I spent most of my childhood years reading crazy amounts of books and playing basketball or soccer every day. The convictions "I can get good at stuff" and "I can think for myself" are really powerful if internalized early on.
Brad, I've read your work going back to The Practice of Groundedness. You keep returning to the same honest diagnosis: the problem isn't that people don't work hard enough. It's that they've lost the internal foundation that makes the work mean something.
This post made me think about something you don't name directly but point toward.
The 47-second attention span isn't just a parenting crisis. It's a leadership crisis in slow motion. The mid-career leaders I work with can run a meeting, manage a budget, and hit their numbers. What they can't do anymore is sit with a hard question long enough to find a real answer. They've optimized their way out of the very capacity that made them worth following.
Reading a book is resistance training for that. So is shooting free throws when no one is watching.
The hidden pattern: competence you can fake feels exactly like competence you've earned, until a decision requires the real thing.
I spent most of my childhood years reading crazy amounts of books and playing basketball or soccer every day. The convictions "I can get good at stuff" and "I can think for myself" are really powerful if internalized early on.
You’re in Michigan. Basketball?
I thought you’d have gone for: Learn how to skate, to give a fair body check, and to take a body check.
Great Read
Brad, I've read your work going back to The Practice of Groundedness. You keep returning to the same honest diagnosis: the problem isn't that people don't work hard enough. It's that they've lost the internal foundation that makes the work mean something.
This post made me think about something you don't name directly but point toward.
The 47-second attention span isn't just a parenting crisis. It's a leadership crisis in slow motion. The mid-career leaders I work with can run a meeting, manage a budget, and hit their numbers. What they can't do anymore is sit with a hard question long enough to find a real answer. They've optimized their way out of the very capacity that made them worth following.
Reading a book is resistance training for that. So is shooting free throws when no one is watching.
The hidden pattern: competence you can fake feels exactly like competence you've earned, until a decision requires the real thing.