your control.

We all say we understand that, but a week like this exposes the truth: a lot of things we believe we can sway are actually in the no-control zone. And that is why you exhaust so quickly. You spend energy as if you were steering the weather.

This week, I was exhausted. I could feel the tension in my body, even though I remained mentally relatively calm. That is an important distinction. Calm does not mean you feel nothing. Calm means you are still in charge of your actions and reactions even under pressure. Anyone selling “never stressed, always confident” as the goal is, in my view, either not challenging themselves or not being honest about the cost.

Challenge must hurt, or nothing changes.

If this week had not hurt, I would not have learned anything. I could sit there and philosophize about inner peace all day long, but that is not the point. The point is to stay balanced while life tries to pull you out of balance.

Here is the practical test I use: can I look in the mirror and say I did everything that was in my power to sway the outcomes I committed to? Not everything that was expected, not everything that was imagined, but everything that was actually in my control to execute.

That is how you build a life without regret.

And this is where I will be a bit provocative, especially for the tech space: I hate deadlines! Not because I dislike commitment, but because “deadline commitment” is often a commitment to something you cannot control.

You can control your effort, your craft, your standards, your decisions, your communication, your prioritization, your ability to say no, your ability to rest and come back, and your ability to keep moving. You can sometimes influence speed with trade-offs. But you cannot control time the way people pretend you can.

A lot of deadlines are fictional milestones wearing serious clothes.

Yes, there are real deadlines in life. If you need to save a life, that is a deadline. But in software, in product, in leadership work, a large chunk of “deadlines” are negotiated fantasies – at best.

When you commit to them like they are physics, you are basically signing up for loss of control, and loss of control is one of the fastest roads to burnout.

So here is the discipline reframe I live by now: commit to getting it done, not to getting it done at a specific date.

That does not mean being vague. That does not mean being lazy. That means being honest about what kind of promise you are making and communicating it clearly.

This is the sentence I use when pressure rises:

“I will get it done. I can’t promise a date, but I will do everything in my power to get it done.”

It sounds simple, but it changes everything. It puts you back into the control circle. It forces a different kind of planning, planning around reality, not around theater. It also forces stakeholders to stop outsourcing their anxiety into your calendar.

And I want to address a common confusion: discipline is not “I must”.

If you think you are disciplined because you push through when someone else tells you to, that is not discipline. That is obedience to an external agenda.

Discipline is “I will”; it is self-led. It is the internal commitment to fulfill what you decided to stand for, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it is uphill, even when the week is ugly.

That is why I went out every day this week.

When I know a day is going to be heavy, I need to move. I am writing this while I am outside, doing my “jogging ruck”, running with a weight. Yes, I know the discussions: “don’t jog with weights, do rucking.” I understand. I still do it because it is one of the ways I test my edge; it is painful, it builds my body, and it teaches me something simple: I can be under load and still move forward – Voluntary discomfort 💪

Stoics treat voluntary discomfort as training: you choose small, controlled hardship (cold, hunger, simplicity) to rehearse resilience and reduce fear of loss, so adversity can’t easily shake your judgment. It’s not self-punishment; it’s a premeditated practice that strengthens self-control and proves to you that you can function calmly, with less – and it works very well; you should try.

That is the whole metaphor.

Not bragging outwardly, but the quiet certainty that when things hit hard, you will not abandon yourself

Several years ago, a week like this would have crushed me. I would have retreated, numbed myself, ordered junk, escaped into easy dopamine. Today, the week ends, and I am still standing. Not because I am special, but because I trained the practice: reflect daily, intervene early, control what I can, let go of what I cannot, and keep commitments without turning timing into a weapon.

That is what confidence actually is. Not bragging outwardly, but the quiet certainty that when things hit hard, you will not abandon yourself. I write that down in my mirror book, in the brag section, not to impress anyone, but to remember who I am when the next week tries to test me again.

So here is my Monday reflection, distilled:

Commit to outcomes. Hold your standards. Tell the truth about time. Use the three circles before you burn energy in the no-control zone. Push through when it is right, rest when it is wise, and never confuse external pressure with discipline.

One question for you: where in your week are you committing to timing, when you should be committing to outcome?

—Adrian

You may know this moment. You feel you could be more; you see yourself sometimes in this future vision. It feels real, but somehow every time you push towards it, you feel fear and doubt. A unpassable, invisible barrier. A voice is telling you to just keep scrolling through the social feed.

And you listen; you obey.

It was your idea to keep scrolling; you are in control, right? This potential is hoaxes anyway, isn’t it?

… still stuck, right? 😔

And you forget again who you could be. Then, after many of these cycles, you start following people on socials who are talking about how to get moving and overcome your own Resistance. “Just do this hack”, “write me a DM, and I will send you XYZ”.

Promises that fit perfectly into your “stuckness”. Fix a little bit and then… what? Keep scrolling socials? Or actually changing something?

If your goal is to become a self-disciplined, high-performing stoic practitioner, do you think listening to Ryan Holiday will make you that? Well, that would be like reading a sports magazine to become a sports person. Good stuff, and I listen to him often; Ryan is really great, but he isn’t you, you are not him; you need to go your own path.

To fully understand what he writes about, or what Marcus Aurelius wrote in this book, Meditations, you need to practise for a long time, fail, reflect, intervene, and adapt.

What brought people to push so far without losing their discipline?

How to keep a calm mind while being a CEO, CTO, Team Lead, or Entrepreneur?

How to choose to stay loyal to yourself when no one is looking, when no one really cares about you. How can YOU still care about YOURSELF then? What was their secret?

🍀 You should not go down this path alone, but it all starts with you alone.

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The Practice Path (Before Ideas)

Which book should I read?
Which course should I take?
Which coach has the right hack?

If you want to get something done in your life and actually change, understand this first: you don’t need a coach to start. You don’t need a hack. You don’t need another book or course.

👉 What you need is to stop breaking promises to yourself.

There is only one way to become a disciplined person: to start acting, deliberately, before you feel ready. Everything else is just Resistance wearing a productive costume.

Let’s get practical on how you can implement a Stoic self-leadership practice.

1) Journaling: Establish Your Baseline

The daily practise with just yourself

Journaling is not self-expression.

It’s not therapy.
It’s not creativity.
It’s a measurement.

🌅 Every morning, write down what you commit to today. Not what you wish you would do. What you are actually willing to stand behind.

🌇 Every evening, compare your intentions with your behavior.

Where did you act deliberately?
Where did you react?
Where did you avoid?
Where did you tell yourself a small, convenient lie to stay comfortable?

… every day!

For the first month, this is the only thing you need to read; no books, just about yourself, your promises, and the results. Are you even honest with yourself?

Who are you? Who do you want to be?

Your journal becomes your primary text. Not because it’s profound, but because it’s honest. It shows you your current baseline, not the version of yourself you’d like to be.

If you don’t know your baseline, every philosophy turns into role-play.

2) Resistance, Discipline, Starting Anyway

Start to develop your intentional Identity.

Once you journal honestly, a pattern appears fast.

You don’t fail because you lack insight.

You fail because something pushes back the moment things matter.

That pushback has many names. Call it fear, comfort, distraction, or self-sabotage. The name doesn’t matter. The mechanism does.

It shows up as:

• “I’ll start tomorrow.”

• “I need a better plan.”

• “I should read a bit more first.”

• “Now isn’t the right moment.”

Discipline starts when you stop negotiating with that voice.

This is the real turning point. You stop acting from mood and start acting from identity. You do the thing because you decided to be someone who does it, not because you feel inspired today.

That’s the moment people often describe as a “second life” or a rebirth. Not mystical. Just practical. You stop waiting for internal alignment and create it through action.

You move from intention to execution.

And this is also the point at which seeking help starts to make sense.

Not because you can’t start alone, but you should start alone. But because once Resistance is visible, you’ll notice another problem: you can’t reliably intervene on yourself every time. Not because you’re weak, but because humans are excellent at rationalizing. We’re built to make our own excuses sound reasonable.

This is where a buddy, mentor, or just reflection partner becomes powerful.

Someone who doesn’t give you a “hack” but gives you a mirror.
Someone who can ask, calmly and directly:

“Is that true, or is that Resistance?”

“Are you choosing this, or escaping?”

“What promise did you make this morning?”

We are not always strong – we need external honesty then

Sometimes you need an intervention you won’t do on your own, because you’re too close to your own story. You’ll try to get away with thoughts and actions you wouldn’t accept from anyone else, and you’ll call it being realistic.

A good reflection partner doesn’t create dependency. They strengthen your honesty. They help you practice the move that matters most: catching the moment you start negotiating, and returning to deliberate action.

3) A Simple Operating Rule

The core principle of stoicism

At the core of this practice is one rule you can apply every day:

What is yours to act on, and what is not?

In practical terms:

What is yours:

• your judgment

• your impulses

• your attention

• your actions and refusals

What is not:

• outcomes

• other people

• recognition

• timing

• how things turn out

This is not philosophy. It’s a filter.

Every time you feel stuck, distracted, or overwhelmed, ask:

“Am I trying to control something external, or am I avoiding acting where I actually have agency?”

Discipline grows when you consistently redirect energy back to what is yours.

4) Sustain the Practice (Not Another Reset)

Most people don’t fail because they lack willpower.

They fail because they design lives that require constant willpower.

Self-discipline is not about intensity. It’s about sustainability.

That means paying attention to cycles:

work, training, recovery, recreation, sleep.

If you’re serious, you eventually have to act here. Fix your sleep. Respect recovery. Stop treating exhaustion as a virtue. Build rhythms you can repeat for years, not weeks.

This isn’t optimization.

It’s maintenance.

Here is an optimized version in your tone: clearer, tighter, with boundaries made explicit, without softening the message or turning it salesy. Content is the same, but the expectations are cleaner and safer.

Reflection, Mentoring, and Staying Intrinsic

You don’t have to do this alone forever.

But the order matters.

Start with yourself. Always.

If you need someone to push you to begin, you’re already creating dependency. That’s not discipline; that’s outsourcing responsibility.

Once you’ve started, a reflection partner can help. Not advice. Not motivation. Just mirroring. Someone who listens and occasionally says, calmly and without drama:

“That sounds like avoidance.”

That alone already sharpens honesty.

About Mentoring

Mentoring comes later.

Real mentoring is not comfort. It’s an intervention.

A mentor interrupts your thinking when you start justifying, procrastinating, or inflating things. Not to control you, but to train a skill you don’t yet apply reliably yourself: honest self-intervention.

The goal is never dependency.

The goal is that you learn to do this on your own.

Coaching is optimization. Optional. Expensive. Late.

Apply Pareto here. If you do the basics seriously, you’re already most of the way there. The last layer costs disproportionate energy and only makes sense once the foundation is stable.

And that foundation is not theoretical.

It’s real work, real challenge, real change.

When to Look for a Mentor

If you don’t yet know who you are or what you need, mentoring easily turns into something closer to therapy. In that phase, talking to someone who has been there can help with orientation, especially if you want to change but genuinely can’t find a way in on your own.

But that’s not the core of mentoring.

If you'd asked me for mentoring at that stage, I’d have sat down with you two or three times. I’d listen. I’d push where necessary. I’d intervene where your thinking goes off track. That’s it.

Whether anything changes after that is entirely in your hands.

Will you apply what you’ve seen?

Or will you let the ego take over again and explain why now is different?

Real mentoring starts later. It starts when you’re already in the cycle.

When daily self-reflection isn’t enough anymore. When you want to go from controlling yourself to influencing outcomes, in your work, your team, your career.

That’s when things get tested in the real world.

Does your self-discipline hold under pressure?

Does your philosophy still work when it costs you something, or even everything?

👉 I am changing for the better while making progress in the real world.

That’s the standard.

Modern Escape and the Serenity Test

Here’s the uncomfortable part.

If your drug is Netflix, YouTube Shorts, excessive gaming, partying, or endless scrolling, you’re not fundamentally different from an alcoholic in the mechanism that matters.

Same pattern:

compulsion over choice,

escape over confrontation,

short-term relief over long-term agency.

The substance changed.

The dynamic didn’t.

The useful question is not “Is this bad?”

It’s “Is this chosen, or is it compulsive?”

Wisdom is noticing the exact moment judgment slips and impulse takes over, and intervening there. Not tomorrow. Not after one more video.

That intervention is the practice.

The Point

This is a quiet hero’s journey.

You start unconscious and reactive.

You notice the pattern.

You stop negotiating.

You act deliberately.

You learn to intervene in real time.

At some point, something changes.

You still feel resistance, but it no longer runs the show. You stop fighting the world and start shaping yourself.

Not with hacks.

Not with shortcuts.

Just with deliberate, repeatable practice.

— Adrian