Last quarter, I wrote about subtraction and the value of clearing our plate before we add anything to it. What I didn’t fully anticipate was what would happen when I started to follow my own advice. Because when you remove the noise to create space, what’s left isn’t always silence. Sometimes, it’s a question: Now that I have the room, what am I actually choosing?

That question has been sitting with me all of 2026, because although subtraction definitely gets you to the starting line, the real shift happens when we stop making trade-offs by default and start making them on purpose.

Barrett Brooks, one of this quarter’s interviewees, helped me find the language for this. In our conversation, he drew a distinction between implicit and explicit trade-offs. The implicit trade-offs we make often times lead to suffering. The cause being the friction between the distinction of the helplessness of the “this is happening to me” mindset and the power that comes from the “I chose this because it serves something I care about” mindset. Often, the latter can reframe your whole experience for the better.

Bree Groff, this quarter’s other guest, arrived at a surprisingly similar place from a completely different direction. She’s spent years studying why people don’t enjoy their work, and in talking with her, it reinforced in me something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Many of us never actually intentionally decide to have a good day. Instead, we wait for the conditions to be right. We assume enjoyment is the reward for meaningful work, rather than a choice we can make within any work we do. Meanwhile, we fill our calendars to the edges, valorize busyness, and then wonder where our aliveness went.

The overlap between the wisdom both of these folks shared illuminates a common blind spot: we sometimes confuse suffering with seriousness. Somewhere along the way, we started treating discomfort as proof that we’re doing something worthwhile, and (unfortunately) ease as proof that we’re not trying hard enough. Barrett said it plainly in our conversation: “There is no inherent value in suffering.” And Bree made a point that I think gets at the same idea from the work side: “We don’t get paid because work is painful. We get paid because we create value. The pain is entirely optional.”

To be clear, neither of them is saying life should be effortless. And it’s important to note the context of Bree’s assertion; she’s perfectly aware that for many, enduring painful circumstances is a short-term reality because of life circumstances. But what I took away from both conversations is that we often have more agency than we act like we do. In fact, the quality of our days is usually less about what’s on our plate and more about whether we’re paying attention to how we’re eating.

So my experiment for this quarter is small but specific: it’s not just saying yes to more fun, it’s being in the moment when fun occurs. And when I catch myself on autopilot, I’m trying to pause long enough to notice what’s actually in front of me. Not because noticing fixes everything. But because, as Barrett reminded me, we’re probably missing 80 percent of the moments in our lives that could be special simply because our minds are off wandering somewhere other than where we are.

I feel fortunate that this quarter was filled with lots of rewarding life experience, but undoubtedly the top of the list for me was a father-daughter trip to Jekyll Island, Georgia, where I got to support my daughter at Katelyn Ohashi’s Drop It Like It’s Hot Invitational. With my daughter recently being accepted into early college, it wasn’t lost on me that this may be the last trip of this kind we get to take together.

It was the perfect opportunity to practice presence, and I loved every minute of it.

I continue to support various causes through quarterly contribution, which are now being tracked on this scorecard.

If last quarter’s lesson was about making room, this quarter’s lesson is about what you do with that space. Not in a big, dramatic, reinvent-your-life type way. More like: Can you catch yourself in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday and make a slightly more intentional choice? Can you sit with a meal alone and not reach for your phone? Can you walk your dog and just be in that moment?

I’m starting to convince myself that change lives not in our grand plans, but in the moments we choose to be an active participant in the present. Because, as cliché as it sounds, all we really have is Now.

As always, thanks for reading. I’m grateful you’re here. 🙌

Sincerely,
Mike Rucker, Ph.D.

P.S. If you haven’t left a review for The Fun Habit and you wouldn’t mind doing so, I would be grateful. It goes a long way in helping others discover the book.

Click to submit your rating.

The post Live Life Love | Volume Seventy-Three appeared first on Mike Rucker, Ph.D..

1) In your book, Today Was Fun, you share a Friends episode where Chandler insists everyone hates their job, only to discover that most of his friends actually like theirs. It does seem socially normative to believe we shouldn’t enjoy work. How do you think about reframing that belief, especially without losing sight of the very real reasons people feel cynical about work in the first place?

I’ve always identified with the curmudgeons of the world because I think curmudgeons are really optimists of the people. Still, they feel all the bumps of the working world, including capitalism and performance reviews. When people say, “We’re not supposed to like our work. We just work to get a paycheck,” I actually empathize with the desire not to be over-extracted by our work or taken advantage of. I think that is the reaction when people say, “Who likes their job? We just work to get paid.” To some degree, that’s healthy because it prompts change in the workplace.

It prompts a grassroots movement to make work better in some ways, and could lead to better working conditions, all rooted in that curmudgeonliness. Still, if we’re going to be curmudgeonly our whole lives and say, “Who likes their work?” it’s really us that loses in the end, because then we’ve experienced week after week of not enjoying the way we’re spending a majority of our time. Obviously, the book is about this, but I think it’s important not to let dissatisfaction or a desire for change get in the way of enjoying today, because once today goes, it doesn’t come back again.

Some of the reframing I’ve tried to do centers on the idea that we don’t get paid because work is painful and people wouldn’t do it otherwise. We get paid because we create value, and the pain is entirely optional. I think a lot of people would say no, the reason you get paid is because otherwise people wouldn’t do it. The pay is the carrot. But there are a billion counterexamples where you see people actually enjoying their work. If you are creating value for a customer, client, or company, the company doesn’t care whether you’re having a good time or not. In fact, they’d probably prefer you have a good time so you stick around.

I think it’s really just up to us to say, “Do I want to have a good day?” I think that’s possible, no matter what the work is. Not every day will be fun, but I do think we need a lot less in terms of context and circumstances than is popularly believed. A lot of people think you need a meaningful job, upward mobility, and growth opportunities, and all those things are good. But I also looked to a show like The Office where there was no meaning. They’re selling paper. They’re not saving the world. There’s not a lot of upward mobility, but still, they made it fun because of the relationships, because they wanted to, because they were sort of like, “Well, if I have to be stuck in this Scranton paper sales company, yeah, I’m going to put someone’s stapler in Jell-O. I’m going to make it fun myself.”

That’s what I try to advocate for. It’s really us who are the recipients of whether we have a good day or not. It’s actually kind of a radical act to prioritize our happiness in a world where maybe we’re just considered human resources.

2) You put a spotlight on how our obsession with scale in the U.S. can undermine and devalue the one-on-one impact that many human-centered professions provide. In a culture that tends to reward growth, scale, and efficiency above all else, how do you think about protecting and valuing human-scale work, and what gets lost when we don’t?

My honest answer is, I don’t have any good societal solves for this because I don’t feel staunchly anti-capitalist. You sell something, people want it, and then they want more. It’s generally a good system.

In a world where we’re set up to primarily want money, a really effective way to do that is through scale. The incentives are a little wrong, which is why I think things like B Corp certification are a really good rebuttal to just making money. I forget all their criteria, but the goal is that you must have a purpose and exist to make an impact beyond profits. That’s a structural answer to scale because otherwise, yes, scale answers a lot of problems. It’s one of the only ways to make massive amounts of money because you just need to multiply your profit by so many customers or users.

If there are maybe not great ways to fix this at a societal level, my rebuttal is, let’s fix it at a human level. One of the things that I see in organizations where there’s low engagement, and there’s good research on this, too, is that sometimes it stems from not having a line of sight to your impact. This happens in companies with scale. You think of the middle-level marketing manager who’s never met a customer in their life, is writing some marketing copy, and shipping it off to some global counterpart. You just never get to see the impact. Say, for instance, you make cookies. That marketing manager is likely never looking at someone eating a cookie and experiencing the joy that they’ve helped provide. That’s part of the problem with scale: you don’t have line of sight to your impact.

Part of the benefit of being in some of those more one-on-one human professions, like teaching or nursing, is that you help someone. You teach a child, and then they light up, and you get to experience that. As a nurse, you help someone in the hospital and see them get better. If anything, I think it’s celebrating how good that feels to be able to deliver human joy, human safety, human healing on a one-on-one level, because that’s what the companies that operate at scale often don’t have. It’s one of the mental gymnastic mind tricks that CEOs try to do when they talk about purpose. “Oh, you’re part of something bigger than yourself.” They try to make you feel good about it, and you’re like, “I don’t know, I’m just writing stupid copy for jeans labels. Am I really part of something bigger than myself?” If anything, I think it’s worth talking about, celebrating, and making more visible the benefits of some of those one-on-one professions.

Separately, there’s so much to say there. I don’t know if you know Joe O’Connor. He’s a friend whose book, Do More in Four, just came out with HBR. He ran the world’s largest four-day workweek pilot. There’s a lot to be said there about how, when individuals become more efficient in their work, who benefits? Is the answer that companies just assign more work, or can employees themselves share some of those efficiency gains? I would say the latter is preferable, though that’s hard to do. Research shows efficiency has skyrocketed over the last several decades, while inflation-adjusted pay hasn’t. Employees have been delivering more, but they’re still working the same amount and being paid the same amount.

The Substack I’m working on for this week is called The Fine Art of Not Growing. I’ve been thinking so much about this because right now I have extra capacity. I’m doing some speaking, some consulting, some podcasts, and I try to keep extra capacity because I have my dad with Alzheimer’s and all these elderly pets. It’s helpful to have the slack because then if something goes wrong, or if my dad’s caregiver needs me for the day, I can do that.

I try to tell myself the slack is important, but it feels very uncomfortable. It feels like, even having written about this, I should be maximizing more. I was telling somebody about this, and they were like, “Just enjoy the equanimity of being calm.” I was like, “This feels incorrect.” Society has not groomed me this way.

I got into atelic activities for this reason. Toward the end of the book, I talk about atelic activities, activities done for their own sake. I always have a new jigsaw puzzle, and it just feels so revolutionary to do a jigsaw puzzle. It’s the opposite of any economic activity. Somebody cut up that puzzle, and I’m putting it back together. We’re literally doing and undoing work. That’s the whole thing of it. I don’t know, I feel so radical. I really enjoy it.

3) Social norms are a strong force and often make us feel like conformity is the only way to succeed at the office. You have some interesting ideas around lowering the stakes in this regard. How can we model non-conformity in a way that actually increases influence and psychological safety rather than putting our jobs at risk?

It’s definitely not an even playing field for everybody. For some people, it’s much easier to be authentic, and for marginalized communities, or even for me as a woman, sometimes I feel like I have to do hair and makeup and all that to be taken seriously. It’s not equally easy for everyone, but I do think it’s important, especially for leaders with a degree of power and privilege, to push the boundaries toward inclusion and authenticity, being welcome, even if only 10%.

I’m never trying to get anyone fired. Obviously, the chapter title is about stretchy pants, showing up in your sweatpants, your yoga pants. I would not do that in front of a client in the same way that if I’m going to a wedding, I’m not going to show up in a tracksuit. But I do try to push the boundaries a bit. What I’ve realized, sort of through exposure therapy, is that nothing bad happens. A lot of times, I do show up to meetings with wet hair, especially Zoom meetings, because I exercise in the morning, come home, shower, and jump on a meeting, and I just can’t be bothered. In the meeting, I’m just as smart. I’m coming with my brain. That’s what I’m here for. It works whether my hair is wet or dry. It could be seen as unprofessional. I’ve done it on lots of podcasts, and to date, no one has said anything.

That’s not to say that no one ever gets called out, especially if you’re closer to normative business culture. I understand, then it’s scarier. You feel like you have to fit in. Still, I think it’s important for everybody just to try a little bit. Some days I show up in a hoodie, and it’s fine. I swear in the book, and sometimes I swear in meetings, and that’s also fine. I think there’s a lot that we self-impose, this feeling of needing to be buttoned up in order to be accepted, when in fact what’s powerful for me is to think about whether I can model, or be the spark in a meeting or in a relationship, that says, “Oh, we can just be casual here.”

I wrote a piece on this called “Give-No-Shits Role Models.” I think everyone has maybe a person or two in their life who is 20% more themselves than everyone else. They just show up as themselves, and you get the sense that who they are there is just who they are. That’s just how they show up. There’s such freedom in that, and I think it’s magnetic and compelling. I try to be that whenever I can, especially if I’m in a leadership position and have a degree of power. I think it’s important to eat during meetings so others know they can, too. These little things just welcome humanity into the room, so that if we can take off our business masks, everything becomes easier. Psychological safety increases, camaraderie increases, sharing of good ideas increases, and so does the enjoyment of your day because you’re not diverting your mental energy toward being palatable. It’s a drain on business and a drain on our mental health, I think.

4) I love how you describe the “Muse” as a deity that hates 30-minute meetings and “grumpy, tired people”. How do you suggest we go about wooing our Muse when our own performance is judged by the very metrics that drive her away?

I think in any quality organization, the metrics shouldn’t drive her away. Over the course of a year’s performance review, ideally what a manager or leader is looking for is solid impact, which comes from brave ideas, brave execution, and all of the things that the Muse is good at, which is being inventive, generative, and creating that sort of sense of possibility.

Where she comes into conflict is with those near-term questions: Did I get to inbox zero? Am I just going to all my back-to-back meetings during a day? Am I floundering around trying to find this thing to send to this person? I think it’s usually us that feels like we want that dopamine hit of checking off the to-do list, getting through the day, getting through the inbox, at the detriment of our Muse and actually at the detriment of our performance in the end.

There are maybe some roles, like project manager, where you’re heavily incentivized to be on top of every single email response time within an hour. Maybe there’s not a lot of time there. You really have to block the time for creativity. But I think, in most roles, if you’re a knowledge worker, you’re being paid for your knowledge, your insight, your brilliance, your creativity, etc. I feel many times, we stand in our own way. It feels risky sometimes to block off hours or a day to think expansively or creatively, when in fact it’s actually what’s required. It’s the same reason we get our best ideas in the shower, because there’s no distraction. There are no Slack messages pinging. Our brains are free to explore.

That’s why it really baffles me, honestly, especially when an executive leadership team gets together, and their off-sites are scheduled down to the minute. There are maybe three hours over the course of a day and a half off-site to talk about company strategy. It’s like, wait, you’re the people. You have to woo the Muse into the room, and she’s just not going to want to join you when there’s 30 minutes of insight presentation, 30 minutes of discussion, 45 minutes of picking a direction, and then you’re on to operational concerns.

I think it’s related to what we were talking about before. If we have slack in our days, it feels wrong. There’s actually something that really serves us about being busy and overscheduled, and even if we’re in a meeting we don’t need to be in, there’s still something gratifying about saying, “I filled my day.” Paradoxically, that actually works against us.

5) You expose “above and beyond” effort as often being free labor in disguise, taken from time meant for renewal and being with loved ones. In my work with physicians, they literally call this “pajama time,” because they feel both the opportunity cost and the toll. What strategies have you found most helpful for setting healthier boundaries around work, especially for people who genuinely enjoy their work or feel called to keep giving more?

It always comes from somewhere, the extra time spent working. A lot of times, I hear the rebuttal, “But I love to work, and work is fun for me, so why shouldn’t I work more if that’s what I want to do?”

Part of me is like, yeah, who am I to say don’t? Yet that time and energy come from somewhere. Even when I was in my twenties and single and childless and could devote all my time to work, I still needed, and probably should have devoted more time to, friendships or hobbies or health or any of those kinds of things.

What I have found to be helpful, first, is the insight that work is like an invasive species. It will just overwhelm your calendar if you let it, because work is a bottomless pit. Organizations are designed to always serve up more of it and take more from you if you are willing to give it. Personally, my best trick is to use my calendar as a weapon of defense. The way I do that is by getting to my calendar first. I know it’s very hard for me psychologically, as somewhat of a people pleaser, to say yes to a meeting and then later say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t make it anymore because of X.” It’s very hard to claw time back after you’ve given it away.

A better way that I have found is to solidify the rocks in my calendar such that my work can be the water that flows around them. You have to put the rocks there first. It’s very hard to place the rocks once the deluge is coming down the river.

It’s just so much easier to say, “Oh, I can’t make that meeting. I have a pre-existing commitment.” People are like, “Sure.” People have pre-existing commitments all the time. It’s very easy to do. You don’t have to say my pre-existing commitment is cooking dinner because I want to, or whatever it is.

The things I tend to put in my calendar, I put my exercise in my calendar for the week or weeks ahead. Anything that I know I want to be at with my daughter, I block. During my more hectic times of life, I would literally put calendar blocks in the evening when I was working at a consultancy, so that other people could see my calendar and it would just show up as not available. You really shouldn’t have to do that. Your evening should be your time. But if our calendars are our overlords, then fine. I want that overlord to work for me, not for the business first.

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1) You have worked closely with a lot of fast-moving creators and operators. In your experience, when growth outpaces self-awareness, what tends to break first? And after having a front-row seat to so many different founder journeys as a coach, what have you had to change your mind about when it comes to leadership, motivation, and what people actually want?

What breaks first, practically speaking, are the relationships. The way it starts to show up is the creator-entrepreneur not maintaining their creative habit. Then it becomes resentment or blame, or ways of misplacing that angst as “my team’s not performing.”

What I’m usually observing is that it’s a leadership capacity issue, and the team and the company have outgrown the creator. The creator ends up resenting the whole system because they got into it as a creative person. That was their initial drive. What they ultimately realize is that along the way, they began chasing the ability to keep being a creative person while earning more money. The way you have to do that is pretty circuitous, and it takes a while until you can get back to just being the creative person. There’s a certain amount of scale that has to happen to increase your income as a creator initially.

The paradox is that to reach the scale where you can be the creative person again, you first have to become a CEO. You’re managing a team, and the creative person is thinking, “I don’t want to be a CEO; I want to remain a creative person.” That’s what ultimately breaks things apart.

So, there are two paths I see people go down. One is that they become conscious of this dynamic and say, “Okay, I actually don’t want a team. I’m going to go back to the original scale of the thing that allows me just to be creative, and whatever I earn, I earn.” (Justin Welsh is an example of someone who consciously made this choice.)

There’s another version of this where they’re not aware of it, and it just keeps playing out. What that ends up looking like is a lot of turnover, a lot of internal conflict on the team, and usually, revenue stalls out. Either they get so fed up with it that they shut it down, or so many people leave that they’re like, “I don’t even know what to do now.” It’s now a culture issue. Who wants to work for someone who actively resents them?

The thing that solves for it is this active choice between, do I want to build the CEO skill set, or do I want to be okay with less revenue, but more creative time?

There’s maybe a middle ground, which is, can I hire a great operator? However, what I usually find is that when the founder-creator tries to get around this whole dynamic by outsourcing team management, the conflict is concentrated in one relationship rather than across the whole team. Then they have to worry about the replaceability of that person because all of that energy is getting directed at the operator. It usually ends up looking a lot like the same patterns that attachment relationships have, marriages, and things like that, in terms of how the pattern plays out.

For me, regarding what’s changed, it’s interesting because I come out at the opposite end. I am a creative person. I enjoy writing. I enjoy podcasting. I enjoy all of that. But I love teams. I genuinely enjoy the building of culture and the active creation of community. But I also wanted to get back to having a team when I left ConvertKit, so I worked really hard to earn the right to have one. My growth came from learning leadership practices that are highly effective at unlocking significant future potential.

Yet, for some of my clients, that’s not their motivation. Their actual motivation is to be as free, independent, and creative as possible, and everything else is just window dressing. That mental model doesn’t work for me, so I had to start studying things like a scientist. In my work as a coach, I had to ask questions like, “What is the actual motivation here? How can I help them make a much more active choice between these paths available to them, and not get in the way of the fact that they just want to do whatever it is they want to do?” Otherwise, I’d be applying my framework or my value system to their decisions. As a coach, that simply doesn’t work. I had to get used to that. And, not just understand it, but get all the way to compassion for it. Otherwise, if I’m thinking, “Okay, I understand you, but I don’t think you’re right,” I’m still not effective.

Getting all the way to compassion allowed me to say, “Okay, I’m actually totally free of this.” For a long time, it was personal because I had experience as the C-level executive, creator, and founder, and I deeply care about teams. I was taking some of that baggage into client relationships and almost advocating for my client’s team. But, instead, I needed to be the advocate for my client, that’s the work of a coach, and I had to do my own processing so I could get there.

2) Why do you think so many smart, capable people can give great advice to others, but still struggle to apply it in their own lives? And in your view, what’s the difference between coaching that helps someone perform better and coaching that helps someone live better?

Why is it that we can see in others what we can’t see in ourselves? The first thing is that we are subject to our own experience in a way that we’re not subject to someone else’s. I can observe you doing things, but I’m not in it. You’re in it. I’m in my own experience. The most base-level answer to this is that we have to build the skill set to truly see and feel before we can make change in ourselves. We have emotional reactions to the things we’re subject to, and these emotions influence our behavior, thoughts, and sensations.

So, this is the value of coaching. This is the value of therapy. This is the value of friendship and community. Other people can say, “Hey, did you notice?” And you’re like, “Well, no, I didn’t.” But now, next time, maybe you have a better chance of noticing, because your level of awareness was raised, which helps you understand that’s the thing you should look for.

To the second part of your question, there’s a spectrum in coaching, from performance to developmental. For instance, it’s not like I’m this or I’m that when it comes to coaching. I wouldn’t get paid what I do for coaching if I didn’t have an eye toward business growth and/or some form of ROI. It’s got to at least be experiential for the founder, if it’s not financial. And, there’s always a performance outcome of some kind. There are results that happen from all behavior. It’s really a theory question about what gets you there and what sustains it.

I think performance coaching can find some shortcuts. Not that it’s intentionally trying to find shortcuts, but there’s more available to you in terms of frameworks. For instance, if you’re trying to improve your batting average performance, it doesn’t matter how your dad yelling at you growing up affects your experience in the batter’s box. It matters whether you get a hit.

A developmental coach would say, “How do we work with not even understanding the history of all of this, but understanding how that shows up for you right now, and all of the ways in which that’s affecting your life?” Then, “How can we start to detach from that and create new behavioral outcomes that you can sustain over time? How can we re-pattern around this so that it can serve you in many different areas of life?”

I believe that for a human’s overall development, that’s a better approach because it offers more benefits. But that might take five years, and if you’re in a contract year, you’re not looking for a five-year solution. You’re looking for a tomorrow solution. There are a lot of these little psychological hacks you can use to essentially suppress and repress things that are getting in your way in the short term, so that you can get a short-term outcome. I don’t think that’s right or wrong. It’s just not going to fix the underlying issue.

That’s why I think a lot of athletes struggle after leaving athletics. They’ve still got all the same issues, but it’s not a short-term window they’re looking at anymore. They’re looking at a long-term developmental window, and none of the tactical skills they’ve learned previously now apply. They have to start back from square one, and I think that’s a lot of what drives their struggles.

Of course, there’s a real loss, and there’s a real transition that happens aside from this, but I also think they need all-new tools to perform in a new environment. At the broadest level, tools that can be applied across multiple domains, whereas performance coaching has a level of specificity that accomplishes a particular goal.

3) How do you think about coaching identity-level change, not just helping someone improve a skill, but helping them become a different kind of person? What have you learned about the relationship between inner state and outer execution, and how much of lasting change is really state management?

Let’s take the identity thing first.

I can be a little allergic to turning my thinking into frameworks for whatever reason. But I’m beginning to develop an increasing level of conviction that identity-level change requires something like this process: If you were to map your life on two dimensions, time scale and emotional valence (positive and negative) throughout your life, you’d see that you have core memories in your memory for a reason, as well as some repressed memories that also shaped you. Repressed memories aren’t as common. To start with, it’s really a question of what the emotional arc of your life looks like. If you were to plot all of your core memories, what would that look like in terms of emotional valence over time? I think this is kind of step one. What is the longitudinal view on the experiences that have most shaped you?

Then there’s a process of seeing how each of those things represents a story that shows up as behavior, thoughts, emotions, and somatic experience today. You show up in the world based on the things that have shaped you. You show up in the world a certain way, and that gets you so far. Then one day you wake up and say, “Okay, maybe I’ve gotten really far. Also, I haven’t really told anyone this, but it’s kind of killing me inside.” This is usually when people come to me and say, “It worked. But, also, I can’t do it like this anymore.” I think the first condition is someone realizing that everyone outside of me might think this has been very effective, but I need someone to know it’s not going to keep working because I actually feel like I’m at a breaking point. Reaching this type of breaking point has to happen for an openness to identity-level change to occur. You become aware of how you’re showing up, and then you say, “All right, what do I need to grieve, process, say out loud, and move on from?”

What I find for most people, generally speaking, is that there’s a backlog of grief for the way things have been. There’s grief for the things that were hard and haven’t been acknowledged, because acknowledging hardness doesn’t exactly equal survival. We have a low tolerance for this type of work, especially in Western society.

So people have to go through this backlog of grief and process it, and the way they do so varies from person to person. Once one gets through that backlog, you’re kind of back to even. Then you say, “All right, I’ve grieved everything that was difficult about getting here. I’ve acknowledged all of the great ways that my habits were serving me. Now, how do I want to go forward, and what is the actual outcome I want?”

It might be, I do want to get to 10 million dollars. I’m going to be willing to do some hard things I don’t enjoy as a CEO, but I’m not going to do them in the old broken ways, with my old relational patterns and my old emotional patterns. I’m going to choose not to take suffering on myself, but instead to actively hire people who can take the burden on for me, or whatever the thing is.

I think it’s essentially this: What has shaped you, and how is that no longer working for you enough for you to realize it, raise your hand, and say, I need help? Then you ask, “What’s hard?” You process through that backlog, and you move on and say, here’s how I want to be going forward.

That’s going to take some retraining. For instance, when someone is upset with you. Rather than collapsing and saying, “Okay, I’ll do what you want,” you’re going to stand your ground and say, “Okay, I hear you. What you’re asking for doesn’t work for me. Here’s another way we can get to a solution. Does that work for you?” Then you learn to embrace the cost of that decision. But that’s better than collapsing and suffering because you weren’t willing to stand your ground on a thing that mattered.

Changing those little behavioral loops becomes the identity change over time. You go from thinking my job in a relationship is to acquiesce and collapse to realizing you have an equal role to play and every right to ask for things, too. Now you have a whole new reality you can lean into.

Essentially, you shift from implicit to conscious trade-offs. Everything’s hard. There’s nothing worth doing that’s not hard. But if you’re making implicit trade-offs, that’s usually suffering. If you’re making explicit trade-offs and knowing that you always have a choice, that’s growth.

So, the state we’re managing is suffering versus growth, and the outcomes might still be growth in either case: growth of revenue, growth of team, growth of whatever. But I think the internal experience changes once you realize you are actively choosing the pain of a growing team, or losing money for a year, or whatever it might be, because it’s in service of this bigger thing that you want over here. Once people embrace that, their whole experience changes, even though the circumstances remain fundamentally the same.

4) You’re aware that I think a lot about enjoyment as a driver of adherence. Do you think leaders underestimate the role of energy, aliveness, and enjoyment in doing meaningful work well? You and I both care about how people do hard things in a way they can sustain, so where do you think hustle is overrated, and what should replace it?

First of all, there’s no inherent value in suffering. I just don’t believe that.

Suffering can yield things that you value. But there’s no inherent value in suffering, and I think at some point we started to get that backwards. That’s the thing with hustle culture. We forgot that the point isn’t to be always on and busting ass nonstop. The point is that you had some way you were trying to improve your experience of life.

When the whole point becomes proving that you are hustling, proving that you’re working hard, or proving that you’re suffering more than the next person, my experience is that it’s a form of brokenness. It’s essentially playing a status game where the status is measured by how much suffering you’re willing to endure, which seems silly to me.

There’s enough suffering in the world. You’re going to experience suffering through externalities, the biggest of which is that we’re all going to die. So why would we place an inherent value on suffering as its own thing? It doesn’t make any sense.

What’s the point then? The point, I think, is experiencing what we’re capable of. That’s a different lens on what can look like the same thing. What we are capable of could be in any domain. I actually don’t care what domain. But, to be fully alive, you should have some domain where you’re trying to find out how good you can be. Good can be measured however you want.

How you present yourself as a father or mother can be a perfectly wonderful organizing force for your life. I think there are a lot of people talking about hustle culture who would say, no, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about going to achieve a ‘thing.’ I would argue that what more could you achieve than being a present parent to a child who is going to develop into a whole person? It’s a whole life you’re affecting.

Assuming that is the organizing force, number one, you have to recognize the risk you’re placing in any one identity, because that identity can be taken from you in any number of ways. But if you do that consciously, I think it’s okay, which is the whole non-attachment idea that gets popularized in Buddhism and other mindfulness practices.

If you have a domain where you’re trying to be great (however you define great), then you can have meaningful bouts of suffering that are in service of that effort. In our parent example, doing bedtime every night can be a form of suffering with a certain three-year-old, for example. But if the practice in the middle of that is asking, “How can I experience this in a way that is not just gritting through it?” You remember your experience as a kid: Go to sleep! If you don’t go to sleep on this timetable, we’ll be angry with you. If you keep going, we will eventually spank you, and then you’ll stop asking us to help you fall asleep.

What’s the opposite of that? It’s saying something like, “I’ll be here no matter what you do to me right now, because I am a capable adult, and you’re a child with less emotional capacity to regulate. You’ll know that you are infinitely safe with me.” If that’s my mission, my child yelling at me has basically no bearing, except as an opportunity to practice.

The joy part of that is holding my son once he’s asleep and realizing that tonight, my son was dysregulated, and I rose to the challenge. He will experience safety because of that. I’m not saying that every moment of it was joyful, but the amount of meaning I get from it is nearly infinite. It’s like I won that day in that situation. It doesn’t get all the way to joy, but I think if you can access joy, joy is not opposed to achievement. Somewhere along the way, in the way we started valuing suffering, we started assuming that joy means you’re not going to achieve anything in this life. Why?

5) For someone who wants an immediate taste of the benefits of being more present, what are a few small, repeatable practices they could start experimenting with right away?

The simplest one is: take a walk.

Your only job on the walk, your only assignment, is to do nothing other than be on the walk. Really radical idea, leave your phone at home. You don’t have to do it for long. Take a five-minute walk around your neighborhood.

We need to make it goal-oriented for a moment because people are so goal-oriented. While you’re on the walk, your assignment is to notice five things, one thing per minute, in your environment.

That is as simple as I can make it, because it’s five minutes. I promise you, you have no excuse. Your only job is not to take anything with you. Don’t do anything else other than walk and notice one thing for a minute. Your brain is capable of noticing hundreds of things per minute, so it’s really a pretty easy assignment.

I think what you learn over time is how many things you just blow past because of whatever’s going on in your head, or whatever task list is on your mind.

The reality is, if you’re taking a walk, even if it’s just from your office building to your car, or walking your dog, or wherever, what is the relative value to you of, for example, scrolling Instagram while your dog poops versus noticing a cardinal on a tree branch? What is the value you get from each? And if you were making a conscious choice, what would you wish for yourself?

I have an assumed answer. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe you really do want to scroll Instagram, and that’s fine. But I assume that most people would say, “Well, it’s probably really nice to look up at the blue sky and think, wow, it’s a really beautiful day today. I’m really grateful for this.” Rather than looking at whatever workout someone did, or whatever some random person had for dinner, or whatever.

I’m not saying you have to be that way all the time, but I think if you can take a five-minute walk, then you can, over time, learn to do a hundred different versions of that.

Something I’ve started doing is, every time I go speak somewhere and I’m away from home for two nights, I intentionally go eat alone on one of those nights.

My challenge to myself is to have a meal at a nice restaurant that I would enjoy even if I were with friends. I don’t look at my phone. I don’t take a book. I don’t listen to anything. I just sit there and experience the meal, have a glass of wine, and think, “Wow, look at how many things I could miss right now.” You’re just watching people, acknowledging the environment, seeing how service is being delivered, thinking your own thoughts.

I used to be extraordinarily anxious about eating alone. Now I savor it. It’s this wonderful exercise, even in noticing. I’ll have moments where I think, I wonder how many people think I’m weird. I’m alone, I’m having a glass of wine, I don’t have anything on my table, especially before the food comes, because then there’s really nothing to do. I’ll think, “I wonder if anyone wonders why I’m alone?”

A younger version of me would have been embarrassed by this. Now I think, “What a privilege, to be aware enough to say I’m choosing this for myself.” We probably miss 80 percent of the moments in our lives that could be special in some way because we’re so caught up in where we’re not.

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2025 was my ‘year of yes.’ It’s been a good year, but also an enlightening one. It helped me realize a pattern in my behavior that I also see in a lot of other smart, capable people. When we feel stuck, or when progress feels slower than it “should,” when a goal starts to wobble under the weight of real life, our instinct is rarely to stop. Our instinct is to add.

We look for more information. We add technology. We search for another approach, one that surely will be the thing that gets us back on track, right? Oh, the comfort of the feeling of forward motion (even though you know you’re standing still).

To be clear, I am not villainizing curiosity. In my opinion, curiosity is one of the best parts of being alive. What I’m talking about here is having the room to make use of the amazing discoveries that curiosity affords us.

Because here’s the part we tend to forget: Skill and mastery don’t simply arise from exposure. Skill requires space for repetition, application, and feedback. And, unfortunately, sometimes those three things aren’t as fun as we’d like them to be. They also require the exact resources modern life is best at quietly stealing: time, attention, and emotional bandwidth.

This is all to say that the problem is rarely laziness, but instead one of capacity. It’s preserved space and the resolve to stack our obligations slowly enough that they don’t trip over each other. In my opinion, this is something that we folks from the world of self-help don’t talk about enough: change initiatives have a really low success rate when they’re executed against a full plate. The most successful path to getting better at anything doesn’t start with pouring more in; it starts by removing what’s not working.

Serendipitously, that’s the throughline I kept coming back to in both interviews this quarter. Erin pointed to a truth most course creators and learners don’t want to hear: simply consuming content is not competence. If your goal is behavior change, you cannot just learn more. You have to first remove (unlearn) what’s not working to get better.

Jon came at the same problem from a different angle. He highlighted that when it comes to betterment, we’re great at addition and terrible at subtraction. We live in a world that celebrates accretion, and then we act surprised when we cannot follow through on what matters because we’re burnt out.

Trevor Noah dropped a piece of advice last month meant for folks with ADHD, but I think, in our overstimulated world, it’s helpful for anyone: Start with ‘no.’ That doesn’t mean you have to end with no; it just means that we set ourselves up for failure when we lack constraints, as well as say yes to too much.

So, while I usually go into the New Year with big plans about what I plan to build, this year I’m starting with what I can remove. This is a new approach for me, so I’m not sure how it will fit yet, but I’m excited to see what grows when I clear the weeds a bit. How about you? What’s your mantra going into 2026? (Honestly, please reply. I’d love to know.)

Life experience this quarter came in the form of exploring new places in the Carolinas.

We went to Appalachian Ski Mountain (pictured) for the first time and had a blast, as well as visited South Carolina a bit by checking out Charleston and Kiawah Island over the holidays.

I continue to support various causes through quarterly contribution, which is being tracked on this scorecard.

Funny enough, it would appear subtraction has made it into the zeitgeist for 2026. While procrastinating on editing this newsletter, I began listening to Chris Williamson on the latest The Diary of a CEO podcast. One of the first nuggets of advice Chris gives in the episode is, “In order to pick something up, you have to put something down.”

In other words, subtraction isn’t an aesthetic preference, but a capability power play. If you want to get better at something in 2026, you don’t necessarily need a better system. You just need room to practice, and room usually shows up the same way every time … by removing something first.

Before I close, I want to highlight three new releases from interviewees, past and present, that fit the moment particularly well:

• Jon Goodman’s Unhinged Habits comes out January 27, 2026. The book serves as a sharp reminder that intensity has its place, but that strategic subtraction is the real starting line.
• Nir Eyal’s latest book, Beyond Belief, is now available for pre-order as well, and let me tell you, it’s good! If you’ve been circling a change you “know” you want to make, but cannot seem to commit to, this one is aimed at the invisible assumptions that keep you stuck.
• And Cathy Heller’s Abundant Ever After is now out in trade paperback. If you’re recalibrating what “enough” feels like and want a more expansive relationship with ease and possibility, this is the book for you. It has a feminine, mystical slant, but even this old, skeptical dude found a way to enjoy the heck out of it.
• And, of course, if you’d like to have more fun in 2026, there’s The Fun Habit.

I hope that at least something in here, be it an idea or a takeaway, helps set up 2026 as your best year yet! One of my favorite things is being in your corner, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to do just that.

Sincerely,
Mike Rucker, Ph.D.

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Fitness was his testing ground; the lessons it produced now shape his work on habits, decision-making, and designing lives that function in the real world.

1) You’ve shared that Unhinged Habits grew out of your “8:4 seasonal way of living” and years of refusing to accept social and educational norms as a given. When you look back, what was the first moment you realized your life had drifted pretty far from what most people consider normal, and, for those unfamiliar with how you frame 8:4, how do you describe it to them?

In the winter of 2012, I ran away from the world to Hawaii. Before that, I was a full-time personal trainer in Toronto. In addition, I had self-published a book for personal trainers, started a blog, hosted a few events, had a couple of online products, and was doing affiliate promotions. I didn’t like what I was becoming. I recognized that I was very jealous of other people and very ego-driven. I was dating my girlfriend at the time, and looking back, I didn’t appreciate just how special she was. Spoiler alert: that girlfriend is now my wife, but we did break up for a period when I ran away to Hawaii.

I spent three months on the island of Oahu on the North Shore in a town called Laie, all by myself. I rented a room off Craigslist, and I would sometimes go four or five days without speaking to another human being. I didn’t know it at the time, but Laie is actually a Mormon town. In those three months, I shut down some of the websites I was running—six-pack workout-type things—and just spent a lot of time by myself figuring out what I wanted to do once that period was over.

I then moved to Maui for three months and started building back up. I decided to fulfill one of my rules for living, which was “get absolutely shredded,” take pictures, and never do it again. This training regimen and hiring a coach really focused my days there and gave me the scaffolding I needed. That whole trip was such an incredible time of transformation for me. By the time I came back to Toronto after six months, I was a different person. I was fundamentally different, and the only reason that happened was because I checked out of my life in order to check back in. Things happened to me when I was a personal trainer (as they happen to anybody in any job), and I went with them and let them adapt to who I was. But I never stopped to really think about it, and I found myself in this downward spiral. I needed to pause and reassess.

When I came home to Toronto afterwards, everybody was the same! I had gone through this incredible evolution, yet everybody was the same. My friends were still in relationships that weren’t serving them, still complaining about bosses they didn’t like, whatever. And that’s when I realized we need to build back in seasonality into our lives. It doesn’t have to be about escaping the world, like going to Hawaii, but we have to build back in these stops in order to check out so that we can check back into who we really are and who we really want to be for the next season of our life.

The idea with the 8-4 is to build back in seasons. The invention of the clock and the light bulb transformed natural time into artificial time. Before that, we had seasons: spring, summer, and fall of longer days, generally working harder—foraging, hunting, gathering. And then we had winter, when it was dark earlier. We spent it with our community, and we slept more. That’s the seasonality our bodies and minds are designed to crave.

With the light bulb, with the clock, with official time, we’re now in this never-ending season. And as a result, we never stop to take stock of what we’re doing and whether it’s serving us based on who we are today, not who we were when we agreed to do the thing. Nature abhors a vacuum. Humans are very good at addition; humans are terrible at subtraction. If we’re in a never-ending season, we’re going to be endlessly adding commitments, adding relationships, adding stuff to our homes, just buying stuff. So 8-4 is seasonality.

2) One of the promises of Unhinged Habits is to help the reader master the art of strategic subtraction. In a world where almost all personal and business systems are built accretively, and growth is celebrated, what does strategic subtraction look like?

There are three elements of subtraction we all need to consider in our lives: physical, mental, and identity.

When people think about physical minimalism, they generally think about the physical aspect of it—I don’t want to own many things, I need to clean up, I need to tidy up, etc. That’s undoubtedly important.

But then you get into mental. How good are you at making better decisions faster? I think it’s important to admit our ignorance towards just about everything in this world. Admit that we’re lost. Admit that we don’t really understand how things are working, because that’s the first step to being able to make better decisions faster. It’s also very important within the mental sphere of minimalism to be really keenly attuned to what our priority is for the season. That allows us to say yes to certain obligations that really serve us, the people we love, and the meaningful work we want to be doing—and confidently say no to everything else.

I love it when people say no to me. I gain a tremendous amount of respect when people say no to me. I like it when people say yes to me, but I gain respect for them when they say no to me (if it’s someone I like and have a relationship with). I actually lose a little bit of respect for them if they don’t answer me or if they commit to doing something and then don’t follow through. The reason for that is it’s a sign to me that this person has not figured out for themselves what’s important. So mental minimalism is second.

And then identity minimalism. What are the rules you take on? What are the commitments? Who are you? Are you a father first and foremost? Are you a business owner? Who are you committing to? What’s your identity?

3) One of the many things I enjoy about your work is that you have a bit of a contrarian view on incremental progress and argue that consistency can sometimes actually impede success. For instance, you write that “consistency is for the maintaining, intensity is for the gaining.” How do you help people discern when it is time to lean into an intense season versus when it is wiser to lean into the marginal gains of consistency?

Is it contrarian, though? Really? I don’t know a single person who’s ever benefited from transformative change in their business, in their health, in their relationships that hasn’t included some element of intensity. Even the guy who wrote the book on getting 1% better used multiple periods of unhinged intensity to get the book across the finish line, and then other periods of unhinged intensity to market that same book. I think what’s actually happened is that there are certain phrases that perform well on social media because they’re very simple, they’re very easy, they’re very nice—and because they perform well on social media, they get undue attention. How the world actually works and how we talk about it in short-form social media content are not the same thing.

Think of consistency as the reliable foundation that keeps you from sliding backward. Intensity is the force that propels you forward.

If there’s something that’s really important for you to build and make better right now—and it can only be one thing at a time—and you have the capacity, the only way to reset your baseline to a higher level of functioning is through intensity. Whether that’s closer relationships with the people you love, an improved physiological set point so your health is much better, or a fundamentally improved business, you have to commit to a season of intensity on that, and accept that the other priorities in your life will be put on maintenance. That’s the trade-off. It’s not nice necessarily, but it’s the truth. And that level of maintenance I would define as consistency.

4) Your book includes the Explorer’s Compass as a framework for breaking routine and rediscovering wonder in everyday life. For someone with a fairly fixed life, kids, a job with set hours, and a limited travel budget, what would an “Explorer’s Compass” week actually look like on the ground?

Depending on where you are, I break exploring up into three different risk spectrums: safe experiments, moderate challenges, and bold adventures.

Safe experiments are things like trying a new restaurant without checking reviews, or maybe taking a different route to work, or striking up a conversation with a stranger. Things that are outside of your routine. Moderate challenges might be traveling to a nearby town without detailed planning. You don’t have to get on a plane, but maybe for an afternoon on the weekend, you’re just going to a neighboring town without planning, without bringing your phone, and just exploring. Maybe you want to volunteer for a project at work outside of your expertise or volunteer in your community. And then there are bold adventures. These are things like solo travel to an unfamiliar country or committing to giving a public talk.

5) Let’s say someone wanted to run a 30-day experiment that captures the spirit of Unhinged Habits, something at the intersection of strategic subtraction, occasional unhinged intensity, and their own definition of a rich life. How could they set up an experiment to kick the tires and get some early momentum?

I like the idea of doing a micro-seasons approach. Let’s say you wanted to focus on some business venture for the next 30 days. Well, you could do any combination of making an agreement with your spouse that he or she is going to take on more of the parenting duties for those 30 days. Maybe you’ll get some additional support around the house in terms of cleaning and meals. Maybe you’ll get some extra childcare for those 30 days.

At the same time, you’re going to want to create an off-season checklist to handle your relationships so you still show up for your family the way you need to, and you’re consistently there for them. And what you’ll do for your health, appreciating that you’re not going to improve your health during this time, but you don’t want it to move backward. So, some baseline of workouts or something similar.

And then what you’ll do is set your schedule up so that your best hours of your week—obviously this changes depending on whether you have a traditional job or not—are committed to this business venture. You accept that the extra expense, if you’re able to afford any extra expense, is not manageable long-term, but it’s okay for the short term. And you don’t feel the guilt of the things you’re not doing. The problem is almost never in the gaining in one area; it’s in the perception of loss in others. And so when you have these off-season checklists, you don’t have this perception of loss in other areas.

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What sets Erin apart is her ability to blend science with strategy. She draws on learning science, behavioral science, psychology, and advertising by leveraging proven techniques from industries specializing in behavior change. As a result, she helps transform knowledge into scalable, results-driven learning products that captivate audiences, increase impact, and convert at scale.

1) When you look at the current course landscape, what do you think most creators misunderstand about what learners actually need?

I think most course creators are creating content they like to talk about and find interesting, but their course doesn’t actually address a pain point their audience is expressing. It’s an understandable approach because that is very natural human behavior. We want to talk about what we want to talk about, and we become experts in something because we’re passionate about it from a theoretical standpoint. So, I think that is probably one of the biggest misses: creating a course on an idea you want, rather than one that the marketplace is actually asking for. I see that as the biggest disconnect when I sit down with someone. They know what they want to teach. And it’s like, “Great, but how do you know that is what people want to buy?”

What is the best way to understand what the marketplace is asking for? There are two things. The first is talking to the market, and the second is doing some really good market research. I just launched a tool that does that. It does not replace the human conversation, but it does like 90% of what I used to do manually (and better!).

Another misunderstanding is that teaching is the same as enabling skill development, because those are actually two different things. I approach course creation from a behavioral science standpoint because, at the end of the day, learning is human behavior. Creating a great course goes way beyond good content. You need skill application, then feedback, and then contextualized feedback around that. These are the elements that actually help us change our behavior as humans.

We also have to think about the environment we’re in and the habits we have, because those are hard to break. And there’s a neuroscience to that, where we often have to unlearn to relearn. So, if we’re an expert creating a course and we’re not understanding human behavior, how humans create new habits, and what makes them implement a new skill (or not implement a new skill), then we’re not actually creating an experience that’s going to give the learner the best shot at changing their behavior. We might as well have them read a book or watch our YouTube videos.

Don’t get me wrong, those are great things as well, we all benefit from them. But, if it were super easy to understand how to apply something from just reading a book or watching a video, we probably wouldn’t have an obesity problem, and we’d all have the most profitable businesses from day one. We need more than just consuming content to learn.

2) What is the difference between “engaging content” and “effective instruction,” and how can creators avoid confusing the two?

The research shows that two primary factors affect the effectiveness of a learning experience. The first is that the learning material is contextualized. What does that mean? As a learner, it means I can practice the material in my own world and in real time. It means that when I’m interacting with the content, I see myself in the lessons. So, for example, when we look at enterprise leadership training, there’s a difference between an off-the-shelf leadership course and one that’s been customized for a specific organization. That’s because an organization’s unique culture really affects how leadership skills are applied and what success looks like.

So, contextualization is important. That actually proves difficult with self-paced asynchronous learning formats, but with AI, there are many new opportunities to improve. I’m working with a client right now on a course that uses AI role-play. The learners are getting live feedback. It is AI-simulated feedback, but the simulation itself is so intelligent that it responds directly to what the individual is saying, enabling contextualized feedback in a self-paced way. And feedback is the second primary factor that impacts the effectiveness of a learning experience.

One of the best ways I like to think about feedback is: imagine someone newly diagnosed with diabetes who is tracking their insulin levels multiple times a day. When they do this, they’re getting immediate feedback from their biometrics, as well as from how they feel based on what they eat, right? So it’s like you’re getting real-time feedback, and you’re like, “Oh, if I make this little adjustment here, it affects my numbers this way.” This is a classic example of a contextualized feedback loop.

To make content engaging, you need the same elements as any good Netflix video. There’s a story involved, there’s surprise, there are characters, and there are all the things that make a piece of content interesting. But, again, what makes it effective is that it’s contextualized and provides specific feedback back to you. However, I would still argue that the course must be engaging for it to be effective. Nowadays, our attention span is competing with Netflix, with TikTok, with our kids; we live in a distracted world. So, engaging and effective are different, but engaging is a prerequisite to being effective.

3) If a course is meant to change behavior, what’s important to keep in mind?

The first step is to properly diagnose where your audience is and accurately identify their pain points. To do this, I draw heavily on the world of marketing: pains and gains, ‘jobs to be done’ theory, value proposition canvas, etc. If I’m not properly diagnosing my audience’s pains and gains, focusing on what they’re trying to accomplish, and the jobs they have to do in their work, then I’m missing the mark.

Early analysis, market research, end-user conversations, and empathy work all make a huge difference in whether your course actually hits the mark for your audience. A risk I’ve seen with creators who have a million followers is that they’re probably going to make a lot of money off their course anyway (whether it’s good or not). But then I have to ask, “Is that ethical?” You’re taking your audience’s money, but are you truly delivering on your promise? If you’re just chopping pre-recorded webinars into pieces, are you being respectful of them?

Then, how can you hyperfocus your course on what’s really important? We underestimate how many times we have to repeat ourselves for someone to actually understand what we’ve said. A recent study suggests we can repeat ourselves seven times and that still might not be enough to cement a concept. Moreover, you may think you are being repetitive, but your audience likely welcomes it. In fact, they may not even notice that you’ve repeated yourself.

So, to change behavior, you might spend two or three hours on a main topic, let your students practice the concept, break it down over several weeks, and do not move on until the feedback loop indicates they get it. Our brains can only handle so much, and we generally overestimate how much the brain can actually retain.

4) If someone wants to become “a better learner” this year, what is the first habit you would recommend they build? And, what’s a common misconception about learning that you believe it would behoove any learner to ‘unlearn’ and reframe?

The one thing to get good at (as a learner) is contextualizing the information that you’re receiving. For example, if I’m listening to a webinar and get the transcript, I will create a GPT model to pull insights. This GPT gives me a deep dive into the webinar’s content, but it also explains how the learnings apply to my business. It’s the modern version of reading a book, highlighting it, and taking notes in the margins. It is the act of synthesis. Now, we just have AI to help us do it so much faster (and better).

And, so, we’re back to the importance of contextualization and feedback. If you can design ways to get yourself feedback, whether that’s being part of a cohort or study group, or creating tools like GPTs that will give you feedback, the key is to reflect on the learning and take action.

Consuming more information, consuming more courses, this is not going to make you smarter, and it’s not going to make you more skilled. You’re way better off choosing what you want to focus on (keeping it small), and then deciding which resources are available to you to contextualize the information and create feedback loops.

Regarding the second part of your question, a big misconception is that you don’t have to unlearn to learn. In many cases, for our brain to make those new connections, and for those connections to happen seamlessly, we have to untrain what we were doing wrong. For example, if you’re working on your soft skills in communication, let’s say we’re giving feedback to an employee who’s struggling, they need to unlearn their old model of communication for the new one to really stick. The problem is that the teaching models we use today are outdated. They were created without an understanding of behavior change, emotional intelligence, or behavioral science. These models of learning were created decades ago, and people have just kept using these antiquated paradigms and passing them on.

Unlearning is not as hard as you might think, but we often don’t take this important step. And, unfortunately, relearning is really difficult without unlearning first.

5) If you had to write a ‘learner operating manual’ for extracting maximum value from a course, what would the first three rules be, and how would someone self-evaluate whether they were on the right track?

• Rule one: make the material contextually relevant. Take the content and self-reflect on it. Not just in your head, but using AI tools to help you.
• Rule two: learn out loud. The act of explaining what you’re learning to someone else actually helps you further cement it. People used to be afraid to do that; now there’s a whole ‘learn in public’ movement, which is great! It’s socially acceptable to be imperfect now.
• Rule three: make it small. Keep your window of focus small enough to avoid overwhelm. Why? When we’re in emotional overwhelm, our brain shuts down. Our working memory holds so much less than we think. As a learner, you need to own your own experience. Work with your brain, not against it.

So contextualize, share what you know, and don’t overwhelm yourself. If you can, I would add that you physically interact with the ingredients you’re learning about. I think that’s important, too. No one can learn to actually cook without getting in there and throwing ingredients into a pot. Learning doesn’t happen passively; you have to make learning active to be successful.

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If you have been following me on LinkedIn, you have seen me challenging the idea that productivity should only be measured by tangible output. We have been led to believe that faster is always better.

But what if that model is outdated?

The old way of measuring productivity treats work like a factory line: the more widgets produced per hour, the better. And, unfortunately, that thinking still lingers with knowledge work, even in jobs where the real value comes from ideas, relationships, and creativity. When speed becomes the ultimate goal, it leaves little room for experimentation, reflection, or recovery.

You may recall this passage from The Fun Habit:

“With intellectual property and innovation now the work product, we are no longer workers operating machines with sprockets and cogs. We are the sprockets and cogs, and our ability to perform is exploited and over-optimized just like the equipment on an assembly line. We have become the machines that now output the goods that create profit for others.”

The truth is, though, progress rarely follows a straight line. Natural systems don’t grow in perfect upward graphs. Seasons cycle, tides rise and fall, even our own energy fluctuates throughout the day. Productivity works the same way. Breakthroughs often come after periods of rest or when we give ourselves permission to slow down. Growth, in practice, looks less like a staircase and more like a spiral circling back, dipping down, then rising again with more strength.

This reframing of productivity challenges us to widen what we measure and value. It asks us to celebrate not only our visible output but also the invisible work: the insights gathered, the lessons learned from a failed experiment, the clarity that comes after stepping away. Progress can mean cultivating better questions just as much as producing faster answers.

The bonus to this approach is that when we expand our definition of productivity, we often get better results in the long run. We are more resilient. Our teams are more innovative. Organizations adapt more fluidly. By honoring the natural rhythm of work, we set ourselves up for longer-term success.

Given all this, I’m excited to share with you ideas from creativity strategist Natalie Nixon, who proposes a “cultivation model” of productivity, as well as Eduardo Briceño, who helped pioneer the growth mindset concept with Carol Dweck. Both argue, in different ways, that our long-term growth requires embracing the fast and the slow, rather than clinging to outdated notions of output at all costs.

This quarter, I celebrated two decades of life experience and marriage with my better half.

I’ve summarized what twenty years of marriage have taught me here on LinkedIn.

I continue to support various causes through quarterly contribution, which is being tracked on this scorecard.

If this quarter has a unifying thread, it’s that progress doesn’t come from chasing speed alone. Real growth happens in cycles. It happens in the back-and-forth between doing and learning, sprinting and resting, output and reflection.

I’m still in the early days of building Upcraft Labs, and it would be easy to fall into “the productivity at all costs” trap. But as Natalie Nixon so beautifully illustrates, the real work of building something great often occurs in the invisible spaces: testing ideas, refining systems, learning from what doesn’t work, and giving things time to take root. And, of course, having fun along the way.

Warmly,
Mike Rucker, Ph.D.

P.S. Although the price of The Fun Habit has increased since last quarter, the hardback edition is still available at a deep discount compared to its retail price. If you would like to grab a copy (or gift one), now’s a great time to do that by clicking here.

The post Live Life Love | Volume Seventy-One appeared first on Mike Rucker, Ph.D..

Earlier in his career, Eduardo was the co-founder and CEO of Mindset Works, the pioneer in growth mindset development services, which he started with Stanford professor Carol Dweck and which he led for over a decade. Before that, he was a venture capital investor with the Sprout Group and served on several boards, both for-profit and non-profit. Before that, he was an investment banking analyst with Credit Suisse. He is a Pahara-Aspen Fellow, a member of the Aspen Institute’s Global Leadership Network, and an inductee in the Happiness Hall of Fame.

1) In your book, you describe the performance paradox: the idea that constantly performing doesn’t necessarily improve performance. Since a growth mindset is a necessary but insufficient foundation for change, how can individuals and organizations who are caught in the ‘rip current’ of stagnant performance best identify the strategies and habits that will truly move them into growth (rather than just believing in it)?

A growth mindset is the belief that we can change, but the belief alone is not enough. We also need to know how to change and to develop the systems and habits that make change possible. Just as important, we need a reason to change. We need a purpose or a “why” that motivates us to put in the effort and engage in deliberate practice. It also helps when we feel we are part of a learning community, surrounded by people who are also working to improve and grow.

Many of us assume that in order to improve, we just need to work hard, do our best, and minimize mistakes. What we often miss is that there are really two distinct modes of working. One is the performance zone, where we focus on getting things done (as well as we know how). The other is the learning zone, where we try new things, experiment, and deliberately go beyond what we already know. We can alternate between these two zones or integrate them, but both are necessary for growth.

We can examine our structures and habits through this lens. For any meeting or practice, we can ask whether the goal is only to get things done or whether it also includes improving how we work. When we consciously design our systems to do both, to deliver results while generating insights and better strategies, we begin to weave the learning zone into the fabric of how we work and live.

Ideally, this shouldn’t depend on individual initiative alone. The biggest opportunities lie in designing systems that make it easy for everyone to engage in both performance and learning. For example, weekly agendas often focus entirely on performance topics. Simply adding a standing agenda item to share what we learned last week, address any questions we have, or discuss the experiments we’re running can shift the conversation. If mid-action and after-action reviews are built into project processes, everyone participates, not just those naturally inclined to reflect and improve.

When organizations fail to blend the performance and learning zones, people default to what they know, trying to minimize mistakes, which eventually leads to stagnation. The paradox is that when we focus too much on performance, performance actually suffers. Part of the reason is psychological: we have a present bias, overvaluing immediate results and undervaluing long-term improvement. Structural pressures amplify this. For example, public companies face constant pressure to deliver quarterly results, which shapes how leaders behave. Those norms get carried into other organizations, reinforcing a culture of short-term exploitation rather than long-term exploration.

To truly thrive, individuals and organizations must be mindful of both the present and the future. The most effective way to achieve today’s goals and sustain success over time is to deliberately combine the learning zone and the performance zone.

2) Evidence suggests real improvement comes from leaning into mistakes and even discomfort, because that’s where growth tends to live. For leaders who want to create this kind of culture, one where failing once in a while is safe, how can they go beyond just making it ‘safe to fail’ and actually help their teams build the skill of turning mistakes into lessons that improve the whole system (instead of just patching one issue or pointing fingers)?

It’s not just about forgiving mistakes. If we don’t experiment and take risks, we’re not doing our jobs. The point is not to create a culture where mistakes are tolerated, but rather one where smart experimentation is expected. Experimentation will inevitably produce errors, and we learn from those errors. The key is to be clear about the difference between high-stakes situations (situations where we just want to be in the performance zone, doing what we know works, and minimizing risk) and the times and spaces where we want to go beyond the known, by asking questions and experimenting.

Leaders need to be explicit about those distinctions and how they want the team to operate in each context. That takes a lot of communication. Leaders often under-communicate. We say something once and assume people heard it, understood it the way we do, and will remember it. The reality is that we need to communicate much more than we think, making it clear that learning is an integral part of what we do every day. As leaders, we must reinforce that growth and self-awareness, understanding our customers more deeply, and learning how to work better together are core to our mission. And we need habits and systems that make improvement a natural part of work: soliciting feedback, gathering customer insights, running projects in ways that surface lessons learned, and constantly refining how we collaborate.

The third piece is modeling. Leaders often engage in private learning (e.g., with a coach, at home, or in one-on-one conversations) rather than in public, where the entire team can observe it. Modeling means sharing openly: “Here’s what I’m trying to improve. I’d love your feedback. Here’s a mistake I made and what I learned from it.” When leaders model learning explicitly, they show the behavior they want others to practice. Otherwise, people just see them focusing on being right, and that sets the wrong tone.

Formal learning and development programs can be helpful, but what matters most is learning on the job, every day, in the context of the work we do together. And this should be championed by business leaders, not just the L&D department. In a fast-changing world, this is not a “nice-to-have.” It is a core part of how the organization succeeds.

Once we are learning, the question becomes how to spread that learning so everyone benefits. Successful companies create structures for this. Netflix, for example, had a principle of “whisper wins, shout mistakes.” When someone made an error or learned a valuable lesson, they were encouraged to share it with the whole company, along with the insight that came from it. LinkedIn added a section to their weekly top-100 leaders meeting specifically for sharing lessons learned from the prior week. These lessons often came from mistakes, and sharing them allowed others to benefit and adapt their own work. Netflix also encouraged “farming for dissent,” where someone with a new idea sought out critical feedback before jumping to action, looking for holes and blind spots to make the idea stronger. These kinds of practices make people smarter and help learning spread across the organization.

3) You’ve described growth as being powered by several interconnected forces: our sense of identity and purpose, the beliefs we hold, the habits we practice, and the communities we’re part of. For someone stepping into a new or challenging role, how can they intentionally cultivate these elements in tandem, so that progress in one area doesn’t unintentionally create blind spots in another? In other words, how can people build a growth path that feels both balanced and sustainable?

You are referring to the Growth Propeller, which is a tool for reflection, and it applies not only to learning behaviors but to any behaviors. Say I want to be a motivated and effective learner. That framework helps me reflect on the five components and examine what supports me in behaving the way I want to behave, and what might be getting in the way.

For example, community: Are the people around me motivated and effective learners? Do they value continuous growth as the default? Do they value feedback and learning from experiments? When I am with them, do they inspire me to act the way I want to act? My social networks have a huge influence on me, and I want to make sure they influence me in the direction I want to go.

Then there are habits: Have I built habits that drive proactive change and evolution? If I have a morning routine, does it help me remember what I want to improve today? Am I in the habit of soliciting feedback from different people, and do I actually do that frequently? Our beliefs influence these habits. If I hold the belief that receiving feedback is a sign of incompetence, that belief will make the habit of asking for feedback very hard to sustain. If my first reaction to feedback is defensiveness, that habit might be rooted in a belief that feedback is bad. In that case, the habit I might want to build is simply pausing and taking a deep breath when I get feedback so I can overcome my initial reaction and respond thoughtfully.

At the center of the Growth Propeller are identity and purpose. Do I see myself as a learner, as someone who is always evolving? Do I believe that ten years from now I will be a different person because I will have improved? And do I care about something enough that it drives me to put effort not just into getting things done, but also into improving myself and my understanding of the world? That sense of purpose is what fuels the work of growth.

If two of those areas feel significantly weaker than the others, that might be a signal to focus there first, because those areas may be what’s holding you back.

It’s also about creating balance. There needs to be harmony between performance and learning. We can over-index on either one. The goal is to create coherence between all these elements so they work well together. Carol Dweck has a 2017 paper where she talks about self-coherence as a fundamental human need. When we have cognitive dissonance, we feel out of harmony, and that makes growth harder.

The same applies to strengths and weaknesses. We can see them as fixed or as malleable. If we see them as fixed, it keeps us stuck. But if we see them as things we can change, we create the possibility of improvement. We can decide which strengths we want to build on and which weaknesses we want to work on. Maybe some weaknesses are fine to leave alone because they are not important or because someone else on the team can cover them. But if I am a really poor listener, for example, that is likely to hold me back in many areas. I might choose to work on it, but only if I can see it as something I can improve. That is the essence of a growth mindset.

4) Leaders often overestimate how well their message or impact is landing, and power dynamics can make it hard for people to be fully honest in return. Beyond just stating their values, how can leaders consistently model the kind of vulnerability and curiosity that fosters a true learning culture without risking their authority or competence in the eyes of their teams?

Sometimes leaders worry that showing vulnerability will undermine their authority or confidence. That often comes from a belief that asking for feedback or ideas is a sign of uncertainty; that, as a leader, they should already know what to do and be able to direct others. When we hold that belief, it becomes harder to truly tap the collective intelligence of the team.

The first step is for leaders to accept that success actually depends on inviting in other people’s thinking. When we incorporate perspectives from different vantage points, especially those closest to customers (as well as those working in other functions), we make better informed decisions. We also create a culture where people feel safe to experiment and take risks, which is what drives innovation. Once leaders are clear on this, they can communicate it explicitly and often. When we ask for feedback or ideas, it helps to remind the team why we are doing it. This is how we succeed. Clarity helps others see these behaviors as strengths.

Leaders also have to be careful about the messages they send and make the implicit explicit. For example, if a leader says something like, “We can do this,” people interpret that differently. Someone in a fixed mindset might think it means we already have what we need to succeed, which discourages questioning. Someone with a growth mindset might hear it as, “We’ll figure it out together.” Leaders can avoid this ambiguity by adding clarity: “We can do this, and part of how we’ll succeed is by experimenting and learning along the way.”

Finally, modeling is essential. However, it has to be done with an awareness of power dynamics. Early in my career, I thought leaders should simply do the behaviors they want to see in others. I later realized it is more nuanced. For example, if a leader wants their team to challenge ideas and disagree more, and the leader jumps in first with strong opinions, others may be less inclined to speak up. In these situations, effective leaders ask questions, hold back their own opinions until later, and encourage others to share. I call this asymmetrical modeling. You create space for others to practice the behaviors first, then you follow.

5) You have written about how top performance often comes from pairing clarity and preparation with strong routines that run almost on autopilot. For individuals or teams in roles that demand constant creativity and adaptability, how can they design these routines to free up mental bandwidth for innovation without slipping into complacency or getting stuck in habits that no longer serve them?

We want to create harmony in what our days and weeks look like, and in the cadence of our work. Great artists and creators often build intentional moments for divergent thinking and play. Some people enjoy taking long walks in nature. Salvador Dalí used to fall asleep holding an object so that when he drifted off, it would drop, make a noise, and wake him up. This allowed him to capture the imagery from his dreams and incorporate it into his work.

Others have their own rituals. I remember reading about a writer who always carried a set of figurines. No matter where he traveled, he would place them on the desk before he started writing, even in a hotel room. Albert Einstein would take breaks to play the violin, which helped him return to his work with new insights. These kinds of routines can get us into the right mental state for creativity.

In design thinking, there are structures for each stage of the process. There are established norms for engaging in divergent thinking, generating ideas, and making sense of them afterward. These structures are designed to create the conditions for the type of thinking we need at that moment.

Routine works the same way. Jean Monnet, one of the architects of the European Union, would begin each day with a long walk. That was his most effective way to problem-solve and generate creative ideas. Again, Einstein’s violin practice served a similar purpose, creating mental space for breakthroughs.

Teams can do this too. When working on a design thinking project, starting with empathy interviews is a routine that helps us learn, surface insights, and discover opportunities we might otherwise overlook. The goal is to be intentional about our habits and structures so that they generate the creativity, reflection, and problem-solving we desire, rather than just falling into patterns that keep us busy but uninspired.

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Nixon’s new book Move. Think. Rest. redefines productivity and our relationship with time by providing readers with practical reflection questions and exercises designed to shift away from burnout and redefine indicators of success.

1) Most productivity models often prize output at all costs. The promise of your book Move. Think. Rest. is to help us shift from the outdated productivity models to meaningful cultivation. What does meaningful cultivation look like in practice, and how can leaders start to measure it differently?

Productivity, as we have traditionally thought about it, is a relic of the first Industrial Revolution. It does not make sense for several reasons: due to burnout, new rules for remote work, ubiquitous technology, and also because it is an “either-or” way of thinking about work. We tend to lean into measuring only what we see. Efficiency and speed are valued. What I am proposing is something I call the cultivation model.

I got to it because I started thinking, if I am going to critique the productivity model that stems from the first industrial revolution, what did society look like before the first industrial revolution? Most societies were primarily agrarian economies, and in an agricultural economy, cultivation is the mode. That got me thinking about what cultivation really is. Cultivation is a “both-and” model. We value both quick spurts of growth and slow growth. We understand, as the Navy SEALs say, that “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”.

The cultivation model values the solo individual practitioner and the collective. We can ebb and flow between doing solo work, which many of us do in remote work environments, and really leveraging collaboration. The long-term yield is in collaboration. In cultivation, we value both quick and slow, the solo practitioner and the collective, as well as what is happening on the dormant, invisible plane when things are percolating and marinating. At the same time, we still value the idea of measuring what we can see. That is what I mean by a both-and model.

Another way it looks different is in how we think about growth. I find the way we think about growth to be overly simplistic. I read economist Daniel Susskind’s book Growth in preparation for this work, and I really like how he challenges the x-y axis model, where growth is a nice straight line starting at the origin. Maybe there are a few dips to illustrate turbulence, but that is not how natural systems work. Society is made up of humans, and we are natural systems. The model of growth that the cultivation approach values is more like a bicycle wheel turning. We get traction by moving forward, but there are dips. We have to look backward retrospectively, and then we can trend up again. This cyclical way of gaining traction through the bicycle wheel metaphor is a much more helpful and realistic way to think about productivity and growth. It sets us up for success.

2) We live in a world of cheap dopamine and shallow engagement. What are some of the “deep thought modes” that you believe unlock breakthrough ideas, and how do we protect the space for them when our attention is so fragmented?

There is a lot of distraction, which ultimately is not helpful. One way I would answer your question about where and how we can unlock breakthrough ideas is to discuss two states of rest that I learned about while researching the book. One is right before we begin to fall asleep, and one is right as we are awakening. The state of falling asleep is called a hypnagogic state.

Thomas Edison famously used this to his advantage. When he would nap, he held a heavy object or a weighted ball in his hand while reclining on a lounge chaise. As he began to drift off, the ball would drop, startling him awake. He had discerned a pattern that in this groggy, hypnagogic state just before sleep, some of the most creative ideas would emerge. This happens because we are entering the default mode network of the brain. When we tap out of the world, we relieve the heavy cognitive workload and allow different neural synapses to fire and catalyze new connections.

The other phase is when we are waking up, called the hypnopompic state. Many of us have experienced those moments just at dawn when we are still a little sleepy and then suddenly get an insight. Some experts suggest planting a seed before falling asleep. For example, it could be a question you are pondering or something you have been wrestling with. They suggest this because answers often emerge in that state. It feels like immersion because some of our best work is actually done when we tap out. Thinking needs ebb and flow to allow different regions of the brain to activate and do their work.

These liminal states and liminal spaces are critical for unlocking breakthrough ideas. Organizationally, this does not have to mean nap rooms, though that can be great if it fits a company’s culture. There are examples from major companies like Zapier, which experimented with no-meeting weeks. They created a liminal space by not requiring people to attend meetings, and the research showed employees remained productive and even reached more interesting insights.

3M has its 15 percent culture, which is related to the way Google once had 20 percent time, during which Gmail was created. Even though Google no longer formally offers this, we can replicate or create parallel liminal spaces within our teams and organizations. Natural systems have ebb and flow, yin and yang, contraction and release. Whether you are talking about the way blood flows through our valves or how food travels down the esophagus into the stomach through peristalsis, there is a rhythm. In our work environments, we tend to contract, contract, contract without building in release.

3) Rest is often treated as a mode of recovery, a way to recharge so we can work again. You are reframing it here not only as recovery, but also as a way to improve performance and retention. What does rest look like when it is intentionally designed as part of an organizational operating system?

In terms of the organizational operating system, rest can be scalable. What I mean by that is it can look like intentionally making sure people are not in back-to-back Zoom or Teams meetings. It can mean building micro breaks into the day. It can look like intentional recess. One of the people I interviewed for the book is Brendan Boyle, a toy designer who teaches a course on play at Stanford’s d.school. Brendan is a big advocate of recess. So is Gerry Laybourne, the founder of Nickelodeon. She actually used to have recess where there was no agenda. It was a moratorium on meetings, a chance to pause and reset.

Rest at an organizational level can also scale up in more significant ways, such as sabbaticals. In academia, there is the opportunity to earn a sabbatical every seven years; however, in many tech companies, sabbaticals are available every five years. The challenge is that not everyone takes advantage of them. Sometimes this is because sabbaticals are not modeled by leaders, and sometimes people fear that they will be penalized for actually taking them. From a policy perspective, sabbaticals and other formalized breaks are really interesting ways rest can show up in an organization.

In my research for the book, I also learned something I thought was very important. We often think of recovery only in terms of physical recovery after exercise, or mental recovery when our brains are fried. But there is also a need for emotional recovery. Leaders, especially during times of layoffs, have to make difficult decisions. People who see colleagues lose their jobs are emotionally impacted. That takes a toll on us. We are emotional beings. I love the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, who writes about how emotions are made. It turns out emotions are constructed and predictive. Instead of “I think, therefore I am,” it is “I feel.” We are sentient beings. Paying attention to the value of rest and recovery for emotional recovery is important.

4) Your book introduces the idea of building one’s own MTR (Move. Think. Rest.) operating system. What have you seen happen when individuals start to consciously design their own personal rhythms of movement, thought, and rest? What does success look like using this OS, and what do the KPIs look like?

This book is a provocation, and it is meant to be additive. I am not suggesting that we throw traditional ways of thinking about key performance indicators out the window. Metrics like market share, sales increases, and similar indicators are absolutely critical for measuring the health and resonance of a business. What I am suggesting is that we also integrate new types of KPIs.

For example, a KPI that incentivizes prototyping and experimentation, and then tracks what sorts of new ideas are yielded and implemented as a result of that prototyping and experimentation. Another KPI could be identifying new connections made through play. For example, connections across the organization, connections interpersonally, and even connections within our own minds as we juxtapose new ideas.

When you think about it, all the attributes of play — curiosity, inquiry, co-negotiation, and active listening — these are the same attributes we say we need in great leadership. Why wouldn’t we want more play? And I am not talking about dartboards on the walls or foosball tables, but real play, which Brendan Boyle likes to say is about engagement. Don’t you want engaged employees? Without engaged employees, you will not have an innovative organization.

So, another KPI could be tracking the types of new connections, both in terms of ideas and relationships that are surfacing because of play. Another KPI could be one that revisits current metrics for productivity that may no longer serve you. I am not sure the right word for this, but it would be like a self-reflective KPI that challenges your assumptions. It asks whether a particular existing indicator is still helpful or whether it is just creating more work. For instance, is it busywork? Is the old KPI just adding to “productivity theater” or is it actually functionally still relevant?

5) We’re living in a reality where AI is now omnipresent. You argue that to thrive, we need to lean into what makes us distinctly human. How do you see the MTR operating system helping people harness AI as an amplifier of creativity rather than a replacement for it?

One of the book’s features is that it offers reflection questions and exercises at the end of each chapter, suitable for individuals, teams, and organizations. Embedded in many of those exercises and questions is an invitation to think about using technology to delegate routine tasks so that you can free up cognitive load in the brain. Another way to use AI is to have it reflect back to you. If you have input a conundrum or a draft of how you are thinking about something, you can ask AI, “What am I missing?” This allows AI to serve as a critic that helps open up new, expansive ways of thinking.

There are also great apps that help minimize distraction. There is an app called Forest that helps block distractions. I use my timer all the time in micro breaks to schedule daydream breaks. There are technologies like Miro and MURAL that help with mind mapping and virtual collaboration, which can lead to more creative outcomes.

Overall, the value of AI as our co-creator and co-conspirator lies in the fact that we can obtain answers so quickly, which actually opens us up to spaciousness. It allows us to dwell in that liminal space where discovery can happen. It opens up time for deeper, more meaningful collaboration. That is why I say in the book that we are in the midst of a human revolution, not a technological revolution. All of this technology is a tool. That is what it is, fundamentally. It is helping us revisit the ways we can be more human.

The post Interview with Natalie Nixon about Move. Think. Rest. appeared first on Mike Rucker, Ph.D..

When you start to practice valuing your time more intentionally, something remarkable begins to happen. It happens in the space between daydreaming about what you wish you were doing and actually doing it. That heaviness we all feel at some point, that feeling that time is somehow passing us by … that feeling begins to fade. As this unease is lifted, it gets replaced with something much better: an empowering feeling that we’re more in control of our story than we once led ourselves to believe.

For most of us, every day we’re upright, there are a handful of decisions that can tilt us toward routine or toward opportunity. When we’re a slave to our habits, many of those chances for microjoys slip away unnoticed. But if you’re a veteran reader of this newsletter, it should come as no surprise that those who mindfully look for ways to make their day enjoyable are the people who report having the most fun.

This isn’t about chasing a “better” way of going about your day. It’s about recognizing that memorable days often begin the same as forgettable ones. The only difference is that we show up a bit differently. We show up with intention. We say yes to life’s little invitations. We consider the consequences of trade-offs when we say no (or yes) to things.

To be clear, I’m not saying it’s easy.

In 2025, I’ve decided to throw my hat back into the entrepreneurial ring. This means lately my mind is often preoccupied with all the things I need to do to get my new business off the ground. But when I see a moment for fun with the kids I can’t get back, or have a chance to see a comedian who’s coming to town that I know my wife and I will enjoy, I rarely flinch. That’s because these things light me up. They might not be your thing, but undoubtedly, there are things you should be doing more of that you’re probably not.

So here’s a small, practical experiment from one of this quarter’s interviewees, Chris Guillebeau: Ask yourself tonight, “What was special about today?”

Don’t overthink it. Just identify one thing. And if nothing comes to mind? That’s your cue for tomorrow to approach things a little differently.

The goal here isn’t more pressure. It’s about presence. When you start showing up for what was always there in the first place, somehow, life tends to feed you more of the good stuff.

This summer, thanks to the kindness of Joey and Nina at Woozy Fishing (who you might remember from The Fun Habit), this quarter’s life experience came from finally taking my son fishing.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit (especially given all I preach) that the idea for this trip had been sitting on the shelf for far too long. It’s so easy to confuse intention with action sometimes. There’s a small lift we get in planning something, but the true magic is in the doing. However, when the plan finally becomes a memory, though, it’s the best kind of payoff. Watching my son catch his first bass this summer was one of those moments.

Takeaway: A great way to increase the opportunity for making memories is to decrease the time between intention and action.

Because Joey and Nina did so much of the heavy lifting to make it happen, I was reminded that some of the most meaningful scenes in our lives don’t ask for much. They just ask us to show up.

I continue to support various causes through quarterly contribution. I have moved the tracking of that effort to this online scorecard.

In many ways, this newsletter has always been about noticing what lights us up and finding small, consistent ways to protect those sparks. That’s still the work I care most about.

Professionally, alongside continuing to share the lessons from The Fun Habit, I’ve quietly started a new chapter with a consultancy called Upcraft Labs. It’s early days, but the focus is on helping creators, founders, and teams launch new ideas or improve existing workflows. It feels like a natural extension of everything I’ve been up to until this point, just with a slightly different slant.

As always, thanks for reading. I’m truly grateful you’re on this journey with me, whether you’ve been here a while or just found your way in.

Warmly,
Mike Rucker, Ph.D.

P.S. As of this send, Amazon has the hardcover of The Fun Habit at the lowest price I’ve ever seen. No idea how long that will last, but if you’ve been meaning to grab a copy (or gift one), now’s a great time to do that by clicking here.

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